Late 19th and Early 20th Century Culture of the Somerset Area
Bernard Pyron
The Late 19th and Early 20th Century Culture of the South Texas Brasada and of Somerset
Bernard Pyron
The culture of the South Texas Brush Country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a lively mix of the Old South, the American West and the large scale cattle raising culture of Mexico. This Brush Country Culture was distinctive, even from other areas of Texas, and had its own accent. It survived to some extent in those born there in the rural areas and small towns in the twenties and thirties.
The culture of the Somerset area of South Bexar county in about 1880 to 1940 was much the same as that of the larger South Texas Brush Country culture.
But this culture was largely lost by the time its Baby Boomer offspring came of age in the sixties.
To some extent, the late 19th and early 20th century lively mix of Old South, American West and Hispanic cattle raising culture of Texas and Mexico was seasoned by an original ingredient which grew from the land itself. The South Texas Brush Country, or J. Frank Dobie's Brasada of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was a region of thickets with lots of brush which had thorns, with prickly-pear, cats-claw, Spanish dagger, black chaparral, and mesquite.
The working outfit of the Brush Country cowboy had to fit the thickets in which he worked Longhorns. He usually wore leather leggins that covered his legs, wore large gloves that went past his wrists, and his huge western hat had to be tied down or he would lose it in the thick brush. The brush cowboy usually carried a shorter rope coiled up on his saddle than did the plains cowboy. Even the brush cowboy's horse was smaller, to better navigate in the thick brush and trails through it.
J. Frank Dobie wrote in A Vaquero of the Brush Country (1929) that "The bronco buster is constantly on exhibition...He has become the darling of the cowboy tradition. But nobody ever sees the brush popper in action. When he does his most daring and dangerous work he is out of sight down in a thicket."
The American Cowboy Culture began in that land of thickets also known as the Brasada, the brush country. It started back in the days of the Republic of Texas. The online Handbook of Texas says that immigrants to Texas in the period of 1821 to 1835 could claim 4,605 acres of grazing land and 177 acres of farm land at a cost of about four cents an acre ($184) payable in six years.
The Anglo American settlers to Texas were able to work small herds of cattle on foot. Initially, upon their arrival in Texas they did not know how to handle large numbers of cattle, especially the Mexican Longhorn cattle, on huge tracts of land. That could not be done on foot because a cow, especially the wild Longhorns, could easily outrun a man on foot. In Mexico, which included the state of Tejas, converted to Texas by the American colonists, the horse was necessary for working large numbers of Longhorns on the large open range.
The Americans in the Texas of 1821-1835 had to learn the ranching and cattle working techniques developed in Mexico. They had to have trained cattle horses and learn to ride them in the thick brush lands of South Texas. They also had to learn to rope with the Mexican lariat and use the Mexican style saddle with its saddle horn designed to be strong enough to hold a roped Longhorn. To protect themselves from the thorns of the thick brush they had to adapt use of leggins or chaps, which were leather pants worn over the guy's usual pants. They also began wearing a version of the Mexican sombrero to protect the cowboy from the sun and the thorns of the thickets. This new American "vaquero" in Texas learned a number of Spanish words involving his outfit and in working cattle. The name "cowboy" itself for the mounted herdsman of cattle is a kind of translation of the Spanish word vaquero from vaca meaning cow.
In addition, the Mexican system of branding cattle and registering brands was seen to be useful by the Texas vaqueros, and they learned to brand their cattle and register their brands.
So the Mexican state of Tejos became Texas, but at first the Anglo-Americans did not call themselves Texans. A Texian was a citizen of the Republic of Texas, and their descendants can be called Texians. On http://www.drt-inc.org/ancestors/drtAncestors.php?alpha=B the Daughters of the Republic of Texas list the names of its citizens, including:
"Blackburn, Gideon b. 05-02-1817 at Williamson Co., TX - d. 12-23-1881 at LaVaca Co., TX "
"Blackburn, John L. D. b. ca 1815 at TN - d. 09-24-1869 at La Grange, Fayette, Co., TX"
Gideon Blake Blackburn was not born in 1817 at Williamson county, Texas. He was born in 1817 at Maury County, Tennessee where his older brother John L.D. Blackburn was born in 1815. Both were citizens of the Republic of Texas, and my grandmother Virginia Blackburn Pyron's uncle, John L.D. Blackburn, was in the Texas Army and in the Mier Expedition. Grandmother's father, Gideon Blake Blackburn was a Texian. A third Blackburn brother. Edward Rose Blackburn, born in 1808, and father of Captain James K.P. Blackburn, CSA, also came to Texas. So did their mother Martha Carney Blackburn. Apparently Edward Rose and his mother arrived in Texas after the time of the Republic of 1836 to 1846.
