Plains Talker

Shambling through downtown streets like a man in plowed ground, leathery little Walter Prescott Webb looks every bit his part: a shrewd real estate trader in Austin. Texas. But Walter Webb, raised in the alkali flats of West Texas, schooled in the saddle, and for 40 years a professor at the University of Texas, is also his generation's foremost philosopher of the frontier, and the leading historian (The Great Plains, The Texas Rangers) of the American West. At 71, he has been made the hero of a sort of plainsman's festival of letters--a collection of his occasional essays (An Honest Preface; Houghton Mifflin; $3.75), trimmed with the personal tributes of his Texas friends. Says his old friend and cultural sparring partner, J. Frank Dobie, the famed Western folklorist (The Mustangs, The Voice of the Coyote): "Webb is one historian who never lets the evidence stand in the way of the truth--as he sees it."

Have Gun, Can Travel. In his inaugural address as president of the American Historical Association, included in An Honest Preface, Webb admits that "I am one of the few persons who did not have to leave home to get a job. I am an example of institutional inbreeding which frightens all universities except the two that practice it most. Harvard and Oxford."

As historian of the plains, Webb follows in the tradition of the great Frederick Jackson Turner, who first formulated the frontier theory of U.S. history in 1893: "The existence of an area of free land and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development." To write his history of the Texas Rangers, says Webb, "Like Parkman I went to all the places where things had happened," and finally "I stumbled on one of the few original ideas I ever had." The idea: "What I saw was that when Stephen F. Austin brought his colonists to Texas, he brought them to the edge of one environment, the Eastern woodland, and to the border of another environment, the Great Plains. The Texas Rangers were called into existence primarily to defend the settlements against Indians on horseback. While the conflict between the Rangers and the Comanches was at its height, Samuel Colt invented the revolver, the ideal weapon for a man on horseback."

In that flash of insight, says Webb, "I sensed that something very important happened when the American people emerged from the woodland, and the revolver [was] an adaptation to the needs of the new situation."

The Southern Century. As the years stiffen his knee joints, notes Dobie, Webb's "intellectual movements" become ever more "flexible and limber." Two years ago in a Harper's Magazine piece titled "The American West: Perpetual Mirage," Webb pointed out the "one overwhelming fact which 17 states have been trying to hide for the last century": "The heart of the West is a desert" both geographically and culturally.

Historian Webb sees the country's next frontier in the South. "Forget the misfortune and injustice of the past," he told the Texas Council for Social Studies last June. "If I could, I would convince the Southern people that their future is brighter than it has ever been in history. The South is the one region whose resources have been largely undeveloped and unexploited. It is not only possible but it is also probable that this next century will belong to the South."

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