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Former TSHA President Jerry Thompson is dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at Texas A&M International University
at Laredo and serves on the editorial advisory board for the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. He is the author of the TSHA publications Fifty Miles and a Fight: Major Samuel Peter Heintzelman's Journal of Texas and the Cortina War and A Wild and Vivid Land: An Illustrated History of the South Texas Border. We asked Jerry to discuss what inspired him to study and write about history.
My introduction to history came early in life. I was only four when a smiling stranger appeared at our home in the mountains
of western New Mexico. The newcomer suddenly burst into the living room and to my amazement, excitedly lifted me in the air.
Standing there in front of the fireplace, he was dressed in a dark green uniform with medals on his chest and stripes on his
shoulders. It was the early spring of 1946 and my father had come home from the war, from the clash of mighty armies that
was the Battle of the Bulge, the frozen feet and mangled bodies of the turned Hurtgen Forest, and the race across the Rhine
at a place called Remagen that doomed the once invincible Third Reich. He was part of what would later be called America’s
“greatest generation.”
Fleeing the poverty of the West Texas Dust Bowl in 1932, my grandfather had taken the family west in a Model T with their
meager belongings and a coop of chickens tied to the roof. The family had settled in one of the last places in the stricken
country where it was still possible to homestead--Catron County, New Mexico. Surviving on vegetables from a small garden,
poached venison, bean pies, the few dollars my grandfather made while working for the PWA, sweat, perseverance, and a meager
World War I pension, the family lived through the remaining days of the Depression in a small and leaky two-room log cabin
far from the halls of Washington and the programs of the New Deal that shaped their lives.
After the war, I rode a bus over a dirt and rutted road for a simple education at a place called Pie Town. Pie Town was a
small village in a ponderosa and piñon pine forest in the middle of nowhere atop the Continental Divide. It was the same Pie
Town that Russell Lee of the Farm Securities Administration had come to in May 1940 to make his poignant images of the “Okies”
turned homesteaders. In a moment of reflection and boredom I once calculated that I rode the bus close to 150,000 miles (70
miles each day) to acquire that education at Pie Town Elementary School. Many years later, while arguing over politics with
a colleague, my friend angrily proclaimed, “Do you realize I have a Ph. D. from Harvard?” The only thing I could think of
to say at the time was, “Do you realize I graduated from Pie Town Elementary School?” A lot more people graduated from Harvard,
I was sure, than Pie Town Elementary School.
After proudly graduating in a class of five at Pie Town, I went on to high school in Quemado, where I graduated in a class
of six. Catron County, the largest county in New Mexico with the fewest people, only had two high schools and it was either
go to Quemado or nowhere. Quemado was just as remote and isolated as Pie Town. In fact, I did not know how to use a telephone
until I was already in college and I will always remember the day the REA turned the lights on in our house.
I spent four years in high school fooling around, playing basketball, more basketball, and learning very little. In my junior
year, however, a seemingly insignificant event turned out to be quite important. My mother, part Cherokee and an orphan who
had fled the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to marry my father in New Mexico, purchased two small hardback books as a birthday gift. They
were reprints of fascinating letters and documents from the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion of the Civil War in New Mexico Territory. Later, when I obtained a $200-a-year scholarship to attend New Mexico Tech at Socorro, I took every opportunity to walk
the arid and desolate battlefield of Valverde and the crumbling rock and adobe ruins of Fort Craig. Here the Civil War came
alive as it did in the lectures of Page Christensen at New Mexico Tech.
At the University of New Mexico, Donald Cutter guided me through a thesis on the life of John Robert Baylor, a high-stepping,
egotistical, Indian fighter and Confederate colonel from Texas. Dr. Cutter’s seminars on the history of the Southwest and
the trans-Mississippi were magical places of inspiration and never-ending wisdom. In a class one evening, a pipe-smoking,
big-cheese Ph. D. candidate from San Antonio named Félix Almaráz Jr. astounded everyone by proclaiming that he had published
a “book.” Another of Cutter’s hard-working students introduced himself as David Weber.
Later yet, after Uncle Sam and the Marine Corps had intervened, I was off to Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
There Irving H. Bartlett, biographer of Daniel Webster, Wendell Phillips, and John C. Calhoun, patiently and skillfully guided
me through a dissertation on the career of Brig. Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley, who had led the grandiose and ill-fated 1861-1862
New Mexico disaster.
My desire to teach history later took me away from the verdant and pine-shrouded mountains, squeaky windmills, and vast vistas
of my childhood to the border at Laredo. Here, in this “wild and vivid land,” the Civil War again came alive with Santos Benavides,
Adrian J. Vidal, Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, and all the Tejanos who fought and died for the blue and the gray. There was also
Maj. Samuel Peter Heintzelman and the rough-and-tumble world of border politics. But it all began with my mother, who had
the foresight to purchase a couple of small books for someone she thought might amount to something someday.-- Jerry Thompson
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