Texas Historical Literature Texas Historical Literature by Don B. Graham
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 (see MOSCOSO EXPEDITION).
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,q 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 Knoxq 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 (see INDIAN CAPTIVES), 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.