Legacies: A History Journal for Dallas and North Central Texas, Volume 4, Number 1, Spring, 1992 Page: 44
48 p. ; 26 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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James L. Haley, Texas: From the Frontier to
Spindletop (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991,
292 pp., $15.95)
The serious student of Texas history has
only to read the Preface of this book to know that it
is yet another popularized, sensationalistic account
of nineteenth century Texas. While Haley claims
that his is "a fairly straightforward narrative," (p.
ix) he has produced something that is neither
straightforward nor narrative. This book could be
more accurately characterized as a collection of
anecdotes than as narrative history. He himself, in
this same Preface, calls his work "a montage of
early visual and literary Texana," (p. ix) a fair
enough representation.
Haley explains,
What is presented here is broad and a bit
impressionistic-rather like a time line
sketched by a literary cubist. The object
was not to produce a definitive history,
but to produce, textually, an engaging first
read for someone new to the subject; interpretively,
new lighting on some topics
that have become hidebound either by
tradition or in revision; and visually, a
window into what it was like to live in that
magical period. (p. x)
This reviewer does not wish to quarrel with his use
of photographs, of which there are many, though
they are not particularly rare or interesting. My
quarrel is with the text. Haley has given the public
a distorted, incomplete picture of nineteenth century
Texas. For him the history of Texas is the
triumph of Anglo-American values and power over
uncivilized Native American and Spanish/Mexican
peoples, as well as wrongheaded Yankees and
Unionists. One of the photographs shows Stephen
F. Austin's hatchet, "by which he literally as well
as figuratively brought civilization to Texas' unsettled
wilderness." (p. 17) His characterizationsof both Indians and Spaniards are reminiscent of
attitudes which are usually absent from polite society-or
at least absent from works which claim to
be serious works of history. For instance, in describing
the Comanche attack on the San Saba
mission, he writes that the Apaches left the mission
"shortly before the garrison and clergy were
butchered by two thousand howling, buffalo-horned
Comanches." (p. 3, italics mine)
Haley is careless in his use of sources, but at
least he knows it. He employs Noah Smithwick's
Evolution of a State uncritically; his failure to use
ellipses gives a false impression of the content of
the quotations. (An example appears on p. 21, to
which Haley had alerted the reader in the Preface.)
He quotes Frederick Law Olmsted's Journey to
Texas to describe conditions in Texas some twenty
years before Olmsted visited Texas (p. 22).
Fortunately Haley expects "some modicum
of critical snorting over what has been left out. It
is not hard to envision the reviewer leafing through
these pages looking for that topic on which he is
particularly expert, only to discover to his pious
horror that I have given it short shrift or omitted it
entirely." While Haley suggests that he could be
fairly criticized for leaving out Robertson' s colony,
the Masonic orders, Gail Borden and Ashbel
Smith-even German breweries and the invention
of hamburger-he seems innocent of the omission
of serious treatment of women, minorities, urban
growth and development (Dallas is mentioned twice,
in a list of census figures), Reconstruction, tenant
farming, to mention but a few significant nineteenth
century topics. His bibliography reveals no
knowledge of recent scholarship on Texas history;
indeed he apparently used no more recent volumes
of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly than 1947!
Another troubling thing about this book is
that the author apparently has no respect for the
discipline of history and the work of historians. He44
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Dallas County Heritage Society. Legacies: A History Journal for Dallas and North Central Texas, Volume 4, Number 1, Spring, 1992, periodical, 1992; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth35116/m1/46/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Dallas Historical Society.