By Thomas Best
Today, I offer you our last time looking that the travels and writing of Frederick Olmstead in the 1850s and Tony Horwitz, who captured this story of southern travel in this “Spying on the South” in 2019. In this last episode, we will examine their mutual travels through Texas.
If you have never had the opportunity to venture across Texas, it is easy to think of this state in a monolithic pattern of oil rigs, cowboys and ranches, and strongly independent conservative thinkers. While you will still find these symbolic items and people in Texas, there is far more diversity in landscapes and personalities than you could imagine. And Olmstead was already recognizing this reality in the 1850s—a time when the Texas most of us think of—was but about 30 years old.
Contrary to stereotyping, Texas has always been a land of complex variety of geography, human culture, and climate traits. Traveling throughout the extreme eastern one-third of the state down to the Gulf Coast, where our two travelers visited, this is land of flat humid grasslands and sporadic forests. This was a region where the earliest Spanish settlers arrived in what was considered “Northern Mexico.” American and European immigrants later arrived to bring their own lifestyles and culture to the landscape. It was long cotton country to these early American settlers. And they were people who often declared themselves tired of eastern politics, especially as regulations relating to the ownership of slavery plagued them. As they often declared to friends and neighbors “They were goin’ to Texas” to live as they wished. Olmstead found a boastful and free-minded people who, because this was not U.S. Territory, but Spanish and then Mexican territory, could live as they pleased. Finding broad land for farming and grazing animals at inexpensive prices, they were initially willing to put up with the requirements of having to produce documents in Spanish and adhere to strict laws produced in far distant Mexico City. The population was Hispanic, African, European-American, Native American and each group sought to maintain their loves and dislikes within a mixture of cultures.
By the 1830s, American immigrants began butting heads with the Mexico government, led their dictator, Antonio de Santa Anna. He believed that these up-start immigrants wanted too much freedom, leaning toward a spiteful independence. A Texas War of Independence ensued with the battles at Goliad, the Alamo, and San Jacinto. These “Texicans” having won their independence from Mexico, established themselves within the Republic of Texas for about a decade. Soon, however, a larger war broke out between the U.S. and Mexico as Americans now embraced the idea of American statehood. Texans, Horwitz noted, had not lost their swagger and demands for treatment fitting with their rough-hewn past and independent-minded ideology.
Whether you talking about oil exports, their independent energy grid, or football (a near religion there), it would not take you long to discover that many Texans currently believe that maybe might be better off today as the “Republic of Texas” once again. Whether they are reminiscing about their military role in fighting on behalf of the Confederacy in the Civil War or speaking out vociferously about their frustration with a porous southern border, Horwitz is not reluctant to speak his mind about Texans. For instance, he insists that Texans remain very proud of their roots as virtual “scoundrels,” who they honor as long standing up to authority.
This book illustrating the parallel journeys of two vagabonds is well-worth reading.
