The Engines of Texanity
Brandon Seale
I.Don’t Mess with Texas Horsemen
II.The Font of Texas Government
XI.When Texanity Fails. And when it doesn’t.
Introduction
I worry that I’ve been doing this all wrong.
In telling these new histories of old Texas, I worry that I’ve been focusing too much on individuals. Individuals can move history, no doubt…but just as often, I’ve come to believe, they ride historical waves, rather than make them.
Every now and then, however, some invention, some innovation, or just some change in how technology is used comes along and moves history forward with a momentum of its own, subtler perhaps but far more powerful than any political ideology. Take for example, cotton. The unprecedented profitability of cotton-raising reshaped the economic loyalties of the region, forever associated land with wealth in Texans’ minds, and required a series of political and moral compromises around slavery that would have violent and long-lasting consequences. Or the railroad. The railroad annihilated the disadvantages of distance which had kept Texas’s economy colonial, and set the state on a different trajectory than the rest of the stubbornly agrarian American South. Or air conditioning…can you really imagine 30 million people living in Texas today without it? These innovations became true engines of history.
The most transformative engines of history tend to cover their own tracks, however. Living in an age of integrated circuits and cheap air travel means we can’t hardly imagine a life before, which means we also can’t see how the genius of the integrated circuit owes an intellectual debt to Comanche pemican or how Southwest Airlines owes its success to a regulatory model developed around the Spanish flood irrigation systems of El Paso and San Antonio.
“Engines” like these concentrate resources behind them and focus the human mind in front of them like nothing else. And so they change how people see the world. The domestication of the horse created the cantankerous individualistic political culture of the Lipan Apaches, and then the Comanches, and then Tejanos and Anglo-Texans. The Colt Revolver enshrined that mythology of self-reliance even more deeply in Texans’ views of themselves. And the discovery of oil in Texas in 1901 transformed Texas from a colonial backwater into a first-world economy…and transformed Texas’s ever-dogmatic political class from vocal anti-corporate populists into equally vocal pro-business boosters in the course of just a couple generations.
And so in this sense the histories of the horse, of flood irrigation, of cotton, of the Colt Revolver, of condensed milk, of the railroad, of Spindletop, of air conditioning, of the integrated circuit, and of aviation aren’t histories at all. They are the reasons why we Texans see ourselves the way we do. This is what I want to explore this season: no politicians, no ideologies, just the ten engines that most meaningfully propelled Texas history forward and the ten innovations that most profoundly shaped our collective psychology as Texans… our “Texanity” as I call it.
Welcome to Season 5 of A New History of Old Texas: The Engines of Texanity.
Don’t Mess with Texas Horsemen
Welcome to the Engines of Texanity. Episode 1: “Don’t Mess with Texas Horsemen.” I’m Brandon Seale.
The origin story of the Lipan Apaches goes something like this. “Down in the lower world, at the beginning, there was no light, only darkness. Down there were the people, us, the Apaches or D’Ne as we call ourselves. From the Guadalupe Mountains we emerged and began walking, clockwise to the four directions. To the north went the Navajo…to the West, the Chiracahua…to the South, the Mescaleros. And to the east, the last to drop off, were the Lipanes.1
The First Lipan was a great one. “Killer of Enemies” he was called. Nothing was impossible to him. But even he prayed for a little help. This was to show us that no matter how strong we are, we must still ask for a little help.
In response, he was told to make a horse. He made the eye from the evening star so that the horse could see in both day and night. He made the ear from the crescent moon. He made the teeth from hail. He made the mane and tail from rain. In the horse’s nostrils, Killer of Enemies placed the lighting. Then he called the four winds from the four directions, and they entered the horse at four different points where today you see whorls on his hide; one at the flank, one under the shoulder, and one at the hip on either side.2
When Killer of Enemies had done all this, the horse stood there complete and grand, and Killer of Enemies’ face “got well,” which is how we Lipanes say that he was pleased.3
But then the horse bolted, galloping out on the plain. “Mouth of my enemy!” Killer of Enemies cursed in our Lipan way. When Killer of Enemies looked again, however, this time he saw four horses. The first was charcoal black, the second was blue roan, the third was yellow sorrel, and the last was a white gray. Killer of Enemies approached the horses. He circled the four horses four times, clockwise, from the east, and came to stand before them.4
One of the horses looked at him and said: “Grandchild, if you know something about horses, you can have us.”
The horses shook their bodies. Killer of Enemies watched. From each horse fell clay the color of their bodies and eagle feathers. Killer of Enemies went up to each of the horses and shook himself in turn. Clay and feathers fell from him just the same. The horses saw this. Then, with a black rope, Killer of Enemies haltered the black stallion. With a blue rope, the blue one. With a yellow rope, the yellow one. And with a white rope, the white one.
Then the horse said, “Grandchild, you know our ways. We belong to you now. Which way are you stepping?”, asking in the Lipan way which where it was that Killer of Enemies wished to go.”
That’s how the Lipanes tell it anyway. The horses might’ve told it a bit differently.
The horses would have told the Lipan that they had been in North America long before the Lipanes had got there. Fifty million years before, if you’re willing to go all the way back to the horse’s earliest evolutionary ancestors. But around 8-11,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, the great plains became great swamps, terrain that didn’t favor the heavy creatures whose single toes sank into the soggy grasslands like a stiletto heel, grasslands whose grasses soon drowned in the oversaturated soils. And so the horse disappeared from North America.5
The horses had to wait for the peoples of the Iberian peninsula to return them to the Americas. The Iberian peninsula is perhaps the site of horse and man’s most extended history together, of horse-man-ship that is. There are still wild horses in Spain today, or semi-wild ones anyway, short-legged, mustachioed creatures known as “Garranos,” that are managed by locals in much the same way that we might imagine horses have always been managed by early horse breakers. Which is to say, they actually don’t “break” the horses at all. No, locals today simply cull out the Garrano stallions whose genes they don’t wish to propagate, like a deer hunter culling inferior bucks from the herd. A few decades of culling out the wilder and more dangerous stallions – a few seasons even – and you’ve got the beginnings of purposeful horse breeding. Over the centuries, Garranos were mixed with other native breeds such as the Sorraia and the Galician pony as well as the ancestors of the Andalusian and Lusitanos breeds, all of which were later fortified by African Berber horses and the unmistakable Arabian strains brought by the Muslim Arab invasions of the eighth century. By the sixteenth century, Spanish horses were recognized throughout Europe as symbols of nobility and refinement, but they were also known for their hardiness and intelligence. In English, this Iberian mixture came to be known as the “Spanish barb,” and this was the bloodline that conquered Tenochtitlan in the Valley of Mexico in 1521.6
The conquest of Tenochtitlan had demonstrated plainly the power of the horse, as both a physical and a psychological weapon. As they moved up through the central Mexican highlands, the Spanish strictly regulated who could ride and even own horses in the Americas. And yet, it was inevitable that some horses would escape back onto the plains that had nourished their ancestors. By 1659, Spanish governors of New Mexico were already complaining about horse-raids by a tribe that seemed to have taken particularly well to the horse: the Apaches. In 1680, when the natives of New Mexico drove the Spanish out of the province for a decade (more on that next episode), the entire Spanish New Mexican horse herd was turned loose onto the Great Plains, more than 1,000 animals according to some sources.7 And no one ended up with more of these horses more quickly than the Apaches.8
When they had first stumbled into the Texas panhandle around 1500 or so, the Apaches were foragers. As they migrated south through the Texans plains toward the Trans-Pecos and Rio Grande, they came into contact with the Jumanos, a buffalo-hunting and trading people whose network reached as far as East Texas and Central Mexico, but whose lifeway was supported by settled, corn-raising communities such as those stumbled on by Cabeza de Vaca at the site of modern day Ojinaga-Presidio. Prior to the arrival of the horse, the cultivation of corn was the biggest thing to hit Native Texas. Planting, harvesting, and storing corn could easily yield 30X the energy invested, compared to foraging which was pretty much a calorically breakeven proposition: you spent almost as many calories looking for food as you it yielded in calories. For further comparison, it takes 11 pounds of prickly pears to yield the same amount of calories as just one corn tortilla. And tortillas don’t leave little spines in your fingers!9
Almost everywhere it appeared, the domestication of corn had the effect of concentrating populations, enhancing their ability to specialize, engage in trade, and protect themselves from wandering nomads like the Apaches. The Apaches imitated the Jumanos as best they could, trying their hand at seasonal corn plots and eventually competing with them for buffalo. And they also tried to break into the Jumanos’ East Texas trade networks, but only earned the enmity of their trading partners, the other great Texas agriculturalists of the epoch, the Hasinai in East Texas, who preferred dealing with the Jumanos.
The horse, the Apaches soon realized, could be their great disrupter! In addition to being a “land eagle” (remember the clay and feathers from the Lipan apache origin story?) a “land eagle” that conferred vantage and speed upon a rider, the horse was a machine that concentrated the dispersed energy of the prairie grasses into usable energy. Grasslands are nutritionally useless to humans. But horses have a four-foot-long addition to their intestinal tract known as a “cecum,” essentially, a “fermentation vat” where a combination of bacteria, protozoa, and fungi break down the cellulosic walls of grasses and turn them into energy. In arid regions – like West Texas - you would need something like 2,500 acres – four square miles! – to support a single human forager…and none of their nutrition would come from the grass. Yet that same grassland could support twenty-five horses! And it gets even better, the ligaments and tendons in a horse’s legs can lock in a neutral position while standing, which is why they can sleep upright. But it also means that a horse can spend almost zero energy while grazing. And unsurprisingly for an animal whose ancestors had evolved on the great North American plains, a horse can go at least six times as far as man can on something like 1/6 of the calories. And a single man could comfortably command a string of six horses, which meant that each Apache in 1680 could now be the master of the equivalent of like thirty-six men or some other crazy compounding multiple.10
Apache horsemen started by imitating some of the horse-raising techniques they’d seen the Spanish use, with their own North American tweaks. Saddles they made from “Tree forks…whittled down to form the front and cantle. On the front a projection is left for the horn. Two flat boards are lashed between these forks, one on either side, to form the saddle skirts. Wet [raw]hide, often with fur on, is stretched over this frame and laced in place. As it dries, it contracts and fits securely.” Saddle blankets were made from deer hide, with the fur side down. Cinches and bridles were from woven horsehair, leather, and cactus fibers, with ironwood rings to ratchet them down tight. Rawhide moccasins dried into hardy but nimble horseshoes on rocky terrain, though Apaches often left their horses unshod. Apaches did use stirrups, but not in the northern European style, with the rider standing and leaned back. The Apaches more imitated the Spanish style, which had in turn been adopted from the Arab and Berber technique, “a la gineta” the rider balancing on their pelvis over the horse’s center of gravity, maintaining contact with the horses back with their seat. The Spanish word for a saddle is a “chair”, a “silla”, a legacy of this style of seated riding. All the photos I’ve seen of Apache stirrups show simple, loose-hanging thin leather straps, that required the Apache to make their seats do most of the work in directing the horse, almost bareback style. The rest they did with good husbandry, selecting for qualities in horses that better suited the Texas plains, preferring smaller horses with lower centers of gravity, nimble sprinters to larger draft horses.11
Which made sense. It was as weapons - not workhorses – that the horse conferred its most immediate advantage on the Apaches. In combat, a person on foot didn’t have a chance against a man on a horse. But horsemen like the Apaches soon realized that they didn’t even really need to fight the farmers. In fact, it was more efficient to let the agriculturalists plant and raise and harvest and shuck the corn for them….and then just go take it and ride away. What were the poor sod-busters gonna do about it? Pursue them out into the plains? On foot? There’s actually a couple of sad episodes in the first years of Stephen F. Austin’s colony where early Anglo settlers accustomed to doing their fighting on foot tried to do just that….and we know it didn’t go well.12
The historical record suggests it didn’t go any better for Jumano farmers either when they tried to retaliate against mounted Apache warriors. Suddenly, for the settled, quasi-agricultural tribes of Texas, the adobe buildings and population concentrations that seemed to mark their “advancement” had become liabilities, not assets. Just a few years after the 1680 revolt in Spanish New Mexico, the Apaches were everywhere at once. By 1685, when Frenchman Rene-Robert Cavalier de la LaSalle landed in Matagorda Bay, he was able to trade for horses with the local East Texas Indians, who had been trading partners of the Jumanos. Yet the presence of horses in East Texas – just five years after they’d been turned out in New Mexico! – actually betrays the collapse of the Jumanos and the rise of the Apaches, who in most of Texan by that date could be safely categorized as “Lipan Apaches.”13
The horse redrew the political boundaries of Native Texas. It brought, in the words of scholar Pekka Hamalainen, “destabilization, dispossession, and destruction.” For some. For others, it brought unprecedented power and wealth. Yet it didn’t just make horse-peoples wealthy collectively. The horse made individual Lipanes wealthy, and gave them a new ability to support themselves on their own much more freely than they could have managed as foragers or farmers. By the 1800’s, contemporary estimates place claimed the average plains horse Indian owned thirty-five horses and mules. At a market price of around $20/horse, that’s $700 of relatively liquid wealth, at a time when the estimated total capital of all 2,000 Tejanos in the state was perhaps less than $10,000.14
This is another one of those Brandon-theories that I’m not sure how we could prove, but it does not seem to me a coincidence that the newly-mounted peoples of the Texas plains developed a political culture characterized by a radical individualism. A man with a horse in Texas in 1700 didn’t need to rely on communal agriculture or communal defense. He could support himself and his family and whoever else he wanted to associate with quite comfortably by raiding and hunting and trading…and if necessary, fleeing. If he didn’t like a chief or a family member or a friend, he could just ride off and join up with some other horse folks. Or maybe spin off with a few of his buddies and start his own raiding enterprise! This feature of Texas plains Indian culture, incidentally, would be the subject of much complaint by first Spanish, then Mexican, then Texian, then American observers, who often lamented that peace treaties made with Lipan and Comanche chiefs were meaningless because dissenting warriors would just break off and continuing warring. Though I’ll note that I’ve started to wonder if plains Indians might not have leveled the same charge back at the confusing diversity of European societies that insisted on making separate treaties with them, from Spanish New Mexicans to Spanish Texans to Anglo-Texians to German-Texians to Anglo-Texans rangers vs. Anglo-American bluecoats, etc. etc.
The Lipanes may have believed that the horse had been made just for them, or perhaps that the horse had chosen them. The horse, however, had no particular loyalties. Soon, some of the victims of Lipan expansion began to master the horse themselves. Starting in 1706, Spanish chroniclers document enormous battles between the Lipanes and an upstart mounted empire to their north: the Comanches. The Comanches had two distinct advantages over the Lipanes, at first anyway: they were still largely unaffected by European diseases and they had gotten ahold of firearms from French traders beyond the reach of Lipanes’ trade networks.15
For the next century and a half, Texas was a multi-front battlefield whose lines were drawn around shifting alliances of Lipan, Comanche, Tejano, and later Anglo horsemen. In some way, it was these groups’ shared reliance on horses that set them against each other in their fight for Texas’s vast – but not unlimited – grazing land. Lipanes harassed newcomer Spaniards in the town they called “Many houses” – San Antonio – until Comanches swept down onto their rear at the head of a coalition of “Northerners,” comprised of the Tonkawas, Wichitas, and Taovayas to name a few. Tejanos allied at first with the newcomer Comanches to fight their shared Lipan enemy. But after Comanche Northerners burned Mission San Sabá to the ground, Tejanos changed horses and teamed up with the Lipanes, who soon found themselves back on the ascendance and by 1771 had pretty well busted up the Comanches’ Northerner Coalition. Feeling their strength, the Lipanes then convened a 4,000 warrior strong pan-Indian conference in 1782 intent on driving the Tejanos out of Texas, but all it ever produced was a desire by Tejanos to import more reliable allies into the state. They landed on Anglo-American immigrants as the best candidates, supporting their immigration as allies against the mounted “indios barbaros” – be they Lipan or Comanche, and who actually started coordinating together in the 1800’s as their numbers dwindled. It’s worth mentioning as well that occasionally, just occasionally, all four of them would come together other against a common enemy, as they did against the Spanish royalists during and after the Battle of Medina – one of the many reasons that Battle so fascinates me.16
Each of these groups followed a similar trajectory that seems to map directly onto their integration of the horse into their societies, a trajectory which I find defies contemporary trends in world political history toward concentration and centralization of power. And this must have been formative on Texans. Maybe someone knows of a scholar who has written on this. But it’s clear that after the success of the Lipanes and Comanches in integrating the horse into their lives, settled, concentrated agrarianism was a losing strategy in Texas. Look at the Jumanos in West Texas and the Hasinai in East Texas, who by 1800 had abandoned agriculture and returned to nomadism themselves. Compare them to the Lipanes, who started down a path of corn-raising but gradually moved away from it. And the Comanches just dispensed with it altogether. Tejanos followed the same pattern; travelers to San Antonio in the early 1800’s puzzled at the villa’s picturesque but abandoned fields: “I have never understood why, although there are well-watered lands about the houses and the missions…one sees no planting there” A another observer from the same period answered the question, however: “the mission farmers live there in as great a state of misery as the natives whom the friars formerly shut up in them. At every moment warring tribes kill some laborer, and they come almost constantly to steal the animals.” Farming didn’t just represent a lower ROI: it was dumb and it was deadly, Tejanos discovered. They instead turned to harvesting the wild cattle on the plains for the hide and tallows for sale in the markets of New Orleans…all of which too was made possible only by the horse.17
When Tejanos declared their independence in 1813, they referred to the act as “tomando en nuestras propias manos las riendas de nuestro Govierno” – using the fittingly horse-based metaphor taking into their own hands the “REINS” of their government. But given how much we’ve seen Tejanos were simply following a similar economic trajectory to the plains Indians before them, to what extent should we perhaps attribute their ideals and desires for self-government to those same “indios barbaros”!? That would be consistent with a scholarly push recently to find in the political ideologies of Native Americans the roots of American style “democracy” and “political liberty.” “Democracy” and “liberty,” after all, were kind of bad words amongst Europeans of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Indeed, the first accounts by Europeans of Native Americans are full of observations meant as critiques, but that frankly sound to our modern American ears more like compliments: “The savage does not know what it is to obey”; “Indians think everyone ought to be left to his own opinion”; “every man is free. in these places, no other person, white or Indian, sachem or sage, has any right to deprive anyone of his freedom” to list a few from a book on the subject called “Indian Givers” by Jack Weatherford. Others have also noted the specific influence of anti-authoritarian, self-governing native societies like the Iroquois and the civilized tribes of the American South on folks like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Montaigne.18
It feels to me like a similar thing happened in Texas. Tejano individualism bucks many of the old communal stereotypes of catholic Spain; and Anglo-Texans came predominantly from the American South, a decidedly non-individualistic and certainly non-egalitarian society. And yet both Tejanos and Anglo-Texans became pretty radical individualists each within about a generation of exposure to the mounted horse Indians of Texas. And doesn’t today’s widespread Texan admiration for the uncompromising, individualistic Lipanes and Comanches today betray some kind of ideological debt to them? Indeed, Lipan and Comanche freedom makes a mockery of our claims to live in the “free world.” If they didn’t like their boss, they left. When you don’t like your job, well, you show up anyway, because you’ve got a mortgage and taxes to pay and good luck getting out from under those. And yet this state of radical liberty in which these Lipanes and Comanches lived, and which Tejanos and Anglos aspired to, would not have been possible without the horse. Maybe “Don’t Mess with Texas” didn’t originate with a 1985 anti-littering campaign…maybe it was written the first time a native Texan hopped on the back of a horse. Because as I’ve said in a previous podcast, once a person has sat in a saddle, they’ll never willingly wear a yoke.19
Engines are machines that convert energy into motion. In the case of the horse, the horse converts the caloric energy of prairie grasses into useful motion that can be harnessed by human beings. But in a metaphorical sense as well, the domestication of the horse became an engine of human history, moving people forward in different directions that they would have gone otherwise. The domestication of the horse in Texas is one of the clearest and the first recorded instances of a material change altering not only the course of Texas history, but the psychology of Texans…their “Texanity,” as I call it, with all the connotations of insanity that that may produce for you.
From an evolutionary perspective, the horse has probably outcompeted every animal in Texas other than perhaps the cow. But beef cattle in Texas aren’t treated nearly so well as the million or more pampered horses that call this state home today. The bloodlines of those original Spanish barbs live on today in those horses, particularly in the world-renowned Texas quarter-horse. Though mostly descended from English breeds bred for racing the “quarter-mile” (hence their name), it was only when Texas mustangs were bred back into these imported breeds that the resulting offspring began to show the hardiness and intelligence that turned them into the legendary cowhorses that helped to create the state’s image to the world.20
In case you remain skeptical of my theory that native Texas horsepeoples showed the world – and future Texans – that political decentralization could be a successful strategy in the modern or at least pre-modern world…you aren’t alone. Chief among the skeptics at the time were Spanish royal authorities. Even if the Lipanes and Comanches had slowed the advance of the Spanish empire up into the arid half of Spanish North America, they had not given Spaniards real reason to doubt the success of their societal model. And their model was built on agriculture, on a style of agriculture that compounded the returns realized by normal, seasonal or dry land crop-raising. There was one thing, the Spanish believed, more powerful than the horse: Water. On the next episode, of the Engines of Texas History.
Thank you for listening.
Post-Script: The Comanches tend to overshadow the Lipanes in Anglo-Texas histories because of Anglo’s man-crush on Quanah Parker. But the hard truth is that even after the arrival of the Comanches the Lipan heartland remained largely the same, notwithstanding the fact that it was the Lipanes who had borne the brunt of Spanish-Mexican and then Anglo-American expansion for almost three centuries. And indeed, it’s worth remembering that the Lipanes – sustained by their special relationship with the horse, would outlast the Comanches by nearly thirty years. Indeed, they would outlast the famed Chiracahua Apache, Geronimo, by 17 years, though to date no one has made any movies about the 19 Lipanes turned themselves into the reservation in 1903. To say nothing of the Lipanes that rode into the Coahuiltecan canyonlands and never came down to be counted again. One day I would love to do a series just on the Lipanes, if I can ever find a way to do them justice. I haven’t found that way just yet.
Editing for this episode was provided by Susana Canseco, sound engineering by Stephen Bennett. The theme music was also composed and performed by Stephen Bennett. Check out our website, www.BrandonSeale.com for more information on sources and our other projects.
Welcome to the Engines of Texanity. Episode 2: The Font of Texas Government. I’m Brandon Seale.
When Don Juan de Oñate crossed the Rio Grande on May 4, 1598 at a spot which he called “El Paso del Rio del Norte”, he didn’t just bring with him the horses that would redraw the map of Native Texas. He brought with him 539 colonists, intent on establishing Spanish government in the northernmost reaches of Spanish North America.
We talked about this at length in Season 4 when we talked about the origins of Mexican Federalism, but something I know I didn’t appreciate at the time was how ancient and vibrant this tradition of Spanish self-government was. They typically guaranteed freedom of commerce, the inviolability of the home, and inheritance rights for women. In fact, in 1188, King Alonso IX of Leon had convened the first parliament in Europe, and it included representatives of propertied commoners, all of this twenty-seven years before the English Magna Carta and nearly a century before any commoners would be admitted to the English parliament. And the comunero revolts of the sixteenth century in large Spanish cities rang out with appeals to the “consent of all” and the “general will,” two centuries before they would flow from the pens of English and French writers.21
Yet the Spanish model of self-government was built around the city-state; the ciudad, the villa, or the pueblo, a word which suggests the representative nature of their elected councilmen, clerks, and mayors, or “judges” as we might more accurately render them in Texas English. All up through the central Mexican highlands the Spanish established a string of self-governing municipalities to process the mineral wealth of the Sierra Madre – Queretaro, Zacatecas, Durango – towns made famous by their prodigious silver output. New World mines would soon soon septuple (that’s 7X) the silver supply of Europe and make many Spaniards – like Onate’s conquistador father - fantastically wealthy.
And yet mining constituted only one quarter of the output of agriculture in Spanish North America. That agricultural output – particularly as Spaniards marched up into the hot, arid north - was attributable almost entirely to the Spanish ability to construct and administer large, complex irrigation systems.22
Flood, or gravity-fed irrigation, represents one of the great innovations in human history. Flood irrigation redirecting water usually from the top of the impressed stream (la presa) downgrade to smaller canales which could then be backed up by means of flood gates to overflow and irrigate the surrounding fields. Flood irrigation allowed societies to control the when and the how much of water, making farming far less of a gamble. It represented a fantastic return on energy invested. according to energy scholar Vaclav Smil, a flood irrigation system could easily return at least 10 times the energy invested in terms of calories, often closer to 30. And these systems can endure for hundreds, even thousands of years.
But for this flood irrigation to work, you have to get the engineering just right. Too steep of a run will wash out your canal; too shallow and the ground will drink your water before it gets to where you want it to go. The Romans had first brought irrigation to the Iberian peninsula, but it was the Arabs who truly irrigated it. The evidence is in the language: The Spanish word for irrigation ditch is acequia, from the Arab al-saqiya. The Spanish for water well is noria, from the Arab na-urah, which referred to a water-lifting wheel. Among others. Just in the south of Spain, there are something 15,000 miles of irrigation ditches, most of them dating back to the centuries of Arab rule, many of them still operating today.23
Onate brought this Old World legacy with him when he crossed the Rio Grande in 1598. Yet in the same way that he carried in his veins the blood of both the old world and the new – he was a great grandson of Hernan Cortez and a great-great grandson of Montezuma – he also brought a New World legacy of flood irrigation with him that was perhaps more ancient even than that of Spain’s. When Cortes had conquered Tenochtitlan, he had done it side-by-side with the Tlaxcalans, a native people that had fought off Aztec subjugation for a hundred years. The Tlaxcalans could claim their own legacy of of constructing irrigation systems, dating back to as early as 800 BC. And like irrigated Spanish municipalities, they governed themselves through elected representatives, reminding Cortes of Italian “republics” in a sea of autocratic empires. The Spanish had recognized that the Tlaxcalans were special, and conferred upon them special privileges, and brought them along as the engineers who would actually build the flood irrigation systems upon which civil society in Spanish North America came to depend. One scholar has written that the administration of the flood irrigation system was Spanish city government’s “most important” responsibility. After 1681, it was actually a requirement spelled out in the Law of the Indies that all American ayuntamientos should appoint a “water judge” to oversee the “allotment of the waters.”24
This Spanish/Tlaxcalan irrigation society marched steadily north through the Sierra Madre Oriental, founding Saltillo, Parras de La Fuente, Monclova, and later San Juan Bautista in Coahuila; Monterrey and Bustamante in Nuevo Leon. Don Juan Onate’s expedition represented the spearhead of Spanish/Tlaxcalan colonization up through the “tierra adentro,” the inland route. If Onate’s chronicler sounds like a hydraulic engineer when he described the future site of El Paso, TX, it’s because he might very well have been: “Joyfully we tarried beneath the pleasant shade of the wide-spreading trees which grew along the river banks…” It was also, according to modern-day residents of the spot, the first Thanksgiving on future United States soil.25
Yet Onate didn’t stop in El Paso. He continued north several hundred more miles up into New Mexico, to a spot known in the local native language as the “Water place.” The natives of this Water Place the Spanish named the “Pueblos,” a nod to their impressive adobe and stone buildings that indeed looked like a Spanish Pueblo, but also perhaps a nod to the flood irrigation systems which they operated nearby. To the Spanish mind, it would have been the irrigation system moreso than the buildings that would have truly marked them as a “Pueblo.”
