https://publications-prairial.fr/representations/index.php?id=1759 Entrées d’index fr 0 https://publications-prairial.fr/representations/index.php?id=1750 In this essay, Gregg Cantrell examines the leader of one of the great migrations of American history: Stephen F. Austin, who spearheaded Anglo-American immigration into Mexican Texas in the 1820s and 1830s. Granted permission in 1821 to bring three hundred American families into the sparsely settled northern Mexican province, Austin made Texas colonization his life’s work. “My ambition”, he wrote, “has been to succeed in redeeming Texas from its wilderness state by means of the plough alone, in spreading over it North American population enterprise and intelligence. In doing this I hoped to make the fortune of thousands and my own amongst the rest”. His statement hints at mixed motives. On one hand, “redeeming Texas from its wilderness state” seems to carry an idealistic vision of civilization conquering barbarism, with the verb “redeeming” carrying quasi-religious overtones. On the other hand, making his “fortune” clearly loomed large in Austin’s calculations. Stephen F. Austin’s case has much to teach us about the complex role that imagination and idealism played in the expansion of the United States into the Spanish/Mexican Southwest. Modern borderlands historians have tended to emphasize the sordid pecuniary motives of the Americans who conquered the West. A nuanced view, however, of “pioneers” like Austin reveals that both idealism and pragmatic concerns figured into the settlement of the American West. As the novelist Larry McMurtry aptly put it, “Explorers and pioneers of all stamps needed imagination, much as athletes need carbohydrates”. sam., 20 déc. 2025 16:34:59 +0100 mar., 20 janv. 2026 15:24:15 +0100 https://publications-prairial.fr/representations/index.php?id=1750