Texas Historical Literature
Source: The Handbook of Texas Online
Since the time of first European
contact, when Texas was a geographic mystery, mission field, and
disputed prize, writers have devoted their talents to the area.
Their efforts embrace every genre of literature and every facet
of Texas history and culture.
Literature through the nineteenth century. In the beginning,
Texas literature, though written in Spanish, was formally very
much like that of Puritan New England-primarily historical in
nature, consisting of narrative, descriptive, and factual prose
accounts.
The first and most notable work in the early Spanish literature relating to Texas is Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's Relación (1542). This book, translated into English numerous times, is an American classic, a spiritual odyssey detailing the explorer's experiences among Texas Indians.
Other significant early Spanish
narratives include Pedro de Castañeda's Relación de la jornada
de Cíbola, the best account of Vásquez de Coronado's
expedition, and Fray Alonso de Benavides's Memorials (1630-34).
Also of interest is The Narrative of the Expedition of Hernando
de Soto, by the Gentleman of Elvas, parts of which touch upon
areas of Texas as far west as Waco.
Nonfiction accounts also characterized the literature of the
revolutionary era.
Mary Austin Holley, cousin of Stephen F. Austin and visitor to his colony, produced Texas (1833), the first book in English that dealt entirely with Texas. It initially consisted of twelve letters to people back East, and was much expanded in 1836 into History of Texas.
After David Crockett's death at the Alamo, a book entitled Col. Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in Texas (1836) capitalized on the frontiersman's fame in the lively, colorful style of southwestern humor.
The Mexican side of the Texas Revolution had its chroniclers as well. For events immediately preceding the Revolution, the best Mexican account is Juan N. Almonte's Noticia Estadistica Sobre Tejas (1835).
The best contemporaneous account of the
Revolution is José Enrique de la Peña's La Rebelión De Texas:
Manuscrito Unédito de 1836, Por un Oficial de Santa Anna. John
H. Jenkins III calls it "one of the most important
eye-witness records of the Texas Revolution, and especially of
the Siege of the Alamo." It was Peña who first reported
that Davy Crockett surrendered before being put to death.
In the years immediately following annexation (1846), several
works merit attention in so far as they reflect the pluralistic
vigor of early Texas history.
Victor Prosper Considerant's Au Texas (1854) related the story of the founding and dissolution of the French Utopian community of La Réunion, near Dallas.
Viktor F. Bracht's Texas Im jahre 1848, nach mehrjahrigen Beobachtungen dargestellt (1849) told of German immigrants and agrarian life in early Texas.
From the Anglo-American perspective there is Noah Smithwick's The Evolution of a State; or, Recollections of Old Texas Days (1900), declared by Jenkins to be "the most fun to read" of all Texas memoirs.
John Crittenden Duval, whom J. Frank Dobie called the "Father of Texas Literature," wrote a lively account of his escape from the Goliad Massacre in Early Times in Texas (serial form, 1868-71; book, 1892). His Adventures of Big-Foot Wallace (1872) contains tall tales, legends, true adventure, satire, and straight history. The chapters on the Mier expedition are among the best published accounts of that episode, rivaled only by William Preston Stapp's The Prisoners of Perote (1845).
Another failed expeditionary venture of the Texas republic was recorded by George W. Kendall of the New Orleans Picayune in his Narrative of the Texan Santa Fe Expedition (1844).
Although most travelers in early Texas wrote favorably of the inhabitants, one memorable exception was famed urban landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, whose A Journey Through Texas (1857) painted a grim picture of slavery-ridden East Texas, indicting the people as crude, the food as bad, and the level of civilization as negligible. Not until he reached New Braunfels, recently colonized by Germans, did Olmsted find anything fit to eat or any civilization worthy of the name.
Narratives of the Texas Rangers constitute a subgenre of Texas writing. Among those dealing with the immediate post-republic era, the best is James Buckner Barry's A Texas Ranger and Frontiersman: The Days of Buck Barry in Texas, 1845-1906 (1932).
In the post-Civil War period, James
Buchanan Gillett's Six Years with the Texas Rangers, 1875-1881
(1921) is a highly readable and useful personal memoir.
Of the many former Confederate soldiers who moved to Texas after
the Civil War, one was young Sidney Lanier, a Southern poet of
considerable reputation in his day. He recorded his impressions,
including a charming essay on "San Antonio de Bexar,"
in Retrospects and Prospects (1899).
Also in the wake of the war came federal troops. With Gen. George A. Custer was his young wife, Elizabeth B. Custer, who felt at first that Texas seemed the "stepping off place" but eventually came to enjoy her stay and wrote a lively account in Tenting on the Plains (1887).
