Elizabeth and I spent almost the whole month of March traveling through Texas, arriving in Sulphur Springs on March 2 and departing the Guadalupe Mountains National Park for the last time on April 2, with stops in Waco, Austin, San Antonio, and Big Bend National Park along the way. It’s a great state in every way, from its geography to its economy and history.
One of the lasting impressions from our time in Texas is its immense size. From our entry into Texarkana to our exit into New Mexico a month later, we towed the RV 998 miles, plus a 180-mile side trip to the remote corner of Big Bend. That’s nearly 1,200 miles just to get through one state from east to west! (See the Google Map of our trek.)
Nothing captured the grandeur of Texas more for us than following US Highway 90 for 462 miles from San Antonio to Van Horn. The highway follows the path of a railway line that fueled the economy of the desert high plains a century ago. The road took us from the greenery of the San Antonio River to the scrub brush and dry river beds of the desert southwest, and to the mountain climates of Alpine, Fort Davis, and the Chisos and Guadalupe mountains.
Another impression from our time in Texas was the dynamism but also the disparity of its economy. Its big cities are thriving, with gleaming high rises, big universities, and suburban growth fueled by high tech and other 21st century industries. But we also saw boarded up store fronts and ramshackle housing in the smaller towns as we headed out onto the plains. This is not a criticism of Texas, since you can see the same in other parts of the country, but the contrast there seemed even starker.
Yet another lasting impression is the pride that Texans take in their history, including their time as an independent republic from 1836 to statehood in 1845. As Lyle Brunson pointed out to me, you see the Texas flag hanging in retail stores and lots of other places where you wouldn’t normally see a state flag elsewhere in the country. The electronic road signs in Austin said, “Slow down. You’re already in Texas!”
We spent a full afternoon with the Brunsons at the Alamo absorbing the history there. Texans are proud of what happened at the mission from February 23 to March 6, 1836, and with good reason. Fewer than 200 defenders held off a much larger Mexican army for those 13 days. All the men died, but not before by some counts killing an average of 10 Mexican soldiers each before the siege was broken. They bought enough time for Sam Houston to gather his troops and finally defeat Gen. Santa Anna at the decisive battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836.
For an accessible one-volume history of Texas, I highly recommend a book recommended to me by one of the staff at the Fabled Bookshop & Cafe in Waco: Lone Star: A History Of Texas And The Texans, by T. R. Fehrenbach (Da Capo Press, 2000). The author weaves a narrative that describes crucial events, the stock of immigrants who populated Texas, and how the vast landscape shaped the state’s culture and development.
I learned a lot about Stephen F. Austin, the statesman and visionary who brought the first 300 families—“The Old Three Hundred”– to settle in central Texas. As Fehrenbach writes, “In ten years, Austin located more than 1,500 American families, and these became the heart of Anglo-Texas. In a single decade, these people chopped more wood, cleared more land, broke more soil, raised more crops, had more children, and built more towns than the Spanish had in three hundred years.”
In the book and at the Alamo, I learned about William Travis, a military man and firebrand who died at the Alamo but not before becoming the Patrick Henry of Texas. At the end of a March 3, 1836, letter from the besieged mission appealing for reinforcements, Travis wrote, “God and Texas—Victory or Death!” Fehrenbach quotes another historian, Louis J. Wortham, who said of Travis’ letter, “It sealed forever the title of the Texans to the soil of Texas. The blood of Travis, of Bowie, of Bonham, of Crockett and the rest, consecrated the soil of Texas forever.”
During our month in Texas, I also came to appreciate the importance of geography in understanding the state. In crossing Texas, you cross a line that angles southwest roughly from Dallas, to just east of the Hill Country and down to Del Rio, a natural line that has shaped the state’s history and development. It’s where the greener, more well-watered forests and farmland of the east give way to the Balcones Escarpment and the high plans and mountains to the west.
West of the line, such industries as cotton farming were not possible, and thus the institution of slavery reached a natural barrier, checking its spread further west in the mid-19th century.
The high plains were also dominated by another barrier to development, the fearsome Comanche Indians. As Fehrenbach writes, “The Comanche hordes debouched on the Texas plains around the year 1725. They came like a thunderbolt; one historian compared them with the mounted hordes of Genghis Khan. Man, woman, and child, they were among the finest horsemen ever known.” In introducing the horse to the Indian tribes in Texas, the Spanish colonialists unwittingly created “the most fearsome light cavalry—the Plains Indian—the world had ever seen.”
Our month-long trek across Texas confirmed what Fehrenbach writes about the expansive and harsh West Texas landscape:
Over the whole land the sun burned, not the distant, friendly orb that filtered light through European forests, but a violent, brassy engine that browned the earth and made the hillsides shimmer with heat. …
If the American Manhattanite has almost forgotten he lives on soil, has shed his history, and is shaped more by social pressures than a sense of territory, the Texan can never, even in his cities, forget or be free of the brooding immensity of his land.
Neither will I ever be completely free of it.
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