Davy Crockett went to Texas after he lost his seat in Congress. "You can go to hell," he told his political enemies. "I'm going to Texas."
That decision didn't work out so well for Davy. He was killed in the Alamo by Santa Anna's army.
Despite Davy Crockett's bad luck, many Americans are heeding his advice and moving to Texas. Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and Tesla are three corporate giants relocating to Texas from California, and thousands of individual Californians are making the same move.
I think they are making the right decision. Many people have migrated to Texas since the day the Alamo fell, and most of them have prospered. I am one of those people. I went to Texas as a young man and graduated with honors from the University of Texas Law School in 1980. Forty years later, it is still my proudest professional achievement.
Even as a child growing up in Oklahoma, I knew that Texas was different from the rest of the United States. My family occasionally visited my Aunt Ann and Uncle Grady, who lived in Borger, Texas, in the bleak Texas panhandle. As we crossed the Texas border on old Route 66 in our 1958 Chevy, I would see that Lone Star flag snapping in the Texas breeze, and I knew things were better on the Texas side of the border.
What does Texas have that the rest of America doesn't? I think it is a distinct heritage that Texans remember on at least a subliminal level--a legacy of courage, risk-taking, and supreme self-confidence.
Texas, after all, is the only state to have once been an independent nation. For ten years--from 1836 until 1846--Texas was on its own, and it organized its own defense against the marauding Comanches--the world's finest and most ruthless light cavalry.
Ed Bruce perfectly expresses my sentiments about the Lone Star state:
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| Shiner: "The beer your mother would want you to drink if she knew you were drinking." |