By 1659, La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís – Santa Fe, as we call it today – had emerged as the center of Spanish settlement in New Mexico, centered around a by-now well-established system of irrigation canals. Unfortunately, relationship with the native Pueblo people had deteriorated badly. Maybe the Spanish had commandeered some of their best irrigated lands; maybe they had been a little too heavy-handed in commandeering Pueblo labor. Actually, it was worse than that, Santa Fe had emerged as a central hub for Native American slave-trading. In 1680, the Pueblos had had enough. They revolted, killing several hundred Spaniards and expelling the rest from New Mexico for a decade - and permanently turning out the horse onto the Great Plains, as you might recall from the previous episode.26
The Spanish – along with a few allied Native tribes like the Tiguas – retreated back to the spot where Onate had crossed the Rio Grande 82 years prior and started rebuilding. Which meant, they set themselves to constructing the flood irrigation systems on which their survival and competitive advantage depended. Over the next few years, five different flood-irrigated communities would pop up along a nine-mile stretch of the Rio Grande running through the modern-day cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, irrigating something like 15,000 acres. Two of them today are on the Texas side of the river, marking the first permanent and continuous European settlements in the state: Ysleta and Socorro. Ysleta, in fact, remains the home of the Tigua nation to this day.27
Further east, Spanish flood irrigation would also define the lines of European settlement of Texas. Note that Spanish attempts to settle East Texas largely failed…flood irrigation conferred no real competitive advantage in rainy East Texas. But in between, it made all the difference. At a spot known to the locals as Yanaguana – also typically translated as something like Water Place or Refreshing waters – hundreds of springs bubbled up from the gently sloping soil deposited by millions of years of flash floods coming off the Balcones Escarpment. It was the “country of 1,100 springs” the old Pearl Beer commercial bragged, and according to one scholar at least “It may have been the largest grouping of springs in the world at that time.” I’m talking about San Antonio, of course.28
As they had in El Paso, the first thing the Spanish did in San Antonio was build their flood irrigation systems. Before they even built themselves houses, in fact! Within fifty years, the system would measure more than fifty miles, lifting the waters of the San Antonio and San Pedro Rivers by means of weir dams, then diverting them through a fifty-mile long system of canals five to seven feet wide, 2 to 11 feet deep, sloping at a perfect .05% gradient on average – never more than .07% and never less than 0.02% over the course of 6.5 linear miles. As in El Paso, parts of it are still in service today, nearly 300 years later!29
But more than just feats of precision engineering, these were feats of human organization, which is why their administration was the most important and complicated job of local governments. It’s almost impossible to estimate how many man-hours went into constructing each of these systems. Because it was the lifeblood of the community, all users of the canal system were obligated to participate in the annual maintenance of the canals. Those who failed to contribute were fined; repeat offenders could be stripped of their irrigation rights, which was like being stripped of their land.30
When the Canary Islanders arrived in San Antonio in 1731, the first thing the presidial captain did was assign them their lots along the irrigation system; the second thing he did, was preside over the election of the first European-style government in Texas to administer that irrigation system. The Canary families elected from their number six officers: one judge, one clerk, one sheriff, two councilmen at large, and one “mayordomo.” The mayordomo – Antonio Rodriguez - had been an acequiero back in the Canary Islands…that is, the man who managed the acequias or irrigation canals. This was, incidentally, his core responsibility as mayordomo, appointed in accordance with the 1681 Law of the Indies as the man in charge of administering the “allotment of waters.” Specifically, the king charged the mayordomo with administering the resource as a “bien de uso común” “common good,” which is to say, to make sure that each user got their fair share.31
Their were two main facets to the mayordomo’s job, one of which we can see clearly in the Texas office which most literally descends from mayordomo, which means “Master of the House” in Latin: in Texas English today, we call this position the “Watermaster”. Watermasters in Texas today administer and operate large irrigation systems along the Rio Grande, Concho, and Brazos Rivers. But the other facet of the mayordomo’s role comes through better in the functional translation you sometimes see of the title mayordomo: “tax assessor-collector.” The mayordomo was charged not only with regulating the irrigation system …he was charged with generating revenue from it. The growth of these frontier communities depended on growing the base of arable, irrigated land. Any place that could be irrigated, needed to be, and it was the mayordomo’s job to make this happen.
What I find fascinating about the different facets of the mayordomo’s job is how perfectly they map onto the jurisprudence of later Texas oil and gas law. Texas nominally subscribes to the rule of capture, but Texas courts and the Railroad commission have spent a century modifying that common law rule to better fit the resource and region. To understand how Texas has actually chosen to administer oil and gas, my old law school professor Ernest Smith taught us that you need to balance the facts of the case against three factors: 1) Is everyone getting their “fair share”?; 2) Are we preventing waste of the resource? and 3) Are we promoting the development of the resource?
What does that sound like to you? That is the old mayordomo’s mandate! It sure seems that Texas’s approach to irrigation administration laid the foundation more broadly for what you might call the Texas or frontier model of regulation. It contrasts to the Anglo-American approach, which is very uncomfortable with regulators acting as promoters of the industries they regulate, and typically focuses on ensuring that no economic actor unduly profits from their role….which can often slide pretty imperceptibly into an implicit guarantee that the regulated actor should never have to lose money. Think of the American banking system. I feel like that the Anglo-American system works better when the centers of economic and political power are close to each other and close to the economic activity being regulated…and when there is plenty of economic activity to regulate. Regulator and regulated can readily and frequently negotiate with each other in that setting and mistakes can be fixed without too much lasting damage. That model works poorly on distant frontiers with scarce resources, however, or for people who are far removed from the centers of power. The Viceroy in Mexico City never could have managed El Paso’s irrigation systems so well as El Pasoans could, anymore than Washington DC would have managed the development of Texas’s early oil industry to the satisfaction of Texans.32
I asked friend of the podcast and attorney Guillermo Alarcon to help me find a direct link between Spanish irrigation law and today’s general Texas frontier regulatory model, because that would be a really powerful thing. There’s a bunch of other places where Texas courts adopted the Spanish model over the Anglo-American one, such as for the rules around venue and the role of independent executors of wills, not to mention the inviolability of the home and the inheritance rights of women, which have come through into the modern day as Texas’s famously generous homestead exemption and community property regime. The closest that Guillermo could come, however, to linking Spanish irrigation law to Texas’s regulatory model was the Irrigation Act of 1852, where Texas counties were given the authority to regulate the construction and operation of irrigation works “similar to the former regulatory power of the community alcalde system of Spanish and Mexican law.” Which is something, but which is limited to irrigation systems. He also found an interesting case from 1868 where the Texas Supreme Court essentially rejected Anglo-American common law as it pertains to rivers, choosing instead to prioritize over irrigation over industry and claiming that this was clearly the intent of the colonization laws of Coahuila y Tejas. Again, a clear nod to the Spanish legal tradition.33
But if I’m being honest, Guillermo and I couldn’t really find a case on point linking Texas’s oil and gas law or Texas’s distinct regulatory model to the Spanish flood irrigation administration that preceded it. And yet, that in and of itself may be an even more powerful conclusion. If different legal systems in different fields and from different cultural traditions all evolve into similar final forms, well that says something powerful about the people and the place that are shaping those systems. It helps, perhaps, to validate those people’s sense of their own exceptionalism, exceptional even if only because their environment forced them to become so.
At the very least, we can definitely say that flood irrigation established European-style government in Texas. On its own, however, flood irrigation was not sufficient to confer upon Spaniards any real competitive advantage over native Texas populations that surrounded them. Texas as late as 1821 remained an “essentially Indian domain,” and the bulk of the new Mexican department of Texas more properly belonged to the Lipan Apaches and Comanches who, according to a contemporary, “at all times, have been masters of the possessions and lives” of the inhabitants of the province.34
After the ravages of the Battle of Medina and years of attacks by mounted Lipanes and Comanches, San Antonio’s population by 1821 was half what it had been fifteen years prior. Many Tejanos had taken refuge in Natchitoches, Louisiana, where they had a front row seat to an economic revolution the likes of which they had never seen. Land that was worth pennies an acre just a decade before was selling for dollars an acre now…land that frankly looked a lot like the land that Tejanos knew well on their side of the Sabine River. The Cotton Economy was about to descend on Texas and redraw the political, economic, and demographic lines of the state. On the next episode of the Engines of Texanity.
Thank you for listening. Special thanks this episode to Guillermo Alarcon, who also joined me last August at the Battle of Medina symposium to explain all the protections that landowners have against their property being taken in the event that historical artifacts are found on it. In short, this is Texas, property rights are king, and the next episode will help trace the roots of that principle back to its origins.
Editing for this episode was provided by Susana Canseco, sound engineering by Stephen Bennett. The theme music was also composed and performed by Stephen Bennett. Check out our website, www.BrandonSeale.com for more information on sources and our other projects.
Welcome to the Engines of Texanity. Episode 3: The Republic of Cotton. I’m Brandon Seale.
On September 30, 1830, Juan Martín de Veramendi appeared before the governor, secretary of state, and speaker of the Coahuila y Tejas state legislature. The fifty-two year Veramendi had just three weeks prior been chosen as Vice Governor of Coahuila, and he was accompanied on this occasion by his family, including his nineteen year old daughter Ursula. A native of San Antonio, Veramendi had done well for himself as a merchant and occasional contrabandista in the years following the Battle of Medina, when he and many of his fellow Tejanos had taken exile in Natchitoches, Louisiana. In Louisiana, Veramendi and other Tejanos had deepened their pre-existing commercial connections with the Anglo-American frontier economy and became convinced of the advantages of bringing Anglo-Americans immigrants – and Anglo-American capital! – back into their impoverished province. In fact, it had been Veramendi along with Erasmo Seguin who had met Stephen F. Austin in Natchitoches in 1821 with the news that his petition to settle an Anglo-colony in the state had been approved.
Yet Veramendi had never been as personally invested in the drive to bring Anglo-Americans to Texas as he was at this moment. Because standing next to him – or perhaps next to his daughter Ursula – was a thirty-four year old Anglo named Jim Bowie that Veramendi. Veramendi had arranged for Jim Bowie to be granted Mexican citizenship by no less than the legislature of Coahuila y Tejas by vouching for him personally.
How did Jim Bowie fast-track himself into the ranks of Coahuila y Tejas’ first families so quickly? He had just rolled into San Antonio earlier that year! Bowie presented himself as a man of means, which presumably helped, declaring the value of his collective properties to be $222,800, an absolutely fantastic sum that would have probably made him wealthier than every man woman and child in Tejano Texas combined! It was, by almost any reckoning however, false. In the previous decade in Louisiana, Bowie had engaged in a series of land speculations involving hundreds of thousands of acres. Many of these transactions were shady; many more were outright fraudulent. Yet he got away with it – for a while anyhow - because Louisiana was in the middle of a land rush, with land prices skyrocketing from $0.40 an acre to $1.00/acre over the course of just a few years.35
There’s a chance that Bowie and Veramendi had gotten to know each other in the post-Battle of Medina years in Natchitoches. We know Bowie lived in and around Natchitoches during those years. We know for certain that he had been buying slaves from the pirate Jean Lafitte on Galveston Island. And Bowie might even have participated in a filibustering expedition or two. In any case, sometime during the 1820’s he became aware of how cheap land could be got in Texas, compared to the $1.00/acre it had surged to in Louisiana, where his land schemes and debt collectors were starting to catch up to him anyway. Even for honest land speculators, things had become much more difficult. Following the Panic of 1819, the US government stopped selling land on credit: after 1820, purchasers now had to put up $100 cash and the new starting price was $1.25/acre. In Texas, however, Stephen F. Austin was soon offering a league and a labor – about 4,600 acres – for $0.125/acre! One-tenth the price! And on credit! But for a guy like Jim Bowie, even that that was like buying retail. He had heard – perhaps from his Natchitoches Tejano connections – that Mexican citizens could claim up to 11 leagues of land – almost 50,000 aces! – for $0.05/acre!36
Jim Bowie decided to become a Mexican citizen. And fortunately for him, Juan Martin de Veramendi decided to sponsor him. Not only sponsor him. He agreed to marry off his oldest daughter, Ursula, to him. Which still doesn’t quite answer our question, of WHY was perhaps the most prominent Tejano politician of the moment going all-in on this Bowie character whose main source of renown was slave smuggling, real estate fraud, and knife-fighting?
Well, Bowie did commit to pay Veramendi a $15,000 dowry, maybe that sweetened the pot, though Veramendi had to be suspicious as to whether he would ever get that money since Bowie was also borrowing $2,500 from Veramendi to take his honeymoon. In any case, that was a private arrangement between the two men. But there was something that Veramendi wanted in the form of a public, notarized commitment, in front of the governor, the secretary of state, and the speaker of the state legislature. Let me read you the language of Bowie’s Mexican citizenship grant: “The constitutional Congress of the free, independent, and sovereign State of Coahuila and Texas decrees the following: A letter of citizenship is hereby granted to the foreigner, James Bowie, providing he establishes the wool and cotton mills which he offers to establish in the state.”37
Cotton. Veramendi was willing to take a flyer on Bowie because of cotton and because of Bowie’s promises to help bring the miracle of the cotton economy deep into Coahuila y Tejas. Recall that after the devastation and depopulation following the Battle of Medina, Texas was perhaps the poorest province in the new Mexican nation. Per capita, Tejanos had something like 1/278th the wealth of the residents of Mexico City, and the entire product of Texas totaled something less than 1/1000th the total of all of Mexico. The last Spanish governor wrote in 1819 that Tejanos were “so distressed, dejected, and desperate” that he believed they might abandon Texas entirely… and, he added, “I am in a quandry because I do not consider that I have a right to stop them.”38
Indeed, it had been their exile in Louisiana that had brought Tejanos to witness firsthand how the cotton economy was transforming the southern United States. Since the days of Spanish Texas’ first capital at Los Adaes right next door, Natchitoches had been a crossroads of native American traders, old Tejano smugglers, French and now Anglo-American merchants. The shift in trade goods in the early 1800’s is telling of the magnitude of the economic revolution that was occurring however: historically the largest Texas exports had been hides and tallow from the wild cattle roaming the province…in the early 1800’s, those were surpassed by horses, destined for the booming cotton farms of the Mississippi delta. And the most traded item in return to Texas? Textiles - finished cotton products. Finished textiles were as valuable as horses, in a province and at a moment where horses were the most valuable and liquid forms of wealth. The going conversion rate (amongst Lipan Apaches anyway) was two blankets for a pony…and a really well-made blanket could fetch a full-grown horse.39
We absolutely take for granted how the industrialization of textile production has changed our lives. That pair of jeans you’re wearing? That represents 6 miles of thread and would have required 100 man-hours (woman-hours more likely) in pre-industrial times. The spinning Jenny, the power loom, and the water frame industrialized processes that previously had been performed entirely by hand, radically reducing the price and thus radically expanding the market for textiles. All of this, however, depended on a large supply of raw cotton. Egypt had some, India had a lot…but no region would prove so conducive to cotton production as the American South. The tipping point for American cotton cultivation, however, seems to have been the invention by Eli Whitney of a cotton “engine” – Americanized into “cotton gin” – a machine to separate the cotton seeds from the pure fibers of a raw cotton boll by machine rather than by hand. The improvement was radical: the most skilled slave – because the American cotton boom was entirely built on slave labor, more on this later – could clean maybe four pounds per day of cotton; Eli Whitney’s cotton gin could process 40 lbs! Paired with other industrial advances such as the steam-engine and you soon had automated gins that could put out 4,000 lbs per day! This was, as they say in business school, a step change.40
As we’ve seen with the horse and with flood irrigation, technological improvements that create those kinds of multiples of return on investment create a momentum of their own. Between 1794-1800, nearly every tobacco farmer in the lower Mississippi converted their farms to cotton. And in the decades following, cotton farmers pushed their way into previously marginal lands. While the non-Indian population of Spanish Texas floundered around maybe 2,000 people between 1810 and 1820, the population of Louisiana doubled from 77,000 to 153,000. Mississippi more than doubled, from 31,000 in 1810 to 75,000 in 1820. Alabama’s growth was even more impressive, from 9,000 to 128,000 over the same period! You see why land prices had skyrocketed from $.40 to $1.00/acre. Cotton volumes followed. In 1796, cotton production around Natchez Mississippi totalled 36,000 pounds; by 1800, it was 1.2 MM pounds. Aided by a doubling of cotton prices from .15 to .30 cents per pound, by 1820, LA, MS, and AL were producing 40 MM pounds of cotton per year.41
So why didn’t this boom extend into Mexico? It’s a particularly interesting question especially when I tell you that by 1820, nearly every pound of cotton produced in the American south was descended from Mexican cotton. Just as the cotton boom was gaining steam the American south, a mysterious pestilence known as “the rot” swept through the gulf coast cotton fields and threatened to strangle the infant industry before it even took off. A few years prior, however, a Mississippi planter in Mexico City on business had smuggled out the seeds of a particularly high-quality, pre-Colombian strain of cotton. Not only was this Mexican strain found to be immune to the rot, when crossed with the prevailing southern strains, it produced just a flat-out superior plant all around. The Mexican hybrid had longer fibers, ripened more quickly, its bolls all ripened at the same time which vastly improved harvest efficiency, and even the way the bolls opened up made them easier to pick. Taken together, a single fieldhand could now pick 3-4 times as much Mexican cotton as they could previously.42
And yet Mexico didn’t benefit from these developments.
One, Mexico didn’t have major navigable rivers. By contrast, the American SouthEast is criss-crossed by gently sloping, navigable streams. Cheap cotton also depended on cheap transport. The prevailing overland freight rates for much of the 19th century in the U.S. at least were around $.20/ton per mile, usually expressed as $1.00 per 100 pounds per 100 miles. When the same steam-engines now powering cotton gins were installed on American paddle wheel packet boats, processed cotton could be shipped from almost anywhere in the inland United States to the coast for pennies a pound – or about twenty times cheaper than overland! Mountainous Mexico had no similar advantage, at least not over nearly so large an expanse of its geography as the U.S.43
Two, even where Mexico did perhaps have similar geographic advantages to the American South, the industrial-scale cultivation of cotton ran up against another challenge: the Hispanic tradition’s discomfort with chattel slavery. The American cotton economy was built on plantation slavery. Between 1810 and 1860, the number of slaves in the American South grew from 1.0 MM to 3.5 MM, 40% of the total population. Some states, like Mississippi, were more than 50% slaves. Mexico, by contrast, had abolished slavery in 1829. Sort of. Mexican agriculture was no shining beacon of free labor. Pretty equally horrible labor conditions existed at the bottom end of the social ladder throughout Mexican history – from the encomienda given to conquistadors over the lives of “their” Indians, to the repartimiento of Indian labor to their overlords, to the forced levies or “mitas” of the mines, to debt peonage, the preferred method of involuntary servitude in nineteenth century Mexico. Yet none of these proved nearly as effective as slavery at organizing cotton cultivation.44
Lastly, number three, there was one thing that Mexican planters could never replicate or compete with: the Anglo-American system of credit. The cotton economy was built on credit, extending from English mills to London insurance agencies to New England ships to New York Banks to New Orleans trading houses and Southern planters. Hard currency almost never traded hands. Sellers were paid in credits they could use on the next transaction, which meant that buyers only needed to have enough currency to cover the difference between the agreed price and what the seller wanted to roll forward…which was often almost everything. We forget these days that there’s a lot of ways to increase the money supply other than just the federal reserve moving the interest rate: people expand the money supply every time they create and accept IOUs to each other. Which is something that the Anglo-American system got very good at in the 1800’s. You can pick your reason as to why: good rule of law, high levels of social trust, almost unlimited land to act as collator…assuming you disregarded the claims of the native inhabitants living there, of course. A few Tejanos – especially those who took refuge in Louisiana after the Battle of Medina – got plugged into the Anglo-American credit system a little via New Orleans. Yet even then, they often needed Anglos like – Jim Bowie – to act as intermediaries for them.45
This was what a man like Jim Bowie offered Juan Martín de Veramendi, who by the way, never got his mill from Bowie. It seems like Bowie tried to order it, but Veramendi and his daughter Ursula died in a cholera epidemic in 1833 and Bowie of course was dead three years after them. And yet, Veramendi’s strategy was sound, economically at least. It was the best hope for Texas’s economy…and everyone understood all that that entailed. Stephen F. Austin put it bluntly: “The primary product that will elevate us from poverty is Cotton and we cannot do this without the help of Slaves.” 25% of the humans entering Texas with his famed first 300 families were enslaved. Working together with allies in the Coahuiltecan legislature, Tejano lawmakers and Anglo-American planters came up with a loophole to allow for the importation “slaves” into Mexican Texas. Before crossing the border into Texas, immigrating slaves would be forced to sign contracts indenturing themselves for 99 years to their masters. They weren’t slaves, they were just indebted peons…slavery in all but name.46
No one at the time tried to portray it as a benevolent institution. The work of raising cotton was grueling: you planted in February, spent the next two months protecting the seedlings daily from encroaching weeds, grasses, and pests; in April you thinned out the rows, manually inspecting and selecting the strongest plants; rain brought more weeds and grasses and pests, which had to be scraped and pulled by hoe or by hand throughout the summer; until harvest time, when every hand available (man, woman, and child) worked picking the fibers from out of the surprisingly sharp bolls, hunched over, hands bleeding. Skilled pickers were expected to pick a couple hundred pounds per day. That’s something like 20,000 bolls, maybe 30 bolls per minute. That’s not a happy, zipidy doo dah pace. That’s maniacal.47
And it appalled most Mexican observers. Future first Vice President of Texas Lorenzo de Zavala, during his tour of the United States in 1833, struggled to reconcile his admiration for the new American republic with “this degrading traffic…the vestiges of so humiliating a condition of the human race.” In particular, he noted the hypocrisy of a nation so enchanted with newspapers and free speech that still felt the need to pass laws criminalizing the advocation of abolition or even of educating slaves. “Sad indeed is the situation of a state where its legislators consider necessary such offensive measures of repression against the rights of man.”48
Yet none of this was appalling enough to prevent De Zavala from taking out an Empresario contract himself in East Texas, which he in turn marketed to cotton planters no less than Stephen F. Austin had. The economic returns were too powerful to ignore, as long as you didn’t tally the human suffering involved. In 1830, Texas produced 400,000 pounds of cotton, pretty much entirely from the Anglo-American areas, and though not a huge number by the standards of the neighboring U.S. states, it represented something like $40,000 of gross domestic product in a province whose Tejano population collectively might have held less than $10,000 of capital in total. essentially all of it on Anglo-American plantations in East Texas. By 1835, that number was 8X as much, something like 3.15 MM pounds of cotton sold that year. One estimate placed the value of that trade at something like $500,000/yr…which would mean that Texas over the course of a SINGLE DECADE had gone from 1/1000th of the Mexican economy to – and let this number sink in - something like 1/16 of it!49
But we should be more precise with our words. Because the truth is that Texas’s cotton economy was never really part of the Mexican economy! Texas’s cotton economy was inextricably linked to New Orleans, and by proxy, to the United States. Even the Tejanos in Texas, one Mexican contemporary grumbled, “are not Mexicans except by birth,” “accustomed to the continued trade with the North Americans they have adopted their customs and habits.” By 1835, Tejanos were badly outnumbered by Anglos. I’ve never found settled numbers on this, but most estimates I find place the anglo population in 1835 at well over 20,000, as compared to maybe 4,000 Tejanos in the entire state? Indeed, Tejanos were almost certainly outnumbered by slaves in Texas by 1835.50
All of this created a powerful, powerful economic rationale for the Texas Revolution of 1835-36. Not just that East Texas was now more economically integrated with the United States than with the Mexico. But there was an easy and glaring economic arbitrage opportunity staring Anglo and Tejano landowners in the face. It was the value of their land! How much MORE valuable would Texas cottonlands be worth if they were no longer stuck behind a deeply unstable Mexican government…which was becoming increasingly vocal if not particularly effective at abolishing the institution. We actually don’t have to imagine how large this arbitrage was: within a few years of Texas’ independence, cotton lands that had been worth just 12.5c an acre were selling for $.45c an acre, a more than threefold increase! This would not have been unforeseeable to the men fighting for Texas independence. There was still a “risk premium” associated with cottonlands in this new, self-proclaimed Republic of Texas, that discounted the value of cottonlands from the $1.25/acre they went for in the U.S. But Texas independence was what finance guys today would describe as an “immediately accretive transaction” – something aided, of course, by removing all ambiguity about the new Republic’s unambiguous defense of the slave labor system on which cotton depended.51
But the timing of a cotton Republic couldn’t have been worse. The Panic of 1837 in the United States crippled Texas cotton planters’ access to capital. And then, cotton prices collapsed from about $.15/pound in 1835 to as low as $.05/pound over the course of the decade of Texas’s independence. This devastated the finances of the Republic. Texas tried printing money, which quickly declined to less than 50% of face value and then plummeted to 10%, though in a clever piece of marketing the government made sure to print a picture of a cotton plant in full open-boll bloom on the face of their $3.00 bills to remind everyone what was backing the currency. But in the end, the Republic of Texas Government largely fell back on borrowing from the same merchant houses in New Orleans that individual cotton planters did to carry their debt. By 1842, Texas’s national debt was out of control, and the government stopped even trying to service it. For the first time, land prices in Texas dropped to $.25/acre, even for good cotton lands along the Brazos. It didn’t help that Republic had been unsuccessful in getting US tariffs on imported Texas cotton reduced…at $.03/lb, they constituted almost half of the value of the product, leaving Texas cotton producers at a pronounced competitive disadvantage!52
There was of course a quick fix for this. An action that would double the price that Texans were getting for their cotton by eliminating the US tariff. An action that would instantly make Texas cottonlands – and Texas landowners - worth five times as much by placing their land on an equal economic footing to the $1.25/acre land of the American south. No Texas landowner would have been unaware or insensitive to this opportunity. I’m talking of course about annexation to the United States. It’s not really a surprise then that Texans voted 7,664 to 430 in 1845 to join the United States.
Some landowning Tejanos and those who were able to integrate themselves a bit into the cotton-based economy enjoyed some of the benefits of these increasing land prices. Like Juan Seguin…at first. But Seguin’s arc serves better as a tragic parable of the societal changes that occurred during the Texas cotton Republic’s years. Most Tejanos were never really able to access fully the system of credit that fueled the Anglo-American engine and really partake fully in the economic life of the nation. First independence and then annexation were dual blows to Tejano’s earlier status as power brokers in the region. Former San Antonio mayor Francisco Antonio Ruiz argued unsuccessfully at the time of the annexation vote that only those Texans who had participated in the war for independence should have been allowed to vote on annexation. When the measure passed, he went to live with the Comanches instead.53
You can’t understate the role of cotton in the growth and economy of 19th century Texas. By 1860 and the outbreak of the American civil war, the census counted more than 600,000 non-Indians living in Texas. This up from maybe 2,000 in 1820. Of course, fully one-third of those 600,000 had not come to Texas of their own volition. And that third of the population represented more than a third of the “wealth” of Texans in 1860, more than $100,000,000 in assessed value, behind only real property which sat at $120,000,000 the same year. This too up from maybe less than $100,000 in total capital in the entire province in the years of Tejano Texas. And that capital base was producing 200 MM pounds of cotton per year in 1860 – up from 3.5 MM in 1835 - representing something like $10 MM/yr of domestic product back when that was real money.54
But cotton isn’t something we should talk about in the past. Texas “cottonlands” never stopped expanding. The economics of the railroad (more on that later) pulled cotton farmers further and further west, out into the high plains. And today, cotton has been raised in 238 of Texas 254 counties. In fact, none of the top producing cotton counties in Texas are back in the old East Texas bottomlands. Today, they are all in the high plains. The leading county, Lubbock County, in fact regularly produces 200 MM pound per year, by itself, as much as the entire state of Texas produced in 1860. The state at-large today produces something like 3.0 bn pounds per year of cotton, 40% of the US total, and something like 5% of the world total.55
Cotton was such a part of Texans’ identity that when Dallas boosters proposed to host the Texas Centennial Expedition in 1936, they renamed a football stadium and associated bowl game in the middle of the fair grounds based on a cotton pun: the Cotton Bowl. It was a nod to the significance of cotton in Texas history, something which Texans in 1936 were not particularly shy about, since cotton was still probably the third most important industry in Texas at that time, behind only oil and lumber. But it’s a legacy that Texans have become increasingly uncomfortable with in recent years, I’m sure because of its obvious association with slavery. Twentieth century versions of Texas history increasingly came to favor the story of the cowboy and cattle drives. There is something far more romantic about a man on a horse than a man with a hoe…particularly when that man with the hoe is enslaved.56
We heard in the previous episode how the Spanish system of flood irrigation had helped the Spanish establish permanent footholds in Texas, which nevertheless remained a “decidedly Indian domain,” populated by maybe 40,000 natives to just the few thousand Spanish subjects. The horse – or rather, a skilled plains Indian mounted on a horse – still seemed to hold the advantage over subsistence farmers working their irrigated fields. Indeed, the primary non-economic motivation of Tejanos in supporting Anglo-American immigration was to import allies to help them counterbalance the Lipan and Comanche presence. Cotton more than counterbalanced the “indios barbaros.” Cotton was such a cash crop that it shifted the advantage back to the farmers. Cotton produced more wealth per unit of land – by a long shot! – than the horse ever could. Unfortunately, good cottonlands were almost always good horse grazing lands as well. A terrible contest had been set-up, pitting a cotton-raising society against the mounted tribes whose need for land could not be paid off, even with all the money that the cotton economy was generating.
