J. Frank Dobie was of a generation of American historians who
wrote readable prose for a general audience. Bernard DeVoto and
Samuel Eliot Morison also come to mind. Though he spent much of his
life standing in front of classrooms, Dobie was not a historian in
an academic sense. He was more of an anecdotal folklorist. His
field of study was the Southwest, especially his beloved home state
of Texas. To this big subject Dobie devoted twenty-odd books.
The Lone Star State fascinates because of its multicultural
frontier history and sheer size. From the eastern pine woods to the
western deserts, and from the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico to the
buffalo plains of the Panhandle — Texas is a country in itself.
The river valleys (The Brazos, the Guadalupe, the Trinity, etc.)
draining into the Gulf were settled by Manifest Destiny-driven
Americans, and even German immigrants. From San Antonio south to
the Rio Grande the Spanish influence from Mexico prevailed. For two
centuries the bellicose mounted Comanches ruled the interior
plains. In 1836 there was the Alamo and the Battle of San Jacinto,
giving birth to the decade-long Republic of Texas. Then statehood
in 1845. The kingdom of cattle and the empire of oil. The legendary
Texas Rangers. Texas has had a more interesting history than many
sovereign nations.
Into this historical-cultural melting pot James Frank Dobie was
born in rural Live Oak County, Texas, on September 26, 1888. His
father Richard Dobie was a rancher. His mother Ella (Byler) Dobie
read the Bible and “Pilgrim’s Progress” to the writer as a child.
Dobie graduated from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas,
in 1910. He married Bertha McKee, a fellow student in 1916. He
served briefly in a U.S. Army field artillery unit in France at the
end of World War I.
Dobie’s first articles about the Southwest began to appear in
local newspapers and magazines in the early 1920s while he was an
English professor at the University of Texas (U.T.) at Austin, and
later during his tenure as English Department chairman at Oklahoma
A&M University. In 1929 Dobie published his first book, A
Vaquero of the Brush Country, a scholarly celebration of the
19th century open range Texas cattle culture. He followed it with
Coronado’s Children (1931), a popular history of tales of
“lost” mines in the Southwest, and those who sought them.
Dobie’s politics was a New Deal liberalism prevalent in the
'30s. He promoted it in a weekly Sunday column that appeared in a
number of Texas newspapers. He seemed to take his cue from H.L.
Mencken as he enthusiastically attacked Texas politicians (“When I
get ready to explain homemade fascism in America, I can take my
example from the state capitol of Texas”). He also fancied himself
an architecture critic, once describing the famed University Tower
on the UT campus as a landmark that “looked like a toothpick in a
pie.”
Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver appeared in 1939,
chronicling the southwest Indian Wars, and then The
Longhorns (1941), a more developed treatment of his first
book: “Man does everything best — or worst; and next to thunder
and lightning, nothing could put more terror into a herd of
man-fearing longhorns than Man himself…. Many a stampede was
started by some prank of boyish innocence. That’s one reason why
many trail bosses would not allow a boy along.” The Voice of
the Coyote howled in 1949. It’s a book best described as
“everything coyote,” an elaborate examination of Indian legends,
ranch folklore, and wildlife biology: “The coyote’s favorite food
is anything he can chew; it does not have to be digestible…. His
investigative nature demands not only seeing, hearing, smelling,
but often also chewing.”
Dobie spent World War II teaching American literature at
Cambridge, and out of that experience came A Texan in
England (1945). After the war there were teaching stints in
Germany and Austria. He was fired from the U.T. faculty in 1947
after tangling with the university regents and Governor Robert
“Coke” Stevenson while defending the liberal politics of certain
professors, including his own. Stevenson thought Dobie a
“troublemaker,” and the regents used his request for an extension
of his European sabbatical as an excuse to dismiss him. Dobie
turned his back on academia and devoted the rest of his life to
writing.
In 1952 Dobie published The Mustangs, his history of
the introduction of the horse to the New World and its
ramifications, and maybe his best book. This changed the
geopolitical makeup of the West as horses — through thievery and
trade — made their way north from Mexico in the 17th century. It
certainly benefitted the raiding and buffalo-chasing Comanches, who
used their newfound mobility to dominate the Southern Plains for a
hundred and fifty years. “The only reason, the Comanches boasted,
that they allowed Spaniards to remain in New Mexico, Texas and
northern Mexico was to raise horses for them.” Nineteen sixty-four
saw the publication of Cow People, a look at colorful
personalities related to Texas ranching history. In 1965,
Rattlesnakes, a quirky tome of stories and folklore about
Texas’ most well-known lethal pest. It was Dobie’s last book,
edited by his wife, and published posthumously.
In 1964 Dobie was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of
Freedom, awarded him by his fellow Texan, Lyndon Johnson. The
president and the writer had a long Texas history in common,
including a shared animus for Coke Stevenson. Oddly enough, Dobie
died four days later on September 18, 1964. He’s buried in the
State Cemetery, not far from the U.T. campus, a place he both loved
and hated.
