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Now that the presidential campaigns are moving into high gear, with Texas in a leading role because its governor is the Republican nominee, we Westerners need to answer an enduring question: Is Texas in the South or in the West?
Granted, a lot of Texans wear pointy-toed boots and broad-brimmed Stetsons, just like county commissioner candidates in the rural West. Many Texans ride horses and raise cattle, just like our friends and neighbors. And vast stretches of the Lone Star State look just like the West -- the biggest trees are sagebrush, and it's so dry that the jackrabbits carry canteens and compasses.
But Texas is a big place, and in other places it boasts Dixie features like deciduous forests and cotton fields. Like the other southern states, it seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy during the Civil War. And in presidential politics, Texas and Mississippi have voted the same way in the past six elections; no Mountain West state matches Texas to that degree.
This political alignment may have been best demonstrated in 1976, when Democrat Jimmy Carter did not carry a single state in the Mountain West, but carried every southern state -- and Texas.
However, the Mountain West is growing ever more Republican, as is the South, so that distinction may no longer be relevant.
There is another one that might be, though. Unlike the Mountain West states, where substantial portions of the territory are owned by the federal government, Texas has hardly any public land.
In the Mountain West, federal land ownership ranges from 27.3 percent of Montana and 33.7 percent of New Mexico to 64.3 percent of Utah and 78.8 percent of Nevada -- mostly national forest and BLM land.
But only 1.2 percent of Texas is federal land, thanks to a quirk of history.
Remember the Alamo? That battle in 1836 was part of the Texas war for independence from Mexico. Jim Bowie and Davey Crockett lost to Santa Ana there, but a few weeks later, Sam Houston led the Texas army to triumph over the Mexican forces at San Jacinto.
Thus was born the Republic of Texas, an independent nation with its own army, navy and currency. Its foreign policy mainly consisted of finding a way to join the United States as quickly as possible, which happened in late 1844.
As an independent country, Texas had run up a lot of bills that hadn't been paid, and this was an embarrassment to the United States.
So in 1845, the U.S. Congress appropriated $5 million to pay some of the Texas debts, and the state government was allowed to keep title to all unappropriated lands within its borders, and use the proceeds from those lands to pay off the rest of the republic's old debts.
That isn't how it worked in states that came into the
union later, where the federal government kept those lands
except for the school sections
-- two square miles,
out of every 36-square-mile township, that were given to
the states for the support of public education.
So Texas isn't a public-land state, and its governor doesn't acquire much experience dealing with the Department of the Interior. No matter how shiny his cowboy boots are, Gov. Bush is from Texas, not the West.
He did name a running mate, Dick Cheney, who grew up in Wyoming -- 49.5 percent public land. Cheney has spent the past three decades in Washington and Texas, though, rather than trying to make a living in Natrona County.
Even so, one or both will visit the public-land West on
several occasions, suitably clad in cowboy garb, and
announce that a new Republican administration will put an
end to the Clinton-Gore-Babbitt War on the West.
They will also support multiple use
and oppose
locking up our public lands.
They will encourage
exploration to reduce our dependency on foreign sources of
energy and minerals,
and discourage elitist
preservation schemes that take away jobs from hard-working
Americans.
In other words, their talk will fit their costumes, and they'll look just like rural county commissioner candidates. It doesn't take all that much to be a Westerner, at least while the TV cameras are running.
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