WHEN DAVID HAMRICK, THE DIRECTOR OF THE University of Texas Press, asked me if I might be interested in writing a history of Texas, my first thought was that maybe he should ask a historian instead. It was a project that seemed too large, too crucial, to entrust to a novelist and magazine writer whose limited formal education in history included a D in a college course on the Roman Empire.
So I said no to Dave, but then I said yes. Turning away from this opportunity made me feel like a painter who had just been handed a giant blank canvas and who—for abstruse reasons of credentialing and acute reasons of fear—was forbidding himself from touching it. Gradually I realized that being intimidated by a task was not the same thing as being unready for it. A lot of my life, and a lot of my career, had been channeling me in the direction of this book. Except for my first five years, spent abroad in Oklahoma, I have lived in Texas all my life. For over forty years I’ve been writing about the state for Texas Monthly, in articles and essays that have almost all, in one way or another, tended to be as much about the past as the present. As a journalist, I was never quite as interested in the top layer of time, which I was supposed to be covering, as I was in the history rumbling beneath it. For that fortuitous grounding, I’ll always be grateful to Mike Levy, Texas Monthly’s founder, and to its editors and staff.
I’ve written two historical novels set in Texas—The Gates of the Alamo and Remember Ben Clayton—and the years of research that went into trying to make them historically as well as fictionally credible had a deep impact on me and gave me an enhanced respect for the work of every sort of historian, from academic to unaffiliated, from those who write sweeping narratives (such as this one is intended to be) to those who spend their lives examining some unexciting-to-relate but crucial-to-understand fragment of the past. Ann Close was my editor at Alfred A. Knopf for both of those books, as she has been for several others, and I’ve always greatly appreciated her editorial guidance and the support of the entire Knopf team.
When I first began thinking about how I was going to attack this book, I had enlightening conversations with Don Carleton, the director of the Briscoe Center for American History, and Jesús F. de la Teja, the former Texas State Historian and now the chief executive officer of the Texas State Historical Association. Light Townsend Cummins, like Frank de la Teja, is a former Texas State Historian and was generous in sharing an early draft of the authoritative Texas bibliography—Discovering Texas History—that he had edited with Bruce A. Glasrud and Gary D. Wintz.
For major help or just welcome little courtesies along the way, I’m grateful to an expansive list of people and institutions: Mark Smith and Jelain Chubb of the Texas State Library; Brian Roberts, Jonathan Jarvis, Marybeth Tomka, and Susan W. Dial of the University of Texas’s Texas Archeological Research Laboratory; Mark Lambert and James Harkins of the Texas General Land Office; Bruce Winders, the curator of the Alamo; Jim Bruseth of the Texas Historical Commission and his wife and co-author Toni S. Turner, who allowed me to accompany them to the fascinating and forlorn site of La Salle’s Fort St. Louis; Bill Hensel of the Port of Houston, and Doug Mims, captain of the M/V Sam Houston; Angela Holder of the National Buffalo Soldiers Museum; Mark Updegrove, Jennifer Cuddeback, and Brian McNerney of the LBJ Presidential Library; Victoria Ramirez of the Bullock Texas State History Museum; Zach Roberts of the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library; Rebecca Russell of the Woodson Research Center at Rice University; Alex Hunt, Timothy Bowman, Maureen Hubbart, A. J. McCormick, and Kaycie Timm of the Center for the American West at West Texas A&M University; Amy Von Lintel, also of West Texas A&M; Warren Stricker of the Panhandle Plains Museum; Sue Prudhomme and Eric Ray of the Museum of the Coastal Bend; and J. P. Bryan, the founder of Galveston’s wondrous J. P. Bryan Museum, along with the museum’s director, Joan Marshall, and Mary Lou Hollender, its director of development.
I’m thankful also for various insight boosts or hospitality provided by Walter Buenger, Carol Dawson, Tom Harrigan, Evan Smith, Jim Harrigan, Robert Sharp, Zach Ernst, S. C. Gwynne, Luci Johnson, Philipp Meyer, Ben Barnes, Regan Gammon, Ricardo Ainslie, Karl Rove, Alvin Lynn, Cina Forgeson, Victor Emanuel, Phil Collins, Jay O’Brien, Brian Sweany, Ninia Ritchie, Paul Hutton, James Donovan, Robert Duvall, Dick Reavis, Lou Berney, Jeff Salamon, David Grogan, Bruce Winders, Joe Bill Sherrod, Bret Anthony Johnston, Andres Tijerina, Ty Cashion, Georgia and Chuck Kitsman, Chris and Kade Matthews, Tim Taliaferro, Alan Huffines, Jan Reid, and Jack and Dee Turner.
Some eminent Texas historians agreed to review the manuscript in whole or in part and to alert me to any mistakes or missteps or foolish conclusions they found therein. They of course made some excellent discoveries, and I made corrections accordingly, but readers should be assured that whatever errors still exist are my responsibility and not the fault of this distinguished panel. Warm thanks in this regard to Stephen L. Hardin, Light Cummins, Paula Mitchell Marks, Bill Minutaglio, and George Diaz.
