By All Accounts: General Stores and Community Life in Texas and Indian Territory by Linda English (review)

University of Texas-Pan American history professor Linda English has done a commendable job of mining store ledgers and other local records for a stratified look at the historical role of general stores in rural areas of Texas and Indian Territory during the late nineteenth century. While her work is understandably tied to the availability of resources, which are no doubt scarce and incomplete, she nevertheless provides geographical and cultural diversity in her analysis. Her study reflects not only the business history of these areas, but also the broader cultural and social implications. In a relative sense, merchants were among the elites of their respective communities and thus involved in power struggles within the consumer culture of developing areas.

Included in the book are many familiar names like Charles Schreiner of Kerrville, Texas; J. J. McAlester, of McAlester, Oklahoma; Hermann Fischer of Fischer’s Store, Texas; and Lyne T. “Tol” Barret of Melrose, Texas, perhaps better known for his early role in the Texas oil industry than his years as a Nacogdoches County merchant. There are also some lesser-known individuals such as Anna Martin of Hedwig’s Hill in Mason County. All present interesting character studies in the role of merchants in such aspects of history as pushing the frontier line, dealing with economies solely reliant on specialized industries, making connections between rural and urban areas, dealing with specific cultural needs, and providing a wide range of products, including medicines and farm supplies, to both small settlements and dispersed communities.

A theme prevalent throughout English’s work might be best described as “how the system really worked.” The role of the local merchant might seem simple and straightforward with regard to the retail trade, but there were also the underlying concerns of credit access, economic integration, and in the case of the Indian Territory, tribal support. By exploring the intricacies of the system, the author manages to bring in important, focused analysis with regard to both gender and race. Equally compelling is her use of store ledgers to shed light on consumer patterns in rural areas. Focusing primarily on the 1870s and 1880s, she observed: “Ledgers detail not only who engaged in commercial relations (the merchants and their clients), but what types of goods were purchased by those who frequented general stores. Shifting the focus to the goods recorded in ledgers enables us both to see what was available locally and to draw comparisons with purchases made by consumers in other regions of the country” (173). English follows that statement with elaborations on such common commodities as alcohol, paregoric (camphorated tincture of opium), and a variety of elixirs, salves, and tonics sold under names like Allen’s Lung Balsam, Wizard Oil, Turner’s Wonder, and Harter’s Ague Tonic. In addition to the medicines, many of which may have been of questionable value and potentially damaging, there were other treatment elements that were unquestionably dangerous, including calomel, chloroform, glycerine, carbolic acid, and the widely-used cure-all kerosene.

In By All Accounts, Professor English presents a solid study based on careful analysis of important but often neglected local records. Her findings are both detailed and provocative, and collectively they present new elements of the Gilded Age in microcosm. One hopes her work will prove to be a catalyst for similar studies that might consider in more detail, for example, the role of women in early consumerism and the socio-political implications of struggles between the elites and non-elites in rural areas in the decades after the Civil War.