Texas by James Michener – What Works, What Doesn’t

I’ve long been a fan of historical fiction but really read mostly the traditional stuff – you know…mostly European history, dealing with the Tudor era, the French Revolution, Regency England, and similar periods.

But, of late, that’s begun to pall…so much so, that I didn’t even bother picking up Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel, a book I would have pounced on a few years ago.

However, enough rambling and on to the book.

Texas by James Michener is one of those massive tomes packed full of the history of Texas, spanning from the days of the early Mexican settlers to the oil and real estate boom of the 20th century.

Now, I know next to nothing about American history – just the little bits and pieces I picked up from college history classes and Gone With the Wind 🥴. So, reading Texas was quite an education for me.

The novel starts with a fictional “Task Force” of modern-day Texans chosen by the Governor to review Texas’ history education for the school system. From there, it delves into the history of Texas. The epic that follows is typical of James Michener’s novels, spanning more than a thousand gripping pages, with each page more gripping than the last. OK, ok, so not everything was gripping. The beginning starts off really slowly. Texas (or Tejas), as it was known then, was largely an empty wasteland with just a few Indian tribes living there. It was slowly discovered by the Mexicans who visited the place in search of a mythical city of gold, and failing to find that, they attempted to “civilize” the local Indians into a Christian way of life.

These early sections are quite slow-moving. It’s only once other settlers enter that conflicts start. Mexicans, Indians, Europeans, and Americans struggle to carve out an existence on the land.

These conflicts form the most interesting part of the book. The story of how Texas managed to gain autonomy from Mexico, become an independent country (I never knew Texas was actually a country once), and then merge into the USA is a thrilling, violent, and sometimes sad tale. And it’s the meat of the book, really.

Other conflicts over North/South loyalties, the question of slavery, and the fight against the Comanche Indians are also covered in this book.

Everything was very interesting, until we came to the 20th century. The discovery of oil and the real estate boom and bust story were pretty stereotypical and not very interesting at all. I suppose at this point, I was ready for the book to end, but unfortunately, it wasn’t over yet.I pretty much ran out of steam around 300 pages from the end and ended up speed-reading it without much interest.

The only interesting aspect of this section was the manner in which the elections were conducted. The book openly states that most votes from the South Texas border area were bought, and that both Republicans and Democrats engaged in all sorts of election chicanery.

Hmm! I thought that sort of thing only happened in India. Interesting to see that this isn’t just a third-world problem ,as I had previously thought. Of course, with all the computerization, this kind of fraud is probably a lot less prevalent now.

All in all, a very interesting and informative book. It could have been improved with more rigorous editing at the beginning and the end, but I liked it overall. It really helped me to gain some insight into the place, its geography, and the nature of the people.

I definitely know that if/when I visit Texas, I won’t be an ignorant tourist.