This is an interesting and sprightly account of Texas—country, life, and society—as seen by the travelers of all nationalities while the land passed successively from Spanish rule to Mexican, to nine years of independence, and to statehood in the United States. Through their eyes Mrs. Sibley is able to examine the routes, means, and hazards of frontier travel, the geography and climate, the Indian and his treatment, the Texan character, the more colorful aspects of the administration of justice, slavery (“a hideous sore that consumes”), and emigration. There is little here on schooling, holidays, newspapers, and religion, but the author enhances her volume with portraits of sixteen travelers and two maps, the first showing Spanish Texas in 1767 and the second the Republic in 1841.
Sources fall into three major categories: reports of official or quasi-official governmental representatives, private letters or journals not intended for publication, and material written for publication by their authors. As travel accounts are highly subjective, and the traveler frequently had a motive in writing, Mrs. Sibley includes as a final chapter a “Critical Essay on Sources” which to some extent duplicates her introductory chapter, “A Century of Travelers.”
The volume is remarkably free from distracting errors of printing and fact, except for an occasional slip like the reference to John Adams for John Adamson as the author of An Account of Texas: With Instructions for Emigrants. The question might be raised as to whether consideration of Zebulon Pike’s motives in traveling to Texas is really pertinent, inasmuch as he made his observations while in Spanish custody. Several pointed references to the relationship of depressions and the movement of people into Texas would seem to indicate that the author subscribes to the “safety valve” thesis, a now somewhat shopworn and questionable hypothesis.
One finds oneself wishing that Mrs. Sibley had included more biographical detail on some of her travelers. For example, what were the circumstances of Rutherford B. Hayes’ visit to Texas in 1849? The reader early learns that Francis C. Sheridan, quoted a number of times, is a Briton, but not until the final chapter can one infer that Sheridan must have visited Texas at the request of the British Foreign Office. Again, from footnote citations of his Missionary Adventures scattered through the book, one assumes that Emmanuel H. D. Domenech must have been a man of the cloth. But not until the “Critical Essay” is it definitely established that he was a French Roman Catholic priest whose activities apparently centered in the area around San Antonio, Castroville, and Brownsville.
Casual readers as well as professional historians will find Travelers in Texas a rewarding book that adds a new dimension to our understanding of Texas and things Texan. More descriptive than analytical, it is at once scholarly and full of human interest, proving again that good history need not be dull.
