September 4, 2003

Plains Folk: Austin

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

The waters pouring into Barton Creek at Barton Springs, 27 million gallons a day at 68 F., are no mystery. Rain falls on the Edwards Plateau, it enters the Edwards Aquifer via limestone passages, and it emerges where the creek crosses the Balcones Fault. Simple hydraulics. No mystery, but nevertheless a good metaphor, for it is at this place on the southern plains, at Austin, Texas, where much of what we think about the Great Plains of North America percolated into our thought.

When I was in college at Bethany College, in Lindsborg, Kan., our main text for the study of the American West was The Great Plains, by Walter Prescott Webb. Currently, as I teach my course on "The North American Plains" at North Dakota State University, my students are reading the same work (or at least I hope they are). It has been in print continuously since original publication in 1931.

Alongside Barton Springs stands a remarkable bronze statue called The Three Friends. It depicts the historian Webb wrapped in friendly argumentation with his two comrades, the folklorist J. Frank Dobie and the naturalist Roy Bedichek. Dobie and Bedichek swam, whereas Webb merely rolled up his trousers and waded. Their rendezvous point here, which they called Bedi’s Rock, is reproduced in the monument.

The idea that percolated from the plains through Webb’s pen into The Great Plains was adaptation to environment. It was the proposition that in this part of the country, environment plays an unusually prominent role in human culture. It shapes institutions, technologies, habits and speech. Since Webb’s ideas are known from Texas to Alberta, I thought it would be interesting to investigate his local environment in Austin. This proved easy with the help of a native guide, my friend Chuck Nowland, a distinguished teacher in the Austin public schools.

At 609 West 9th Street is the Boardman-Webb House, home of the historian. We were fortunate that the business people currently occupying the place let us in for a cook’s tour. I don’t put much stock in the ghost stories, but to ascend the central stairway to Webb’s study stirred something in me.

Still more impressive was a visit to Dobie’s house, just across the street from the University of Texas, which fired him from the faculty. It is now the university’s Michener Center for Writers. We went upstairs to Dobie’s library, where he wrote, and I spent a few minutes in what the staff call the "Death Alcove." It’s a little windowed alcove off the library where every afternoon Dobie lay down for a siesta. One afternoon he didn’t get back up. I like to think he passed away looking out at the old cedar elm under which he and Bedi and Webb and sometimes the folksong collector Carl Sandburg passed hours and days in discussion.

We located the graves of Webb and Dobie at the Texas State Cemetery. Below them lie the ranks of white markers on the graves of Confederate dead; above them spires the Stephen Austin monument. Alongside Webb lies Fred Gipson, who you may know as the author of Old Yeller. Dobie’s gravestone makes note of his Presidential Medal of Freedom and bears the legend, "I have come to value liberated minds as the supreme good of life on earth."

We heard, too, the story of the fund-raising banquet for the Three Friends statue. It seems that Tommy Lee Jones and Rip Torn and another celebrity each was to read a tribute to one of the scholars depicted in the statue. The third reader did not show. Jones was gracious and eloquent in reading two tributes, but Torn, unfortunately, seemed impaired and, droning on interminably, emptied the hall.

Which is why, as always, as the counter reaches 500 words, I’m going to quit now.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

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