The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 89, July 1985 - April, 1986 Page: 386

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

usually socially, economically, and politically as well, by a host culture.
In Texas, the host/dominant group throughout the past century and
a half has consisted of old-stock Anglo-Americans, here defined as
whites of colonial eastern-seaboard ancestry.4 More precisely, southern
Anglos served as the host culture in Texas through most of that period.
Even as early as 1830, a mere fifteen years or so after southern pio-
neers began settling Texas, they had acquired majority status (figure 1).
The war of independence in 1836 formalized the host culture claim
of southern Anglos by awarding them political, social, and economic
overlordship.
Though basically British-derived, the host group was itself far from
internally homogeneous. Southern Anglos numbered not just English,
Scotch-Irish, and Welsh among their ancestors, but also Pennsylvania
Germans, Hudson Valley Dutch, French Huguenots, Delaware Valley
Finns and Swedes, and others. These diverse groups, far to the east
of Texas, blended through intermarriage to form the southern Anglo
population. The Texian victors of 1836 lived in Finnish log cabins,
fought with German long rifles, drank Scottish whiskey, adhered to
British dissenter Protestantism, and introduced the language and com-
mon law of the English. Walk among their tombstones in the graveyards
of rural Texas and you will find the Scotch-Irish McLane and Ross,
the Germans Snider and Buckner, the English Alsbury and Cooper,
the Dutch De Witt and Kuykendall, the Welsh Williams and Jones, the
Huguenots Lamar and Alley, the Swedes Swanson and Justice.
Even in colonial times, the Anglo host group had formed two distinct
southern subcultures, one rooted in the coastal plain and based in the
SWsevolod W. Isajiw, "Definitions of Ethnicity," Ethnicity, I (July, 1974), 111-124; Terry G.
Jordan and Lester Rowntree, "Ethnic Geography," Chapter 9 in The Human Mosaic: A Thematic
Introduction to Cultural Geography (4th ed.; New York, 1986), 271-304.
4Basic sources on the southern Anglo-Americans include Terry G. Jordan, "The Texan Ap-
palachia," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, LX (Sept., 1970), 409-427; Henry
Stuart Foote, Texas and the Texans; or, Advance of the Anglo-Americans to the South-West (2 vols.;
Philadelphia, 1841); Rex W. Strickland, "Anglo-American Activities in Northeastern Texas,
1803-1845" (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1937); Lester G. Bugbee, "The Old Three
Hundred: A List of Settlers in Austin's First Colony," Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Associa-
tion, I (Oct., 1897), 1o8-117 (this journal is cited hereafter as QTSHA); Mark E. Nackman,
"Anglo-American Migrants to the West: Men of Broken Fortunes? The Case of Texas, 1821-
1846," Western Historical Quarterly, V (Oct., 1974), 441-455; Barnes F. Lathrop, Migration into
East Texas, 1835-1860 (Austin, 1949); Seymour V. Connor, The Peters Colony of Texas (Austin,
1959); William W. White, "Migration into West Texas, 1845-1860o" (M.A. thesis, University of
Texas, 1948); Homer L. Kerr, "Migration into Texas, 1865-1880" (Ph.D. diss., University of
Texas, 1953); R. Marsh Smith, "Migration of Georgians to Texas, 1821-1870," Georgia Histori-
cal Quarterly, XX (Dec., 1936), 307-325; Ethel Zively Rather, "De Witt's Colony," QTSHA, VIII
(Oct., 1904), 95-192; and Eugene C. Barker, The Life of Stephen F. Austin, Founder of Texas,
1793-1836: A Chapter in the Westward Movement of the Anglo-American People (Nashville, 1925).

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