The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 63, July 1959 - April, 1960 Page: 489
684 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Book Reviews
Much of the difficulty stems from the slanted writing and the
forced reshaping of the facts of history to fit the persecution con-
cept. This distortion is exemplified to the ultimate by the fabri-
cated impression that Morris was an irresponsible, shoot-first
sheriff who thought that Romaldo and Gregorio Cortez were
both unarmed so he just "...drew his pistol to shoot Gregorio
because Gregorio did not want to be arrested." (page 63.)
The step by step development of the unfortunate altercation
in which Romaldo attacked Morris and Gregorio shot Morris to
death, appears in the sworn testimony given before the courts,
and is a matter of public record [see Texas Criminal Reports,
XLIV, 169-183; and Southwestern Reporter, LXIX, 536-541] and
stands in contradiction to the unrealistic and interpretive version
laid out in Pistol in His Hand.
Reviewing beyond such a fundamental fault is probably point-
less; yet, for the sake of completeness, a brief assay might be made
of the extent of the book's trouble rather than the degree. In
other words, do minor flaws necessarily accompany major ones?
Was it, for example, carelessness or just an easy flow of jour-
nalism that prompted the spelling of Dilworth, a town in Gon-
zales County, as "Kilworth" and the shortening of Karnes City
and Karnes County to an ambiguous "Karnes?" Why was Henry
Schnabel, a rancher who was shot to death on his own ranch while
trying to apprehend the fugitive Cortez, erroneously referred to
as Constable [Tony] Schnabel, his brother who subsequently
chased Cortez beyond the Guadalupe River? Was it a lack of
familiarity with scholarly forms or a modernized disregard of them
that permitted the use of the activities of sixteen public officials
sans their Christian names?
Exemplary of further streamlining is the index where an at-
tempt seems to have been made to restrict it to personal names.
Although a number of unimportant place names crept in (Palo
Alto, Tamaulipas, and Kansas Trail), vital ones were excluded
such as the location of Cortez' birth and death and the various
localities in which he left his mark. Also deleted were the names
of the several pro-Cortez newspapers. Furthermore, a casual com-
parison of the index with the personal names appearing in
Chapter III reveals over seventy-five incomplete entries and489
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 63, July 1959 - April, 1960, periodical, 1960; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101186/m1/597/: accessed April 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.