Heritage, Volume 5, Number 3, Autumn 1987 Page: 29
38 p. : ill. ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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BOOK REVIEW
Our Land, Our Lives:
A Pictorial History of
McLennan County, Texas
Our Land, Our Lives: A Pictorial History
of McLennan County, Texas.
By Patricia Ward Wallace; Norfolk/
Virginia Beach; The Donning Company,
1986; pp. 8 + 202; preface, illustrations,
bibliography, index; $34.95 plus $2.20
tax and $2.00 postage.
McLennan County, located near the
state's center, and with Waco as its hub,
rightfully can lay claim to an eventful
history. Organized in 1850 out of portions
of Milam and Robertson Counties,
it is bisected by the Brazos River, whose
rich alluvial bottom-lands became the
state's finest cotton-producing area. It
was named for frontiersman Neil
McLennan, who settled there a few
miles west of the Brazos in 1845. A year
earlier, one of the famous Torrey Brothers
trading houses had been built on the
Eastern side, by George Barnard. Both
settlements were located near the ancient
village site of the Waco Indians.
The establishment of the new town of
Waco in 1849 brought in some stalwart
builders, such as San Jacinto veteran
George B. Erath, Indian fighter Shapley
P. Ross, youthful Virginian Richard
Coke, and cattleman Henry Caufield.
Although growth was critically
impeded by the Civil War, the community
rallied, and in 1870 completed the
first and only bridge across the Brazos,
an ambitious frontier accomplishment
which attracted a veritable stream of
traffic through the county, including
many thousands of cattle plodding the
Chisholm Trail to Kansas. The
railroads arrived a little later in that
decade.
Baylor University and TCU brought
cultural renown during the closing
years of the century, as did the farfamed
Texas Cotton Palace Exposition.
William Cameron's lumber empire,Tom Padgitt's harness and saddles, and
Dr. Pepper's beverage bonanza were
among the numerous prospering industries.
Cotton producing and marketing
remained supreme, however, for almosta century. during the turbulent Nineties
some less attractive notoriety was achieved
by the caustic, gun-toting journalist
William C. Brann and his virulent magazine
called The Iconoclast.
World War in 1917 brought the
great army training base Camp MacArthur,
which doubled the county's
population in an matter of just a few
months. Similarly, major adjustments
were required in the early Forties and
World War II, brought about by the
installation of two extensive flying
fields. Baylor University had meantime
gone on to become the largest Baptist
educational institution in America.
A Waco Indian legend had long
persisted that this vicinity enjoyed a permanent
immunity against windstorms of
any severity, but that ancient promise
ended late one afternoon in May of
1953, when a brutal tornado ripped
across Waco, killing 114 people and
leaving a wide path of destruction
across much of the historic downtown
section. The suspension bridge and the
sky-scraping Amicable Life Insurance
Building, although directly in the
storm's path, came through with only
minor damage.
Dr. Patricia Wallace, a professor at
Baylor, and author of several previous
works of history, has provided a perceptive
and highly readable text to accompany
the wealth of photographs this
new-style county history offers. All the
diverse ethnic and economic elements
of the community are given noticeably
even-handed treatment. Many of the
photographs are previously unpublished,
being the fruits of a year-long
search throughout the county.
Published in a limited edition of
two thousand numbers copies, the book
is available from its sponsoring agency,
The Brazos Forum, P. 0. Box 1541,
Waco, Texas 83915.
La Frontera: The United States
Border with Mexico
La Frontera: The United States Border
with Mexico. Alan Weisman; photographs
by Jay Dusard; Harcourt BraceJovanovich; cloth, $29.95.
People
Mexican
Madrid isalong the border say that
President Miguel de la
a magician. After all, heturned the peso into cow d--- a few
months after he took office. For us rico
North Americans (and to most Mexicans,
nearly everyone here is richer then
they are), the exchange rate makes
Mexico the travel bargain of the
century. That, along with the recent
federal fuss about the flow of illegal
immigrants and drugs into the U.S., has
put the spotlight on Mexico and our
mutual border.
The present border follows a natural
course along the Rio Grande from
Brownsville to El Paso, then goes due
west through Gadsden's Purchase to its
unceremonious ending at the Pacific,
where beachcombers from either country
can stroll back and forth below the
high tide mark. On the other side of this
line is one of the most foreign countries
that Americans can visit, and it's conveniently
just outside our back door. We
throw our trash there, recruit cheap
labor, and use its people as guinea pigs
for new pharmaceuticals. We pull the
strings of international finance to
squeeze our advantage. Our 1,500 mile
border with Mexico is a convenient fiction
to separate the rich from the poor,
and to preserve that vast pool of exploitable
labor, natural resources, and a
ready market for our latest consumer
junk.
But the U.S.-Mexican border is also
a very loose boundary between two vastly
different cultures. We are a mongrel
breed that entered the New World a
few short centuries ago, and remade it
in our image. In Mexico, the conquerors
were absorbed, and European culture
was recast in an Indian image. That
sense of deep, traditional culture dominates
Mexico today, and is shared
among many different regional peoples.
Their strength is in their connectedness
to the rural landscape and to large
networks of family and compadrazgo,
the social glue that binds relatives,
friends and associates. On the other
hand, we systematically root up the
local and traditional, and replant with
the shallow monoculture of fast food
and polyester. We have a fascination
for the old and the regional, but
smother it in a nostalgic embrace. These
two Americans, the U.S. and Mexico,face each other across a very fluid
boundary, engaged in a political and
cultural tug-of-war.
This book about the borderlands is
a good way to stretch your horizons
29
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Texas Historical Foundation. Heritage, Volume 5, Number 3, Autumn 1987, periodical, Autumn 1987; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth45439/m1/29/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas Historical Foundation.