The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 91, July 1987 - April, 1988 Page: 260

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

of the country, and a second invasion from Mexico permeates the
letters. Included among the correspondents are such Texas notables as
Mary Austin Holley, Gail Borden, and Thomas J. Rusk, but the real
wealth of the collection seems to be those letters from the common
frontier people of Texas who were not at all reluctant to express their
fears and concerns directly to their nation's president. Often replete
with misspellings, poor penmanship, and a grand sense of democracy,
the latter correspondence serves as a valuable addition to the docu-
mentation of social conditions in the Texas Republic.
The Andrew Jackson Houston collection should and most probably
will be used in any subsequent biography of Sam Houston; any histo-
rian of the Texas Republic period will find the collection invaluable.
Haley's abbreviated collection will undoubtedly bring the entire Hous-
ton collection to the attention of additional researchers and historians.
This small selection of letters also reveals a few more interesting facets
of daily life and frontier concerns. Attractively designed and printed,
the volume will almost certainly entice Texana collectors. The field of
Texas studies, however, and indeed Haley's own purposes, would have
been better served if he had concentrated on a larger number of the
letters in a format modeled on many similar endeavors, rather than
publishing another relatively expensive, limited edition of Texana. De-
spite its excellent content and design, this is a volume that is destined
for the collectors rather than the students of Texas history.
Star of the Republic Museum D. RYAN SMITH
Essays on the Mexican War. By Wayne Cutler, John S. D. Eisenhower, Mi-
guel E. Soto, Douglas W. Richmond. (College Station, Tex.: Texas
A&M University Press for the University of Texas at Arlington,
1986. Pp. xiv+gg. Preface, introduction, illustrations. $17.50.)
The Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures at the University of
Texas at Arlington have a well-deserved reputation. They focus light on
topics of special interest to contemporary scholars in a way that Pro-
fessor Webb would have appreciated. Most of the essays, at least those
that this reviewer has read, have made contributions to our under-
standing of the topics. The 1985 lectures treat four quite different as-
pects of the Mexican War. As Archibald Hanna points out in his intro-
duction, the subject was a particularly appropriate one for the Webb
lectures since the war began in Texas, and since the Jenkins Garrett
Collection at Arlington is one of the premier repositories of material on
the conflict. Nor should we overlook Webb's own early work on the
Texas Rangers during the war.

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