The American cowboy culture and personality traits grew out of the Mexican Vaquero and out of his skill in riding horses and in handling large herds of Longhorns - and out of the lingo and outfit of the Vaquero, and in Bexar county, from the Vaqueros and ranchers who lived on the San Antonio and Medina rivers, Los Bexareños.
But the American cowboy, his culture and his personality traits, did not spread much into the Great Planes of the West until after the end of the War of Federal Aggression. After about 1867, Texas cowboys began driving large herds of Longhorns north to the railroad heads, first to Sedalia, Missouri and later to towns in Kansas. The TV series, Rawhide 1959-1965, was based to some extent on real Texas cattle drive history, about the dangers of the long trail from San Antonio to Sedalia, Missouri, and also the problems the trail drivers had with the Missourians once they arrived in that state. That conflict of Texans with the Missourians got into the story grammar of the Western novel.
And the cowboy with his culture and personality traits, coming up out of the Brush Country, did spread to the territories of the Great Planes. The culture of the West Coast states of California, Oregon, Washington, and Nevada diverged from the cowboy culture of the Great Planes, and as far as culture is concerned the West Coast states were not part of the West. The culture of the Great Planes was first described and exalted to some extent by historian Walter Prescott Webb, who was a professor of history at the University of Texas.
Walter Prescott Webb said in his presidential address to the American Historical Association: “History as High Adventure,” American Historical Review 69 (1959): 265–81, that "The excitement of that moment was probably the greatest creative sensation I have ever known. I had come upon something really important, that I was no longer an imitator, parroting what I read or what some professor had said. This idea that something important happened when the Americans came out of the woods and undertook to live on the plains freed me from authority, and set me out on an independent course of inquiry.”
Webb pointed out in The Great Planes that this region is different from the land east of the 98th meridian, and that in adapting to this different environment the pioneers of the West had to change their institutions and way of life. One of the ideas of The Great Planes is that the environment itself had an influence upon the culture of Webs's West - the great planes - which emerged from the experiment of Americans adapting to life in the West.
The people of the Great Planes West were "lawless," said Webb, not meaning that they were all outlaws, but that they became unconventional, mavericks and more resourceful by the cultural standards of the civilized East. Webb’s idea that history is "a branch of literature"put him in opposition to the conventional academic historians of the Ivory Towers.
He said "In graduate school the student is taught to select a subject of such small dimensions that it offers no challenge to the intellect, does not develop the mind, and has little or no significance when developed. He is encouraged to write without benefit of imagination, to avoid any statement based on perception and insight unless he can prove by the documents that his idea is not original.” Quoted in George Wolfskill, “Walter Prescott Webb and The Great Plains: Then and Now,” Reviews in American History 12 (1984): 302."
Webb defined the Great Planes as being flat land, relatively treeless and semi arid, that is, with not enough rain.
In Texas the 98th meridian runs approximately through Meridian, which is in the middle of Bosque county. If you draw a line straight south from the middle of Bosque county, it would run near the town of Bede in Gonzales county. Wilson county, southeast of Bexar county, would be west of the 98th meridian. So, Bexar county is clearly west of the 98th meridian. The South Bexar County area of Somerset, in Southwest Bexar county, is in Walter Prescott Webb's West.
The northern edge of the South Texas Brush County, in South Bexar County, is flat land, but in its original state was not treeless, since the mesquites in this area often grow taller than in the more southern areas of the Brush County. Compared to southeast, Texas, Bexar county gets less rain, though it is not always semi arid.