The cowboy, a subject that dominated Texas literature thereafter, entered the scene in the 1880s. Alex E. Sweet and J. Armoy Knox treated cowboy lore in a humorous, satirical fashion in their On a Mexican Mustang, Through Texas from the Gulf to the Rio Grande (1883).
Charlie Siringo, a native Texan who
rode the range for nearly twenty years, turned author in 1886
with A Texas Cowboy: or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a
Spanish Pony, later revised as Riata and Spurs (1912). Siringo's
books became required reading for those interested in the cattle
industry.
Fiction about Texas, which began very early in the nineteenth
century, is of interest today only to the occasional scholar
willing to slog through an undistinguished morass of romantic
historical novels. The first Texas novel, L'Héroïne du Texas:
ou, Voyage de madame * * * aux États-Unis et au Mexique,
"by a Texian," was published in Paris in French in
1819, but was not available in English until Donald Josep's
translation of 1937. Its author is identified only as "F-n.
M. G-n." After the manner of Chateaubriand, the novel deals
romantically with the short-lived French colony named Champ
d'Asile, located on the Trinity River about sixty miles from
Galveston. Its ideological thrust is characteristic of the strong
anti-Catholic bias of early Texas fiction: a Protestant hero
marries a Spanish Catholic girl, after which both must flee from
ecclesiastical authorities.
Timothy Flint's Francis Berrian; or the Mexican Patriot (1826), although set only partially in Texas, introduced two motifs that often reappeared in nineteenth-century Texas fiction: the captivity narrative in which white women are captured by and rescued from Indians, and the religious-cultural conflict between Protestant Anglos and Catholic Mexicans, with the hero usually representing the former.
Mexico versus Texas, the first novel to
incorporate seminal historical events such as the Goliad Massacre
and the battle of San Jacinto, was published anonymously in 1838;
it was reissued in 1842 under the title Ambrosio de Letinez and
credited to A. T. Myrthe, although its title page lists Anthony
Ganilh. The novel's argument is characteristic of the period: the
dedication poses the rhetorical question "whether anything
could have taken place more conducive to the regeneration and
improvement of Mexico than the success of the Texans."
The Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet (1843) by Frederick
Marryat, a retired British naval officer and prolific author,
consists of pure adventure ranging over much of the American
West, including Texas of revolution times.
Carl Anton Postl, an Austrian ex-monk who wrote prolifically under the pseudonym Charles Sealsfield, used early Texas as the setting for The Cabin Book (1844), in which the hero becomes a general in the Texas army.
Frenchman Olivier Gioux, whose pen name was Gustave Aimard, devoted one of his more than twenty novels of the American West to Texas-The Freebooters, a Story of the Texas War (ca. 1860).
Charles Wilkins Webber, in Old Hicks the Guide (1845), added the search for a lost Spanish mine to Texas adventure fiction.
And Alfred W. Arrington, writing as Charles Summerfield in The Rangers and Regulators of Tanaha...A Tale of the Texas Republic (1856), contributed the bandit motif in his novel, which is set among plantation slaveholders in East Texas in 1845-46.
Emerson Bennett's Viola (1852) also takes place during the republic era.
Jeremiah Clemens in Mustang Gray (1858)
fictionalized the life of Mabry B. Gray, a soldier-bandit of
early Texas.
Not surprisingly, the legend of the Alamo proved a popular
subject for early novelists.
Augusta Evans Wilson's Inez: A Tale of the Alamo (1855) pits an Anglo heroine against the unscrupulous wiles of the Catholic priesthood.
Amelia E. Barr's Remember the Alamo (1888) sums up the anti-Catholic feeling of much fiction from the republic and post-republic era: "the priesthood foresaw that the triumph of the American element meant the triumph of freedom of conscience, and the abolition of their own despotism." Barr's autobiography, All the Days of My Life: An Autobiography, the Red Leaves of a Human Heart (1913), which includes a lengthy section on life in late-nineteenth-century Austin, retains more interest today than does her florid fiction.
Hostility against Mexicans is also a strong ingredient of novels about the republic. The Trapper's Bride: or, Love and War: A Tale of the Texas Revolution (1869), by W. J. Hamilton (pseudonym for Charles Dunning Clark), is peppered with virulent racist epithets, as is Jeremiah Clemens's Bernard Lile: An Historical Romance, Embracing the Periods of the Texas Revolution and the Mexican War (1856).
Scores of dime novels exploited the
subjects of bandits, rangers, and cowboys, but these belong to
the vast underthicket of popular culture. The first novel to make
use of the trail drive was Live Boys: or Charley and Nacho in
Texas, written by Thomas Pilgrim in 1878 under the pen name
Arthur Morecamp. J. Frank Dobie praised its authenticity.
