Some thirty-five years have passed since Eugene Barker edited a volume of readings in Texas history; now Ernest Wallace and his associate, David Vigness, have put forth a new collection of documents. The distinction between documents and readings chosen for the two collections seems to be that a document is an official report or primary source, roughly contemporaneous with the event, while a reading is a fuller extract of material, more likely from a secondary work. Overlappings, of course, there must be: for example, Travis’ immortal letters from the Alamo belong justly in each category. By design or not the Documents begin and end with Galveston Island. Cabeza de Vaca’s relation of his landfall there, November 8, 1528, is the first item in the volume and the last is the report of the United States Weather Bureau concerning Hurricane Carla which swept the Texas coast in September 1961.
Only a captious critic will quarrel with the selections found in this volume. In no case would the reviewer choose to omit an item chosen by the editors, but he could recommend the inclusion of extracts from a few comparatively rare travel journals concerned with gold rush parties, freight caravans, and/or stage coaching.