The culture and personality
traits described by Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb,
historians of the frontier and of the great planes, is useful in understanding
the difference between the older American generations and the Baby Boomers.. The
largest change that Transformational Marxism, among other things,
caused was the contrast between those born before about 1940 in the
rural and small town West and those born after 1946, the Baby
Boomers..
And that Texas Brush Land in the twenties and thirties was still cowboy country. To some
extent, the horse age lingered on there in the thirties because of the Great
Depression. After the beginning of World War II in 1941, fewer and fewer people used horses and mules to plow fields and they mostly stopped using horses to pull their wagons to go to
town for shopping. But the older generation born in the 1890's in the South Texas Brush
Country remembered a time when everyone rode horses or rode in horse drawn wagons
or buggies. And the older people had a distinctive Brush County accent.
Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter
Prescott Webb wrote about the mentality of Americans of the western
frontier, saying they were more independent, self-reliant and
resourceful.
One of the reasons for this contrast between the older generations, now aged, and the generations born after about 1941-1946 is the influence of the counterculture and behind it, and other cultural influences for change, is Cultural Marxism, also called Political Correctness and Transformational Marxism.
The Baby Boomer generation became the target of the Frankfurt School's
intellectuals, the first American generation to live under the new
collectivist cultural dominance created by Transformational Marxism.
American generations born before the Baby Boomers began in 1946 tended
to follow a culture of individualism, a culture that
valued individual freedom, individual moral responsibility and
self-reliance.
Frederick Jackson Turner gave a paper called "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," to a gathering of historians in 1893 in Chicago. He said that:
"Individuals, forced to rely on their own wits and strength, were simply too scornful of rank to be amenable to the
exercise of centralized political power."
"If the frontier had been so essential to the development of American
culture and democracy, then what would befall them as the frontier
closed? It was on this forboding note that he closed his address: "And
now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a
hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone,
and with its going has closed the first period of American history."
The Western frontier mentality lingered on in the memories of many
Americans born in rural and small town America during the thirties and
early forties, especially west of the 98th meridian. It mostly died
out in the Baby Boomer generation.
The literary form of the Western formula story celebrates this frontier mentality in the West following the close of the War of Federal Aggression (1861-65) to about 1910. In the story grammar the white hat cowboy who is regenerated by living in a physical wilderness and by the American frontier attitude overcomes transgressive behavior. And in the formula range war Western, this cowboy of the wilderness frontier defeats the villain who is a society insider and is respected as a banker, business man or big rancher.
Michael T. Marsden in Savior In the Saddle: The Sagebrush Testament (In Jack Nachbar, Focus On the Western, 1974) says to see the Western hero "...as a coming together of certain elements from the Old and New Testaments and to see through him the creation of a Sagebrush Testament with its own ethos...The savior-like nature of the Western hero is nowhere more clearly manifested than in Gorge Steven's masterful Shane (1953). Allan Ladd at the beginning of the film moves slowly down the Grand Teton Mountains from the West.
A lot has been written on the culture and personality traits of the cowboy of history.
Richard Harding Davis (1892) said the Texas cowboy was "A fantastic looking individual." In writing on the cowboy of the Great Planes Walter Prescott Webb said "When he made this perfect adaptation he departed farther and farther from the conventional pattern of men, and as he diverged from the conventional pattern he became more and more unusual." In other words, the Texas cowboy, as reality and myth, who came up out of the South Texas Brush Country, was a little eccentric. The bow-legged man in the cowboy boots and large hat who liked to sit around campfires and tell leg-pulling stories was an eccentric driver of longhorn cattle. In the late thirties, a cowboy culture lingered in West Texas and in South Bexar county. I remember that at peanut threshing time in the late summer, some young men who came to the area from farther west in Texas to work in the peanut harvest, dressed and acting like cowboys, camped near our house at night,and would sit around a campfire telling stories.
Bernard Pyron
The culture of the South Texas Brush Country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a lively mix of the Old South, the American West and the large scale cattle raising culture of Mexico. This Brush Country Culture was distinctive, even from other areas of Texas, and had its own accent. It survived to some extent in those born there in the rural areas and small towns in the twenties and thirties.
The culture of the Somerset area of South Bexar county in about 1880 to 1940 was much the same as that of the larger South Texas Brush Country culture.
