The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 50, July 1946 - April, 1947 Page: 498

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

societies would find in rummaging into the traditions and leg-
ends of the early days of their counties would be a generous
reward for the time spent. But with him the prime motive in
urging their organization was to rescue from impending oblivion
historical lore which lived only in the recollection of men and
women fast marching to their graves. Much of the history of
Texas has been lost in that way, and Mr. Dealey's hope was to
put an end to that neglect.
But he had ends in mind which lay beyond the pleasure and
profit which would come to those who made researches into the
state's past. He had the hope and the firm belief, even, that
some day a man having the ambition and the ability to tell the
epic of Texas worthily would appear; thus Mr. Dealey saw
that it would further the writing of an adequate history of
Texas to make ready to the historian's hand the tested data still
left for gathering.
To those who did not know the man well, it may seem more
than strange that such lively concern for the preservation of
Texas history should be manifested by an alien, for, as is rather
generally known, Mr. Dealey was born in England. But to those
who did know him, who know how he cherished courage, hero-
ism, and noble aspiration, it was quite natural that he should
wish to give the most lasting inspirational effect to the exhibi-
tion of those virtues as they were manifested by the men and
women who converted a province of Mexico into the Republic
and afterward the state of Texas. This rather intense eagerness
in Mr. Dealey to preserve yet unrecorded data of Texas history
was one of several evidences of the extraordinary ardor of his
love for Texas. It was not a demonstrative love. Mr. Dealey was
not demonstrative; he was, indeed, the antithesis of a demon-
strative man. It was literally true of him-as it is of no other
man that I have known-that he deliberately hid his light and
his countless acts of kindness under a bushel; and while it could
not be said that he resented publication of them, it is true that
publication was undesirable to him, to which he was reconciled
on occasion only by the thought that publication might give to
his acts of generosity and philanthropy an emulative force.
There were circumstances to Mr. Dealey's love of Texas which
made it exceptional. One was the absence of sectional partiality.
It would be a bit less than quite true to say that his love of
Texas was spread out over the whole of the state with perfect

498