All true, but having spent the last 5 years doing Texas history research in my spare time, I just have to say how poor and simplistic some of these guys are. A lot of it has to do with where they started. All science is standing on the backs of giants, but Texas history has really had some midgets, and has been stunted for a long time.
Part of this is racism. I want to use a different term, because that's too strong. I don't think these guys were racist in the horrible connotation of it. Many of them were the most open and enlightened people of their time. But they had a kind of soft bigotry that came from simply not being able or caring about looking at things from someone else's viewpoint. They also wanted to tell the story that their audiences wanted to hear, and that's the romantic story of Texas. The Alamo is a bright and shiny object, and if you stare at it for too long, it's hard to see into the dark places of Texas history. From their very limited viewpoint, a lot of problems and errors arise that are kind of inevitable.
I'll take Fehrenbach for starters. Love the guy. I met him once in 2003 when I was working in the legislature. My boss was honoring him with a proclamation and I got to give him a tour of the capital. I got him to sign my copy of "Lone Star" his history of Texas.
Fast forward 16 years and I'm doing my research on the Gutierrez Magee Expedition. He's so dismissive of it, that he summarizes the whole two year war in basically a paragraph. He says that the American volunteers were just a bunch of "common cutthroats." Which ones were common and which were cutthroats, Mr. Feherenbach, the ones who went to Harvard or the ones who went to Dartmouth?
What? Some of them were highly educated? Yes indeed. Now, he couldn't have known that. I figured it out from digitized sources that are available online which he would have taken decades to track down in a library. But he's basically extrapolating and making sweeping conclusions based on limited evidence. I find this very frequently in Texas history, and a lot of myth gets in there in place of actual provable history.
Another case is Jane Long. The whole "Mother of Texas" bull***** She was supposed to be the first Anglo woman who settled in this wilderness untamed and all that ***** First of all, that's bigoted nonsense anyway. Even if you dismiss the Indians, there were plenty of civilized women in Hispanic Texas. But even if you want to stick to the Anglo woman part, that's provably untrue. I always belived it because it was the myth I was raised with, but it's nonsense.
A few years ago, I read Mattie Austin Hatcher's "The introduction of Foreigners into Texas." This is a book written a long time ago (she died in the 1950s). In it, she notes Anglo Americans living in Texas as early as 1786. As in before the U.S. Constitution was signed. Then I started getting to the Bexar Archives myself and found all these names like Guillermo Suel - his real name is William Sewell. There was, in fact a small but robust group of Anglo Americans - with wives and even children - living in Texas (alongside a greater number of French creoles) during Spanish colonial times. It was only in 1810, on the eve of the revolution, that Spain kicked them out.
So there were American women living and having children in Texas before Jane Austin was born. Similary, there were American men living in Texas when Stephen F. Austin was a toddler. In fact, in my research, I discovered one of them who lived in Texas in the 1790s, fought in the 1812 revolution, then resettled in Texas in the 1820s, and he was actually living there as a squatter when Austin arrived and not knowing what else to do with him, signed him up as part of his old 300.
This information has been there, but Anglo historians didn't care to sift through them. Hatcher was one of the first who actually read Spanish and looked into their records. She was followed by Robert Bruce Blake, who spent 30 years translating the Bexar and Nacogdoches archives, typing them up on a typewriter, for which I am immensely indebted, since I now have them in a set of keyword-searchable PDFs.
So the point is that technology, but also a bias of perspective, hindered these early Texas historians. Half of them confined themselves to the post-Austin world because of bias, and even those who looked deeper were hamstrung by these failings and predjudices.
I used to have a real strong negative reaction to the phrase "revisionist history" because I associated it with a PC attempt to tear down heroes and make statements about the moral values of current generations because of what their ancestors did. I still think a lot of that is true, but I have also learned that there's a lot of bad nonsense in Texas history that's been perpetuated over decades and now we have turned them into a sort of old testament standard of purity, on which we will live and die over an event (say Travis drawing the line in the sand) which by any reasonable standard of history is just a myth with no documentary basis in fact.