But a new invention was about to arrive on the Texas plains, an invention that would intensify the contest, if not settle it. An invention that become so associated with the state, that it came in a discrete box made to look like a book labeled “The Common Law of Texas.” If the Colt Revolver made Texas, it’s also not too much to say that Texas made the Colt Revolver. On the next episode, of the Engines of Texas History.
Thank you for listening. If you haven’t read Andrew Torget’s “Seeds of Empire,” you need to. It’s one of the best books of the last few decades on Texas history, dedicated to the outsized role of Cotton on the development of the state. It’s the basis for much of this episode.
This season is brought to you by the 11th Street River House in Bandera, Texas. Sort of. My wife and I have dreamed for years about owning a place in Bandera, and we finally bought a house their last year. Four blocks from the bars, three blocks from the Frontier Times Museum, with 120 feet of Medina River frontage and a collection of historic Texas maps on the wall curated by yours truly, it’s a great place to spend a weekend and indirectly support his podcast. You can find it under 11th Street River House on Backroads Reservations @ www.backroadstexas.net
Editing for this episode was performed by Susana Canseco, sound engineering by Stephen Bennett. Stephen Bennett also composed and performed the theme music, you can find more about Stephen at info@nosomedia.com. David Moore designed the cover art for this season, you can find him at illustrationonline.com.
For more information on our sources and other projects, please check out www.BrandonSeale.com.
Welcome to the Engines of Texanity: Episode 4: I’m Brandon Seale.
On June 8, 1844, two scouts came galloping into camp where thirteen other Texas rangers were resting. One of the resting rangers was a gangly twenty-seven year old who had only been in Texas for three years, but had already participated in one of its most famous historical episodes: the Black Bean affair following the failed Mier Expedition which was beat back by our friend Antonio Canales from Season 4. After surviving his first adventure on the Texas frontier, Samuel Walker enlisted in Captain Jack Hays’ ranger company in San Antonio, and just a few months later found himself on the trail of a band of Comanches led by a chief named Yellow Wolf.57
No sooner had the two returning scouts come into view than Walker and the other rangers realized that, Yellow Wolf had found them. 70 or 80 or maybe 40 or maybe 200 Comanches appeared on a nearby brushline – the rangers would never agree on the number, so surprised were they and so frantic were they to mount up and prepare themselves to fight or to flee. But the Comanches didn’t attack. Instead, they melted back into the brush. Captain Jack Hays was familiar with the old Comanche fake retreat, however, used to lure lumbering ranger units out into the open, where their single shot carbines left them fairly defenseless against a mounted warrior capable of unleashing 20 arrows per minute. And sure enough, no sooner had the Ranger troop started to advance than a few dozen Comanches reappeared from the brush, baiting them, hooting and hollering at the Rangers and daring them to fire at them.58
Hays ordered his men to hold their fire and to continue forward. Slowly. Under control. More Comanches materialized, shouting insults in Spanish, which even newcomers like Samuel Walker understood. Yet still, the advancing Rangers didn’t fire.
Seeing that their tactic wasn’t working, Yellow Wolf’s Comanches pulled back to a nearby hilltop, deciding I suppose that if they were going to have a heads-up fight they might as well have the high ground to do it on. In the course of their withdrawal, however, they lost sight of the Rangers. It was now Hays and Walker and the other Rangers’ who had disappeared into the brush. The Rangers worked their way stealthily through a draw behind the hill where the Comanches had congregated, and then charged – this time at a full gallop, but still holding their fire! Yellow Wolf must have recognized that this wasn’t the norm – he had the Rangers badly outnumbered too - but he couldn’t have imagined what it was that made this Ranger troop so reckless. It wasn’t until the Rangers were within arrow range that their arms – their hands more accurately – began to unleash a stream of a fire. Each ranger hand carried a three pound chunk of iron, 13.75” long, with no trigger guard, and a distinctive round cylinder bulging out of the middle. Jack Hays had picked up these curious, repeating firearms at the Texas Navy’s liquidation sale, where a ship’s commander praised them for their role in a brief action that Texas sailors had seen in support of the Yucatan’s war of independence against centralist armies in 1843. Hays himself was now experiencing for himself the way the bullets just seemed to pour out of the barrel: “one for every finger of the hand” a Comanche survivor later recalled.
“Crowd them! Powder-burn em!” Hays shouted as the Rangers began to open fire. The Comanches managed to get off an effective first volley. One ranger fell dead, three more were wounded, and as the lines collided, Samuel Walker took a lance through his thigh. But the rangers kept coming. And they kept firing. Yellow Wolf and the Comanches broke, shocked by the novelty of the new weapons and the power of the enormous .36 caliber, 83 grain projectiles the Rangers kept firing. The collective effect of thirty five-shot revolvers belching was as one continuous stream of fire, and the Comanches never had a chance to regroup. The fight – or rather, now, the pursuit, continued for miles – somewhere between 20 and fifty Comanches falling to the Rangers bullets, ending only when one of the Rangers picked off Yellow Wolf…according to legend, with the last of the 150 rounds that the Rangers had loaded into their Colt revolvers that morning.
Hays’ Big Fight, as it came to be known, had entered in American frontier lore almost as soon as it was over. They were already being called the “Texas Patterson,” the Paterson a reference to their place of manufacture in New Jersey, the Texas a nod to the state that was about to make them famous. Which makes it all the more surprising that when General Zachary Taylor landed in Corpus Christi, TX on February 19, 1846 to press Texas’s – and now the United States’ – claims to all of the lands between the Nueces and Rio Grande, that not a single one of his men carried a Colt as his standard issue weapon. In fact, the US Army had rejected them entirely. “The board is of the unanimous opinion…that this arm is entirely unsuited to the general purposes of the service.” It was too complicated for the average soldier, they believed, and it invited soldiers to be profligate with their fire, which was expensive. As Samuel Colt’s biographer put it, “As long as guns were primarily used by armies on battlefields, and as long as living men could be supplied to replace the dead and wounded, the advantage went to whoever possessed more guns”59
Yet this wasn’t the case on the frontier, where men were few, spaces were large, and rate of fire meant everything. Which is why Texas rangers became the earliest and most fervent adopters of the arms. And when now-captain Samuel Walker of the Texas ranger unit attached to Taylor’s army heard that there were, actually, 150 of these “Patterson Colts” sitting in storage with the quartermaster, he snapped up thirty-two of them for his twenty-four men as quick as he could.60
In March of 1846, General Taylor advanced with his army (including Walker’s Rangers) to the future site of Brownsville, Texas. Unsurprisingly, Mexican General Mariano Arista – do you remember him from last season??? – attacked, citing correctly the fact that Texas’s border had never extended below the Nueces and that the peace treaty that Santa Anna signed after San Jacinto had been signed under duress. The US Army found themselves deep in enemy territory, unfamiliar with the terrain, and blind to the enemy’s movements. Over the course of the next week, Samuel Walker and members of his unit rode through enemy lines three separate times to deliver critical messages to General Taylor and his subordinates, taking advantage of the fact that most of the Rangers now dressed quite a lot like south Texas vaqueros. During an escape from a unit of Mexican lancers, Walker was thrown from his horse. Defenseless, he looked up, coolly drew his Colt, levelled it at a lancer that was bearing down on him, dropped him, hopped on the lancer’s horse, and rode on off. The press learned of Walker’s daring exploits and made him the hero of the campaign, which Taylor ended up winning. Walker’s heroics and the press’s coverage of them continued all the way through to General Taylor’s successful capture of Monterrey in September of 1846.61
After Monterrey, General Taylor prevailed upon Samuel Walker to accept a commission in the regular U.S. army and return to the US to use his fame to raise men, money, and arms for the US’s impending landing at Veracruz. The now-famous Captain Walker was greeted by crowds of people wherever he disembarked, praising at every stop his Colt Revolvers which he claimed permitted “a hundred [Rangers to] discharge a thousand shots in two minutes.” When he arrived in New York, Walker was surprised to find a letter waiting for him. It read: “I have so often heard you spoken of by gentleman from Texas that I feel sufficiently acquainted to trouble you with a few inquiries regarding your experience in the use of my repeating Fire Arms…” it was signed by another Samuel: Samuel Colt. It closed with a pitch “It has also occurred to me that if you think sufficiently well of my arms to urge the President and Sec of War to allow your company to be thus armed you can get them.”62
Samuel Colt was nothing if not a relentless pitchman. Yet he was also an innovator, very much a nineteenth century Steve Jobs, for all the good and bad that comparison might entail. He possessed the four traits that seem to be universal in a successful disrupter. One: he was technically gifted. He developed his first design for a revolver during the course of a year at sea as a 17 year old, whittling the prototype out of a piece of scrap wood. A few other folks had dabbled with the idea, but Colt had the insight to link the hammer of his pistol to the ratchet that advanced his multi-round cylinder, so that the cylinder could be advanced with a single motion and by a single hand. Then, to prevent misfires and hold the cylinder in alignment, he installed a spring-activated pin that would lock into a small divot on the backside of the cylinder, holding it firmly in place. He would later be an early adopter the percussion cap, solving some of the awkwardness of reloading multiple chambers with the right amount of powder and lead, but again demonstrating his eye for innovation.63
Trait Number Two: salesmanship. For several years, he worked as a traveling showman to raise money to build his prototype for his revolver. More specifically, he sold hits of laughing gas, nitrous oxide, to people for entertainment. It took him three years to make enough money to build his prototype, $605.53 in total – the equivalent of maybe like $50,000 today, or like a whole year’s worth of 12 hour workdays for a craftsman at the time. But he insisted the final product be not only functional, but beautiful, using black walnut handles and brushed steel when oak and unfinished steel probably would’ve worked. And his salesmanship shined through in the presentation boxes his firearms came with: velvet-lined mahogany boxes or, for the more playful, hollowed-out fake books titled “The Law for Self Defense” and, soon enough, “The Common Law of Texas.”64
Once Colt had his prototype, he called on his third entrepreneurial talent: his organizational ability. From the beginning, Colt wasn’t interested in just building a gun. He wanted to build a company, a process that would make guns cheaply, and affordably. He was inspired, in fact, by Eli Whitney, of cotton gin fame from last episode, but who had really made his money perfecting the idea of mass manufacturing guns using interchangeable parts. Actually, Colt initially contracted out the manufacture of his guns to Eli Whitney’s son. But Colt was the original six sigma ninja, always focused on creating the manufacturing process that would allow him to make his machines from machines…to take the individual out of the process. Journalists at the time appreciated the metaphor of it all, observing that Colt’s manufacturing process “is itself one large machine, well oiled too, which takes in at one end a shapeless lump of iron and a piece of wood, and puts out at the other a beautifully finished arm.” There’s actually a direct throughline between Eli Whitney’s so-called “American system” of manufacturing, through to Samuel Colt, and on through to even the first automotive assembly lines, whose supervisors in many cases came out of Colt’s factories.65
Lastly, Samuel Colt’s fourth trait: he was a phenomenal fundraiser. It helped that he was born into American manufacturing royalty, his Connecticut family contained several plant supervisors and owners in the early years of American industrialization. But Samuel Colt surpassed them all. At the age of 21, he raised a “seed round” of capital, selling off 1/4 of the rights to his patent – which he hadn’t even received yet – for a post-money valuation of $8,000 for his non-existent company, and would soon capitalize the company to the tune of $230,000 in his “Series A” round the next year – an absolutely extraordinary sum of money for the time and the kind of pre-revenue valuations that we like to laugh at when they happen in the tech world today.
And yet, Samuel Colt’s first firearm company went bust. He produced a couple thousand revolvers, but the U.S. army and every state militia east of the Mississippi told him to pound sand, so three years after opening, he closed his doors and moved on to other ventures.
But not before some of those revolvers ended up in Texas. And Texans immediately got it. As early as June 1836 – before colt had manufactured a single one, a Texan friend of Stephen F. Austin was inquiring after purchasing 500 repeating rifles and 500 revolvers for the Texian army. It seems so obvious now as to why the Colt Revolver was such a powerful innovation, that it begs the question: Why the hell didn’t everyone else in the US see it?66
My basic hypothesis is that in the Colt Revolver prospered in Texas for the same reason horses did. In the same way that horses thrived in Texas because they served as a highly concentrated, portable store of energy, similarly the Colt Revolver placed a highly concentrated, portable store of energy. The continuous state of conflict that persisted along the Texas frontier for many decades only increased the stakes further. A man with a revolver in the wide-open expanses of Texas carried with him the energy to protect and provision himself in a way that had never been possible before, and Texans had the means and motivations to pay for that power in a way that no other market could at the time. In 1839, the Texas Navy became one of the few purchasers of Colt’s first batch of revolving pistols, purchasing 180 of them. Thirty of which Captain Jack Hays had acquired just in time for his Big Fight, which made Samuel Walker and every other Texas Ranger who used them a convert. And a critic.67
Which is why Walker agreed to meet up with Colt. He wanted to give Colt feedback on his invention: “With improvements, I think they can be rendered the most perfect weapons in the world for light mounted troops.” In December of 1846, the two Samuels met. Samuel Walker was clear and uncompromising in the modifications he wanted:
First, he wanted six shots, not five;
Second, he wanted it chambered in a monster 44 caliber with three times the amount of gunpowder used in the original .36 caliber revolver;
Third, he wanted a trigger-guard instead of a gimmicky folding trigger;
Four, he wanted a nine-inch barrel, extending the total length of the weapon to a monstrous 15.5” and increasing its weight to 4.5 lbs: “It would take a Texan to shoot it,” Samuel Colt said.68
Fifth, reloading needed to be possible without disassembling the gun, which had not quite been possible with the original;
And sixth, he wanted the front sight to be made of polished german silver, a sort of pre-modern fluorescent dot sight to improve target acquisition.
Colt paid for the manufacture of several prototypes, but Walker was merciless, commenting on the tolerances of parts down to the 1/16 of an inch. But at last, in early 1847, Samuel Walker was able to trade on the strength of his fame – and the lobbying of powerful Texas Senators like Sam Houston – to compel the war department to order 1,000 of the soon-to-be-named “Walker Colts.”
Samuel Walker finished raising his unit in the U.S. and sailed to Veracruz with General Winfield Scott in March of 1847. Walker and his Rangers would prove as useful to General Scott in Central Mexico as they had been to General Taylor in Northern Mexico. On October 5, 1847, the first of the Walker Colts made it to Mexico, a special, early release pair sent just to Walker. He was delighted and might have been particularly pleased by the intricate engraving that would decorate the barrel of each Walker Colt going forward: a depiction of Hay’s Big Fight against Yellow Wolf’s Comanches, with Samuel Walker on his black horse and Jack Hays on his white one.
Samuel Walker was dead four days after he got his new revolvers. Not for any fault of the weapons. After capturing a little town called Huamantla, his troop was counterattacked by a column of Mexican lancers, one of whom brought down Samuel Walker. The accounts differ as to how; they do not differ as to what followed. His men retaliated on the town in horrible fashion. Which was, unfortunately, in keeping with a terrible pattern of behavior in the Mexican War. Every Anglo-Texan saw himself as the avenging angel of the war crimes of the Alamo and Goliad and the Mier Expedition – of which Walker had been a part, you might recall…and there is every reason to believe that he participated in these retributions in the Mexican war. One US Army officer, in writing about Walker and his rangers, could only pray that “all honest Mexicans were at a safe distance from their path.”69
Samuel Walker may have been the one to give Samuel Colt and his invention the most ironic of nicknames: “Peace Maker,” he called Colt in one of his letters to the inventor. And an old Texas maxim reinforces this idea, declaring that “God made man, but Samuel Colt made man equal.” Colt would have loved that sentiment. It played to his exaggerated sense of autonomy. “If you allow other people to govern you, you subscribe yourself inferior to them,” he once counseled a young relative. It’s foolish to deny how his invention was both a product of that individualism and an enabler of it. And it’s foolish to deny that his marketing played into this idea most powerfully by associating his firearms with Texas, from the engravings of Hay’s Big Fight, to the “Common Law of Texas” boxes they came in, to his next product release which came to be known as the Texas Navy because of its depiction of the Texas Navy’s use of the first revolvers in the Bay of Campeche. And Texans returned the love. One observer in 1854 estimated that there were more Colt revolvers in Texas than there were men, and he might not have been far off the mark. Not so much an economic engine, it became a psychological engine, propelling Anglo-Texan frontiersmen triumphantly out of their old Brazos and Colorado River heartlands and across the Texas plains.70
Maybe. The truth is…I can’t find a direct correlation between the arrival of the revolver and the advance of the Anglo frontier in Texas. The fact is that there were more Anglos moving into Texas each year than there were Comanches in the entire tribe - 40,000 men, women, and children on the highest-end! In fact, both the line of Anglo-settlement and Texas population numbers seems to have tracked much more closely the expansion of cotton-raising rather than that of revolver adoption, but I haven’t found a scholarly study of the matter. And the truth is, I hate arguments like this. The argument that one group of people was so wealthy and reproduced so quickly that they were destined – manifestly or otherwise – to replace another people is pretty unsatisfying. It almost seems to pass for a moral argument, but it shouldn’t.
What is undeniable, however, is that the association that Colt cultivated between Texas and his revolver impressed itself upon the Texas psyche. It rounded out Texan’s image of themselves as the ultimate self-reliant man. But it also created a terrible power imbalance for anyone without access to the American consumer goods economy: like Mexicans, native americans, and Tejano borderlanders. Texas was not a particularly peaceful place before the Colt revolver…but I think it’s fair to wonder whether the power imbalance introduced by the Colt Revolver might have invited the extreme violence that characterized Texas history for so much of the second half of the nineteenth century. Believing that they were untouchable with their six-shooters in-hand, did the Colt Revolver make Anglo-Texan avengers that much more brutal to Mexican civilian populations? Realizing that they possessed such an unassailable firepower advantage, did Anglo settlers push even more boldly into Lipan and Comanche lands? Accepting they were so badly outgunned now, did Comanches become more unrestrained in their counterattacks on the advancing line of Anglo settlement?
Comanches, in the words of TR Fehrenbach, refused to play the “doomed savage.” They had a generation of fight left in them. And this half century of conflict has left an indelible scar on the psyche of Texans through to the present. Yet this violent end so powerfully colors our memory of the Comanches that it leads us to overlook their more peaceful contributions they made to Texas history. In the next episode, I’ll try to convince you that one of Texas’ greatest contributions to the American consumer goods economy was not in fact the Colt Revolver; it was the commercialization and mass production of an old Comanche staple: portable, non-perishable, calorically-dense food. In the next episode of the Engines of Texanity.
Rasenberger book
Welcome to the Engines of Texanity. Episode 5: Comanche Superfood. I’m Brandon Seale.
Gail Borden moved through the streets of Galveston “in breathless haste,” a “man forever ahead of himself.” On this evening in 1847, he was loudly and excitedly inviting Galvestonians to an impromptu midnight dinner at his house, sweetening the invitation with the promise of some post-dinner “entertainment.” Being a devout Baptist, no one mistook the invitation for anything too wild, but thirty-six year old Gail Borden was well-known enough - and eccentric enough - for people to be intrigued. Gail Borden was basically the town’s founding father, if you set aside the pirate Jean Lafitte, as the head of the land company that had surveyed and sold off most of the town’s lots. But even before that, since his arrival in 1829 almost, Gail Borden had always been one the most widely-known men in Anglo Texas.71
Born in Western New York in 1801 and raised along the Ohio River, at the age of nineteen he had hired on to one of the first steamboats to ply the Ohio-Mississippi River, and worked it all the way down to New Orleans and back. It was his first glimpse at the power of a literal engine of history, the steam engine, and the radical way in which it was revolutionizing the economics of transportation. Instead of one round trip per year to New Orleans, a steam-powered packet boat could now make 6 or 8. Not surprisingly, freight costs along the Mississippi soon fell from $.05/lb to $.02/lb. It was as though the world had been condensed, and the calculus of transportation distances rewritten. In this new world, location was better measured in steam-ship days to New Orleans than in miles, an idea that must have impressed itself upon the young, analytically-inclined Borden. Borden followed the Big River south in the 1820’s, taking on a job as a school teacher and then land surveyor in lower Mississippi.72
Which placed him solidly in the Texas fever zone, and in 1824 it infected his brother, who was among Stephen F. Austin’s first 300. Gail didn’t make it to Texas until 1829, but almost as soon as he did, Stephen F. Austin recognized his talent, and made him his de facto colony land surveyor. Which meant that he came to know pretty much every Anglo settler that came into East Texas during that time. Which placed him in the inner circles of Anglo Texas politics, where he would be elected repeatedly to the increasingly revolution-minded conventions and committees on public safety. Which gave him the idea to leverage this position in October in 1835 to start a newspaper, the Telegraph and Texas Register. And what a time it was to start a newspaper in Texas! It was his paper that would warn Texans of centralist units advancing on Gonzales to take their cannon; it was his paper that would print William Travis’ letters from the Alamo; and it was his paper that would print the March 2, 1836, Texas Declaration of Independence.
The Telegraph and Texas Register would go on to become the newspaper of record for Texas until the American Civil War. But being a customer of the Texas government during its bankrupt Republic years was not very good for business. In 1837, his bills to the Republic almost entirely unpaid, Borden happily sold off the paper, turned back to surveying to pay his bills, and hired on with the land company that was developing Galveston. Yet Borden couldn’t escape his reputation for diligence and good clerical skills. The new Republic appointed him customs collector for the port of Galveston, which meant that Borden was responsible for collecting something like 1/3 of the Republic’s entire revenues each year. All this while getting elected to Galveston city council and continuing to administer the sale of town lots that the Galveston City Company had entrusted him with. So it’s not a surprise that when the well-known, always dynamic Borden went around inviting Galvestonians to a party on that evening in 1847, people came.73
Borden started his dinner party by presenting his guests with a special culinary treat: “There are articles on this table from which, if you know what they were in their original condition, you would turn with loathing and horror…out of the offal of the kitchens and the streets, I have created…a food for the poor which will cost almost nothing.” Borden – at this point in his career anyway – didn’t seem to have Samuel Colt’s natural salesmanship. Because, to be clear, what he was rather unappetizingly offering his guests was some kind of food paste made from animal byproducts. His guests politely sampled the pressed meat byproduct patties and did their best not to vomit.74
A short time later, Borden invited everyone back to the carriage house-slash-workshop behind his house for the real entertainment. In the carriage house, he unveiled for them a contraption, which he proudly called his “Terraqueous machine.” Terra for land, aqua for water, it was basically an aquatic wagon with a square sail in front, that would allow it to be pushed along by the wind on land or at sea. If images of Dr. Emmett Brown at this point, I am too!
His audience was clearly excited by it, because when Borden hitched up the wagon and towed it to the beach, a crowd followed along. As he unhitched the horses and pointed the stern to the west, he asked for volunteers to climb aboard with him. A few brave souls came forth. Once everyone was seated, Borden raised the sail – and to the delight of the riders the Terraqueous machine began to move! It was a marvelous sensation: no jolting, no loud engines, no odorous surprises from the back end of the horses pulling them. Were they parties to the maiden voyage of the next great transportation revolution? If the steam-ship had annihilated the distances between port cities, what might this new Terraqueous machine do for overland distances? Might it connect the inland centers of commerce as seamlessly as the great river ports to the boundless commerce of the seas?
Pretty soon, Borden’s passengers were moving along at quite a respectable speed. QUITE a respectable speed. Actually, the machine kept accelerating. Faster. And faster. A few of the riders squirmed. A few called for Borden to slow down. Up ahead, the beach veered north. But Borden – and the terraqueous machine he was piloting – did not. He crashed the machine straight into the surf at full speed, without warning, terrifying his passengers, who impulsively rushed to the landward side of the craft. “Sit still, still, sit still!” Borden screamed, indifferent to their terror, concerned more about the machine’s stability. Because for that brief moment, the terraqueous machine was working! The transition was rough, but it was now smooth sailing, so to speak. But his passengers still hadn’t recovered from the shock. In their panic, the passengers capsized Borden’s invention. Luckily they were still in shallow water and were able to slog their way to shore – the same shore perhaps where Cabeza de Vaca had swept up 300 years before, I can’t help but add. Once these 1847 castaways had reached dry land, they took a headcount and realized that everyone was accounted for… except for Gail Borden. They looked for him in the surf and realized he was still riding the capsized hull of his contraption out in the bay.
“Can you make it to shore?” someone cried out.
“Don’t want to make it! It can’t sink…[then paused for an angry moment.] There was no danger. What did you make such fools of yourselves for! Con-cern you!” he cursed them in his animated Baptist way.