But this culture was largely lost by the time its Baby Boomer offspring came of age in the sixties.
To some extent, the late 19th and early 20th century lively mix of Old South, American West and Hispanic cattle raising culture of Texas and Mexico was seasoned by an original ingredient which grew from the land itself. The South Texas Brush Country, or J. Frank Dobie's Brasada of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was a region of thickets with lots of brush which had thorns, with prickly-pear, cats-claw, Spanish dagger, black chaparral, and mesquite.
The working outfit of the Brush Country cowboy had to fit the thickets in which he worked Longhorns. He usually wore leather leggins that covered his legs, wore large gloves that went past his wrists, and his huge western hat had to be tied down or he would lose it in the thick brush. The brush cowboy usually carried a shorter rope coiled up on his saddle than did the plains cowboy. Even the brush cowboy's horse was smaller, to better navigate in the thick brush and trails through it.
J. Frank Dobie wrote in A Vaquero of the Brush Country (1929) that "The bronco buster is constantly on exhibition...He has become the darling of the cowboy tradition. But nobody ever sees the brush popper in action. When he does his most daring and dangerous work he is out of sight down in a thicket."
The American Cowboy Culture began in that land of thickets also known as the Brasada, the brush country. It started back in the days of the Republic of Texas. The online Handbook of Texas says that immigrants to Texas in the period of 1821 to 1835 could claim 4,605 acres of grazing land and 177 acres of farm land at a cost of about four cents an acre ($184) payable in six years.
The Anglo American settlers to Texas were able to work small herds of cattle on foot. Initially, upon their arrival in Texas they did not know how to handle large numbers of cattle, especially the Mexican Longhorn cattle, on huge tracts of land. That could not be done on foot because a cow, especially the wild Longhorns, could easily outrun a man on foot. In Mexico, which included the state of Tejas, converted to Texas by the American colonists, the horse was necessary for working large numbers of Longhorns on the large open range.
The Americans in the Texas of 1821-1835 had to learn the ranching and cattle working techniques developed in Mexico. They had to have trained cattle horses and learn to ride them in the thick brush lands of South Texas. They also had to learn to rope with the Mexican lariat and use the Mexican style saddle with its saddle horn designed to be strong enough to hold a roped Longhorn. To protect themselves from the thorns of the thick brush they had to adapt use of leggins or chaps, which were leather pants worn over the guy's usual pants. They also began wearing a version of the Mexican sombrero to protect the cowboy from the sun and the thorns of the thickets. This new American "vaquero" in Texas learned a number of Spanish words involving his outfit and in working cattle. The name "cowboy" itself for the mounted herdsman of cattle is a kind of translation of the Spanish word vaquero from vaca meaning cow.
In addition, the Mexican system of branding cattle and registering brands was seen to be useful by the Texas vaqueros, and they learned to brand their cattle and register their brands.
So the Mexican state of Tejos became Texas, but at first the Anglo-Americans did not call themselves Texans. A Texian was a citizen of the Republic of Texas, and their descendants can be called Texians. On http://www.drt-inc.org/ancestors/drtAncestors.php?alpha=B the Daughters of the Republic of Texas list the names of its citizens, including:
"Blackburn, Gideon b. 05-02-1817 at Williamson Co., TX - d. 12-23-1881 at LaVaca Co., TX "
"Blackburn, John L. D. b. ca 1815 at TN - d. 09-24-1869 at La Grange, Fayette, Co., TX"
Gideon Blake Blackburn was not born in 1817 at Williamson county, Texas. He was born in 1817 at Maury County, Tennessee where his older brother John L.D. Blackburn was born in 1815. Both were citizens of the Republic of Texas, and my grandmother Virginia Blackburn Pyron's uncle, John L.D. Blackburn, was in the Texas Army and in the Mier Expedition. Grandmother's father, Gideon Blake Blackburn was a Texian. A third Blackburn brother. Edward Rose Blackburn, born in 1808, and father of Captain James K.P. Blackburn, CSA, also came to Texas. So did their mother Martha Carney Blackburn. Apparently Edward Rose and his mother arrived in Texas after the time of the Republic of 1836 to 1846.
