Historic Texas

By Rick Sapp

Texas was built on stories of cactus, cattle, and cowboys that have stretched as big as the state itself to encompass the even more fabulous tales of railroads, oil, and the bravest of settlers. Railroads brought commerce, people, and vitality to early Texas creating such strong growth and welcoming numerous industries that now the state’s economy is broad based and globally reknowned. Men like Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving pioneered ranching on the prairies and their kind was only tamed when fence posts and barbed wire closed the open range in the 1880s. With more than 26 million residents, the vast majority of which reside in its cities, the Texas of today has the room, the resources, the diversity, and the willpower to continue at the unabated rate of growth of the last century. Texas’ international cities gleam with glass and steel. From Austin to Amarillo, a visitor can be understood almost as well (sometimes better) in Spanish as in English. It is the character of the people, so many of them with a Mexican heritage, that gives a savory flavor to all things Tex-Mex.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TAJ Books International
• Release date: Jan 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781844063079

Rick Sapp

Born near Chicago, Rick Sapp grew up on Amelia Island, Florida. His unusual heritage— on one side a long line of southern farmers, shrimp boat captains and rebels, and on the other, a legacy of northern coal miners, gangsters and union organizers—gave him a restless spirit and an inquisitive mind. After three years at the U.S. Air Force Academy he joined the army as a paratrooper and subsequently worked as an intelligence officer in Europe. He completed his PhD. in cultural anthropology at the University of Florida, conducting field work with the National Institute of Mental Health (St. Elizabeth Hospital) in Washington, DC, and in the Great Bend of the Suwannee River, Florida. Rick owned a Media Consulting firm until 9/11 and soon thereafter began freelancing full-time. Rick has since authored (or coauthored) 30 books about camping, bicycle touring, urban redevelopment, history, political cartoons, and outdoor activities. A prolific freelance writer since 1980, his resume includes hundreds, perhaps a thousand, nonfiction articles, creative nonfiction, and short fiction stories, and even poetry. Rick lives in Florida.

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INTRODUCATION

In popular imagination, Texas is built on castles of cactus, cattle, and cowboys. That is a romantic myth, of course. Another version of Texas’ glory story is that of oil barons and wealth that simply gushes out of the ground, Black Gold.

Every myth carries a subtle element of truth and both cattle and oil had their day as pillars of the Texas economy and builders of its cities. Texas cities, however, as much or more than any state in the nation owe their foundation to the Iron Horse, the railroad.

The Big D, Dallas itself, is a good example of railroads and right-of-way. It was hardly a village in 1870. Then, the Houston & Texas Central, running north-south, and the Texas & Pacific, running east-west, crossed in Dallas in 1873. The population more than doubled in one year.

Even though it was the first capital of the Texas Republic, Houston was little different. In fact, H-Town set the example.

Houston’s shallow water port facilities and those of Galveston could load only so much produce if those goods had to be hauled to the ships by ox-drawn wagons. Hence, Houston had a limited commercial horizon until, as early as the 1850s, visionary citizens decided to build a rail system to connect their port to the hinterland. Eleven companies eventually built 451 miles of track before the Civil War began.

Activity around the soda pop stand at a polo match in Abilene in 1939

Johnson’s Texas, a map drawn by cartographer Alvin Jewett Johnson (1827–1884) in 1873 at the beginning of the Grange Movement, begun after the Civil War as one of the first American Populist efforts with the goal of organizing farmers to unite against the railroads and to form consumer cooperatives. Unique for its time, the Grange Movement included women as members and even required that four of its elected positions must be held by women.

A book titled Houston: Where Seventeen Railroads Meet the Sea (Jerome Farbar, 1913) written a century ago, acknowledged that while the ship channel may be the city’s greatest single asset, Houston had already become the railroad (and hence shipping and communications) capital of the U.S. southwest. Railroads brought commerce, people, building, and vitality to the Texas bayous.

Texas also needed something to ship over those endless miles of railroad and needed products to sell at the end of the lines, so in the 1800s farmers and ranchers contributed cattle and cotton. The nugget of truth in the cowboy saga is that for a brief time, perhaps actually beginning with the Spanish—later Mexican—vaquero, the life of wild and free