And as you probably know, the Terraqueous machine did not become an engine of Texas history. Yet Borden – like Samuel Colt – was a relentless if not a bit oblivious entrepreneur. “If I miss it in one thing, I will hit it in another,” he always told friends. He had a “diversified” portfolio of inventions, back before diversification was cool, and yet even meat byproduct patties and terraqueous machines shared something in common: they were attempts to harness uncaptured energy – either in the form of the calories contained in animal byproducts or gusts of wind that could move a ship across the land as well as across the sea. The industrial age was all about finding new ways to use and harness energy, but after these initial failures, Borden refined his thinking about the matter. He began to focus more on condensing energy than harnessing it in different ways. Which really was the same thing, as energy scholar Vaclav Smil says it, “Energy is the universal currency.” Energy is energy, whether captured, saved, or produced, and condensed energy is effectively the same as newly harnessed energy or saved energy.75
Borden was not the first to realize this. Indeed, anyone who had lived in the distant arid expanses of Texas in pre-modern times had to appreciate this. Native American population densities in Texas were driven by proximity to energy sources, defined as good foraging or lands good for raising corn. The horse, or course, redrew that map, yet it didn’t change the reality that anyone moving around the Texas plains needed to think about how to move their calories around with them, and how to do so as efficiently as possible. The less efficient you were at carrying calories, the more calories you had to carry. And even in colonial times, Tejanos ongoing commercial struggle had been trying to find a way to get their agricultural bounty to distant markets. They never quite succeeded, settling on non-perishable tallow and hides as the only goods they could export in any volume.76
But what if you COULD find a way to get the rest of the bovine to market. Beef sold for $.02/pound in Texas at the same time as it sold for $0.06 a pound on the east coast. That’s a 66% gross margin. If only Borden could figure out some way to get $.02 perishable product to a $.06 market. The economics of steam ships helped, but you still had to transport the entire live animal, fully 2/3rd of the weight of which wasn’t really edible AND you had to transport feed to keep it alive, 2-3% of its bodyweight per day you intended to transport it. Trail drives were another alternative, but the losses and risks for those – particularly before the railroad – were so high as to deter all but the most desperate.77
According to at least one history, a “Comanchero,” a Comanche trader, introduced Borden one day to a Comanche superfood which he described as “pinole.” It consisted of “powdered, pulverized, dried buffalo meat, dried crushed hominy, and mesquite beans.” So-called “pemmican” recipes were common amongst the plains Indians. Pemmican was meat and fruit based, however, typically made from the lean meat of large game animals like buffalo or deer, dried in the sun until about five portions of meat were reduced to one hard portion of jerky, then ground into a powder and mixed with dried berries and just the right amount of tallow to hold it together. It could then be reconstituted later on the trail in a soup (adding back five portions of water to each portion of pemmican) or eaten raw in some cases.78
But the interesting thing to me about this story is that the Comanchero wasn’t talking about pemmican, his recipe was for something a little different: indeed, the fact that he called it “pinole” is an interesting clue in this respect. Pinole, as its commonly used in Spanish, does not refer to a meat-based product, it refers to a meal made from ground roasted corn, with mesquite beans and other flavorings occasionally mixed in. Yet the Comanche recipe wasn’t true pinole either. Listen again, it consisted of “powdered, pulverized, dried buffalo meat, dried crushed hominy [corn], and mesquite beans.” He was describing some kind of a hybrid as non-perishable as pemmican, yet as energy-rich as pinole.79
This was the recipe that Borden filed a patent for, the novelty deriving specifically from the mixing in of meat protein with carbohydrate rich cereals, and then baking it to make it shelf stable. In Borden’s words: “The nature of this discovery consists in preserving the concentrated nutritious properties of flesh meat of any kind, combining it with flour and baking it into biscuits. One pound of this bread contains the extract of more than five pounds of the best meat.” Note even that the ratio of five to 1 is preserved from the native plainsmen’s recipes!80
By 1850, Borden had produced his first samples, finally landing on the product name of “Meat Biscuit” before submitting it for U.S. Army trials. The Army had more foresight on this one than they had with Colt’s revolver. They loved the idea that a soldier could carry two months’ rations on his back and have it weigh less than 20 lbs. Compared to the enormous livestock herds and stores of feed that previous expeditions onto the Great plains had had to carry, it was a revolution in logistics. The army started buying them, and Borden went all in, mortgaging himself to the hilt to build out an enormous production line on Strand Street in Galveston. He attended the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, where the judges awarded him a first-class medal, alongside Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical Reaper, Charles Goodyear’s vulcanized rubber…and over Colt’s Revolver, which failed to initially impress London judges as much as it failed to impress U.S. army purchasing agents.81
And yet as the Great Exhibition wrapped up, some less than salutary reports started coming back from the U.S. Army’s field trials. The meat biscuit had proven to be more nutritionally complete in theory than in practice. Soldiers forced to live off of the meat biscuit complained of “head-ache, nausea, and great muscular depression.” And it tasted terrible. More than one tester stated they would rather starve than eat one of Borden’s meat biscuits, no matter how novel the idea it was. The news reached Borden in London that the army wouldn’t be ordering any more of his meat biscuits. He was devastated. And he was financially ruined.
Borden’s voyage home from the Great Exhibition gave him plenty of time to reckon with the consequences of his failure. Yet he was still fixated on the possibilities of what he had unlocked with the meat biscuit: “I mean to put a potato in a pillbox, a pumpkin into a tablespoon, the biggest sort of watermelon into a saucer…” As these thoughts churned through his head, Borden noticed that the milk cows onboard had gotten sick and stopped giving milk. In the cries of the infants onboard, Gail Borden heard opportunity calling him once again. He would deploy his “condensifying” genius to the production of condensed milk. Milk had a lot of similarities to beef. Aside from coming from the same animal, it was perishable and it was heavy, which made it expensive to move around and limited the distances that it could be moved. It also meant that someone who could improve the logistics of its transport could do well for themselves. Condensed milk wasn’t a new idea, but simply boiling milk into a solid stripped the milk of its flavor. Also, this typically could only be done with skim milk which was already pretty flavorless to begin with. Borden determined to condense whole milk and preserve it nutritional properties and flavor content.82
Borden’s idea was to boil the whole milk in a vacuum. This came from an intuition that he had: “Milk is a living fluid, like blood, and as soon as drawn from the cow begins to die.” The vacuum was a way of keeping that life force all together…and of keeping any invading microbial forces out. And my mind, by the way, connects Borden’s image of “milk as a living fluid, like blood” to the old Comanche practice of mixing warm blood with milk from the udder of nursing buffalo heifers for a special treat…but I don’t have any reason to think that Borden was thinking of that. Though I’ll note here that once he had perfected his condensed milk process, the recipe for reconstituting it called for adding 5 parts water to 1 part milk…just like his meat biscuit, just like that old Comanche “pinole” recipe.83
This fixation on milk as a living fluid, and thus on the need to protect that fluid from all outside contaminants, became the guiding principle of Borden’s process. All his milk cows had their udders washed thoroughly in warm water before milking; no cows could be fed turnips (it affected the taste); and milking barns were required to be swept clean and manure carried away twice a day. The milk was required to be kept at 58 degrees or below all the way to the factory, where the cans of milk were placed into a vat of water, raised to 190 degrees, then lifted into a separate vat and heated once more, where the vacuum would suck the milk into a pan whose temperature never exceeded 136 degrees. It was condensed there to 25% of its original volume, and placed in a vat of ice to cool, loaded onto railcars with ice and delivered at a temperature that – once again - never exceeded 58 degrees. It was a level of industrial precision that I’m not sure had ever been applied to food production before, a decade before the discoveries of Pasteurization and the germ theory of disease and the subsequent emphasis on sanitation as a key to public health.84
Borden’s invention, as you might suspect, was particularly attractive to city dwellers, without access to their own fresh milk. For this reason, Borden moved to Brooklyn New York in 1858 and launched Eagle Brand Condensed Milk – he’d finally figured out the marketing thing. In 1861, Gail Borden had completed a plant expansion - just in time to supply one of the largest armies the world had ever seen. In 1862 he sold the US Army something like 300 quarts per day of milk. By 1863, he was selling something like 15,000 quarts per day. But when the war was over, demand didn’t falter. Returning soldiers had acquired a taste for condensed milk. In 1871, he was selling 165,000 quarts per day.85
Condensed milk was among the first and most successful innovations in processed food. Americans have a complicated relationship with processed food today, but that is largely because it has become so good at condensing and cheaply transporting caloric energy that it has overwhelmed our ability to measure its consumption. But from the standpoint of farmers and ranchers, which is what most Texans were well into the 20th century – processed food helped level the price differentials between producers and consumers. It removed the costs of perishability! It helped eliminate the disadvantages of distance under which Texas agriculture had labored for so long.
Gail Borden died back in Texas in 1874, but he was always a bit unappreciated in his home state because of his Union loyalties and for his later donations in support of freedman’s schools and black churches. He was returned for final burial in New York City, where his gravestone today carries perhaps the most beautifully Texan epigraph I can imagine: “I tried and failed. I tried again and again, and succeeded.”86
There’s a recurring pattern that we’ve already seen – and will continue to see – of Texans innovating around the disadvantages of distance by finding ways to concentrate diffuse energy and make it denser and thus more portable. And there’s no better example of an engine of history that would do more to annihilate the disadvantages of distance, than the railroad. On the next episode of The Engines of Texanity.
Frantz book
Cover art by David Moore, you can check out his work at IllustrationOnline.com
David Moore / IllustrationOnline.com(for image)
Welcome to the Engines of Texanity: Episode 6: The Iron Horse. I’m Brandon Seale.
Twenty-one year old John Warne Gates came to San Antonio for the first time in 1876, when it had already been the center of the region’s ranching culture for 150 years. Yet San Antonio stockmen in 1876 were open-range stockmen, rounding up their cattle when they could and leaving them turned out in the general vicinity of their ranches when they could. Losses to theft, appropriation, and honest wandering off were probably pretty high, because fences were unheard of, because fences were expensive! Even in well-forested parts of the US, rail fences were time-consuming to deploy and expensive to maintain. In the land of south Texas scrub brush, most landowners were lucky to have a corral.
But when John Gates rode into San Antonio in 1876, he brought with him an innovation that would transform the Texas landscape. He brought with him a spool of drawn wire, of twin wires actually, intertwined with each other and with little barbs woven in between. It was, in Gates’s words, “light as air, stronger than whiskey, and cheap as dirt.” And Gates intended to prove it. Gates went out into Military plaza (where City Hall stands today) and strung up several strands of wire between some trees or some posts or maybe some buildings…it’s unclear to me what he anchored them to, only that the wire was nearly invisible to the growing crowd of onlookers other than the sunlight glinting off the little barbs every few inches. Gates then led a herd of famously ornery Texas longhorn cattle into his makeshift corral, closed them in, and then started getting them worked up! He and a helper whooped and slapped the ground with their handkerchiefs, as the puzzled longhorns tried to move away. Only the longhorns couldn’t escape. Every direction they turned, they bounced off this invisible “Devil’s rope” as it would come to be called. The longhorns panicked, and tried to stampede, but ended up just running in circles. They tested the wire a few times, spun around a few more times…and then gave up and calmed down.87
Gates’ demonstration was so successful – and memorable – that podcasters are still talking about it today. And that’s probably what you want this story to be about. How the barbed wire made the cattle business boom and how that became an engine of Texas history.
But the data doesn’t back that up.
Between 1875-1885, something like 3 MM head of Texas cattle were driven to northern markets…at an average price of about $10.00 a head DELIVERED to the railhead in Kansas, that’s maybe $30.0 MM of product, which is not nothing. But that’s less revenue than Texas cotton-raisers produced on average each year! In fact, in the year 1900, cotton producers received more for their crop than cattleman had been paid for all of their livestock in the previous twenty-eight years combined! The story of cattle ranching in Texas, in fact, has always almost always been a story of retreat. Cattle’s highest and best use was as a way to hold land until the cotton farmers could get to you. And what would carried the cotton farmers forward in nineteenth century Texas – and indeed, what made the delivery of barbed wire and many other consumer goods to Texans affordable - was the railroad.88
Texas was a latecomer to the railroad game. The first railroad in Texas was the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos, and Colorado railroad in 1853, when there was already 10,000 miles of railroad in the rest of the United States. It also didn’t help that Texas – like other Southern states - were supremely suspicious of railroads and corporations, most of which were financed with English or northern capital. To control this, the ante-bellum Texas legislature placed extremely restrictive conditions in the charters of the few Texas railroad companies that went so far in some cases as to allow the state to take them over at the end of the charter. These policies served their purpose a little too well, deterring both foreign capital and the railroads they wanted to build: Texas had built only 468 miles of railroad before the Civil War, as compared to 22,000 miles in the Northern states alone. The Civil War slowed down development even more, followed by the Panic of 1873, a double blow that left the average Texan poorer in the 1870’s than he had been in the 1840’s.89
Yet Texas was a railroader’s dream: it was largely flat, its rivers were few and small, and its large distances meant that it had stood to benefit more than anyone from reducing the economic costs of that distance! And after the Civil War, something changed. Texas – in contrast to many other southern states -- implemented a relatively generous policy of granting land in fee simple to railroad developers – like the U.S. government had begun doing. The state began offering 8 sections (or square miles) of land to railroad companies for each mile of track laid and eventually increased it to 16 sections per mile.90
This set Texas apart from other Southern state governments, that viewed their lands as inalienable assets that were best rented out rather than sold off. In a way, the southern model resembled the old Spanish model, which was consistently stingy with patenting lands into private hands: in all the years of Spanish and Mexican rule, only 15% or so of Texas’s lands were released by the sovereign. This was a major grievance of Tejanos and a high-priority action item for the new Republic of Texas government which sold off more land in its first two years of independence than Spain and Mexico had done in the 100 years prior. So there was good precedent for using the state’s lands to develop the state, and over the first two decades of railroad development in Texas, the state would grant out 32,153,878 acres to railroads, which represented something like ¼ of all lands in the Texas public domain at the time!91
It was not a universally popular policy, and it seems to have stood only because it was an issue that split both of the parties: the Republican legislature at first supported it over the opposition of the Republican governor; and there were just enough democrats in favor of the policy to preserve it when they took over at the end of Reconstruction, over the protests of some rather vocal critics within their own party.92
It seems to have been effective, however. Texas saw 4,548 miles of railroad built between 1875 and 1885, about one-third as much as was constructed in the entire rest of the Old South during the same period! By 1885, Texas had surpassed every former confederate State in terms of railroad trackage and population, even Tennessee and Virginia, which was pretty remarkable given that Texas had ranked third-to-last in population of the 11-state Confederacy at the start of the civil war. And even after the state stopped giving out land, railroad construction continued. By 1904, Texas had more trackage than any state in the United States, a distinction it has held ever since.93
The economic payoff was enormous, at both the micro and macro level. Before the railroad, overland freight moved mostly by oxtrain. Wagons with great creaking oak tree cross sections for wheels pulled by as many as 16-oxen yoked by their horns lumbered across long muddy trails. Some days, 150 teams a day would enter cities like San Antonio and Houston, each limited to maybe 1,000-4,000 pounds a piece…and in some cases a quarter or more of that consisted of the feed they had to carry just to feed the oxen. Freight costs by oxtrain seemed to pretty consistently hover around $1.00 per 100 pounds per 100 miles, or $.20 per ton-mile to use a modern term. This was a time when a ton of cotton sold for maybe $400…so moving that ton 200 miles overland would have cost you $40, shaving 10% off of your final price where that 10% might have represented your entire profit margin! The railroad cut the rate by 2/3rd. Imagine if your gas prices fell by 2/3rd overnight! And by 1900, freight rates had fallen by almost 95%, to something like 1 cent per ton-mile, a 20X improvement!94
You can’t attribute all of Texas’s growth during these last decades of the nineteenth century to the railroad…but there’s a pretty strong correlation. Here are some numbers: in 1860, Texas had 311 miles of railroads, 600,000 people, and total assessed value of property of $111 MM dollars, not including enslaved people. By 1890, it was 5,410 miles, 2.2 MM people, and $886 MM. It’s even more pronounced when you look at the populations of major cities. Austin grew from 4,428 to 11,013 people in just nine years after the Railroad came to town; Waco, from 3,008 to 7,295; Dallas county grew from 13,314 people to 33,488 in the first six years of being railroad connected, and then 67,042 people 10 years after that. Between 1880 and 1890, counties with new railroads saw their population grow, on average, 200%. Counties without, by contrast, grew only 40%. Much of the map of Texas population centers today is the map of “common point” railroad towns from 1890: think, Amarillo, Fort Worth, Waco, Tyler, Victoria, and once again – and especially – Dallas. By 1890, Texas was not only larger than all of the old Confederate states, it was the 7th largest state in the entire United States!95
And economically, that growth from $111MM to $886MM over a 30 year period represents more than a 7% compounded annual growth rate over a 30 year period, and actually most of that had been in the last 15 years of that period, because as we discussed the Civil War and Panic of 1873 had actually destroyed a lot of wealth in Texas. So really, we should say that railroads created something like a 15% compounded annual economic growth rate for the state of Texas between the years 1875 and 1890!
It also created whole new industries. The railroad infrastructure of East Texas allowed for – and demanded – the growth of a large East Texas lumber industry. For thirty years or so, Texas cypress trees shingled the American south, until they were so over-harvested that lumbermen had to look to other species, and just in time, chemists developed processes that made southern pine suitable for paper. By 1900, lumber made up a quarter of railroad tonnage in Texas, larger than cotton, cattle, and wheat combined.96
But that was only in terms of tonnage. Cotton remained the cash crop, and was the largest revenue-generator on the railroads until 1928! It was a self-perpetuating cycle. By reducing freight costs by 95% in some cases, railroads made enormous swaths of Texas economic for cotton-raising, which in turn created more volume of product that railroads could move. Cotton-raising moved into increasingly marginal land which may have yielded less cotton per acre, but it was still enough to cover their costs. Total acreage under the plow in Texas grew from 18 MM acres in 1870 to 126 MM acres in 1900 (which btw, is about where it sits today), a 7X increase ….and yet over this same period the total value of farm products grew from $49 MM to only $209 MM, an impressive increase for sure, but only a 4.3X increase, demonstrating how yields were decreasing as farmer’s entered more marginal lands. Still, land values reflected the value-creation. East Texas lands which Stephen F. Austin had sold for 12.5c/acre in the 1820’s sold for $5.00/ac in 1870 and almost $100/acre in 1900. Railroads made Texans wealthier than they had ever been. And they brought labor-saving and efficiency improving implements like riding plows, threshers, mechanical harvesters, and soon, tractors, which collectively lifted the standard of living of most Texans far beyond anything their parents could have imagined.97
And Texans hated them for it!
Sure, it was cheaper to get your cotton to market, but why was it that freight rates always went up around harvest time? And fine, new people were flooding into Texas which indirectly boosted the economy, but most farmers just noticed the increasing land prices and property taxes! As a percentage, land ownership in Texas during the period declined by about 10% compared to tenancy. And all this while the railroads were getting land for free!?!98
Texas farmers – which is what the vast majority of Texan heads of household were in 1890 – were not capitalists. They had little appreciation for the nuances of supply and demand that naturally drove up freight prices when everybody tried to ship their product at harvest time. And they weren’t particularly sympathetic to the fact that these railroads required coordination and capital on scales that had really never been seen before in human history, at least not by private corporations. All of which may be surprising to people who today think of Texas as a beacon of free market boosterism.
But what Texas farmers were responding to in the 1890’s was a sense that Texas’s was still a colonial economy. And in this they were right. Texans exported commodities at low-margins, and imported finished goods on which they paid high margins, and all of this on railroads owned by people who mostly didn’t live in Texas. Actually, one of the few railroad owners who did make Texas his home was John Warne Gates, the barbed wire guy. Gates did well in barbed wire; but Gates did really well in railroads, coming to control the Kansas City, Pittsburg, and Gulf Railroad in 1899 which had as its terminus on the Gulf Coast a little town called Port Arthur, where Gates eventually moved. But Gates was the exception that proved the rule. In 1890, Texas was home to 1/25 of the nation’s population, but accounted for only 1/109 of its output. Texas’s status as the 7th largest state in terms of population was a wildly misleading statistic. In terms of revenue collections returned to the U.S. treasury in 1891, Texas was something like 27th.99
Texans still didn’t have a homegrown capital base in the 1890’s. And so it’s unsurprising that Texans turned against the capitalists. The 1870’s and 80’s saw the rise of small farmer’s political power with the formation of the Grange Movement and Farmer’s Alliance, neo-Jeffersonian movements that idealized the small family farm in contrast to the heartlessness of big, English and Northeastern corporations. The Farmer’s alliance in Texas would eventually number some 80,000 members, a shocking member when you realize that there were only 250,000 white heads of household in the state. And actually, the “White” Farmer’s alliance paled in comparison to the so-called “Colored farmer’s alliance”. Founded in Texas, the Colored Farmer’s Alliance eventually numbered 1,200,000 across the south! A staggering number. These movements would later morph into the populist movements of the turn of the century. They called for the formation of a state-owned farmer’s bank or at least for the Postal Service to take over banking, rather than leaving it in the hands of private groups; they called for the direct issuance of currency without any banking intermediaries; they called for a graduated income tax to reduce the state’s reliance on property taxes, and some at least called for the state ownership of all railroads. Banks and railroads were able to blunt the force of some of these initiatives at the statehouse, but the movement still passed a string of anti-banking, anti-corporation, and especially heavy-handed railroad legislation.100
Anti-railroad sentiment would culminate in 1891 in the formation of the Texas Railroad Commission. It was, in truth, the state’s only functioning regulatory agency, which meant that a decade later, it would be called on to become the defacto regulator of a brand new industry that would, for the first time, begin concentrating capital IN Texas. And it’s striking to see how differently Texans thought about – and regulated – an industry that they came to view as THEIRS. I’m talking, of course, about oil, the state’s next great engine of history and the engine that would finally dethrone cotton and propel Texas into a post-colonial economy. On the next episode of the Engines of Texanity.101
Thank you for listening. For this episode I found a comprehensive 1941 history of Texas railroads, written by a railroader named S.G. Reed. Not a light read, by any reckoning, but as an infrastructure guy myself I always enjoy the contributions of practitioners to the study of the fields they are working in.
Welcome to the Engines of Texanity: Episode 7: Spindletop. I’m Brandon Seale.
The morning of January 10, 1901, found brothers Al and Curt Hamill on a drilling rig overlooking the Neches River. In earlier times, back when this spot had been part of an empresario grant to friend-of-the-podcast and first Texas Vice President, Lorenzo de Zavala, it had been known as “cimas de boneteros,” a reference to the peculiar, conical tops of the cypress trees at this particular spot that reminded observers of a tree known in English as a “spindle”: hence its later name in English, Spindletop. The trees sat near the top of a hill known as Sour Spring Mound which audibly hissed with sulfurous seeps. Locals would sometimes drive hollow tubes into the ground and light the gas which came out as a sort of party trick. Then they’d scoop up some of the dirt, mix it with the bubbling spring water which gave the hill its name, and drink this lightly carbonated – or in this case, methanated – “lemonade.”102
The Hamill brothers, however, weren’t drilling for lemonade. For four months now, they – along with their other brother Jim, who was in town that morning getting supplies – they had been putting down an oil well. A local developer named Patillo Higgins had convinced himself that Sour Spring Mound was an “anticline,” the geologic structure that oil prospectors back east had started drilling with much success. Think of an anticline like a pimple on the surface of the earth, full of oil, just waiting to be popped. But everybody – from the experts at Standard Oil to the Texas state geologist – kept telling Patillo Higgins that he was wrong. And this next fact sometimes gets lost in the telling of this story: Patillo Higgins was wrong, Sour Spring Mound was not an anticline. Three test wells that Patillo Higgins drilled between 1893 and 1896 would’ve confirmed this, if only he could have managed to drill through the “heaving sands” that swallowed his drill string at around 400’ sub-surface on each well.103
His inability to drill through these sands allowed Higgins to persist long enough in his delusion to be discovered by a Montenegran salt mining engineer. As a salt engineer, Antonio Francesco Lushich was particularly well qualified to evaluated Higgins’s mound. Lushich – or Anthony Lucas as he anglicized his name - had observed in nearby Louisiana that salt would sometimes well up from deep inside the earth in the shape of a giant plug, pushing up the surface above. Only in this case, the resulting mounds weren’t full of oil: they were full of salt. BUT, as that salt plug pushed up against the surface, sometimes it would mushroom out around the edges. And Lucas had discovered that that mushroom cap could trap significant quantities. After talking to Higgins, Lucas came to suspect that Higgins might be right about Sour Spring Mound but for all the wrong reasons: he might be sitting on top of an oil-trapping salt dome, not oil-containing anticline.
In August of 1899, Anthony Lucas spud in his first well at Spindletop, targeting the edges of the sub-surface mushroom that of course he had no way of actually seeing. The drilling went well for Lucas until, like Higgins, he hit the heaving sands. The formation collapsed in on his drill string and he lost the well…but not before noticing that the heaving sands where he was drilling were absolutely dripping with oil.
Lucas decided to try again, but realized he needed help. Which is when he heard about the Hamill brothers. The Hamill brothers had grown up near Waco, planting watermelon, fattening calves, and raising what cotton they could for cash. As we heard in the previous episode, the economics of farming in 1890’s Texas became increasingly challenging for smaller farmers, however, and after a hailstorm ruined his cotton crop in 1892, Jim Hamill had to go to work for a water well driller to pay his bills. It was good timing. In 1894, at 1,027’ below the surface, a water well in nearby Corsicana struck oil. The well produced a whopping 2.5 barrels a day. A barrel is 42 gallons, so call it 100 gallons a day, trivial by today’s standards, but enough to set off the first little – and let me emphasize little – Texas oil boom. Every water well driller in the area became, by default, an oil driller. Jim Hamill was soon busy enough to bring on his brothers Al and Curt to team up with him, and the three Hamill brothers went out on their own as drilling contractors, distinguishing themselves for their honesty, work ethic, and practical genius.
On October 27, 1900, the Hamill brothers spud in Lucas’s second well. It wasn’t but a few days before they reached the notorious heaving sands, at only 160’ deep in this case. But they had a plan. Back in Corsicana, the Hamills had been one of the earliest adopters of rotary-style rigs, rigs which turned the drillbit rather than hammering it into the rock. In fact, as far as I can tell, Lucas’s second well here may have been the first well on which a rotary turntable set into the drill floor was used. But to deal with the heaving sands, the Hamills actually went back in time. They pulled the rotating drill string out of the hole, and went back into the hole with just an 8” string of casing – with no bit at all. Once they got the casing on bottom, instead of rotating it, they just hammered the casing through the heaving sands. The sand fought them the entire time, belching sand up into the drive pipe, clogging it, and occasionally sticking it. Progress was measured in inches per day. It took them twenty days to get through the next 90 feet of sand! And their reward once they finally got through the heaving sands, was that the well came to see them! Which is to say, they suffered a mini-blowout. They tried to drill through the gas pocket, but it kept fighting them, powerfully, and moreso with each foot. They’d never encountered a well with this kind of energy before. They’d conquered the heaving sands, but now they had a new problem.104
Once againt, the Hamills drew from their past experience. On previous wells, when drilling through waterlogged formations, the Hamills had noticed that the drill bit would churn up rock cuttings with the formation water into a thick slurry that actually slowed down the rotation of the drill bit: a 500’ column of muddy water is a lot heavier and harder to rotate through than a 500’ column of air. Normally this was bad, because the extra weight could grind the drillbit to a halt. But heavy was exactly what the Hamills needed right now! So the Hamills decided to make their own slurry. They hired up some local hands, and had them plow up 10” of clay top-soil at the base of their rig and then built a makeshift corral on top of it. Like John Gates in San Antonio’s military plaza thirty years prior, the Hamills then brought in a small herd of cattle, stirred them up into a great big swirling, stampede for four hours, and worked themselves up the first ever batch of drilling mud.
By injecting the heavy drilling mud down into the hole, the Hamill brothers were able to weigh down the gas pocket while simultaneously drilling through it! Soon enough, they were all the way to 700’ 800’ feet – deeper than anyone had ever been beneath Sour Spring Mound. By December 1900, the Hamills were down to 870’, when Brother Al noticed a rainbow sheen on the surface of their drilling mud. It was Oil! In later life, Al would estimate that the well at that point was making something like 50 barrels a day, an absolutely barnburner at the time that would have made the cover of every newspaper in the state. But Lucas had promised himself he would drill to 1,200’…which meant he had 300 more feet to go. He told the Hamills to punch through. Once again, they snubbed the casing into the wellbore, cased over the oily sands that were flowing with enough force to clog up their drill string, and kept going.
