Life on the Texas Frontier

Most Anglo-American farmers grew corn and cotton, herded a few sheep, hogs and cattle, but the Germans Texans established thriving dairies and poultry farms, even experimenting with types of wheat.

The free and easy pioneers of eastern Texas abandoned their lands, exhausted by cotton, and moved to the richer west Texas lands.  Mile after mile of abandoned plantations in Houston County were common.  The "lazy poverty" of eastern Texas wrote one observer, describing encounters with settlers who left their work to a few slaves and lived in drafty, ill constructed cabins, subsisting on diets of rancid bacon, bitter coffee, and cornbread.

Corn was indispensable in the conquest of Texas - nourishing men and livestock.  It grew almost untended in the virgin lands from the Red River to the Gulf of Mexico. 

The Texan settler's dwelling varied according to materials on hand.  In east Texas, timber was abundant and houses were one room cabins.  In the woodless central region, adobe or stone was typical.  The poorest settlers had "picket huts" consisting of stakes driven into the ground to form walls, chinked with moss and mud with the roof of leaves or grass. 

The more affluent settlers became the grander the house, clapboard or brick houses with marble fireplaces, carpet, mahogany or walnut furniture.  Only in the dining room could a visitor see the irony - tableware of bowie knives and sugarcane stalk forks, gourd drinking cups and tin plates.  In the dining room all settlers became equal.

By 1850 Houston, San Antonio and Galveston all boasted more than 1000 residents.  Town dwellings were raw wood frame houses on dusty roads in summer and mud bogs in the winter.  The chief wagon roads from town to town were just cow tracks.

Life in the early days of the Texas republic was rugged and lonely, even dangerous and disappointing.  Violent weather, shaky economy, yellow fever and cholera, and the always present Mexicans and Indians to make things uneasy.  To those who survived  they became a proud, independent-minded breed of American pioneer.

Next time...more Clashes with Mexico
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Today in Pioneer History: On November 3, 1964, D.C residents cast their first presidential vote.  The 23rd amendment gave citizens of the nation's capital the right to vote for commander-in-chief and vice president.