In addition, it was a great relief, and a real pleasure, to work with Christian Wallace and Emily McCullar of Texas Monthly as they carefully fact-checked the manuscript, diplomatically calling my attention to errors both forgivably small (somebody’s age being a year off) to howlingly huge (oops, wrong century!).
My friends William Broyles, James Magnuson, Bill Wittliff, and Lawrence Wright helped to convince me that writing a history of Texas was within my authorial range, and they provided encouragement whenever I began to fret that it wasn’t. Bill Broyles read the manuscript and made valuable comments, as did Larry Wright. Larry and I have had many memorable adventures together during our long friendship, but among the best of them was the bicycling excursion we took along San Antonio’s mission trail, as well as a trip to Abilene where we discovered that, unbeknownst to our younger selves, we had gone to school across the street from each other. (For more on that, including a schoolyard lightning strike that almost ended Larry’s career before it began, see his book God Save Texas.)
For decades, Larry and Gregory Curtis and H. W. Brands and I have had breakfast together on Monday mornings. The long-running discussions that take place have often involved each other’s works in progress, so it was natural that this book would be field-tested to some extent in their company. Greg is a particularly insightful editor (he edited Texas Monthly for over twenty years) and Bill Brands is an esteemed and uncannily prolific biographer and historian with total recall of American history. This book—and my life in general—has benefitted greatly from those Monday breakfasts.
There was no possibility of having breakfast with my great friend Elizabeth Crook—she’s a restless night owl and needs her morning sleep—but in countless lunches and probably thousands of phone conversations her wisdom and sometimes her wisecracks have helped immeasurably to shape and steady the course of my career.
I wish I could take credit for the profuse and arresting illustrations in this book, but that was the result of Dave Hamrick’s original vision and of Chuck Bailey’s expert and tireless research in tracking down the images. (And special thanks in this regard to the Briscoe Center, which was particularly generous when Chuck came calling.) We were all delighted by the lighthearted maps produced by Margaret Kimball, and I’m grateful to Gary Zaboly for allowing me to repurpose the authoritative Alamo sketch that he originally drew for the endpapers of The Gates of the Alamo. Kip Keller, who copy edited this book, matched his exactitude to my persnicketyness (Kip, did I spell that right? Is it even a word?) with graceful efficiency, and made the process of reviewing his comments a pleasure. And it was my good fortune that UT Press entrusted the design of this book to Erin Mayes, whose artistry is visible on every page. For the heavy lifting required for indexing, I’m grateful to Kay Banning, and for proofreading to Rebekah Fowler and Luke Torn.
In-house at the Press itself, my editor Casey Kittrell was always an unflappable presence, undemanding but quietly directing. I have no idea how Lynne Ferguson, the senior manuscript editor, managed to keep her sanity while bringing order to all the scattered components and citations of my many drafts, but she somehow did, and even managed to convince me that the disarray was never as great as I imagined. Dustin Kilgore likewise kept things moving ahead with seeming effortlessness on the design and production side of things. Gianna LaMorte has been a champion of this book from the beginning, and the architect of ever-inventive ways to bring it to the attention of readers, even including the publication of a preview volume called They Came from the Sky. Cameron Ludwick has also been a pleasure to work with as she helps this book make its way into the world. Thanks also to the other members of the UT Press team—Demi Marshall, Robert Devens, Robert Kimzey, Bailey Morrison, Angelica Lopez-Torres, Andrew Hnatow, Cassandra Cisneros, Joel Pinckney, Brenda Jo Hoggatt, Dawn Bishop, and Kate Shannon—who have been aiders and abettors of this outsized publishing project. And it’s important to note that the project would not have been viable in the first place without the support of Bill Powers, the former president of the University of Texas at Austin, Victoria Corcoran, and the remarkable members of the UT Press advisory board.
Any acknowledgments I make in any book I write would be incomplete to the point of meaninglessness if I didn’t mention, with deep gratitude, my steadfast agent and friend Esther Newberg.
It would be nice to make a clean break here and not get my family all mixed up in a list of what should probably be professional thank-yous, but I don’t know where to draw that line, especially since my wife, Sue Ellen, our daughters, Marjorie, Dorothy, and Charlotte, and our sons-in-law, Rodney, Mike, and Zach, have all weighed in with welcome opinions and suggestions during the years it took to write this book. (Sue Ellen’s advice, as always, was inspiringly direct: “Just hurry up and get it over with.”) And during those years our family has happily expanded to include six grandchildren—Mason, Travis, Maisie, Romy, Sonny, and Gladys. It has been the joy of my life to use my book advance to treat them all to LuAnn Platters almost every week at Luby’s cafeteria.
Finally, even though I’ve already mentioned Dave Hamrick several times, it’s time to bring him back for a curtain call. Without his vision, determination, goading (sometimes), and generosity (always), I would never have embarked upon the long journey that has ended, with so many debts to so many people, upon this final page.