They had been making about 5 feet a day when on the morning of January 10th at about 1,020’ total depth their progress slowed. Al and Curt Hamill figured that their drill bit had dulled, so they pulled the drillstring out of the hole. They replaced the bit. Then they started tripping back in. With 700 feet worth of drill stem in the hole, the entire assembly began to shake. But not just the assembly, the rig itself! A few seconds later drilling mud came belching out of the hole, rising slowly until it was spilling up onto the rig floor itself. A bystander passing by recalled hearing a “hissing, spewing sound” at that point followed by an audible rumble from beneath the earth. Then, rumble became a roar just as drilling mud came geysering out of the ground, through the rig floor, through the top of the derrick, launching rocks hundreds of feet into the air before raining down like artillery shells on the stunned Hamill brothers, who leapt from the rig floor to seek cover as 700 feet of drill pipe sprayed out of the hole like silly string, flopping, snapping, bending, and crashing back to the surface. Then, the drilling mud stopped spewing and the roar settled back into a sour-smelling hiss. Brother Curt remembered the lit boiler that was powering the drawworks. He bravely rushed over to it and quenched it with a bucket of water before the sulfurous gas could ignite it.
After a few unforgettable minutes, the gas cap gave out, and the hiss subsided. Al and Curt Hamill cautiously walked back over to the drilling rig. The derrick was all but ruined. Thousands of dollars of drill pipe were reduced to scrap iron. The bottom joint of pipe with the bit still attached stuck up out of the ground like a javelin.
Still dazed, Al worked up the courage to approach the hole itself. He looked inside and saw a dark, bubbling fluid, rising and falling rhythmically as if it were breathing, as if some sleeping “giant under the hill” had just been awakened, to use the title of Jo Stiles, Judith Walker Linsley, and Ellen Walker Rienstra’s spectacular history of Spindletop. With each giant breath, the earth pumped the fluid column a little closer to the surface. The Hamill brothers pulled back, the fluid now bubbling out of the wellbore and onto the surface. This wasn’t drilling mud, however. It was oil! A stream of pure oil, literally bubbling out of the ground. There were stories from the old world, places like Baku in Azerbaijan where oil flowed out of the ground like an artesian spring, but those seemed like as much fantasy as lost cities of gold. Yet here it was, in Beaumont, TX, more oil flowing out of the ground – and under its own power – than anyone on this continent had ever bailed or pumped or scooped out by other means.
Then, from deep in the earth. Another rumble. A great crescendo. And, a shot, like a cannon. A chunk of rock fired into the sky. A column of oil chasing it close behind, through the ragged rig floor, through the splintered derrick, 150 feet or more into the air! A raging fountain of oil audible from three miles away! Beaumontonians could hear, Beaumonters could see the spectacle up on the hill above them, and they rushed toward the source of the excitement. Jim Hamill was ahead of all them, running up to the rig and pulling his brothers out of the shower of oil raining down on them. Lucas – a former officer in the Austro-Hungarian empire – was close behind, conscripting local men into building levies to contain the pooling oil that was threatening to deluge the town.
Spindletop would rage for nine days before Lucas and the Hamills concocted a plan to control the awakened giant. Al Hamill made his way to base of the oil geyser and somehow managed to cut, thread, and cap the remaining casing with a series of valves that at last allowed them shut-in the flow of oil. The valves sticking out from the sides of the assembly gave it a roughly conical shape – like a Christmas tree, or like the Spindletops which had given this spot its name – yet another Hamill invention which sits atop every producing oil well in the world today.
According to author Jo Stiles “…the Lucas Gusher at Spindletop produced twice as much oil per day as all the wells in Pennsylvania. What was more, the first six gushers in the Spindletop field produced more oil per day than all the rest of the fields in the world put together.” The widely accepted number is that it flowed something like 100,000 barrels per day, which I think is more than the entire state of Louisiana produces today. By the end of 1901, 138 wildly prolific wells had been brought in around Spindletop, with 46 more rigs actively drilling, at a density of something like 20 wells per acre!105
The Spindletop 40th anniversary marker was only slightly exaggerating when it marked Lucas’s gusher as the spot where “a new era of civilization” began. Within one year, coal-burning furnaces across the US started switching to oil; trains first, then steamships, then much of the rest of industry. The four-stroke internal combustion engine was also coming into its own at precisely the same moment, waiting for oil, “like a bride on the threshold of the new century,” to use the phrasing of the authors of Giant Under the Hill. The world wouldn’t see an adoption curve this aggressive again until the arrival of the personal computer – more on that later.106
Oil was so much radically more energy-dense than anything that came before it. 900 pounds of oil cost about $.60 in 1901, but could produce as much as energy as $3.50 worth coal, which weighed twice as much! That’s a 12X advantage in terms of energy density. Oil allowed for the concentration of massive numbers of people into megametropolises like never before in human history. Prior to the hydrocarbon age, cities had to draw on areas nearly 30 times their size for their energy needs, in the forms of forests or crop residues. Post-spindletop, cities could get their energy from a surface area something like 1/1000th of its area, even as energy use per capita increased 10X! When the Hamill brothers were born in the 1870’s, 95% of Texans lived on farms; by 1933, that number was down to 33%; by 1955, it was in the single-digits. Empowered by cheap, dense energy in the form of hydrocarbons, cities became auto-catalytic engines of innovation that fed upon themselves: since the discovery of oil, as the population of a city doubles, its productivity goes up 130%. The closer by and cheaper the oil, the more benefit to the cities involved: by the 1920’s, oil towns like Dallas and Houston had passed farm and ranch centers like San Antonio as the largest cities in the State. By a long shot.107
And yet, in some ways, the discovery of oil at first only reinforced the colonial-nature of Texas’s economy. Just like cotton and just like cattle, oil was a low-margin commodity that Texas shipped to manufacturers out-of-state who seemed to capture all the margin when they returned the products as finished goods on railroads owned by evil eastern capitalists from out-of-state. But something interesting happened after the discovery of oil: Texans became capitalists. Oil was familiar enough to cotton and cattle and lumber – commodities that came from the land – that Texans very quickly figured out how to produce it cheaply and in massive quantities. But oil yielded runaway margins the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the maybe the first years of cotton cultivation. And for the first time in its history, Texas started to accumulate capital: $500MM/yr in royalty payments alone on $715 MM of assessed value in-place by 1955, from zero fifty years before. Of course, this new wealth tended to follow the patterns of old wealth: it was the great farming, ranching, and lumbering barons who became the first great oil barons. But some of that capital got reinvested in businesses in and around this great new industry: Howard Hughes Senior’s self-cleaning tricone bit was just one example of the indirect fortunes that oil made in Texas, and which soon began to project themselves out onto the world.108
The effects of local capital formation and the benefits it brought to a state long-starved for capital were powerful incentives for state agencies – like the Texas Railroad Commission – to reconsider their regulatory model. Unsurprisingly, the Railroad Commission turned away from the more antagonistic anglo-american regulatory model in favor of a regulatory system that better served the state’s economic and political interests. From the 1930’s and 1960’s, the Texas Railroad Commission effectively controlled the world oil price through its “proration” orders, its setting of production quotas for Texas oil prodcuers – OPEC would very openly model itself on the Railroad commission, whose market power it replaced in the 1970’s. But what will stand out to listeners of this season is the authority under which the RRC exercised this proration authority: under a so-called “fair share” doctrine, with a dual mandate to prevent waste and promote the development of the resource. The Railroad commission had ended up adopting the same regulatory model as the old frontier Spanish watermasters.
But what truly transformed Texas into a modern rather than purely colonial economy, I would argue, wasn’t the discovery of oil, it was the development of the oil refining and petrochemical industries that finally allowed Texans to capture the lions’ share of the margin of the commodities they produced. One statistic from the period claimed that one barrel of crude oil processed in the state contributed as much to the economy as three barrels of crude shipped elsewhere for refining. The margin in petrochemicals is even more striking. A professor at the University of Houston claims that 72% of the value of a barrel of oil comes from the 20% of the barrel that ISN’T combusted: i.e., all the benzenes, toluenes, xylene, ethane, and ethylene (to name a few) which you know better as nylon, polyester, anti-freeze, styrene, paint, refrigerants, pharmaceutical drugs, and most of the things you call “rubber.” Not to mention the fertilizers and agrochemicals on which at least 40% of the global food supply depends. According to Vaclav Smil, “No other energy use offers such a payback as higher crop yields resulting from the use of synthetic nitrogen.”109
Even if Spindletop hadn’t been the world’s first great gusher, Texas’s oil still would have been produced. But the fact that it happened first in Texas did concentrate a disproportionate amount of the investment and innovation in the industry in-state. Overnight – in historical terms anyway – Texas became an industrial powerhouse. By 1921, refining surpassed agriculture in terms of output in Texas; by 1929, it was worth three times the annual output of all agriculture combined. By 1936, Petroleum and Petroleum products was the largest single category of goods hauled by the railroads…and it wasn’t even close…13.4 MM tons as compared to 5 MM tons of lumber, 1.7 mm tons of cotton, and 1.1 MM tons of livestock. In 1940, Texas had exactly zero chemical industry; by 1956 (sixteen years later!) Texas accounted for 85% of the petrochemical industry of the U.S. and 80% of all organic chemicals produced in the nation, representing something like 20% of the entire industrial output of the U.S. at the time! And more than half of that production was located within 100 miles of Lucas’s gusher.110
Texas oil also created a cultural legacy, that we shouldn’t ignore. Let’s start with the image of the Texas oil man. As TR Fehrenbach put it, other Americans viewed the Texas oil man as “something of a personification of ostentatious vulgarity, replacing the industrial barons of the American East….the oilman, like the second-generation industrial rich, was freed from economic worry and responsibility to pursue whatever form of social disintegration he preferred.” Texans have sometimes leaned into this caricature as a way of thumbing their noses at coastal types that were already pre-disposed not to like Texans. But this antagonism reflected in some way the reality that oil-producing Texas had been placed on a countercyclical trajectory from the rest of the oil-consuming U.S. economy! As if Texanity needed a reason to feel exceptional, now macro-economic circumstances confirmed it. When oil prices are low, the U.S. economy prospers but Texas suffers: the direct, indirect, and induced impacts of the oil and gas industry constitute something like 30% of the state economy. In the alternative, when oil prices are high, the U.S. economy drags, and Texas – which still constitutes 43% of the nation’s oil production and 26% of gas production – booms.111
The great fortunes made in oil also confirmed Texans’ deeply held notions that true wealth only comes from land. That, at least, is a prejudice that I feel like I internalized at some point, and I’d argue that it’s reflected in the way the state pays its bills: property taxes make up 50% of the state and local taxes collected in the state each year. It’s never been intuitive to me why a state with such a strong property rights tradition would tax that most sacred possession so aggressively, unless we trace it back to some kind of unquestioned belief that land is the only really measure of wealth. Anyway, we’ll see in a later episode why this prejudice might have held Texas back from fully appreciating another, non-land-based Texas innovation. But on the positive side, however, I think this worldview has kept Texas at the forefront of energy development even when that energy doesn’t come in the form of a hydrocarbon: Texas is already the largest producer of wind-power in the U.S. and, by the end of 2023, the largest producer of solar power as well. Those industries – as much as oil and lumber and cattle and cotton – are natural outgrowths of the Texan drive to maximize the output of every square inch of land at his or her disposal.112
And yet even with Lucas’s gusher, it’s not that hard to imagine an oil-producing Texas that DID REMAIN colonial in character. A place like Alaska or Saudi Arabia or Nigeria say where oilworkers go for two weeks at a time, and then return home to spend their money elsewhere. If we’re being honest, Texas’s climate is not materially more comfortable than any of those places. In fact, I’d venture to say that it’s a near certainty that even with Spindletop and everything else that has happened in Texas history, there would not be anywhere close to 30 MM people living here today if not for the next engine of Texanity: air conditioning. On the next episode, of the Engines of Texanity.
Thank you for listening. The best book on the story of Spindletop – hands down – is Giant Under the Hill by Jo Stiles, Judith Walker Linsley, and Ellen Walker Rienstra. I actually interviewed Mrs Stiles for a Witte conference a few years ago, she was great.
Welcome to the Engines of Texanity. Episode 8: “Making Texas Cool.” I’m Brandon Seale.
A party was underway at the historic St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans on a humid July evening in 1869. The partygoers were going to dine that evening on Texas beef. Which wasn’t necessarily a novelty in and of itself, New Orleans had been a regular destination for Tejano trail drives going back 150 years. Most famously, in 1779, some 2,000 head of Texas cattle had been sent to the Spanish governor of Louisiana to help support the rebellion of thirteen English colonies along the Atlantic seaboard. And yet the Texas beef that was going to be served that evening in July 1869 hadn’t been driven to New Orleans. It had been shipped there, frozen instead of salted, in a cold storage vessel. 113
The entire affair had been structured as a contest, to see WHO could get frozen Texas beef to New Orleans first. Two vessels had arrived from Texas within days of each other, each using a different refrigeration technology. The first relied on dry ice, carbon dioxide frozen via a process developed by a pioneering balloonist named Thaddeus Lowe in Dallas. Although his vessel arrived first to New Orleans, it has so heavily laden that it sat too low in the water to enter New Orleans harbor! And so, Dr. Howard Peyton of San Antonio slipped in after him with a more modest steamship outfitted with a smaller cold storage locker chilled by a simpler process of mechanical refrigeration, and took the prize.
That the winner had come out of San Antonio wasn’t a surprise because in the years following the Civil War, San Antonio became a hotbed of ice-making innovation! Prior to the Civil War, Texans had relied on New England merchants to ship them blocks of ice from way up north packed tight with saw dust or straw for insulation. Yet the northern blockade of southern ports during the Civil War had cut off Texans from their ice supply.114
Entrepreneurs jumped into the void. The most promising technology of the day came from a Frenchman named Ferdinand Carré. The key to making a space cooler actually isn’t to make it cooler, Carré and other innovators realized; it’s to make the space NOT hot, that is, to remove the heat from the space. Carre’s process heated up an ammonia-water mixture to increase the pressure of the mixture then pushed that high-pressure ammonia-water through a small hole into a lower-pressure chamber. The expansion of the high-pressure mixture into the low-pressure chamber created a cooling effect: think of how a spray paint can gets cold after you’ve been spraying it a while or a valve stem on a tire if you let the air out quickly. If you circulate that now-cooler, lower-pressure mixture through a conduit in a warmer space, the mixture via the conduit, will effectively “absorb” some of the heat from the warmer space and carry it on out of the room. You can then heat up and pressure up the mixture again, run it back through the small restriction into the lower-pressure chamber again, and just keep cycling the fluid indefinitely until you had “absorbed” all the heat out of the room via the cooling fluid.
San Antonio had strong cultural ties to France, thanks to a string of French bishops and religious orders in the heavily Catholic city, as well as a small but prominent French immigrant community. Also, in 1862, the French emperor Napoleon III imposed Austrian Archduke Maximilian on the throne of Mexico, which essentially made San Antonio’s closest trading partner a French outpost. For the next five years, French-controlled Mexico bought uncounted tons the blockaded south’s cotton left stranded by the same blockade that had cut-off ice shipments to Texas, and San Antonio merchants brought back French trade goods on their return trip to Texas. The road from San Antonio to Matamoros became known as the Wisps of Cotton Road because of all the stray cotton fibers lining the trail, and many San Antonio trading houses built their fortunes on this trade.
In 1863, someone set up a “Carré Aqua-Ammonia Absorption Refrigeration Machine” in Matamoros. And then somehow, in 1865, a Confederate signal corps major named Daniel Livingston Holden got ahold of one of these Carré ice machines and moved it to San Antonio.115
The Carré machine – like many other early attempts at mechanical refrigeration – worked far better in theory than in practice. Holden set himself to the task of making a Carré machine actually work. First, instead of directly heating the ammonia-water mixture with a wood-fire – which is a little like stocking a pellet grill to run your A/C – Holden ran steam coils through the mixture so that he could heat it in a more controlled manner. Second, the hard water he was using from San Pedro springs kept fouling his equipment with calcium build-up; he realized that he could achieve much more consistent results by using distilled water…in fact, the frozen distilled water came out even clearer than natural ice, which made for great marketing! And third, he swapped out the ammonia-water mixture in favor of petroleum ether which was, again, safer, cheaper, and more consistent. Holden’s work was sufficient to earn him a handful of patents, and resulted in “the most complete ice machine ever erected,” as the press at the time called it. It spit out one 20-pound block of ice every four minutes, which Holden sold for 10 cents per pound.116
A cluster of ice-making innovation took off in Texas. By 1867, US census reports cited five ice-making plants in the United states…three of which were in San Antonio. Another French immigrant in San Antonio named Andrew Muhl set up his own “Ether ice machine” that year. And Charles Zilker of Zilker Park fame in Austin got his start in San Antonio with ammonia absorption units before moving his headquarters to Austin. Charles Ball in Sherman, TX and David Boyle in Jefferson, TX were soon experimenting with their own designs. And Thaddeus Lowe of Dallas, who lost the frozen beef race to New Orleans, continued working on dry ice. His carbon dioxide refrigeration compressors – which could get much colder than ammonia or petroleum ether absorption units – would become the standard for marine transport and refrigeration for the next 70 years, until the invention of Freon.117
At $30,000 - $70,000 each during a time when the entire capital investment in the state of Texas was only $3 MM or so, each one of these ice plants represented something like 2% of the state’s plant capacity…the nineteenth century equivalent of building a car manufacturing plant or a new refinery or a semi-conductor production line. Having so many different innovators working in the same space at the same time had the predictable effect of driving prices down, from 10c a pound to 1c per pound of ice in just the first decade. The rapid decline in price allowed Texas entrepreneurs to look for more novel applications for ice. Their attention landed on the same place that Gail Borden’s had and where countless generations of trail-driving Tejanos had as well: on figuring out how to get $.02 per pound Texas cattle a $.06 per pound east coast markets, and capture that margin!? Gail Borden’s meat biscuit hadn’t been the answer…but $.01 per pound ice might be. Because there was another savings implicit in shipping frozen beef versus live cattle: you only had to ship the trimmed carcass, ½ or so of the weight of the animal. And you don’t have to feed a carcass: cattle feed was an additional cost and burden of shipping live cattle.118
Daniel Livingston Holden – the adapter of the first Carré machine - continued to lead. In 1871, he opened the first mechanically refrigerated abattoir in America in Fulton, Texas, which was soon packing 100 carcasses a day for shipment to Liverpool, England. A former Holden associate named Thomas Rankin developed the first refrigerated rail cars in North Texas the next year, and in 1873 made the first successful shipment of chilled beef from Texas all the way to New York, arriving after only 4 days and 22 hours in transit, still perfectly frozen, and ready for sale. Chicago meat-packer Gustavus Swift liked the idea so much that in 1875 he began to build a fleet of them. His larger competitor, Armour and Company followed suit, and by the turn of the century, Swift and Armour had made Fort Worth the major frozen meatpacking center in the state. Meat-packing briefly constituted the largest “manufacturing industry” in Texas, from 1909 to 1919, when oil-refining took over. San Antonio’s Friedrich Air Conditioning would pioneer the open, refrigerated case, called “Floating Aire,” that would eventually allow beef to be kept chilled all the way to the customer’s grocery cart.119
If cattle gave impetus to Texans efforts to drive down the price of mechanical refrigeration and ice-making, it would be that truly dominant Texas industry – cotton – that would bring cooling to the people. As late as 1929, only 2% of the textile mills in the United States were located in Texas, despite the fact that the state grew something like 40% of American cotton at the time. Why did far-away places like Massachusetts and New England dominate the final, most valuable stages of cotton-production when it seems like it would have been so much cheaper to finish the raw product right where it was produced?120
The problem was climate. Textile mills needed to keep the air inside their facilities exceedingly moist in order to keep the cotton fibers elastic but tough in order to be able to card, spin, and weave them. This was referred to as “yarn-conditioning.” Mills achieved this by pumping steam onto the factory floor, something which was tolerable in a mild northern summer, but insufferable in the hot and humid south.121
Around 1895, a textile engineer from North Carolina named Stuart Cramer decided to set himself to the task of “conditioning” the air in a textile mill, not the yarn. “Air conditioning” as he called it, meant more than just cooling: it meant artificial control of the room’s temperature, humidity, air quality, and distribution – the four characteristics that would come to define our modern understanding of the term. This was to distinguish it as well from earlier attempts at cooling interior spaces by placing fans over blocks of ice, which left the air “clammy”. The main legacy of these earlier attempts would be that future air conditioning systems would be rated in terms of tons, as in the number of tons of ice necessary to produce the equivalent cooling effect in a 24 hour period. As the science of air conditioning advanced – and, like ice-making, the cost came down – new applications began to benefit from its use. Entrepreneurs like Willis Carrier in New York pushed the technology into printing, flour, cigarettes, gunpowder, chocolate – all things that benefited from a climate-controlled setting. The New York Stock Exchange became the world’s first first-air conditioned office space. But air-conditioning was only necessary like two months out of the year in a place like New York, making it harder to recover the capital investment. In a place like Texas, however, you had most of the calendar year to help you amortize the expense.122
And in places like the Golden Triangle in the 1920’s, you had oil wealth willing to pay for a bit of comfort. The first Presbyterian church of Orange, TX – situated right in the shadow of Spindletop’s bounty, FYI, claims to be the first air-conditioned building in Texas. The original system installed in 1912 sounds suspiciously like a fan with an ice-maker to me, but nevertheless, by 1929, it was clear that they had a complete, Carrier-designed air conditioning system installed. The Rice Hotel in Houston – site of the old Republic of Texas capitol building – air-conditioned its cafeteria in 1922. That was the same year that the 21-story Milam building in San Antonio – named after Ben Milam, from the Siege of Bexar in Season 1 if you want to brush up – opened up to much fanfare as the world’s first, fully air-conditioned building. In 1936, the St Anthony hotel right down the street from the Milam became the world’s first fully-air conditioned hotel, the same year that Joske’s department store around the corner became the first full-air-conditioned department store in Texas.123
And yet most Texans’ first experience with air conditioning wasn’t in an office building or a luxury hotel or a fancy department store… it was in a movie theater. The American movie industry was exploding in the early 1920’s and 30’s. Something like half of Americans went to the cinema weekly. And yet southern movie theaters effectively had to close their doors in the summers. It was too hot, too unbearable to sit in a crowded, 100 degree enclosed room no matter how good the movie. Which, from a financial standpoint, meant that any dollar that Texas movie theaters could make in the summer was a dollar that they weren’t making otherwise. It was financial gravy. Texas theaters jumped at the opportunity. The Old Mill Theater in Dallas in 1917 sems to have been the first-mover, and then marketed the hell out of it, promising patrons they would be “one hundred percent cooler and more comfortable than [they] could possibly be at home.” The Palace Theater also in Dallas and the Texan in Houston followed in 1924, and San Antonio’s Texas and Majestic Theaters by 1929. By the 1930’s and 40’s, movie theaters were competing on how cold they could get, decorating their exteriors with icicles, frost and snow, with brand names like “Artic Breezes” and “Siberian Zephyrs” and promises of “20 Degrees cooler inside,” “Never over 70 degrees.” 124
I feel like the fact the air conditioning came to Texas with the movies had another profound impact on the Texas psyche. Americans have always been good at reimagining what it is that makes them Americans, and coming of age during the dual national crises of the Great Depresion and WWII, cinema lead the way in defining a new, 20th century American identity. And by far the most American of American film genres of this period was the Western, which was inseparable then as now from American’s views of Texas and Texans’ views of themselves. The movies made Texas, forgive the pun, “cool,” in a way that it had never been before. John Wayne’s “Alamo” in 1960 represented the height of Texas-cool. For a people living through an ideological cold war, unprecedented technological advancement, and rapidly changing demographics, the Texas Western “gave substance to the ideal of personal self-determination and responsible freedom that realities of modern life and institutions seemed to deny.”125
Yet the cinematization of Texas mythology for American audiences required homogenizing Texas a bit and, frankly, cherrypicking those aspects of “Texanity” that were most palatable to audiences in other parts of America. Which at the time meant anchoring Texas mythology in the Anglo-American part of its identity. It made Anglo-Texans more American. But it pushed non-Anglo Texans into the shadows. As movies replaced older forms of entertainment based on ethnic and religious affiliation, they redrew the lines of culture, in ways that would ripple through the social movements of the 1960’s and beyond.126
With the worst drought in Texas history raging through the 1950’s, air conditioning took on a new sense of urgency in Texas beyond just places of entertainment. In 1952, only 196 offices in all of Houston had A/C installed; five years later, it was basically a requirement to get people to come to work. One scholar has found that once 20% of office buildings in any one city had A/C, the remaining ones were effectively required to install it to remain competitive. In a survey in 1957, 88% of companies said air-conditioning was the most important item for “office efficiency.” They were probably right: recent studies have shown a 2% decrease in productivity for every degree above 77 degrees in a work setting.127
Home A/C units hit the markets in the 1940’s. By the 1950’s, they were down to $500/a piece, not cheap, but within reach, led by innovators like San Antonio’s Friedrich Air Conditioning and their window units, many of which are still running to this day. By 1966, Texas became the first state to have half of its homes and apartments air-conditioned. Soon, central A/C units were being installed in new homes, almost for purely economic reasons. Air-conditioning actually lowered the cost of new home construction! It eliminated the need for “high pitched-roofs “vented from top to bottom, open porches, broad eaves that blocked the slanting sun, massive doors and windows that sometimes stretched from door to ceiling, louvered jalousies, transoms placed above bedroom doors, dormers, groves of shade trees blanketing the southern exposure, houses situated to capture prevailing breezes…” It allowed for a much more compact footprint, and in most cases, the A/C system actually paid for itself in materials-savings. Yet it changed – and again, homogenized – Americans’ images of themselves and what home looked like. From the 50’s on, most American houses would feature low ceilings, smaller windows, and low-pitched roofs packed with insulation.128
Aesthetics and economics aside, however, at a qualitative level air conditioning also just improved life. Residents of air-conditioned houses got “More than an hour’s extra sleep at night during the summer for each member of the family. Daytime naps for children that stretch out three times longer. Hot meals – 40 per cent more nutritious – enthusiastically eaten despite soaring outdoor temperatures. A $5.80 average weekly savings on outside entertainment. Laundry time cut in half; house-cleaning time cut by one-third.” Not to mention the public health benefits of “reduced fetal and infant mortality, prolonged the lives of thousands of patients suffering from heart disease and respiratory disorders, increased the reliability and sophistication of micro-surgery, facilitated the institutionalization of public health, and aided in the production of modern drug such as penicillin.”129
The Astrodome opened in 1965 calling itself the eighth wonder of the world in no small part because it was the world’s largest air-conditioned space. In 1961, the Alamo itself had been air conditioned. Air conditioning had conquered Texas’s past and present and future. By 1980, 83.2% of Texas households had air conditioning and more than 90% of office buildings, banks, hotels, hospitals. By 1980, even one-third of tractors in the state were air-conditioned!130
Air conditioning led, in the words of one scholar, to a “dramatic decline in regional distinctiveness” and the “largest migration of human beings in the history of the United States.” It made Texas “comfortable,” both psychologically and physically, for people from other parts of the United States. The first half of the twentieth century saw a massive out-migration of 10 MM people from the un air-conditioned South, but the second half saw an even larger immigration into the air-conditioned Sun Belt. And their most common destination was Texas. Texas went from the sixth largest state in the Union in 1950 to the second-largest by 2000, with a population today four times larger than what it was in 1950. This wave of immigration hasn’t really ever stopped through to the present, even during Texas’s quite brutal economic depression of the 1980’s. And yet it’s hard to imagine that 30 million people would be living in Texas today without air-conditioning.131
Air-conditioning is the great people-mover of the modern age, yet its role is largely unsung because its impact is so subtle. The next engine of Texanity, however, is much more widely appreciated. Actually, it’s working for me now, scribing everything I’m saying into little 1’s and 0’s and spitting it back out to you in the form of a human voice: the integrated circuit. On the next episode, of the Engines of Texanity.
