Texas on My Mind
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
Last weekend, my wife and I went to the town of Bandera, in the western part of the Texas Hill Country. (We live in the eastern part.) We went there to celebrate the maturation of our COVID-19 vaccinations, as bizarre an idea as anything very real might be. We went to Bandera to ride horses. More precisely, my wife rode horses. My few experiences with horses all ended in pain and embarrassment. On the other hand, I do know how to ride the subway, and how to wedge myself in during rush hour, which she hasn’t mastered.
Bandera calls itself the “Cowboy Capital of the World,” and there is a plaque from a former Texas governor affirming that, so it’s obviously true. We stayed at a dude ranch that had no horses and no room service. My wife secured the deadly beasts elsewhere, while I contemplated a surprising discovery.
Bandera had not been founded by John Wayne’s ancestors. Rather, it had been founded in the mid-19th century by a Polish immigrant, who was followed by 16 Polish families. They landed in Galveston, which had been a major destination for immigrants through that century. How they got to Bandera and why they chose to settle there is unknown to me. What is known is that they made shingles from cypress trees and sold them to buyers in San Antonio. The Polish presence can still be glimpsed, blended into the complexity of the World’s Cowboy Capital.
We went hiking one day and paused at a lookout called Comanche Bluff. The Comanche were a powerful force from the Rocky Mountains to Kansas, and they raided deep into Texas, as far as San Antonio. The bluff was not named after them arbitrarily. The Comanche used the bluff to observe the area below. I have seen the movie “Hondo,” in which John Wayne plays John Wayne to the Comanche Nation. That is a comfortable notion for me. But now I have to face the fact that it was a group of Poles who had to fight and make treaties with the Comanche. I can’t quite deal with the fact that a band of Polish carpenters, and not an Anglo called Hondo, created the Cowboy Capital of the World, and fought the Comanche and lived to tell about it. “Bandera” means “flag” in Spanish, and a white flag near Comanche Bluff marked the border between the Comanche and the settlers. It stood for a while, until violated by both sides.
There is a tendency to see Texas as Anglo country, settled by migrants from Appalachia and the like. They were certainly there and were critical in settling and defining the country. (It was a country before it was a state and, frankly, isn’t sure it made the right move.) In the conventional model of Texas there were Anglos, Mexicans and raiding Indians.
But Texas was much more complex than that. The Polish band was accompanied by a Czech settlement just north of the Hill Country, and Fredericksburg, north of Bandera and west of where I live, was settled by Germans. German flags still fly there, German food is sold and tribute is paid to its famous son, Chester Nimitz, commander of Pacific forces in World War II. Indeed, I am told that until about Nimitz’s time, the schools taught students in the German language. There is a town to the east of where I live called Buda. The only Buda I’ve known in the world is the one attached to Pest on the Danube, in Budapest. There were Hungarian settlers here in Texas, and there is a book written about them, but alas, I am but the sad remnant of a once noble people. There must have been many more settlements that I don’t know of from many more small countries that I am unaware of.
Most of these Germans, Poles, Czechs and Hungarians arrived in the mid-19th century. A wave of revolutions, nationalist and liberal, gripped Europe in 1848. European nations were trapped inside of empires, free to speak their language but not to determine their fate. The revolution intended to free nations like Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary from these tottering entities, allowing them to form their own nations. It was a liberal revolution in the sense that they demanded not only the right to self-determination but also the right to representative governments and the end of the power of the aristocracy. The revolutions failed catastrophically amid a wave of executions, and hence a wave of immigration. The immigrants left their homes not for high moral principles, as some of those on the Mayflower did, but rather to go somewhere where life wasn’t so bitter and a living could be made. In other words, they came for the same reason others came.
It is interesting that they came to Texas. Texas was in its way part of the European revolutions of 1848. Having arrived first in Mexico, the newcomers rebelled against being part of it, and fought a revolution freeing it from Mexican rule. Having lived in Texas for a quarter-century, I will never be seen as a Texan, as I have no ancestors who died at the Alamo. Few states in the union revere the memory of their birth as much as Texas. But then, Texas won the revolution and became an independent nation. It entered the union through a treaty between two nations, the only state created in this way. The independence of Texas’ electrical grid stands as a monument to its rugged independence.
My wife and I chose to live in Texas at a time when we were free to settle anywhere. She wanted to live in a place that was hot and dry and had horses, like her native Australia. I wanted to live with her. I came to love Texas for a sense of freedom I never really felt anywhere else. The state is vast, and outside of the cities, the land is designed for privacy and idiosyncrasy. It has a silence to it that invites thought.
My discovery in Bandera of the original Polish settlers reminded me of the other Central Europeans who came here when the cities beckoned. But they were at one with Texas. They wanted their own life to be lived on its own terms, dealing with droughts and Comanches as needed. When I was raised I was told of Sandor Petofi, a Hungarian revolutionary and poet who died in the 1848 revolution. The land my house rests on was part of a land grant to William Travis, who died at the Alamo. The go-to-hell courage of these two men mingle here, I would like to think.
The insistence on living on your terms must be accompanied by the willingness to die for that right, the fundamental paradox of humans. The Comanche lived that paradox. So did the Poles, Hungarians and the rest. The famed cowboys – immortalized in the writings of Karl May, a German who had never seen America but who would inspire the cowboy movie – could not grasp the meaning of cowboys, many of whom were Black or Mexican, and the rest were the strange confluence of Texans, living their lives as they would.
