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It was in the isolated setting of ranch life that I developed a love for history. I was born in Hidalgo County and raised
at the McAllen Ranch in deep South Texas. The ranch, a part of the Santa Anita land grant awarded to my Ballí ancestors in
1790, was in many ways caught in another era; though my McAllen grandparents--who came to live there in the 1930s--made improvements,
they maintained the buildings and wells their forebears had built a century and a half earlier. As I was the oldest of five
children, my grandparents on both sides, one in ranching, the other in oil and gas drilling, took me with them frequently,
be it to drive and work cattle, learn crafts and cooking in the home, or learn about oilfields. My mother encouraged the adventures.
My ranching grandfather Argyle and father, James, would take me out all day on horseback to work with them, along the way
teaching me about wildlife, cattle and the native plants and then testing me to see if I was paying attention. My grandfather
would stop sometimes and ask me to pick leaves or berries off a tree, to smell or taste them. I can never forget the time
he told me to chew a sprig of palo de muela, which deadens the mouth and was used by older generations for toothaches. He showed me how he made fences; these were his
works of art. Along our drives, my father stopped to examine old campsites of people that had crossed there before us. The
Indian scrapers and the Civil War relics that included bits of tableware, scissors, toys, and thimbles, captured my active
imagination. Adding to the mystery were the tales that came from the local vaqueros who would tell of buried treasure and glowing lights in the brush. I loved and continue to love that land which witnessed
so much.
The lessons continued with the camp cook Emilio Bautista coming out to meet us mid-day wherever we were working. He taught
me about cooking barbacoa and of course, the standard fares of guisados, sopas, and pan de campo. My grandmother, Margaret, carried that further in teaching me recipes from the ranchland, including medicinal remedies that
she later incorporated into an historical cookbook. When we were very young, she taught us embroidery and other needlecrafts,
encouraging us to always have a project. As I grew older, she began to share her love of history, showing me documents she
had organized or collected.
While this education went on at the ranch, I attended the public and Catholic schools in Edinburg. Between the basics, sports,
and the catechism taught by the nuns, the teaching of history seemed almost an afterthought. In seventh and eleventh grades,
it was our physical education teachers who taught history, and in a mechanical, textbook way. In those airless environments,
I could not wait until the bell rang. In retrospect, I still fault them for the crime of boring the students to death. The
only educators who taught historical research were my English teachers who loved the past, anthropology, and philosophy. They
believed in doing what T. R. Fehrenbach once told me: tell history as a narrative, tell a good story.
While a student at the University of Texas, I worked at the Texas State Historical Association in 1984 and 1985 with Tom
Cutrer, Tuffly Ellis, and Roy Barkley. The main thrust of work was the gathering of information for the New Handbook of Texas. They sent me on daily missions into the stacks of the Barker Center (now the Center for American History) to unearth random
and obscure details for fact checking. Every day was different and I learned to enjoy finding the needle in a haystack, another
puzzle piece.
In the early 1990s, my grandmother, Margaret H. McAllen, a member of the TSHA, the Texas Historical Commission, and founder
of the Hidalgo County Historical Museum, came to the sad realization that her health was failing quickly. She asked me to
finish a project she had begun in the late 1970s covering the history of South Texas using the archival materials of our ancestors
who had owned the Santa Anita land grant--the Gómez, Dominguez, Ballí, and McAllen families--and assimilate them into a story.
Moreover, my father, James, had been assembling a chronology of various characters in order to help her visualize a stream
of events. As details came to light, she would parcel ideas and print them for me to review.
After her death in 1995, I did not know what I was in for, but had some ideas. I knew that these family materials had to
be set into context, and the larger history had to be told, especially of Brownsville and Matamoros. The first day in the
family archive, I looked around the rows of gray archival boxes, books and albums of letters and did not know where to start,
except at the beginning, 1748. I discovered what Margaret had so expertly organized and collected in the way of rare documents
and books, some of which hit me on the head, literally, as I rummaged around. New documents came to hand, at the National
Archives, private archives, at Columbia University and Harvard, those collected by my father and myself. Old families of Brownsville--King,
Kenedy, Young, Yturria, Stillman--four generations later assisted me or allowed me into their archives.
Using these sources in addition to family records going back to the colonial period brought to life the varied epics of Valley
history--cowboys and cattle, the Civil War and its cotton trade, steamships on the Rio Grande, political intrigue and revolution.
John McAllen wrote vividly, spelling phonetically, bringing startling clarity to Reconstruction and the region’s volatile
politics in the voice of his Irish brogue. With the deft guidance of Jerry Thompson, much of the raw firsthand information
was able to stand on its own, further putting the reader in another world.
My husband Chris helped me to see matters as a layman, and even found the quotation from John McAllen that served as the
book’s title. Most of the book was written before the birth of my twin girls and my son. I wrote as I could snatch time, which
seemed to be evaporating quickly as they grew older. After seven years, my father and I completed I Would Rather Sleep in Texas: A History of the Lower Rio Grande Valley and the Santa Anita Land Grant and it has just come out. We hope that people use this comprehensive study and glossary of ranching terms to help them enjoy
the history of South Texas, and assist other writers, even those who write fiction or just like to dream about the past.
--Mary Margaret McAllen Amberson
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