Thank you for listening. A special thanks to Friedrich Air Conditioning’s Product Manager and resident historian, Chris Magee, 19 yr veteran of the company. Thanks to Friedrich for letting me use one of their old ads as the cover art for the episode.
Welcome to the Engines of Texanity: Episode 9, the Integrated Circuit. I’m Brandon Seale.
July in Dallas is hot, and July in 1958 was even hotter. Texas was slugging through its worst drought on record, and although air conditioning was taking the state by storm, people still mostly worked according to the rhythms of pre-air conditioned years. Since closing the office was the normal response to insufferably hot days, some companies just pre-emptively required their employees to take their vacations in July.132
That was Dallas-based Texas Instruments’ policy in 1958 when a 34-year old engineer named Jack Kilby started working there. Texas Instruments was one of the oil industry spin-offs alluded to in Episode 7, founded originally as the Geophysical Research Corporation dedicated to collecting and processing seismic data for oil exploration. The role of oil and gas seismic processing in advancing the tech industry is pretty significant: from sonar to advances in digital data storage to quantum computing to auto-tune, all of them found their first applications in the need to collect and progress staggering amounts of data about the sub-surface. Eventually, companies found others ways to commercialize those technologies, such as in 1954 when Texas Instruments had “crossed-over” into the mainstream with the introduction of the Regency TR-1 pocket radio. It was revolutionary…a portable, pocket-sized musical device that sold for $49.95! Within a year, Texas Instrumnets had sold 100,000 of them, and was firmly on the path to being a technology company, rather than just an oilfield services company.133
The “TR” in the Regency TR-1 stood for Transistor Radio, which called out the key technological innovation that had made the product possible: the transistor. The transistor itself had just been invented in 1947 by Bell Labs to replace the vacuum tube. A vacuum tube is essentially a light bulb – and like an incandescent light bulb, it is fragile, large, expensive, electricity-hungry, and puts out an incredible amount of waste heat. The transistor, by contrast, made from a couple slices of semiconductor material, was robust, small, cheap, used 1/1000th’s the electricity of a vacuum tube, and shed a comparably low amount of heat, all while performing the principal tasks of a vacuum tube just as effectively!134
The transistor was particularly well-suited for the radio, but it didn’t take long for product developers to find other applications for it. From hearing aids to rocket guidance systems, transistors revolutionized anything where size and efficiency mattered, which as we’ve seen as far back as the days of the first native equestrians in Texas, is almost everything. And yet installing transistors wasn’t easy; each transistor had to be hand-soldered into place – typically by women’s hands, FYI – meaning that a device with 1,000 transistors might require 10,000 soldered connections. And like old Christmas lights, all it took was one bad one to make the entire device inoperable.135
The problem had become so well-recognized in engineering circles by 1958 that it had a name: the “interconnections problem.” According to the recollections of an older Jack Kilby: “It was pretty well accepted that this was the problem that had to be solved.” And in July of 1958, Kilby had the time on his hands to solve it. Because he had just joined TI a few months earlier, he hadn’t accrued enough to even take the compulsory vacation time in July, so Jack found himself stuck in the office, pretty much alone. Which isn’t the worst thing for a solution-oriented practical engineer. It gave him time and space to tease out an idea that he had written down in his notebook a few months prior: “it would be desirable to make multiple devices on a single piece of silicon, in order to be able to make interconnections between devices as part of the manufacturing process, and thus reduce weight, size, etc as well as cost per active element.”136
Jack Kilby was always thoughtful about his problem-solving process, not just about solving the problem at hand. His first step, as he described it, was to define the problem to be solved, clearly and precisely. In his words, “A lot of solutions fail because they are solving the wrong problem.” Second, he then tried to step back, to review the problem generally, at the highest level possible. Third and last, zoom back in on the specific mechanics of the challenge, tuning out the obvious solutions because if it was obvious, someone would have done it already. And then iterate over and over, shifting intentionally from the specific to the general to the specific to keep both them both in equal focus.137
But what separated engineers from theoreticians, in Jack Kilby’s mind, was his old farmboy’s cost-consciousness. According to Kilby, “You could design a nuclear-powered baby bottle warmer and it might work, but it’s not a engineering solution.” Anyone who’s worked in business can appreciate this. The truly gifted engineers aren’t the ones that can devise a solution: they are the ones that can devise a solution that costs less than what people are willing to pay for it!138
By contrast, everyone else who was working on the interconnections problem was hyperfocused on miniaturizing the transistor by making each component smaller, without really thinking about how to make the whole thing smaller. And their solutions were exceedingly expensive, since they were focused on the best – and usually most expensive – materials for each individual component rather than the best material for the problem at-large. And yet, Jack Kilby realized that there was an entire class of elements, widely-distributed throughout the planet and therefore cheap, that were not the best material for any single transistor task, but that might work adequately enough at each to get the job done. At first, he locked onto germanium. Germanium did conduct electricity…that’s why it was called a “semi-conductor”….as the name semi-conductor suggested, however, semi-conductors don’t conduct as well as silver or gold…in this sense, germanium was could be described as “semi-resistive” in that it was also slightly “resistive” to the flow of electrical current. But actually resistivity was something that transistors needed to. Again, the best resistors were made of something else, typically carbon…but germanium could do the job. And actually, come to think of it, you could also make the insulators between conductors out of germanium, so-called “capacitors”. The best capacitors were made of porcelain…but once again, germanium served.
On July 24, 1958, it all came together in Kilby’s head, and he wrote in his lab notebook: “The following circuit elements could be made on a single slice: resistors, capacitor, distributed capacitor, transistor.” Specifically, on a single slice of semi-conductor material, like germanium or, more famously, silicon. While everyone else was fixated on miniaturizing the existing parts and on optimizing performance of each component…but that wasn’t the problem that the world was actually trying to solve, people just assumed it was…but by settling on the performance of the components, Jack Kilby solved the real: how to design a truly integrated circuit with that could be manufactured by machines, at scale, cheaply.139
On September 12, 1958, Jack Kilby demonstrated his prototype…a rough looking patchwork of germanium that looks like a four-year old’s failed art project. Kilby later said that “Had I realized that I would have to look at that thing for 42 years, I would have put a little more effort into its appearance.” You can see pictures of it online and one of the earlier prototypes at the Bullock Museum in Austin. But it worked. In March of 1959, after a little refinement, Texas Instruments debuted it at the annual convention of the Institute of Radio Engineers. Where almost nobody appreciated it. GE, Sylvania, and Westinghouse, the logical customers if not acquirers of the technology all passed on it. There was only one firm that appreciated its potential impact, a firm founded by a group of engineers that had themselves spun-out of a spin-off from the Bell Labs inventors of the transistor: Fairchild Semiconductor.140
Fairchild Semiconductor had also been independently experimenting with semiconductors. After seeing Jack Kilby’s creation, they went to the patent office and pulled TI’s patent application…and realized that the there was a still an opening for them: TI’s drawings in the patent application didn’t match the actual design as written up or produced by Jack Kilby. Instead of showing wires integrated into printed grooves on the integrated circuit as described by Kilby, the drawings featured wires flying out the top like spider legs…Kilby’s innovation was too radical even for his own company’s patent illustrators to understand. Fairchild believed they could differentiate their patent by correctly describing the integrated circuit with the wires integrated into grooves on the semi-conductor chip and on July 30, 1959, they filed their patent.141
On April 26, 1961, the first U.S. patent for an integrated circuit was granted…to Fairchild Semiconductor. It would set off a decade of litigation between Texas Instruments and Fairchild, which would eventually end with the two parties reaching a settlement to grant each other unlimited reciprocal licenses for the use and production of the integrated circuit. It was one of those cases where the market was so large and growing so rapidly that each party decided it was more profitable to focus on the production of the circuit than to fight. Because in the intervening years, an enormous customer had emerged for the integrated circuit. The dream customer of every great innovator in American history, from Eli Whitney to Samuel Colt to Gail Borden: the U.S. Government.
On Sept 12, 1962, US President JFK had appeared at Rice University in Houston and made his famous “We Choose to go to the Moon Speech,” following through on an earlier commitment he had made before a joint session of congress to place a man on the moon – and returning him safely! – “before this decade is out.” This unleashed a flood of spending by NASA unparalleled in the peacetime history of the United States. Integrated circuits were particularly well-suited and particularly necessary to space flight…machines were required to perform the complicated aeronautical calculations and every extra pound of payload translated into a need for five pounds of propellant. NASA could – and did – pay almost any price for these circuits, which they found use for in just about everything, from guidance systems to telemetry encoders to infrared trackers to loran receivers to basic avionics. The U.S. government was, in fact, the entirety of the market for the integrated circuit until 1964 and still fully half of it well into the 1970’s. By the time Neil Armstrong took his steps on the moon on July 20, 1969, the Apollo program had purchased more than 1 MM integrated circuits, and driven the price down to a quarter of where it started earlier in the decade, from about $32/ea…to something like $8.33/each. And the price kept falling. By 1971, the cost was down to about $1.27 per unit, about 1/20th its original price in about the same amount of time it took railroads to drop freight prices in Texas by the same multiple, incidentally.142
In 1968, a pair of former NASA contractors named Gus Roche and Phil Ray (who was also a Texas instruments alum) founded a company called the Computer Terminal Corporation in San Antonio. This was only four years after integrated circuits really hit the private market, but Roche and Ray had the idea to apply the integrated circuit to the Teletype machines that filled American corporate offices at the time. Teletypes were something between a cutting-edge telegraph and a primitive email: you typed a message out onto a specialized keyboard, sent it through a phone line, and it then printed out on the receiving end from a similar typewriter. Teletype messages could be sent to one or to many different receivers all at once. In an age when long-distance calls were prohibitively expensive, it was a radically more effective way to send and receive information.
Roche and Ray’s innovation was to install intuitive alphabetic keyboards on each end of the line, screens to allow senders to review their messages before sending them, and receivers to receive them instantly, silently, and without the mess of ticker tape. They called their terminals the Datapoint 3300, hired a motorcycle helmet designer to design a sleek case, a top Madison avenue marketing to market it, and it became an immediate hit. Anyone who could press a button could now send information instantly around the world. By 1970 – just two years later – they IPO’d, changed their company name to Datapoint to capitalize on the success of their product, and were neck deep in designing an even more advanced terminal – which they rather counterintuitively named the Datapoint 2200 in an attempt to highlight how much smaller it was.143
It also obscured a little bit how revolutionary it was. The Datapoint 2200 was programmable BY THE USER! Messaging could be automated and you could tell the machine to do stuff with the information it sent and received! For example, Datapoint 2200, send out a summary of employee hours worked at every location every Friday, over the phone lines, rather than having to mail time sheets across the country, add up the hours, produce a report for me, and cut payroll checks….instantly! Or, Datapoint 2200, call in every branch’s inventory data at the end of each week, let Datapoint’s internal memory store it, let its processor add it up, and the then let central HQ optimize it in ways that radically reduced the amount of working capital that companies had to tie up in inventory. It’s the kind of thing that is so integrated into our daily lives now we take it for granted, but Datapoint was building this system architecture from off-the-shelf Texas instrument chips that weren’t really designed for it. In fact, Datapoint’s design tended to make the TI circuits overheat and malfunction. So Datapoint turned to Texas instrument’s new competitor, Intel – effectively a spin-off from Fairchild. Datapoint was already Intel’s largest customer for a type of chip known as a “shift register,” and Datapoint’s biographer Lamond Wood speculates that Datapoint might have been Intel’s largest customer period at that time. For the Datapoint 2200, Datapoint went to Intel and presented them with a specification sheet for a customized “chip processor” as they called it. It would represent a departure for Intel, which at the time viewed itself principally as being in the memory chip business. Their view was that you could only sell one processor per terminal…but you could sell an unlimited amount of memory. Even the 4004 (forty-04) chip they had released in 1971 I’m told was more accurately a “microcontroller chip,” not a microprocessor, a control panel for issuing instructions, not for manipulating data.144
Intel was reluctant to take the commission for Datapoint’s microprocessor chip. In the words of Intel CEO Robert Noyce at the time, the microprocessor was a “useless product.” Intel only agreed to build it if Datapoint funded the development cost….and assigned the Intellectual property for the chip to Intel.
The tech press now commonly refers to Datapoint’s acceptance of these terms from Intel as the “Worst business decision in history,” because the resulting 8008 (eighty-08) microprocessing chip which Intel produced for Datapoint is what launched it on its path to becoming the $100 billion giant it is today. It’s probably unfair to second guess the decision too much. On the one hand, even if Datapoint had retained ownership of their chip design, Intel probably could have just tweaked a few things and developed their own variant. And on the other hand, the arrangement actually got Datapoint what they wanted at the time. Datapoint 2200’s sold faster than they could produce them. And to the extent that a personal computer today can be defined as a device with a keyboard, a screen, mass storage, internal memory, communications capabilities, a processor, and operating system, and a price that individuals could afford…Datapoint has slowly, if not a bit begrudgingly, become recognized as the inventors of the Personal Computer.145
Datapoint would develop many other firsts in the personal computing space: the first word processor in the form of their SCRIBE program; the first wi-fi communications systems; the first Local Area Networks (LAN’s) – which they actually called the “internet” at first before abandoning the term. At their peak, Datapoint did more than $100 MM a year in revenue and employed 9,000 people. By the 1990’s, however, they were firmly on the path to bankruptcy, a victim of financial engineering, a closed operating system, and, frankly, of its isolation from the cluster of innovation which had taken root firmly in California by that time.146
You can see the very first Datapoint 2200 today at the San Antonio Museum of Science and Technology located in the new Techport building on the grounds of Port San Antonio. And you can find David Monroe, former CEO of Datapoint, there on most days. Talking to him one day, I asked him why – given the early leadership of Texas Instruments and Datapoint – Silicon Valley didn’t happen in Texas? Actually, in my presumptuous way, I stated my theory as to why it hadn’t happened: from the days of Tejano stockmen to the ante-bellum cotton planters to twentieth century oilmen, Texans deep down believed that the only real wealth came from land. And so, I proposed to Monroe, Texans couldn’t appreciate the value-creation potential of a little piece of silicon the way that a more commercially-oriented society like California could.
But Monroe pushed back on that idea. He pointed to all the computing and tech innovation that has come out of Texas, much of it in a direct line out of Texas instruments and Datapoint: Fort Worth’s Radio Shack with their TRS-80 home computer kits; the computer graphics hub that emerged in the 80’s in the metroplex; Mostek, another Dallas company founded by a TI alum that “materially advanced Dynamic Random Access Memory through address multiplexing,” which tech folks assure me is important; Ross Perot’s EDS; and all the computer manufacturers like AST, Compaq, and of course, Dell. And don’t forget that when old rivals like Texas Instruments and Intel and IBM came together to defend the American semiconductor against new Japanese Rivals in the form of an industry consortium called Sematech, they chose as their headquarters Austin, TX, whose economy since then has probably owed more to the tech industry than to more “traditional” Texas industries like ag or oil.147
The National Academy of the Sciences has described Kilby’s invention of the integrated circuit as the catalyst of the “Second Industrial Revolution.” It launched the computer age, accelerated the concentration of populations into urban areas, and has helped lift the comparative standard of living of nearly everyone on the planet. Kilby went on to invent the thermal printer, still used today for simple print jobs like receipts, and the pocket calculator, the descendants of which anyone who has taken high school math is probably familiar with. That was another case of clearly defining the problem – a calculator that could perform basic arithmetic, fit in a coat pocket, and sell for less than $100 – and solving it using his methodology. He had a successful but pretty conventional corporate career, working his way up the ranks at TI from Engineer, to Manager of Engineering, and Deputy Director of Semiconductor – and he never made Silicon Valley riches. In the year 2000, however, Jack Kilby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, an incredible accolade for the work of a staff engineer in Dallas. He gave away most of the $1.0 MM prize money.148
Texas’s role in giving birth to the computing age is important, but it’s hard to claim that it is “uniquely Texan.” It came out of a company that had established itself in Texas’s oilfields in a state that had long appreciated the importance of energy density…but even if Jack Kilby hadn’t invented the integrated circuit, it feels like someone else might have…and that they might very well have done so somewhere else. That shouldn’t diminish Texas’s celebration of its tech heroes by any means and it certainly doesn’t diminish the impact they’ve had on the shape of life in our state. But to round out our list of ten engines of Texas history, I want to turn us back to something that couldn’t have come from anywhere else. An engine that benefitted from a centuries’ old Texas model of regulation and a millennia-old Texan desire to overcome the distances that so much define the state: come fly the friendly skies with Southwest Airlines, on the next episode of the Engines of Texanity.
There’s lots of good literature out there on the integrated circuit, I relied mostly on an older one by TR Reid titled, “The Chip.” For the often overlooked history of Datapoint, check out Lamont Wood’s book, “Datapoint: The Lost Story of the Texans who Invented the Personal Computer Revolution.”
Welcome to the Engines of Texanity. Episode X: The Texas Love Triangle. I’m Brandon Seale.
It was summer in San Antonio in 1966 and – I know you’re tired of me starting episodes this way, but…it was hot. Which is why air-conditioning from a couple of episodes ago was such a big deal and which I’m guessing is why Herb Kelleher and his client Rollin King had chosen to meet for drinks at the bar of the St. Anthony, the world’s first fully air-conditioned hotel. They were there to talk aviation, appropriately enough, given San Antonio’s long involvement in the field. The first military flight had taken place at Ft. Sam Houston in 1910, and the first US aircraft deployed in military operations had left from San Antonio to chase Pancho Villa in 1916, the same year that the Stinson sisters had launched their flight school on the city’s southside at a spot that remains the second oldest continuously operated civilian airfield in the country. Nearly every military aviator in US history up to that point had come through San Antonio’s Brooks, Kelly, Lackland, and Randolph air force bases, including no less than Charles Lindberg himself. In fact, the first Oscar award had actually gone to a movie called “Wings” which was filmed in San Antonio and had premiered at the newly air-conditioned Texas Theater on Houston street just a few blocks away from the St. Anthony, where the entire cast and crew had stayed during filming!149
And yet, it’s never been easy to make money in the aviation business, as King was lamenting now to Kelleher. King had originally founded his “Wild Goose Flying “charter service to cater to Texas hunters – a price insensitive market if ever there was one – but there were only so many folks you could fly to Eagle Pass to shoot deer and the business was failing. And so King was meeting Kelleher, an attorney, to help him liquidate his company.
But King wasn’t giving up on aviation. He was just tired of going after the charter business: he wanted to go after the bigger market of moving passengers between major population centers like Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. And yet, access to the very limited number of gates at big city airports was controlled by the big, established domestic carriers: the Eastern Airlines, the TWA’s, the Panams, the Braniffs, to name a few, who had no interest in letting in smaller, more nimble competitors. And yet a couple years of running a flight service had shown King that what the big domestics charged for tickets was way out of line with what actually cost to move passengers around. Something didn’t add up.
The problem was that by the 1960’s, the aviation business in the United States had become a syndicated oligopoly, thanks to the federal government’s role in setting ticket prices and allocating specific routes to specific carriers. To be fair, it wasn’t like the Feds had corrupted a well-functioning private market. They had, quite frankly, created the aviation industry, starting in 1925 with the Air Mail act. Initially, 90% of the revenue for U.S. airlines came from carrying the mail for the US government. It wasn’t until 1938 that passenger fares exceeded mail revenues on domestic carriers, which was the same year that the Federal Civil Aeronautics Board was formed. Ostensibly, the Civil Aeronautics Board or CAB was formed to “promote safe and economic air transport,” the most visible manifestation of which was the CAB’s role was in setting ticket prices and assigning routes to different carriers. Unfortunately, their original charge to keep ticket prices from getting too high morphed into an implicit guarantee to the airlines that their profit margins would never get too low either. In such an environment, the only way for airlines to grow was to buy routes from each other… to consolidate. In 1949, there were 20 domestic and international trunk carriers in the United States. But by 1975, there were only 11. Less options, of course, led to higher prices for travelers which the CAB routinely approved because the carriers were always able to show how their costs too were increasing. This of course removed any incentive for airlines to control their costs or try to operate their fleets effectively. As proof of this, average flights in those years were only 49% full. Planes were operated on average only about 7 hours per day, a situation no manufacturing plant manager with large fix costs would have ever allowed.150
In exchange for these high prices and guaranteed profits, the airlines were obligated – theoretically - to fly some non-profitable routes as well as the big, profitable ones. This was meant to help smaller cities integrate themselves into the larger American economy. Over time, however, the carriers managed to shed many of the least profitable routes. By 1973, fully twenty-five Texas cities that had been served by airlines in 1948 had been entirely disconnected from the air grid….some of them never to return!151
And so this gets us now to the real evidence of how broken the American aviation industry was: Despite being protected from competition, despite having the profitability of their routes guaranteed, despite industry consolidation, and despite the elimination of many of their unprofitable routes, CAB records reveal that not a single one of the major domestic carriers was profitable in 1970! How could this be? Even when the CAB began to chase profitability on behalf of the carriers in the face of the Arab Oil Embargo with a 5% fare increase in 1973, a 6% in 1974, and then a second 4% increase in the second half of 1974, it still didn’t get them out of the red!152
Rollin King wasn’t so arrogant as to believe that he could play the game better than the big boys. Contrary to later depictions, neither he nor Herb Kelleher were cowboys. They were both astute businessmen; King was a Harvard MBA and Kelleher was a graduate of NYU law school. No, but they could tell that the big airline industry was screwed up. And they believed that they had found a way to workaround the regulatory moat that the airlines had built around their space. If they could fly routes that were entirely within Texas’s borders, they could avoid the federal Civil Aeronautics Board entirely. It wasn’t an original idea. A wholly intra-state airline was already operating in California, the only other state with enough people and enough distance between those people to really make it worthwhile. The airline was called Pacific Southwest. The big domestic airlines hated Pacific Southwest, and fought it at every turn, but it had survived for more than a decade now, thanks in large part to the assertion of jurisdiction over intrastate air travel by the California Public Utilities Commission. The presence of effective state regulation over a wholly intrastrate activity kept the CAB – and the influence of the big domestic carriers – at bay!
King grabbed a fresh cocktail napkin off the St. Anthony Bar, and drew out a triangle, labeling each vertex: Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio, and he pushed it across the bar to Herb Kelleher. The idea explained itself. The three largest cities in the state, connected by cheap, frequent, and direct daily flights. San Antonio’s Hemisfair was scheduled to begin in less than twenty-four months, on April 6, 1968, the 155th anniversary of the first Texas declaration of Independence, and it promised to bring millions of visitors to the state. If King and Kelleher got to work now, they could be in-service in time for Hemisfair.
On March 15, 1967, King and Kelleher incorporated Air Southwest, the name a direct nod to their plans to emulate Pacific Southwest. They even signed up some of Pacific’s original investors. In November 1967, they filed with the Texas Aeronautics Commission for their charter to operate. In their charter, they promised to “provide an entirely new type of commuter-oriented service, characterized by high flight frequency; low fares; intense promotional activity; simplified ticketing; express check-in and baggage handling; high reliability in meeting schedules; all non-stop flights; and single class service” In short, everything the seven big airlines then operating in Texas weren’t providing. They would reduce costs by eliminating frills: no meals, no connections - which made the logistics of booking flights at single call-center easy, and no cargo - only passenger service, which meant they needed less terminal and hangar space. They proposed starting with 18 flights per day: 8 Dallas-Houston, 4 Houston San Antonio, and 6 Dallas San Antonio.153
The three most active airlines in Texas – Braniff, Texas International, and Continental – were determined, however, to make sure that Southwest never took off. They opposed Southwest’s charter application with the TAC, arguing that unless Air Southwest could prove that existing air service in Texas had failed - whatever that meant – then their proposed new service couldn’t be initiated. But Kelleher was prepared with a rebuttal. He had found an analogy in Texas Banking law, which made explicit that new bank charter-seekers didn’t have to prove that nearby banks had failed, only that new banks wouldn’t harm the level of banking services provided to that community. Which they of course never did. On the contrary, multiple banks created more competitive banking options and more banking services in those markets. And again, it’s an acknowledgement of how successful Southwest Airlines has been in changing public thinking about these things that their arguments today seem so self-evident and its an acknowledgement of how deeply woven the premises of the Texas frontier regulatory model are woven into the fabric of our society that we don’t question it. Listen closely to the threefold charge that was given to the Texas Aeronautics Commission in 1961: “to protect, promote, and develop aeronautics.” It was the old Spanish frontier irrigation model! Regulation and promotion of the same industry by the same body! And it stands in stark contrast to the CAB and even to the California State Public Utilities Commission approach. The classic Anglo-American model (as represented by the CAB and the California PUC) was, OK, we’ll grant you a little monopoly (“a certificate of convenience and necessity,” it’s called), but in exchange, we get to make sure you don’t make TOO much money. In practice, however, this often ends up simply guaranteeing that the regulated party never has to lose money either, and all incentives for efficiency are removed.154
The old frontier model was a little different. Located far from centers of power, people of the frontier felt more often the consequences of bureaucracy rather than the benefits. Complaints against bad policy often fell on deaf, distant ears. And mandates to “protect” certain classes of economic actors often devolved into taxes on the non-protected class in the form of artificially high prices. This was maybe the core economic complaint of free-trading Mexican Federalists in 1813, 1835, and 1838, go back to our Podcast seasons 1, 2, and 4 respectively for reference. By contrast, the frontier model charged regulators with promoting the activity they regulated in addition to making sure it was done responsibly. This is an uncomfortable pairing in the Anglo-American tradition, but I think Texas history gives it some context. Frontier communities always struggled to attract capital, so focusing on limiting the returns on scarce capital seemed self-defeating. And if the trade-off to limiting profits was that you had to grant mini-monopolies or guarantee profit-margins, well that seemed just outright unholy to a borderlander who always had to scrap to make ends meet.
