Texas Independence Day is the celebration of the adoption of the Texas Declaration of Independence on March 2, 1836. With this document signed by 59 delegates, settlers in Mexican Texas officially declared independence from Mexico and created the Republic of Texas.
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“To Texas ...
Joyous and sparkling,
Evergreen when it rains, enduring in drought,
Timeless, endless in boundaries, exciting,
Home to the adventurous of yesterday and today,
With shrines from the past, and space
and spirit for the future.
To Texas.
Everlasting in the hearts of your people!”
It was back in the 90's when, as editor of the Fort Stockton Pioneer, I was handed a letter from one of our readers, for publication in the next issue ... a letter admonishing our paper for not devoting adequate space to Texas Independence Day. She may have been Daughters of Republic of Texas (I honestly don't remember for certain), but she was certainly something of a Lone Star zealot ... an impression of mine that was reinforced by her comment as she handed me the letter ...
"You probably won't realize the importance of this, not being from around here."
Well, actually - I realized later, after I'd had time to think about it - I do, and so do a lot of dang-Yankees-from-back-east, such as myself. True, I am someone who - to borrow the old saying -
wasn't born in Texas, but got here as fast as I could. But the same could be said for such Lone Star luminaries as Stephen Austin, William Travis, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, Mirabeau Lamar and Sam Houston.
DON'T GET ME WRONG ... I do
NOT equate myself with them - even remotely! But it doesn't hurt to remember that, with the exception of Juan Seguin and his company of Tejanos, you'd be hard-pressed to find a 'native Texan' on the Texas side of the revolution.
The Keystone Stater in me would like to point out that there were an estimated 13 Pennsylvanians defending the walls of the Alamo, and offering up their lives for the revolution and the ideals it represented. And well they should. Because it was something that had been important to them, their parents and their grandparents for more than half-a-century.
Maybe that's what bugged me about the woman's remark ... the fact that, 'not being from around here,' I would be unable to understand what was being decided in the Texas revolution. To my mind, it was something that all free-thinking people know ..... or should know.
You see, it wasn't just men that came to Texas ..... the ideals adopted at Washington on the Brazos had been conceived many years before, in Philadelphia ..... and the determination to defend those ideals in Goliad and Gonzales, San Antonio and San Jacinto, had been inspired - again, many years before - by what took place at Bunker Hill and Valley Forge, Lexington, Concord and Cowpens.
And let's not forget the the material needed to pursue that defense came from all over the United States, from the decision by Alabama to strip its state arsenal of muskets and send them west, to the
Twin Sisters - a pair of canons donated by the 'People of Cincinnati, Ohio' and arriving just in time to blast a hole in the Mexicans' makeshift breastworks at San Jacinto.
And so, I lift my glass, and I will join the toast heard statewide today ..... but mine will be a private affair ... and while I may follow closely the words printed at the top of this post, I will deviate on one point, and replace the word 'Texas' with 'America' ...
God Bless It!
ONE MORE THING ... With that one exception back then, people of Texas have been warm and welcoming to me these past 36 years, with an occasional, good-natured jab at my northern origins. :-)
