The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 103, July 1999 - April, 2000 Page: 120
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120 Southwestern Historical Quarterly July
city made Bush into something of a hero in the eyes of the store owners, King
Brothers. He helped them to re-open quickly by buying clothing from factories
to re-stock the inventory. He then went on the road as a salesman for King
Brothers. Over the next several years W. H. Bush used money made from com-
missions to buy many burned-out lots on Chicago's north side as well as proper-
ties on the west and south sides of the city.
His next significant decision occurred when he married Elva Frances Glidden
of nearby DeKalb in 1877. Elva was the daughter of Joseph Glidden, the inven-
tor of barbed wire. Bush became the confidant and personal agent of his father-
in-law. When Glidden and his sometime partner Henry B. Sanborn bought
125,000 acres of Texas Panhandle land, Bush went to Texas to look after
Glidden's interest in the Frying Pan Ranch. Within a few years Bush owned the
Frying Pan and was using his influence to coax two railroads to build into the
Panhandle. Amarillo sprang up near where the two lines crossed thanks in no
small part to both Bush and Sanborn. In the meantime, back in Chicago Bush
had opened his own highly successful wholesale hat and glove business.
But W. H. Bush was more, much more, than a successful businessman. His
philanthropic activities exerted cultural influences on both Amarillo and
Chicago. This avid reader who amassed an impressive personal library created
Amarillo's first library. A frequent traveler to Europe, Bush became an art lover
and contributed large sums of money to the Chicago Institute of Art.
Paul Carlson has done an impressive job with bringing Bush out of obscurity.
The book is a worthy beginning for the West Texas A&M University Series.
Chadron State College DONALD E. GREEN
The Slave Narratives of Texas. Edited by Ron Tyler and Lawrence R. Murphy.
(Austin: State House Press, 1997. Pp. xlviii+143. Ilustrations, preface,
acknowledgments, introduction, appendix, bibliography. ISBN 1-880510-
35-9. $24.95, cloth; $16.95, paper.)
During the quarter century since the Encino Press first issued Ron Tyler and
Lawrence R. Murphy's The Slave Narratives of Texas, I have seen the book in an
amazing array of locations. It was on the breakfast table of a noted Texas bigot, it
was on the desk of a black intellectual in Brenham, and it has been on library
shelves from Orange to El Paso and beyond. It is no understatement to describe
The Slave Narratives of Texas as one of the pioneer studies in Texas African-
American history.
When Ron Tyler and Lawrence R. Murphy put together this group of selec-
tions extracted from the much larger collection of Texas ex-slave narratives in
the Rare Book Room (now Manuscript Division) of the Library of Congress in
1974, only a handful of scholars like George R. Woolfolk and J. Mason Brewer
had specifically addressed the history of blacks in Texas. Only the year before
had Alwyn Barr issued his overview Black Texans (Austin: Jenkins Publishing Co.,
1973), and Randolph B. Campbell had probably not even considered the idea of
writing his An Empire for Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1989) on African-American slavery in Texas. Suffice it to say, The Slave Narratives
of Texas was a groundbreaking work on the lives of African Americans in Texas.
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 103, July 1999 - April, 2000, periodical, 2000; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101220/m1/146/: accessed March 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.