Anglo Texas had its roots in Southern, not Western, culture. The
first settlers were slaveholding planters or would-be
slaveowners. The early Texas novel most firmly rooted in Old
Southern culture was Mollie E. Moore Davis's Under the Man-Fig
(1895), which details events in Brazoria County from 1857 to
1880. Even more interesting is her The Wire-Cutters (1899), which
moves from a Southern plantation context (in Kentucky) to a West
Texas ranch and the conflict between open-range cattlemen and
small farmers, a theme that was reprised in hundreds of Western
novels to come.
Early Texas poetry was abundant but undistinguished. That from
the republic era usually reflected two themes representative of
the attitudes of Southerners in general: a martial spirit coupled
with religious sentiment. Poems dealing with contemporaneous
history were commonplace. "To Santa Anna," a typical
piece, addresses its subject as "thou blood-hound of
death." Poems honoring such Texas heroes as Ben (Benjamin
R.) Milam, James W. Fannin, and Sam Houstonq were plentiful.
Later in the era, poets turned to more pacific subjects, writing
of labor in poems celebrating the "plough" and cattle
drives, or of Texas landscapes and natural phenomena, or of
cities, or even, as early as 1849, the blue norther.
An excellent brief anthology of such poetry is Early Texas Verse (1835-1850), edited by Philip Graham in 1936. Much of the verse in Graham's collection is anonymous. Among the poets whose authors are named, a few deserve mention.
Mirabeau B. Lamar, soldier and statesman, is remembered chiefly for two lyrics, "Carmelita" and "The Daughter of Mendoza." His only volume is Verse Memorials (1857).
The poetic reputations of two of his associates in affairs of state rest on one poem of each: "Hymn to the Alamo" by Reuben M. Potter and "All Quiet Along the Potomac" by Lamar Fontaine, son of Mirabeau Lamar's secretary, Edward Fontaine; others have claimed the latter poem.
Much better known in the nineteenth
century was Mollie E. M. Davis, who, in addition to her fiction,
gained renown with Civil War poems published in newspapers.
"Lee at the Wilderness" and "Minding the Gap"
were widely circulated throughout the South. Davis, known as the
"Texas Mocking Bird," published several volumes of
verse, including Minding the Gap, and Other Poems (1867) and
Poems (1872).
After the Civil War, with the development of the cattle industry,
ballads of the range became popular. Usually sung or recited,
these ballads were orally transmitted, and the names of their
author-composers were often lost. The same process occurred in
Spanish verse along the Mexican border in South Texas, where
corridos were composed, sung, and passed down from one generation
to the next.
Collecting cowboy ballads and corridos became a major occupation of scholars and folklorists in the twentieth century. Even the skillful and popular recitative piece "Lasca" (1882), at one time the best known of all Texas poems, was passed around and handed down orally. By the time it got into print, lines had been lost and the author identified only as Frank Desprez. Not until the 1950s was anything known about this Englishman, who was for three years "occupied on a Texas ranch" before he returned to England and became a professional writer.
Another famous cowboy recitation was "The Cowboys' Christmas Ball" by William Lawrence Chittenden, an Eastern newspaper reporter who became known as the "Poet-Ranchman of Texas." His poem immortalized the Anson ball of 1885, which is still reenacted each Christmas under the title Cowboys' Christmas Ball; dancers in costume come from hundreds of miles away for this celebration. Chittenden's volume Ranch Verses (1893) has seen many editions.
John P. Sjolander, a young Swede,
immigrated to the Texas Gulf Coast in 1871, settled on Bayou
Cedar, built boats, farmed, and wrote poems for periodicals. In
1928 his poems were gathered into a volume titled Salt of the
Earth and Sea. Before his death in 1939 he was called the
"Dean of Texas Poets." Except for the cowboy ballads,
however, none of the nineteenth-century Texas verse outlasted its
day.
The story of theater in Texas is not generally well known. The
first edition of the Handbook of Texas mentions folk plays in
Spanish that were performed orally along the border, but contains
no mention of early Texas Anglo drama. There were in fact,
however, plays that deserve mention. Again, not surprisingly, the
siege and battle of the Alamo was a popular subject.
Francis Nona's The Fall of the Alamo: An Historical Drama in Four Acts (1879) told its story in verse.
Hiram H. McLane's The Capture of the Alamo: An Historical Tragedy in Four Acts, with Prologue appeared in 1886.
The only play dealing with Texas themes that achieved popular success was A. P. Hoyt's A Texas Steer (1890), which traced in a farcical manner the colorful doings of a Texas rancher-congressman named Maverick Brander from Red Dog, Texas, "where men are men and the plumbing is improving." Hoyt's play enjoyed great popularity, was filmed three times including a 1927 version starring Will Rogers, and was still in print as late as 1939.