Texas & the West9 quotes

“I go everywhere. I admire all kinds of country...But when I strike the open plains, something happens. I’m home. I breathe differently. That love of great spaces, of rolling open country like the sea—it’s the grand passion of my life. I tried for years to get over it. I’ve stopped trying. It’s incurable.”

“Bowie, born somewhere in the South in the 1790’s, was raised in a family that became wealthy in Louisiana early in the century. He roamed, running slaves with Jean Lafitte in contravention to what every Southerner felt was a stupid law, exploring Texas, fighting Indians. Bowie was remarkable in two respects. He fitted in easily with the best society of the Creole towns and vast plantations, and he had the enormous respect of the wildest and toughest men on the harshest of all American frontiers. He was a killer: he killed the son of Jean Lafitte, who crossed him, crippled ‘Bloody’ Sturdivant, gutted Major Norris Wright and a verified number of others, in the most desperate ‘medleys’ or duels. He made the great knife his brother Rezin forged for him a glittering legend; soon Bowie knives were manufactured in England for sale on the American frontier. Yet Bowie was simply not a killer in the modern, civilized sense. He lived in a violent society, and men of keen judgement and good breeding considered him quite sound. The respect tendered him far exceeded that of any duelist.”

“It is a valid question, whether the long frontier shaped Anglo-America, or whether attitudes, prejudices, and ethics brought from Europe shaped the American frontier.”

“Texas was never a refuge for the lowly, or oppressed, or a beacon proclaiming human rights. It was a primordial land with a Pleistocene climate, inhabited by species inherently hostile to the Anglo-Celtic breed. Some North Americans chose to conquer it, and in the process unquestionably came to look upon themselves as a sort of chosen race.

This sense of being a chosen people, which was tribal and biblical, was an enormous Texan strength rather than a weakness. It gave Anglo-Texans immediate moral superiority, in action, over their enemies. It led to high nobility and at times a valor almost beyond belief. It also produced brutal prejudice, and ethnic self-satisfaction that amounted to chauvinism. The whole feeling was guileless, and therefore guiltless. Hypocrisy toward warfare was never part of the Texan ethos. The generations that moved across the Sabine were already bred to certain hatreds and war.”

“I have been raised in the country all my life. I love dearly to feel the wind on my face, to see the sunrise, to see the moon in the night. I have no intention of spending any of my days in a concrete box.”

“I think that most people in my generation have been brought up to think that we don’t and can’t have public goods in this country, and at first I found it deliriously exciting to see ranchers running cattle on federal ground, a crashing together of collectivism and the most iconic image of free Americana—because who on earth is a more ardent socialist than an American cowboy, pushing horns across 640 million acres of shared public land? It made me very happy to think—to have proof—that these things could coexist.”

“For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, and even some affection, but with Montana it is love, and it’s difficult to analyze love when you’re in it…It seems to me that Montana is a great splash of grandeur. The scale is huge but not overpowering. The land is rich with grass and color, and the mountains are the kind I would create if mountains were ever put on my agenda. Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans…I wanted to stay. But I see that, as usual, love is inarticulate. Montana has a spell on me. It is grandeur and warmth. If Montana had a sea coast, or if I could live away from the sea, I would instantly move there and petition for admission. Of all the states it is my favorite and my love.”

“Most areas in the world may be placed in latitude and longitude, described chemically in their earth, sky and water, rooted and fuzzed over with identified flora and people with known fauna, and there’s an end to it. Then there are others where fable, myth, pre-conception, love, longing, or prejudice step in and so distort a cool, clear appraisal that a kind of high-colored magical confusion takes permanent hold. Greece is such an area, and those parts of England where King Arthur walked. One quality of such places as I am trying to define is that a very large part of them is personal and subjective. And surely Texas is such a place.”

“Writers facing the problem of Texas find themselves floundering in generalities, and I am no exception. Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word…It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religions, few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery and paradox…But I think there will be little quarrel with my feeling that Texas is one thing. For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings, Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.”