The American cowboy culture and personality traits grew out of the Mexican Vaquero and out of his skill in riding horses and in handling large herds of Longhorns - and out of the lingo and outfit of the Vaquero, and in Bexar county, from the Vaqueros and ranchers who lived on the San Antonio and Medina rivers, Los Bexareños.
But the American cowboy, his culture and his personality traits, did not spread much into the Great Planes of the West until after the end of the War of Federal Aggression. After about 1867, Texas cowboys began driving large herds of Longhorns north to the railroad heads, first to Sedalia, Missouri and later to towns in Kansas. The TV series, Rawhide 1959-1965, was based to some extent on real Texas cattle drive history, about the dangers of the long trail from San Antonio to Sedalia, Missouri, and also the problems the trail drivers had with the Missourians once they arrived in that state. That conflict of Texans with the Missourians got into the story grammar of the Western novel.
And the cowboy with his culture and personality traits, coming up out of the Brush Country, did spread to the territories of the Great Planes. The culture of the West Coast states of California, Oregon, Washington, and Nevada diverged from the cowboy culture of the Great Planes, and as far as culture is concerned the West Coast states were not part of the West. The culture of the Great Planes was first described and exalted to some extent by historian Walter Prescott Webb, who was a professor of history at the University of Texas.
Walter Prescott Webb said in his presidential address to the American Historical Association: “History as High Adventure,” American Historical Review 69 (1959): 265–81, that "The excitement of that moment was probably the greatest creative sensation I have ever known. I had come upon something really important, that I was no longer an imitator, parroting what I read or what some professor had said. This idea that something important happened when the Americans came out of the woods and undertook to live on the plains freed me from authority, and set me out on an independent course of inquiry.”
Webb pointed out in The Great Planes that this region is different from the land east of the 98th meridian, and that in adapting to this different environment the pioneers of the West had to change their institutions and way of life. One of the ideas of The Great Planes is that the environment itself had an influence upon the culture of Webs's West - the great planes - which emerged from the experiment of Americans adapting to life in the West.
The people of the Great Planes West were "lawless," said Webb, not meaning that they were all outlaws, but that they became unconventional, mavericks and more resourceful by the cultural standards of the civilized East. Webb’s idea that history is "a branch of literature"put him in opposition to the conventional academic historians of the Ivory Towers.
He said "In graduate school the student is taught to select a subject of such small dimensions that it offers no challenge to the intellect, does not develop the mind, and has little or no significance when developed. He is encouraged to write without benefit of imagination, to avoid any statement based on perception and insight unless he can prove by the documents that his idea is not original.” Quoted in George Wolfskill, “Walter Prescott Webb and The Great Plains: Then and Now,” Reviews in American History 12 (1984): 302."
Webb defined the Great Planes as being flat land, relatively treeless and semi arid, that is, with not enough rain.
In Texas the 98th meridian runs approximately through Meridian, which is in the middle of Bosque county. If you draw a line straight south from the middle of Bosque county, it would run near the town of Bede in Gonzales county. Wilson county, southeast of Bexar county, would be west of the 98th meridian. So, Bexar county is clearly west of the 98th meridian. The South Bexar County area of Somerset, in Southwest Bexar county, is in Walter Prescott Webb's West.
The northern edge of the South Texas Brush County, in South Bexar County, is flat land, but in its original state was not treeless, since the mesquites in this area often grow taller than in the more southern areas of the Brush County. Compared to southeast, Texas, Bexar county gets less rain, though it is not always semi arid.
The culture and personality
traits described by Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb,
historians of the frontier and of the great planes, is useful in understanding
the difference between the older American generations and the Baby Boomers.. The
largest change that Transformational Marxism, among other things,
caused was the contrast between those born before about 1940 in the
rural and small town West and those born after 1946, the Baby
Boomers..
And that Texas Brush Land in the twenties and thirties was still cowboy country. To some
extent, the horse age lingered on there in the thirties because of the Great
Depression. After the beginning of World War II in 1941, fewer and fewer people used horses and mules to plow fields and they mostly stopped using horses to pull their wagons to go to
town for shopping. But the older generation born in the 1890's in the South Texas Brush
Country remembered a time when everyone rode horses or rode in horse drawn wagons
or buggies. And the older people had a distinctive Brush County accent.
Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter
Prescott Webb wrote about the mentality of Americans of the western
frontier, saying they were more independent, self-reliant and
resourceful.
One of the reasons for this contrast between the older generations, now aged, and the generations born after about 1941-1946 is the influence of the counterculture and behind it, and other cultural influences for change, is Cultural Marxism, also called Political Correctness and Transformational Marxism.
The Baby Boomer generation became the target of the Frankfurt School's
intellectuals, the first American generation to live under the new
collectivist cultural dominance created by Transformational Marxism.
American generations born before the Baby Boomers began in 1946 tended
to follow a culture of individualism, a culture that
valued individual freedom, individual moral responsibility and
self-reliance.
Frederick Jackson Turner gave a paper called "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," to a gathering of historians in 1893 in Chicago. He said that:
"Individuals, forced to rely on their own wits and strength, were simply too scornful of rank to be amenable to the
exercise of centralized political power."
"If the frontier had been so essential to the development of American
culture and democracy, then what would befall them as the frontier
closed? It was on this forboding note that he closed his address: "And
now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a
hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone,
and with its going has closed the first period of American history."
The Western frontier mentality lingered on in the memories of many
Americans born in rural and small town America during the thirties and
early forties, especially west of the 98th meridian. It mostly died
out in the Baby Boomer generation.
The literary form of the Western formula story celebrates this frontier mentality in the West following the close of the War of Federal Aggression (1861-65) to about 1910. In the story grammar the white hat cowboy who is regenerated by living in a physical wilderness and by the American frontier attitude overcomes transgressive behavior. And in the formula range war Western, this cowboy of the wilderness frontier defeats the villain who is a society insider and is respected as a banker, business man or big rancher.
Michael T. Marsden in Savior In the Saddle: The Sagebrush Testament (In Jack Nachbar, Focus On the Western, 1974) says to see the Western hero "...as a coming together of certain elements from the Old and New Testaments and to see through him the creation of a Sagebrush Testament with its own ethos...The savior-like nature of the Western hero is nowhere more clearly manifested than in Gorge Steven's masterful Shane (1953). Allan Ladd at the beginning of the film moves slowly down the Grand Teton Mountains from the West.
A lot has been written on the culture and personality traits of the cowboy of history.
Richard Harding Davis (1892) said the Texas cowboy was "A fantastic looking individual." In writing on the cowboy of the Great Planes Walter Prescott Webb said "When he made this perfect adaptation he departed farther and farther from the conventional pattern of men, and as he diverged from the conventional pattern he became more and more unusual." In other words, the Texas cowboy, as reality and myth, who came up out of the South Texas Brush Country, was a little eccentric. The bow-legged man in the cowboy boots and large hat who liked to sit around campfires and tell leg-pulling stories was an eccentric driver of longhorn cattle. In the late thirties, a cowboy culture lingered in West Texas and in South Bexar county. I remember that at peanut threshing time in the late summer, some young men who came to the area from farther west in Texas to work in the peanut harvest, dressed and acting like cowboys, camped near our house at night,and would sit around a campfire telling stories.
J. Frank Dobie wrote that "They" - the men of the earth - are utterly at ease on the planet and express the flavor of the earth to which they belong..." "They" - the people of the land or wilderness - "have lingered with the grass, the rocks, and the thorned shrubs..." Walter Prescott Webb, side-kick of J. Frank Dobie and Roy Bedichek in Austin, said that "The true distinctive culture of a region springs from the soil just as do the plants."
W. S. James (1898) said that under the influence of a free, wild life, the Texas cowboy grew to be self-reliant. These are not traits of an urban conformist. Walter Prescott Webb in The Great Planes (1931) said that the great distances and sparse population of the West encouraged self-reliance.
But the somewhat unique Texas and American Western subculture of the Brush County was replaced by an American lower middle class which is not too different from lower middle classes in other parts of the U.S. We might date the transition from a somewhat distinctive Brush Country subculture in South Bexar and Northern Atascosa counties to the standard lower middle class culture to the time when the oldest Baby Boomers of the area came of age - in the sixties. The people who were born and raised in the Brush Country, born before about 1940, at least to some extent, belong to a different American Western culture
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