The Texas Aeronautics Commission refused to endorse the established carriers oligopoly on the market, and on February 20, 1968, they approved Southwest’s application. But the incumbents didn’t give up. Braniff, Texas International, and Continental sued the Aeronautic Commission in State District Court and got an injunction preventing them from issuing Southwest their charter. Southwest appealed, and in March of 1969 the Texas State Court of Civil Appeals upheld the big boys’ injunction. Kelleher, appealed again, this time to the Texas Supreme Court, having now made the issue a bit of a personal cause, at one point carrying the legal bills for the fledgling company which would incur over $530,000 in legal expenses before it ever flew its first route. At the Texas Supreme Court, however, Kelleher and Southwest airlines finally prevailed. After the US Supreme Court refused to hear the case, on June 18, 1971, Captain Emilio Salazar piloted the first flight from Dallas Love field to San Antonio International…only three years and two months later than Rollin King and Herb Kelleher had originally anticipated.155
Without detracting from their brilliance and tenacity, Southwest airlines also benefitted from a lot of good luck. Almost their entire stable of pilots came from another small airline that went bankrupt just as Southwest was starting up. The Arab oil embargo and rising fuel prices put immense pressure on the larger domestic airlines which were already loaded down with debt, which led to a series of canceled equipment orders by the airlines which Southwest was able to take advantage of. American Airlines and Boeing effectively seller-financed Southwest’s first $20mm of capital purchases when they found they couldn’t follow through on some of their orders, including the purchase of four brand-new 737’s. The 737 carried only 1/3 as many passengers as the more glamorous 747, but it cost 1/3 to operate as well, and better suited Southwests’ high-frequency, short-duration route schedule. And it also helped that Southwest became a darling of the Texas political class – attributable in some part to the family connections of Kelleher’s wife, Joan Negley, and in other part to the inclusion of folks like Texas governor Dolph Briscoe among their early investors. But this too strengthened the Texas Aeronautics Commission’s backbone when the established carriers tried to get them to at least set ticket prices on Southwest’s new routes. In contrast to the California PUC, whose regulated rates increased between 43-70% in the years from 1971-74 in the midst of the Arab oil embargo, the Texas Aeronautics Commission stayed out of the price fixing game….and Texas consumers were rewarded by rapidly falling prices and the cheapest airfare in the nation.156
During these early years, Southwest embraced their underdog persona and climbed to success on the backs of bombastic marketing that played on their base at Dallas’s Love Field, calling their routes Love Lines, their three destinations the “Love triangle, “and their famous Stewardesses as their “lovelies.” Their “lovelies” dressed in bright orange knit tops, red hot pants, and knee-high white boots, which somehow came across as playful more than sleezy. “Professionalism can be worn lightly,” Southwest CEO Herb Kelleher maintained, even as Southwest operated in a high-stakes and humorless industry that wanting nothing more than to see them fail. The big airlines continuing legal challenges against Southwest proved to be such a financial drain on the company that the young upstart was forced to sell one of its four planes to cover court costs…which of course, famously led to the “10-minute turnaround,” a truly revolutionary initiative that saw Southwest perfect the art of landing, deplaning, cleaning, boarding, and taking off a plane in 10 minutes or less at each destination. Soon, southwest was covering as many routes with three planes as they had been with four...and as many routes as it would've taken the big carriers twice as many planes to serve.157
The airlines started to get desparate. They denied Southwest access to their joint credit card and booking system, which is why you still won’t find Southwest airlines on sites like Expedia or Kayak. Southwest of course, developed their own booking system and used the savings from not being on the joint sites to pay travel agents higher commissions…and charge passenger’s lower fares. When the domestics finally did drop their prices to try to undercut Southwest’s routes, Southwest responded by offering customers a choice: they could pay the cheaper fare offered by their competitors, or they could pay full fare…and get a free bottle of whisky. Given that most travel was still businessmen on expense accounts, businessmen happily paid full freight and walked home with a bottle of liquor after each flight, making Southwest the largest liquor distributor in the state for a brief period. The domestics then began to hoard fuel at airports and to push Southwest flights to the least desirable gates, which led to Southwest seeking out secondary airports, like Hobby in Houston and of course Dallas Love. In a way, it was competitors’ tactics that pushed Southwest to adopt their point-to-point model instead of a traditional hub-and-spoke rather than a larger strategic vision. (I.e., instead of routing all traffic through major airports in route to their final destination, they flew direct between mid-size and secondary airports.) Which only infuriated the big boys further. In order to further hamstring Southwest’s route offerings, the big airlines promoted no less than an act of Congress – the famous Wright Amendment – to prevent Southwest from offering long-range flights from Dallas.158
It eventually got so bad, that in 1975, Braniff and Texas International were indicted for conspiracy under the Sherman anti-trust act for colluding to drive Southwest Airlines out of business. And yet, by then, it was too late…too late for Braniff and Texas International, that is. By 1976, Southwest was carrying 70% of all passengers in the Love triangle! By 1979, Southwest was serving 11 Texas cities. And, true to Kelleher’s predictions and in defiance of the warnings of the domestic carriers, total air passengers in Texas had skyrocketed. In 1975, there had been 1,136,456 total passengers flown between Texas Cities. By the end of 1978, that number had grown to 4.0 MM. And 3.5 MM of them had flown on Southwest. Southwest had democratized the Texas skies…and been rewarded with 75% of the market!159
In every market that Southwest airlines entered, fares fell and numbers of flights increased. By 1978, even Congress couldn’t ignore what was going on in Texas, and Congress passed the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, effectively dismantling the CAB which petitioned for its own dissolution in 1983. All of this within twelve years of Southwest’s first flight! It was an absolutely epic change of political attitudes that was pretty unprecedented. But the results have been so unequivocally positive for consumers in terms of increased flight options and decreased fares, that – even when they are complaining about flight cancellations or the lack of decent meals - no one would even think about going back to the old model of air regulation. Except perhaps the old domestic airlines, most of whom didn’t survive. Braniff declared bankruptcy in 1982, resurrected with a clean balance sheet in 1984, then went bankrupt again for good in 1989. Southwest’s two other major competitors – Texas International and Continental – merged in 1982, then went bankrupt in 1983, emerged in 1986 only to bought out by United Airlines, which today still technically operates under Continental’s operating certificate, though with nothing like Southwest’s financial track record. Most of the other major domestics disappeared or consolidated: Eastern, TWA, PanAm. Delta – another airline which got its start out of Dallas – has survived. And so has American Airlines which in 1979 moved its headquarters to Fort Worth and the new DFW airport – and is today the largest-airline in the US at something like 165 MM passengers in 2021.160
But coming in second at 123 MM passengers in 2021, is the only major airline in the country never to have declared bankruptcy - Southwest Airlines. In fact, setting aside its first two years Southwest had boasted 47 years of consecutive annual profits, a streak ended only by COVID. And moreso than the integrated circuit, Southwest’s story does seem to be inextricably Texan. The aviation industry’s disproportionate presence in the state seems to confirm this. Today, 10% of all the aerospace jobs in the US are in Texas, and aerospace is arguably the single largest employer in the state, depending on how you categorize the industry. Add to that USAir Force’s many missions here, the fact that the state has more public airports than any other state, and the fact that something like 63,000 Texans’s today hold pilot’s licenses, your humble narrator included. Maybe it’s something about the immensity of the state, we’ve seen how distance and remoteness have informed so many other factors of Texas’s development, though in this case Texas’s good weather and relative lack of topography are contributing factors as well. Maybe the pilot all alone in the open sky appeals to the same part of the soul that the idealized cowboy on the open range does: why else did Jeff Bezos feel the need to throw on a cowboy hat after he touched down from his brief space flight? And speaking of space, is it a coincidence that all three of the major private initiatives trying to conquer space are launching from Texas soil? Bezos’ Blue Origin in Van Horn, Elon Musk’s SpaceX from Boca Chica, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic at Spaceport in – fine, technically New Mexico – but real damn close to Texas. To say nothing of NASA, and its 3,200 employees, 100+ astronauts, etc at Johnson Space Center in Houston – which you might recall, was the first word spoken by man from the moon!161
Texas critics will be quick to correct you here, however. They will tell you that technically, the first words spoken from the moon were “Contact light. Ok, engine stop.” And then, “Houston, Tranquility base here, the Eagle has landed.” So Houston was the sixth word, if you insist on including the five words on the astronauts’ landing checklist. I kind of roll my eyes at this, because when Houston folks are boasting about Houston being the first word uttered from the moon, what they are really bragging about is Texas’s outsized contribution to flight generally. And that is well-deserved. Could it have ONLY happened in Texas? Maybe not. But it did.
And this bothers people. It’s why coastal folks always seem inordinately giddy when Southwest airlines does stumble – as they did on Dec 26, 2022 in the midst of a cold snap that grounded planes, crews. For an airline that had survived years of legal harassment, the Sept 11 attacks, and COVID, it was an embarrassment to say the least when they had to cancel 70% of their flights – representing 90% of all cancellations that day – for a rather mundane winter storm. In this case, Southwest’s point-to-point model left them vulnerable in ways that the hub-and-spoke carriers weren’t. Once the snow cleared at the hub airports for their other carriers, their crews and equipment resumed normal service. But Southwest’s crews got stranded in different places than their planes did! Before the news cycle moved on to other issues, it briefly became public validation for all the critics that Texanity shouldn’t work! That it couldn’t work! That the widely-touted benefits of airline deregulation – deregulation, frontier Texas style – needed to be walked back.
But I don’t think most people would be willing to go back to a time when air travel cost was the preserve of the business traveler and the super wealthy. Three times as many passengers in the US fly today as did in 1978…and they pay almost 50% less, even as consolidation in the industry in the last decade threatens to undermine some of those gains. No, I think Southwest has become a bit of a punching bag for the nation’s love-hate triangle with Texanity. Critics of airline deregulation from the media centers on the coasts increasingly sound a little like Texans did a century ago railing against the railroads that were making their state prosperous: the problem isn’t so much what the airlines are doing, it’s the fact that they aren’t FROM where we’re from!
Airline deregulation was Texas’s gift to the nation, the product of centuries of wrestling with the best ways to manage distance and energy density and economic activity far from the centers of power and finance. But in some ways, so too was the deregulation of the electrical markets that swept the US two decades later, with decidedly more mixed results. And if we’re gonna call out outsiders for their petty resentments of Texan successes, it means we probably have to be willing to reckon honestly with Texan shortcomings. And nowhere in recent memory was Texanity’s vulnerability displayed more clearly than during 2021’s Winter Storm Uri. On the next, and final episode of the Engines of Texanity.
Christie Dockery’s Master’s Thesis, “Southwest Airlines: A Texas Airline in an Era of Deregulation.”
When Texanity Fails. And when it doesn’t.
Welcome to the Engines of Texanity, Episode 11: “When Texanity Fails. And when it doesn’t.”
About once a year it gets cold enough in San Antonio for people to overreact and pretend like it might snow. But since January of 1986, it hadn’t actually happened.
When I looked at the following week’s weather forecast on Friday, February 12, 2021, I didn’t really believe it. The forecasted HIGH for Monday Feb 15 was 30 degrees, with projections of freezing rain, sleet and maybe snow. And a low of 14 degrees? Those kind of numbers didn’t even make sense, and so, like a lot of Texans, I ignored them.162
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas – or ERCOT – however, was thinking about it. And they were worried. ERCOT is the independent system operator of Texas’s electrical grid. It has four primary responsibilities: to maintain system reliability, facilitate a competitive wholesale electricity market, facilitate a competitive retail electricity market, and to ensure open access to transmission, and if those four responsibilities sound like the “frontier regulatory” model that we’ve been talking about in this series, then you’ve been paying attention. Every other state in the US gets their electricity from interstate grids that cross state lines and are regulated by the Federal government. Texas’s size, energy-richness, and independent nature – some might call it hostility to federal regulation – has allowed it to develop its own, self-regulated electrical grid. And inspired by the success of “deregulation” in the airline industry, in 1999 Texas “deregulated” its electrical markets. Instead of fixing prices for electricity so as to guarantee a fixed profit a la the Anglo-American model, electricity generators and distributors would now have to compete on price – a la the Southwest Airlines model. Like the old Spanish irrigation ditches, the transmission lines that moved the electricity around, however, were maintained as an “open access” (“bienes de uso común”) to be administered by ERCOT like the old Watermasters opening and closing the flood gates of the canals of an irrigation system. What ERCOT does NOT do is produce electricity that they transport. For this, they run auctions every fifteen minutes where electricity producers compete to offer electricity to the grid, and the lowest price wins, in the same way that airlines compete for customers now on routes by trying to offer the most competitive ticket prices.
Backing up for a second: Electricity production (and consumption) is typically measured in Megawatts. Going into the winter of 2021, ERCOT (theoretically ) had 119,000 MW of installed electrical generation connected to the system. About 25% of that capacity, however, comes from so-called “intermittent” sources – wind and solar – and there are always some gas and coal plants down for maintenance too, which is all to say that the 119,000 MW number is never ALL there. The actual, reliably callable capacity on any given day during the winter of 2021 was closer to 82,500 MW, which is still more than double the average statewide demand which typically sits in the 40,000 MW range. In fact, the most demand that ERCOT had ever experienced on a winter day was about 69,000 MW …until Sunday, February 14, 2021.163
As morning broke on Sunday February 14, – and the freezing temperatures outside DIDN’T – ERCOT could tell that problems were developing. Natural gas prices were shooting up, a sure sign that natural gas powered power plants were struggling to find the gas they needed to produce electricity. Then, wind farms started falling off-line, as the winds died down and equipment started to freeze-off, and the sun stopped shining, cutting off the solar farms. At 8:30 AM, ERCOT issued a voluntary appeal for conservation. Texans, however, cranked up their thermostats as temperatures across the state remained stubbornly below freezing. At 2:00 PM – still on Sunday the 14 - ERCOT announced anticipated “emergency operations” and at 7 PM, a new winter peak demand of 69,222 MW was reached – 20% higher than ERCOT modeling had predicted in their worst case projections for the winter of 2021. ERCOT scrambled to call online every plant that they could. There should have been another 13,000 MW available at least, according to the 82,500 MW of theoretically available production. But when ERCOT called, the electricity didn’t show up!
At 12:15 AM, now early in the morning of Monday, 2/15, ERCOT declared a Level 1 Energy Emergency Alert. Less than an hour later, at 1:07 AM, they escalated to Level 2. At 1:20 AM, they ramped up to Level 3. What the different emergency alert levels mean is less important than appreciating how quickly the situation was spiraling out of control. The lack of electricity supply exceeded electricity demand high enough and for long enough, it could drop the frequency of the entire ERCOT grid, a truly catastrophic situation that best case would have damaged every single piece of equipment connected to the electrical grid in the state and worst case could have led to a total blackout that would have taken months to restart! In order to save the grid, ERCOT started “rotating outages” better known as “rolling blackouts” – which, as Texans learned the hard way, meant that ERCOT basically started just turning off the electricity to entire parts of the state during the coldest freeze in recorded Texas history! And not just small outages. ERCOT started by turning off 10,800 MW, 1/6 of the entire state’s demand at the time! But it wasn’t enough. At 1:26 AM, 1,418 MW of production just disappeared, stopped producing without warning, followed by another 2,382 MW over the next sixteen minutes. The grid frequency started dropping again! At 1:55 AM, ERCOT turned off another 3,500 MW; at 1:57 AM, 1,600 MW; at 1:58 AM, 2,000 more, basically an additional 10,000 MW in total in less than an hour since they had cut the initial 10,000! In plain English, this 20,000 MW drop represented something like a 1/3 of the people in the state who wanted electricity not being able to get it! And still, power plants kept cutting out without warning: Gas plants couldn’t find gas; the wind stopped blowing; the goddamned nuclear plant for chrissakes lost a feedwater pump and was only producing at about 1/3 of its capacity! further complicating ERCOT’s efforts to spread the pain of the blackouts by truly rotating them to different geographies. Instead, ERCOT had to just leave the lights – and the electric furnaces that most Texans rely on for heat in our mild winters - off for huge swaths of the state, out of fear that if they turned anything back on it might crash the few parts of the grid that were still working. ERCOT actually still had to shed a few thousand more MW at 7 PM that evening of the 15 – seventeen hours later! – as rolling blackouts continued.164
By Tuesday February 16, Texas – the energy capital of the world – was only producing 46.8% of the electricity that it nominally should have been capable of producing. And what made this situation particularly painful was that Texas had NOWHERE to turn for replacement capacity! Not because it had deregulated its markets, as many parts of the United States had in the 1990’s…but because what made Texas’s deregulation so different was that the Texas grid remained disconnected from the rest of the United States. Not all of Texas, to be clear. The cities on the edges – El Paso, Amarillo, Texarkana, Beaumont, to name a few – were connected to the larger US power pools, but the rest of Texas’s 52,000 miles of intrastate transmission wires had remained disconnected from the rest of the country in order to avoid federal oversight. Texas’s independent spirit and frontier model of regulation had left it physically and jurisdictionally isolated – and left it literally out in the cold.
As a part of my day job, I was on daily calls organized by the largest utilities, pipeline operators, and regulators that were trying to hash out what was going. I recall the moment on the morning of Wednesday the 17 I think when everyone realized the biggest problem: the rolling blackouts were hitting the natural gas processing plants that were needed to get the gas to the power plants! You can’t make the wind blow, you can’t make the sun shine, but you can make a gas turbine produce electricity if you can get gas to it. ERCOT typically relies on gas plants for 40-50% of its electricity, but during that same week, half of the natural gas production in the state was off-line and 85% of the processing plants that clean up the gas before it can go to a power plant were shutdown. Once ERCOT was able to prioritize electricity to those assets, the curve turned. On Wednesday 2/17, electricity production finally started to ramp up, though it would take until Friday the 19 and later in some cases for freezing temperatures to break and for service to be restored to most citizens of the state.165
At the operational level, ERCOT deserves plenty of blame for what happened to Texans during Winter Storm Uri. Prior to winter, ERCOT had performed several worst-case scenario drills: but the problem was that they had modeled each worst case scenario on its own, not in the aggregate. That is, they had modeled the wind not blowing and the gas plants going off-line and the load spike that would come from everybody in the state turning on their furnaces….but they hadn’t modeled all three of those things happening at the same time. They had projected the winter peak demand to be 57,699 MW; their worst-case scenario was 67,200 MW. It turns out that during Winter Storm Uri Texans actually would have needed something like 76,819 MW to keep their homes warm, two thousand more MW than Texas’s all-time peak from the summer of 2019. For almost three days at the peak of Uri’s freezing temperatures, ERCOT was moving around less than 50,000 MW, two-thirds what the citizens of the state needed.166
Did “Texanity” kill 246 Texans in Winter Storm Uri? Or maybe as many as 700, according to unofficial estimates? Either number makes it the second worst natural disaster in Texas history, behind only the Galveston hurricane of 1900. Did Texas mythology and Texans’ sense of their own exceptionalism lead them to create a system that killed Texans? Texas’s political and media class has enjoyed debating this question as a way to distract from the rather nuanced discussion of what would have actually prevented the tragedy. Democrats attacked the system because some people made a lot of money, but have proposed no solutions that would actually lead to the construction of more reliable, baseload generation. Or that seems to appreciate the realities of what things cost. Republicans have defended the current system under the mistaken belief that it was a functioning free-market, even while ignoring the fact that electricity deregulation had failed in its most basic free-market promise: to lower electricity rates for consumers. Even before Winter Storm Uri, in most circumstances an average ratepayer was better-off in a regulated market like Austin’s or San Antonio’s than they were in the deregulated market. After the economic damage of Uri is reckoned, I think you’ll see that Texans have given up any marginal financial gain they might have realized from deregulation in the two decades prior.167
It's a painful thing when the lessons of history don’t work. But there are a few lessons from Texas’s past that still do apply here, I’d argue. At its best, Texas is living proof that Pragmatism is the great, eternally relevant virtue of a frontier society, the quality that I want to believe buttressed Texans through centuries of violence and disease and change. Far removed from the centers of dogmatic cultural conformity, a frontier society has both the luxury and the obligation to take what works and discard what doesn’t. Like when the first Lipan horseman abandoned their nomadic culture in favor of a mounted existence. Or when the administrators of remote flood irrigation systems took on the dual role of regulator and promoter. Or when Gail Borden wrote off his meat biscuit – and his life savings – to turn toward condensed milk. Or when Texas legislators broke from the southern model of railroad regulation. Or when the Hamill brothers innovated their way through the heaving sands of Spindletop. Or when Jack Kilby settled for semi-conductors. Or when Southwest airlines debunked the economic orthodoxy of so-called natural monopolies.
Let me offer another example to you, that I haven’t been able to shoehorn in anywhere else but that directly serves as a precedent for Texan pragmatism. Texas was the first jurisdiction in the Anglo-American world to dissolve the distinction between courts of law and equity. Let me explain what that means. Before the 1830’s, Anglo-American law was rigidly formalistic. A deeply wronged party could have their lawsuit fail for small technicalities in how they wrote up their complaint. It was a system that favored the well-connected and the well-lawyered. Such plaintiffs whose cases failed in the courts of “law” had to bring their cases in courts of “equity,” which in theory were based on principles of fairness more so than on technicalities…but the very existence of two parallel legal system demonstrates how “unfair” many of the outcomes of either system operating in a vacuum.168
In contrast, Texas lawyers that had lived in Mexican Texas had been exposed to the flexibleness of the Spanish system of demanda respuesta, or petition and answer. The Spanish system – in which the judge was charged with getting to the bottom of the case, rather than just refereeing the two parties’ – encouraged courts not to throw out a poorly argued case that otherwise seemed sound on its merits. The 1836 Texas constitution eliminated the distinction between courts of law and equity, in favor a unified, call it Spanish-style court system! Now, there’s plenty of other aspects of the Spanish system that are more absurdly formalistic than the English one, don’t get me wrong there, yet precisely because they sat on the frontiers of these two cultural spheres, the Texas framers in 1836 had the luxury of cherrypicking the best of each. Even in 1840, when Texas formally adopted the English Common law, the unification of courts of law and equity was preserved: “Should the cause more properly belong to equity jurisdiction, the court shall, without delay, proceed to try the same according to the principles of equity…” Or as Chief Justice Hemphill said in 1849, Texas courts recognize no distinction between law and equity because the Texas legal system descends from the Spanish civil law tradition as well.169
But in law school – even at the University of Texas law school, where I went! – they will teach you that New York was the first jurisdiction to dissolve the distinction between law and equity (ten years after Texas did so) precisely because, they say, Texas never really was an Anglo-American common law jurisdiction – which to me seems to be conceding the point in an attempt to disprove it. New York, however, is an established center of Anglo-American culture, and boasts a large megaphone. Innovation on the fringes is always perceived as a threat to the established centers of culture, in places like New York and Mexico City, both of which I love, but both of which go to great lengths to tear down anything they see as threatening their cultural hegemony. Hence the rather unattractive spectacle of the great arbiters of culture dancing through the ruins of Winter Storm Uri, or proclaiming the end of airline deregulation everytime Southwest airlines cancels a flight, or why it’s hard to find anyone’s name BUT Willis Carrier from New York in a history of air conditioning. It’s a chilango from Mexico City referring disparagingly to Pochos – Mexican-Americans – as somehow culturally impure and hence inferior. It’s the image that I used as the cover art for Episode 3 showing a caricature of a “Texan” as imagined in a New York newspaper in 1845 that depicts the archetypal Texan as some kind of animalistic mix of Southern slave-catcher and Mexican bandido, conflating the sin of being a slaveholder with the sin of being Mexican.170
Yet sometimes, the frontier slips one past the center. On June 19, 1865, a Union General arrived in Galveston, TX with the news that – by operation of the Emancipation Proclamation two years prior – all of the enslaved people of Texas were now free. The next year, Texas freedman gathered to commemorate the anniversary. And in every year after. And it spread, from Galveston in 1866, to Austin in 1867, to a much broader swath of the state by 1872. By the 1930’s, Juneteenth celebrations in Texas frequently drew tens if not hundreds of thousands of celebrants, in the face of Jim Crow laws and the resurgence of the KKK and the height of Civil War Lost Cause nostalgia. Yet so powerful was the memory and so persistent were the celebrants of Juneteenth that even in the face of this hostility, in 1938 the Texas Governor recognized Juneteenth as the official day of observance of Emancipation in Texas. By 1945, it was in San Francisco and by the time of the US Civil Rights Movement, it had spread nationwide. In the wake of another generation’s worth of wrangling with the legacy of slavery, the still very conservative Texas state legislature made Juneteenth an official Texas holiday in 1979. Fittingly, it’s also recognized today in Texas’s sister-state, Coahuila, where a community of Black Seminoles has kept the memory of emancipation alive. And of course, in 2021, it became a United States national holiday.171
There’s a certain irony to the fact that history-obsessed Texas’s greatest contribution to the United States’s rituals of historic remembrance is a national holiday celebrated in memory of perhaps the most oppressed class of people in the history of Texas. Of course, it’s only ironic if we make the old mistake of assuming that the history of Texas is only the history of powerful Texans, instead of the history of all Texans. By its nature, a season dedicated to the history of technological engines in Texas history was always going to focus more on powerful Texans than on disempowered ones. But there’s nothing more powerfully Texan, I’d argue than Juneteenth, the commemoration by an oppressed people of the historical memory of their emancipation in the face of a society that was so actively hostile to it for so long.
Economic and technological histories may explain more than ideological histories…but they don’t explain everything.
Bibliography
American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE). “125th Anniversary Highlight: Texas Has Been in Forefront of Artificial Ice Production since 1865 & Progressed to Frozen Beef Transport by Train & Ship.” Proclaiming the Truth (2020). https://ashraehouston.starchapter.com/downloads/texas_artificial_ice_world_leader_1865_10_28_20.docx
----- Star Chapter. “First Presbyterian Church of Orange, Texas Built and Air Condition in 1908-1912. https://ashraehouston.starchapter.com/downloads/Historian/carrier_corp_negotiating_at_orange_texas_church_1928_1929.pdf.
Arsenault, Raymond. “The End of the Long, Hot Summer: The Air Conditioner and Southern Culture.” Journal of Southern History Vol. 50, No. 4 (Nov 1984): 597-628.
Buckelew, Francis M. Life of F. M. Buckelew: The Indian Captive. Edited by Thomas Dennis. Normanby Press, 2015.
Caldwell, Edwin. “Highlights of the Development of Manufacturing in Texas, 1900-1960. Southwestern Historical Quarterly Vol. 68, No. 4 (April 1965): 405-431.
Chipman, Donald E. Spanish Texas 1519-1821: Revised Edition. Austin, University of Texas Press. Kindle.
Clark, Laverne H. “Early Horse Trappings of the Navajo and Apache Indians.” Arizona and the West Vol. 5, No. 3 (Autumn 1963): 233-248.
Cooper, Gail. Air Conditioning America: Engineers and Controlled Environment, 1900-1960. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1998.
Cortés, Hernán. Fifth Letter of Hernan Cortes to Emperor Charles V. Translated by Pascual de Gayangos. B. Franklin: 1963.
Denhardt, Robert M. “The Horse in New Spain and the Borderlands.” Agricultural History Vol. 25, No. 4 (October 1951): 145-150.
De Zavala, Lorenza. Journey to the United States of North America/Viaje a los Estados Unidos del Norte de América. Edited by John-Michael Rivera. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2005. Kindle
Dockery, Christy. “Southwest Airlines: A Texas Airline in an Era of Deregulation.” Master’s Thesis, Texas Tech University, 1996.
Fehrenbach, T. R. Lone Star: A History of Texas and Texans. Washington, D.C.: American Legacy Press, 1983.
Ford, John S. Rip Ford’s Texas. Edited by Stephen B. Oats. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023. Kindle.
Frantz, Joe B. Gail Borden: Dairyman to a Nation. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951.
Fuentes, Carlos. El espejo enterrado: Reflexiones sobre España y América [The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and America]. Ciudad de México: Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, 1992.
Gold, Russell. “The Texas Electric Grid Failure Was a Warm Up.” Texas Monthly (February 2022). https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-electric-grid-failure-warm-up/.
Hämäläinen, Pekka. “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures.” The Journal of American History Vol. 90, No. 3 (Dec 2003): 833-862.
Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook
Jácome, Alba González. “El Manejo del Agua y Algunos Elementos de la Agricultural en Tlaxcala [Water Management and Some Elements of Agriculture in Tlaxcala].” Perspectivas Latinoamericanos Número 10 (2013), https://core.ac.uk/download/236155189.pdf.
Lenihan, John. Showdown: confronting modern American in Western Film. Urbana: University Illinois Press, 1980.
López, Miguel R. “Disputed History and Poetry: Gazpar Pérez de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva México.” Bilingual Review Vol. 26, No. 1 (Jaunary-April 2001-2002): 43-55.
Martinez Saldaña, Tomás. “El Riego Tradicional En El Eriazo Norteño. La Expansión de la Herencia Hidráulica Agrícola al Norte Novohispano [Traditional Irrigation in the Northern Barren Lands: The Expansion of Agricultural Hydraulic Heritage to Northern New Spain], Anduli 8 (2009), https://www.lucerito.net/documents/ElRiegoTradicionalporTomasMartinezSaldana.pdf.
Mau, Mark and Henry Edmundson. Groundbreakers: the Story of Oilfield Technology and the People Who Made it Happen. Peterborough, United Kingdom: 2015.
