The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, Volume 10, July 1906 - April, 1907 Page: 282

Texas Historical Association Quarterly.

few and trifling compared to the contests waged by the adventurers
who won Kentucky, Tennessee and Texas.
* In the southwest the early settlers acted as their own army. In-
deed, the southwesterners not only won their own soil for them-
selves, but were the chief instruments in the original acquisition
of the northwest. The warlike borderers who thronged across the
Alleghanies, the reckless hunters, the hard, dogged frontier farm-
ers, by dint of grim tenacity, overcame and displaced French, In-
dian, and Spaniard alike."
In this book, Dr. Garrison briefly traces this movement down
to the year 1841, when these same frontiersmen are flying their
own flag. Six hundred miles in advance of the furthest outposts
of the United States with their laws, customs and institutions
transplanted over the fertile area of Texas, from which they had
a few years before displaced the Indian and Mexican. He takes
the story of their incorporation into the Union from its legitimate
beginning, and traces it through the intricate mazes of interna-
tional diplomacy, the Mexican war and American politics and car-
ries it to its final consummation on the shores of -the Pacific-
and when this is done, he gives us an elaborate survey of the steps
by which this immense territory was adjusted to the political con-
ditions of the United States. In doing so he has had to deal with
the slavery issue, and many facts and circumstances bearing im-
mediately or indirectly on that issue, which perplexed the minds
and stirred the passions of people in that day.
Political antagonisms and party strife were at white heat, dur-
ing most of that period, and historians and writers of that epoch
have, as a rule, not been able to divest themselves of the influence
of the political partisanship resulting from the struggle of that
day. In dealing with questions that involve passions, and motions
of men, the historian has a delicate and difficult task, but Dr. Gar-
rison has brought to his aid much that is new to the world, has
had the advantage of a fifty-year survey of 'the results, and im-
mense facilities for examining questions from every point of view,
'and has surveyed the whole subject with a purely historic spirit,
and woven together the whole history with the genius of the artist
and wisdom of the philosopher.
The chapter on the boundary of Texas is perhaps the most dis-

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