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Title: Texas Panhandle Frontier (Double Mountain Books--Classic Reissues of the American West) by Frederick W. Rathjen, Fredrick W. Rathjen, Elmer Kelton ISBN: 0-89672-399-2 Publisher: Texas Tech University Press Pub. Date: November, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: Making a Region Understandable
Comment: As a relative newcomer to the Texas Plains-Panhandle region, I found The Texas Panhandle Frontier quite helpful in advancing my understanding of the forces that crafted its culture. Rathjen artfully begins with a geographic review of the llano flat lands and the canyons that splay out from them. He moves chronologically from the Paleo Indian cultures through the Spanish explorers, the Anglo-American scientist-explorers, the historic Indian cultures, the buffalo hunters, and finally, the U.S. military conquest. The Panhandle region was discovered by Europeans twice-first by Coronado and his followers from Spanish New Mexico and later by the Anglo scientists, such as James Abert and Randolph Marcy. Yet, the wearying sameness of the region, its extreme weather, and paucity of water intimidated settlers, leaving it open through the middle 19th century for the free run of semi-nomadic Comanches and other native groups.

Coming to this region from El Paso, I wondered why the Spanish influence was nearly absent from the Plains-Panhandle. Rathjen shows how the area today might have been oriented toward New Mexico if the Spanish explorers of the 16th and 17th centuries had seen the region as a place of settlement rather than as an expanse to be crossed in the search for gold. Ultimately in the 19th century, as more choice lands were claimed, the region attracted Texas cattlemen and ranchers who saw financial opportunity in the emptiness. Hence, the region today is oriented east to the heart of Texas and even north toward Dodge City, Kansas.

Rathjen suggests that the tough barren landscape drew settlers who were equally as tough. His book helps a reader to understand how an intense and often uncompromising Christian Bible-based culture took hold in an uncompromising region. The book also leads the outsider begrudgingly to admire this land and its relatively new residents, yet also to lament that its Native American peoples were not permitted to flourish and add a plurality to the region.

Rathjen deals sensitively with the various groups who crossed the land, crediting both the Indians and their Anglo adversaries with the intelligence and nobility of worthy opponents. In different ways each found a niche in a difficult land. He acknowledges the sometimes severe military tactics on both sides and also presents a dispassionate but sympathetic look at the buffalo slaughter of the late 1800s. Rathjen's prose is never overbearing, melodramatic, or intrusively opinionated. He allows readers to draw their own conclusions about the complex relationships between humans of different cultures, animals, and the environment that all must share.

The book is well written and engaged in its subject. Rathjen is to be commended for the way in which he periodically summarizes the chapters and draws meaningful conclusions. Passages like the following are especially insightful:

"Significantly the scientific exploration of the Texas Panhandle was exclusively financed and directed by the federal government and executed by its agents, and was in no way a function of state or private enterprise. Having occurred in a state that owned its public lands, this fact, in turn, suggests that the federal government was far more a factor in the development of the American West than has generally been supposed" (113).

The Texas Panhandle Frontier is a classic study of this region. It is an excellent companion to Walter Prescott Webb's The Great Plains, Dan Flores's Caprock Canyonlands, and Donald Worster's Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. Rathjen provides a highly readable history of a part of the West that is indelibly woven into our American heritage.