McDonald, Archie. José Antonio Navarro: In Search of the American Dream in Nineteenth-Century Texas. Austin: Texas State Historical Association Press, 2010.
McKnight, Joseph W. “The Spanish Legacy to Texas Law.” The American Journal of Legal History Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 1959): 222-241.
------. “The Spanish Legacy to Texas Law.” The American Journal of Legal History, Vol. 3, No. 4 (October 1959): 299-323.
Moore, John H. “Cotton Breading in the Old South.” Agricultural History Vol 3, No. 3 (July 1956): 95-104.
Opler, Morris Edward. Myths and Legends of the Lipan Apache Indians. American Folk-Lore Society, 1940. Reprint Bordino Books, 2018.
Palerm, Jacinta, and Tomás Martínez Saldaña, eds. Aventuras con el agua: La administración del agua de riego: historia y teoría [Adventures with Water: Irrigation Water Management: History and Theory]. Texcoco: Colegio de Posgraduados, 2009.
Perez, Aminta I., “Tejano Rangers: The Development of Ranging Tradition, 1540-1880. PhD Diss., University of Iowa, Iowa City, 2012.
Porter, Charles R. Spanish Water, Anglo Water: Early Development in San Antonio. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011.
Rasenberger, Jim. Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter that Changed America. New York: Scribner, 2020.
Reed, S.G. The History of the Texas Railroads. Kingsport, Tennessee: Kingsport Press, 1941.
Reid, T.R. The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution. New York: Random House, 1985.
Reséndez, Andrés. The Other Slavery: the Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Hartcourt, 2016.
Ridout, Joseph B. “An Anti-National Disorder: Antonio Canales and North Eastern Mexico, 1836-1852.” Master’s thesis, University of Texas, 1994.
Robinson, Sherry. I Fought a Good Fight: A History of the Lipan Apaches. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2013.
Smil, Vaclav. Energy and Civilization: A History. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2017.
Soday, Frank J. “The Petrochemical Industry.” Analysts Journal Vol. 7, No. 3 (1951): 17-24.
Spratt, John Stricklin. The Road to Spindletop: Economic Change in Texas, 1875-1901. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1955.
Stiles, Jo Ann, Judith Walker Linsley, and Ellen Walker Rienstra. Giant Under the Hill: A History of the Spindletop Oil Discovery at Beaumont, TX in 1901. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2002.
Stogner, Charles H. “Relations between Comanches and Lipanes from White Contact to Early Nineteenth Century.” Master’s Thesis, Texas Tech University, 1997.
Swanson, Philip. “Remember the Alamo? Mexicans, Texans, and Americans in 1960’s Hollywood.” Iberoamericana, Año 11, No. 44 (Diciembre 2011): 85-100.
Tijerina, Andrés. Tejanos and Texas Under the Mexican Flag, 1821-1836. College Station: Texas A&M University, 1994.
Tomassini, Giovanni Battista. “‘A la brida’ and ‘a la gineta:’ Different Riding Techniques in the Late Middle Ages on the Renaissance.” The Works of Chivalry. December 2, 2014. https://worksofchivalry.com/a-la-brida-and-a-la-gineta-different-riding-techniques-in-the-late-middle-ages-%e2%80%a8and-the-renaissance/.
Torget, Andrew J. Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Traxler, Jr., Ralph N. “The Texas and Pacific Railroad Land Grants: A Comparison between the Land Grant Policies of the United State and Texas.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly Vol. 61, No. 3 (January 1953): 359-370.
Vandello, Joseph A. and Dov Cohen. “Patterns of Individualism and Collectivism Across the United States.” APA PsycNet. https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/1999-03699-004.
Vibrant Clean Energy. “ERCOT Winter Storm Uri Blackout Analysis.” February 21, 2021. https://www.vibrantcleanenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/VCE-ERCOT-StormUri.pdf
University of Texas Energy Institute. “Timeline and Events of February 2021 Texas Electric Blackouts.” (July 2021): 1-100.
Weatherford, Jack. Indian Givers. New York: Crown Publishers, 1988.
Williams, Wendy. The Horse: The Epic History of Our Noble Companion. New York: Scientific American, 2015.
Wood, Lamont. Datapoint: The Lost Story of the Texans who Invented the Personal Computer Revolution. Englewood, Colorado: Hugo House Publishers, Ltd., 2010.
Woolrich, W.R. The Men Who Created Cold. New York: Exposition Press, 1967.
Footnotes
- Sherry Robinson, I Fought a Good Fight: A History of the Lipan Apaches (Denton, Texas: University of North Texas Press), 214. ↩
- Morris E. Opler, Myths and Legends of the Lipan Apaches (American Folk Lore Society, 1940; Bordino Books, 2018), 51. ↩
- Ibid., 15. ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- Wendy Williams, The Horse: The Epic History of our Noble Companion (New York: Scientific American, 2015), 128. ↩
- Williams, The Horse, 179, 183. ↩
- Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures” Journal of American History Vol. 90, No. 3 (December 2003): 845. ↩
- “Return to Freedom Presents Wild Horse Nation: Equine History,” Return to Freedom: Wild Horse Conservation, November 2, 2025, https://returntofreedom.org/wild-horse-nation/history/. ↩
- “Jumanos forged a long-distance trade network between New Mexico and the Caddo villages in eastern Texas.” Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017), 41, 650. ↩
- One for hunting, two for riding, and three for dragging the lodge poles and other possessions. By the early nineteenth century, the average Comanche family had thirty-five. Hämäläinen, 836, 841, 847; Williams, The Horse, 79; Energy and Civilization, 72, 74. ↩
- Laverne H. Clark, “Early Horse Trappings of the Navajo and Apache Indians,” Arizona and the West Vol. 5, No. 3 (Autumn 1963): 243-246; Francis M. Buckelew, Life of F. M. Buckelew: The Indian Captive, ed. Thomas Dennis (Normanby Press, 2015), 72; Giovanni Battista Tomassini, “‘A la brida’ and ‘a la gineta:’ Different riding techniques in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” The Works of Chivalry, November 2, 2025, http://worksofchivalry.com/a-la-brida-and-a-la-gineta-different-riding-techniques-in-the-late-middle-ages-%e2%80%a8and-the-renaissance/. ↩
- Aminta I. Pérez, “Tejano Rangers: the Development and Evolution of Ranging Tradition, 1540-1880” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, Iowa City, 2012), 164; Andrés Tijerina, Tejanos and Texas under the Mexican Flag, 1821-1836 (College Station: Texas A&M University, 1994) 88. ↩
- Thomas Earl Speir, “The History of Characteristics of the Spanish Mustang,” Handbook of Texas Online, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/mustangs. ↩
- Hämäläinen, “Rise and Fall the Plains Indian Horse Cultures,” 834, 840-841; Robert M. Denhardt, “The Horse in New Spain and the Borderlands,” Agricultural History Vol. 25, No. 4 (October 1951): 150. Charles R. Porter, Spanish Water, Anglo Water: Early Developments in San Antonio (College Station: Texas A&M University, 2011), 69. See also Andrew Torget, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. ↩
- Charles H. Stogner, “Relations between Comanches and Lipanes from White Contact to Early Nineteenth Century” (Master’s Thesis, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, 1997), 9. ↩
- In the end, what would ultimately tip the scales decidedly against Native Texans were technological advances that we’ll cover in the next few episodes. But it’s worth pointing out how incredibly effectively the horse served his original masters – the Lipanes - The Comanches tend to overshadow the Lipanes in Anglo-Texas histories because of Anglo’s man-crush on Quanah Parker. But the hard truth is that even after the arrival of the Comanches the Lipan heartland remained largely the same, notwithstanding the fact that it was the Lipanes who had borne the brunt of Spanish-Mexican and then Anglo-American expansion for almost three centuries. And indeed, it’s worth remembering that the Lipanes – sustained by their special relationship with the horse, would outlast the Comanches by nearly thirty years. Indeed, they would outlast the famed Chiracahua Apache, Geronimo, by 17 years, though to date no one has made any movies about the 19 Lipanes turned themselves into the reservation in 1903, though this obviously didn’t count the Lipanes that rode their horses into Coahuilan canyonlands and never came down to be counted in any formal government census. ↩
- Stogner, “Relations between Comanches and Lipanes from White Contact to Early Nineteenth Century,” 24; Hämäläinen, “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures,” 857; Porter, Spanish Water, Anglo Water, 81, 82. ↩
- 1491, 16:00:27. ↩
- Joseph A. Vandello and Dov Cohen, “Patterns of Individualism and Collectivism Across the United States,” APA PsycNet, November 2, 2025, https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/1999-03699-004, ↩
- Bruce Beckmann, “The Evolution of American Quarter Horse: From Sprinter to Versatile Ranch Companion, November 2, 2025, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/quarter-horses. ↩
- “Cortes de León de 1188,” Wikipedia, November 6, 2024, https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortes_de_Le%C3%B3n_de_1188; Carlos Fuentes, El espejo enterrado: Reflexiones sobre España y América [The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and America] (Ciudad de México: Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, 1992), 74, 161. ↩
- Fuentes, El espejo enterrado, 166; Tomás Martinez Saldaña, "El riego en el árido norteño: La herencia hidráulica agrícola en el norte de México y suroeste de Estados Unidos [Irrigation in the arid north: The agricultural hydraulic heritage in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States]" en Aventuras con el agua: La administración del agua de riego: historia y teoría [Adventures with Water: Irrigation Water Management: History and Theory], edited by Jacinta Palerm and Tomás Martínez Saldaña (Texcoco: Colegio de Posgraduados, 2009), 330. ↩
- Porter, Spanish Water, Anglo Water, 31, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221011-the-moorish-invention-that-tamed-spains-mountains. ↩
- Alba González Jácome, “El Manejo del Agua y Algunos Elementos de la Agricultural en Tlaxcala [Water Management and Some Elements of Agriculture in Tlaxcala]” Perspectivas Latinoamericanos Número 10 (2013), 70, https://core.ac.uk/download/236155189.pdf; Hernán Cortés, Fifth Letter of Hernan Cortes to Emperor Charles V. trans. Pascual de Gayangos (B. Franklin: 1963), 44; Martinez Saldana, El Riego, 349; Jacinta Palerm, “La Administracion del Agua para riego en el imperio espanol [Water Administration for Irrigation in the Spanish Empire]” en Aventuras con el agua. ↩
- For more info on the first Thanksgiving in Texas see: Miguel R. López, “Disputed History and Poetry: Gazpar Pérez de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva México,” Bilingual Review Vol. 26, No. 1 (Jaunary-April 2001-2002): 43-55. Tomás Martinez Saldaña, “El Riego Tradicional En El Eriazo Norteño. La Expansión de la Herencia Hidráulica Agrícola al Norte Novohispano [Traditional Irrigation in the Northern Barren Lands: The Expansion of Agricultural Hydraulic Heritage to Northern New Spain], Anduli 8 (2009), November 2, 2025, https://www.lucerito.net/documents/ElRiegoTradicionalporTomasMartinezSaldana.pdf. ↩
- See Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: the Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Hartcourt, 2016). ↩
- Palerm, “Distritos de riego en Mexico, Algunos mitos [Irrigation districts in Mexico: Some myths]” en Aventuras con el agua. ↩
- Porter, Spanish Water, Anglo Water, 136. ↩
- Ibid., 36. ↩
- Palerm “La Administracion del Agua para riego en el imperio espanol.” ↩
- Porter, Spanish Water, Anglo Water, 53. ↩
- Note as well that San Antonio is still one of the few cities in Texas with a municipal-owned utility, CPS, which is not a bad model for understanding how this Texas triple mandate works. That is, a local electric utility is charged with providing electricity equitably to all users, with making sure the system works efficiently, and with growing the ratepayers in its market. ↩
- Joseph W. McKnight, “The Spanish Legacy to Texas Law,” American Journal of Legal History Vol. 3, No. 4 (October 1959), 323. ↩
- Donald E. Chipman, Spanish Texas 1519-1821: Revised Edition (Austin, University of Texas Press), Kindle loc 422 of 5000; Torget, Seeds of Empire, 25 ↩
- In 1834, Juan Almonte estimated that the total capital in the entire community of Bexar did not exceed $10,000. The entire import export activity of the province in 1834 was $600,000, almost entirely from the Anglo-cotton settlements which of course were not producing at those levels in 1830. ↩
- Torget, Seeds of Empire, 49, 64 ↩
- William R. Williamson, “The Life and Legacy of James Bowie: A Texas Hero,” Handbook of Texas Online, November 2, 2025, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bowie-james. ↩
- Torget, Seeds of Empire, 34, 47; Joseph B. Ridout, “An Anti-National Disorder: Antonio Canales and North Eastern Mexico, 1836-1852” (master’s thesis, University of Texas, 1994), 22; “Mexico’s GDP and position among the world’s largest economies, 1800-1900,” Mexio, the Geography and Dynamics of Modern Mexico, November 2, 2025, https://geo-mexico.com/?p=6799. ↩
- Torget, Seeds of Empire, 72, 36; Archie McDonald, José Antonio Navarro: In Search of the American Dream in Nineteenth-Century Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical Association Press, 2010), Kindle, Loc 1215 of 7817; Porter, Spanish Water, Anglo Water, 89; Buckelew, Life of F. M. Buckelew, 122. ↩
- Virgina Postrel, “The Fabric of Civilization,” https://www.farmcollector.com/steam-engines/evolving-uses-for-steam-power/#:~:text=Cotton%20gins%20were%20a%20huge,pounds%20of%20cotton%20per%20day.&text=ginning%20by%20steam%20from%205,solid%20foundation%2C%20usually%20of%20brick. ↩
- Torget, Seeds of Empire, 35-36. ↩
- John H. Moore, “Cotton Breeding in the Old South,” Agricultural History Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 1956): 97; Torget, Seeds of Empire, 82 ↩
- Jim Rasenberger, Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter that Changed America (New York: Scribner, 2020): 261. ↩
- Fuentes, El espejo enterrado, 137. ↩
- Fuentes, El espejo enterrado, 310; Torget, Seeds of Empire, 124. ↩
- Torget, Seeds of Empire, 85. ↩
- Ibid., 83. ↩
- Lorenza de Zavala, Journey to the United States of North America/Viaje a los Estados Unidos del Norte de América, ed. John-Michael Rivera (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2005), Kindle loc 1135, 1180. ↩
- Torget, Seeds of Empire, 122, 157-158; Porter, Spanish Water, Anglo Water, 69. ↩
- Torget, Seeds of Empire, 125, 157, 159. ↩
- Ibid., 195; Section 9, General Provisions of the Constitution of the Republic of Texas. ↩
- Torget, Seeds of Empire 192, 210, 167. ↩
- Ibid., 157. ↩
- Ibid., 264. ↩
- John S. Spratt, The Road to Spindletop: Economic Change in Texas, 1875-1901 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1955), 81; S. G. Reed, The History of Texas Railroads (Kingsport, Tennessee: Kingsport Press, 1941), 733; “Texas Counties: Cotton Produced in 2017,” Texas Counties.Net, November 2, 2025, http://www.texascounties.net/statistics/cotton2017.htm ↩
- “1836 Project Promotes Sanitized Version of Texas History, Experts Say,” Texas Tribune, September 26, 2022, https://www.texastribune.org/2022/09/26/texas-1836-project-pamphlet/. ↩
- Thomas Cutrer, “The Battle of Walker’s Creek: A Pivotal Moment in Texas Ranger History,” Handbook of Texas, November 2, 2025, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/walkers-creek-battle-of. ↩
- Rasenberger, Revolver, 4. ↩
- Ibid., 135, 137, 4. ↩
- Ibid., 226. ↩
- John S. Ford, Rip Ford’s Texas, ed. Stephen B. Oats (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023), Kindle loc 6525; Rasenberger, Revolver, 227. ↩
- Rip Ford, 2182 ↩
- Rasenberger, Revolver, 54. ↩
- Ibid., 155. ↩
- Ibid., 301. ↩
- Ibid., 122. ↩
- Ibid., 192. ↩
- Ibid., 238. ↩
- Ibid., 233. ↩
- Ibid., 203, 315. ↩
- Joe B. Frantz, Gail Borden: Dairyman to a Nation (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1951), 239. ↩
- Ibid., 47. ↩
- Ibid., 147. ↩
- Ibid., 198. ↩
- Ibid., 200. ↩
- Spratt, The Road to Spindletop, 7. ↩
- W. R. Woolrich, The Men Who Created Cold (New York: Exposition Press, 1967), 104. ↩
- Frantz, Gail Borden, 201; https://hmn.wiki/nn/Pemmican ↩
- Frantz, Gail Borden, 201. ↩
- Scientific American, Vol. 5, No. 27, 213. ↩
- Frantz, Gail Borden, 205. ↩
- Ibid., 223, 225, 227. ↩
- Gwynne, 48, Frantz, Gail Borden, 246. ↩
- Frantz, Gail Borden, 242-243, 251. ↩
- Ibid., 255. ↩
- Frantz, Gail Borden, 276. ↩
- “‘Bet-a-Million’ Gates Dies,” Handbook of Texas, November 2, 2025, https://www.tshaonline.org/texas-day-by-day/entry/764. ↩
- Spratt, The Road to Spindletop, 91-92, 286; Reed, The History of Texas Railroads, 8; The other sad truth is that Texas cattle were pretty poor quality for most of that period. In the 1890’s Texas had twice as many cattle as Iowa…but they were in the aggregate worth only about half as much, because of their distance from markets and their inferior breeding. Indeed, one of the main contributions of barbed wire to the cattle business – other than killing the iconic cattle drive – was to help ranchers improve the genetics of their herd but keeping undesirable genetics out. This favored the more muscled and marbled continental breeds like the Hereford, but spelled the end of the iconic but rangy Longhorn. ↩
- Reed, The History of Texas Railroads, 178, 517; Spratt, The Road to Spindletop, 11. ↩
- Reed, The History of Texas Railroads, 13. ↩
- Ibid., 178, 141, 157. ↩
- Ralph N Traxler, Jr., “The Texas and Pacific Railroad Land Grants: A Comparison of Land Grant Policies of the United States and Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly Vol. 61, No. 3 (January 1953): 361-362. ↩
- Spratt, The Road to Spindletop, 26, 31-32; Reed, The History of Texas Railroads, 180. ↩
- Reed, The History of Texas Railroads, 9, 43, 45; Spratt, The Road to Spindletop, 62-62, 226 ↩
- Reed, The History of Texas Railroads, 182. ↩
- Spratt, The Road to Spindletop, 4, 253. ↩
- Reed, The History of Texas Railroads, 729; Spratt, The Road to Spindletop, 285-286, 41. ↩
- Spratt, The Road to Spindletop 41, indices. ↩
- Edwin Caldwell, “Highlights of the Development of Manufacturing in Texas, 1900-1960,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly Vol. 68, No. 4 (April 1965), 406. ↩
- Spratt, The Road to Spindletop, 190, 116. ↩
- Reed, The History of Texas Railroads, 578. ↩
- Jo Ann Stiles, Judith Walker Linsley, and Ellen Walker Rienstra, Giant Under the Hill: A History of the Spindletop Oil Discovery at Beaumont, TX in 1901 (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2002), 13-14. ↩
- Ibid., 48. ↩
- Mark Mau and Henry Edmundson, Groundbreakers: the Story of Oilfield Technology and the People Who Made it Happen (Peterborough, United Kingdom: 2015), 21; Stiles, Linsley, and Rienstra, Giant Under the Hill, 94. ↩
- Stiles, Linsley, and Rienstra, Giant Under the Hill, 3, 150, 192. ↩
- Stiles, Linsley, and Rienstra, Giant Under the Hill, 216. ↩
- Smil, Energy and Civilization, 12, 353-354. ↩
- T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and Texans (Washington, D.C.: American Legacy Press, 1983), 667; Caldwell, “Highlights of the Development of Manufacturing in Texas, 408. ↩
- Frank J. Soday, “The Petrochemical Industry,” Analysts Journal Vol. 7, No. 3 (1951), 20, 24; Dr. Christine Edelweise, conversation with author, summer 2022; Caldwell, “Highlights of the Development of Manufacturing in Texas, 414; Smil, Energy and Civilization, 278, 309. ↩
- Caldwell, “Highlights of the Development of Manufacturing in Texas, 407, 410, 415; Reed, The History of Texas Railroads, 730. ↩
- Fehrenbach, Lone Star, 668. ↩
- “Economic Development Programs and Assistance,”November 2, 2025, https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/local/ch312/biennial-reports.php. ↩
- Willis R. Woolrich and Charles T. Clark, “The Evolution of Refrigeration in Texas: A Historical Overview,” November 2, 2025, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/refrigeration; “Letters Authorizing First Cattle Drive From Texas: Livestock sent to aid American Revolution,” The Story of Texas, November 2, 2025, https://www.thestoryoftexas.com/discover/artifacts/letters-authorizing-first-cattle-drive-from-texas-spotlight-7-1-19. ↩
- Woolrich, The Men Who Created Cold, 30. ↩
- Woolrich and Clark, “The Evolution of Refrigeration in Texas: A Historical Overview.” ↩
- Woolrich, The Men Who Created Cold, 45, 50, 97-100, 7. ↩
- Gene Fowler, “The Iceman Came to San Antonio: Inventions of French Immigrant had Chilling results in the 19th century, Texas Coop Power, June 2016, https://texascooppower.com/the-iceman-came-to-san-antonio/; Woolrich, The Men Who Created Cold, 45, 107. ↩
- Spratt, The Road to Spindletop, 268; Woolrich, The Men Who Created Cold, 104, 197. ↩
- American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), “125th Anniversary Highlight: Texas Has Been in Forefront of Artificial Ice Production since 1865 & Progressed to Frozen Beef Transport by Train & Ship,” in Proclaiming the Truth (2020), https://ashraehouston.starchapter.com/downloads/texas_artificial_ice_world_leader_1865_10_28_20.docx; Woolrich, The Men Who Created Cold,101, 103, 198; Refrigeration, TSHA ; Spratt, The Road to Spindletop, 269; Caldwell, “Highlights of the Development of Manufacturing in Texas, 408. ↩
- Caldwell, “Highlights of the Development of Manufacturing in Texas, 409. ↩
- Gail Cooper, Air Conditioning America: Engineers and Controlled Environment, 1900-1960 (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press), 18, 12. ↩
- Cooper, Air Conditioning America, 13. ↩
- ASHRAE Star Chapter, “First Presbyterian Church of Orange, Texas Built and Air Condition in 1908-1912, accessed November 5, 2025, https://ashraehouston.starchapter.com/downloads/Historian/carrier_corp_negotiating_at_orange_texas_church_1928_1929.pdf; Cooper, Air Conditioning America, 161. ↩
- https://www.businessinsider.com/movie-attendance-over-the-years-2015-1; Cooper, Air Conditioning America, 114; Raymond Arsenault, “The End of the Long, Hot Summer: The Air Conditioner and Southern Culture,” Journal of Southern History Vol. 50, No. 4 (November 1984): 604. ↩
- Philip Swanson, “Remember the Alamo? Mexicans, Texans, and Americans in 1960’s Hollywood,” Iberoamericana, Año 11, No. 44 (Diciembre 2011): 92, 89; John Lenihan, Showdown: confronting modern American in Western Film (Urbana: University Illinois Press, 1980), 11. ↩
- Cooper, Air Conditioning America, 83. ↩
- Cooper, Air Conditioning America, 159-160; “Can Air Conditioning Really Improve Workplace Productivity, Moore Heating and Air Conditioning, April 25, 2018, https://mooreheating.com/can-air-conditioning-really-improve-workplace-productivity/. ↩
- Cooper, Air Conditioning America, 143, 154-155, 190; Arsenault, “The End of the Long, Hot Summer,” 624. ↩
- Arsenault, “The End of the Long, Hot Summer,” 625, 617. ↩
- Arsenault, “The End of the Long, Hot Summer,” 611, 613-614. ↩
- Arsenault, “The End of the Long, Hot Summer,” 616; Carlos Morales, :Birth of Cool: A Brief History of Air Conditioning,” Marfa Public Radio, July 20, 2018, https://www.marfapublicradio.org/2018-07-20/birth-of-the-cool-a-brief-history-of-air-conditioning. ↩
- Cooper, Air Conditioning America, 159. ↩
- T. R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution (New York: Random House, 1985) 165. ↩
- Ibid., 11. ↩
- Ibid., 15, 18. ↩
- Ibid., 4, 21, 8. ↩
- Ibid., 65. ↩
- Ibid., 66. ↩
- Ibid, 77. ↩
- Ibid., 265, 119. ↩
- Ibid., 106. ↩
- Ibid., 150 ↩
- Lamont Wood, Datapoint: The Lost Story of Texans Who Invented the Personal Computer Revolution (Englewood, Colorado: Hugo House Publishers), 26. ↩
- Wood, Datapoint, 45, 56, 58, 62, 97. ↩
- Ibid., 143, 10. ↩
- Ibid., 130, 153, 155, 163. ↩
- David Monroe; http://alanclements.org/dram.html ↩
- Reid, The Chip, 23, 166-167, 252. ↩
- “Herb & Rollin: The Birth of South West Airlines,” Southwest, November 2, 2025, https://southwest50.com/our-stories/when-herb-met-rollin-the-birth-of-southwest-airlines/; Steve Elliot, “Foulois Ushed Dawn of Military Flight at JBSA-Fort Sam Houston 110 years ago,” Joint Base San Antonio, March 2, 2020, https://www.jbsa.mil/News/News/Article/2099337/foulois-ushered-dawn-of-military-flight-at-jbsa-fort-sam-houston-110-years-ago/. ↩
- Christy Dockery, “Southwest Airlines: A Texas Airline in an Era of Deregulation,” (Master’s thesis, Texas Tech University, 1996) 10, 21, 25. ↩
- Ibid., 28. ↩
- Ibid., 19, 32. ↩
- Ibid., 39, 41. ↩
- Ibid., 14. ↩
- Ibid., 62. ↩
- Ibid., 67-68, 39, 187, 15. ↩
- Ibid., 69, 188, 202, 90. ↩
- Ibid., 93, 74. ↩
- Ibid., 93-94, 133. ↩
- Ibid., 71, 130. ↩
- Chris Isidore, “Southwest Returns to Profitability,” CNN Business, January 27, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/27/business/southwest-earnings/index.html; Texas Economic Development and Tourism Office, “Texas Aerospace Aviation & Defense Industry, https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/business/TexasAerospaceReport.pdf. ↩
- “Justins Midday Update: February 12, 2021,” KSAT, https://www.ksat.com/video/weather-forecast/2021/02/12/justins-midday-update-february-12-2021/. ↩
- Vibrant Clean Energy, “ERCOT Winter Storm Uri Blackout Analysis,” February 21, 2021, https://www.vibrantcleanenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/VCE-ERCOT-StormUri.pdf ↩
- UT Energy Institute, 31 ↩
- UT Energy Institute, “Timeline and Events of February 2021 Texas Electric Blackouts,” (July 2021): 41-42. ↩
- Vibrant Clean Energy, “ERCOT Winter Storm Uri Blackout Analysis.” ↩
- Russell Gold, “The Texas Electric Grid Failure Was a Warm Up,” Texas Monthly (February 2022), https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-electric-grid-failure-warm-up/. ↩
- McKnight, “The Spanish Legacy to Texas Law,” 231. ↩
- Ibid., 232. See also Smith v Clopton, Judge Hemphill of the Texas Supreme Court held no distinction between law and equity because Texas legal system descends from the civil law tradition. Smith v. Clopton, 4 Tex. 109, 113 (1849). ↩
- McKnight, “The Spanish Legacy to Texas Law,” 231. ↩
- “Juneteenth,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth. ↩