Bob Bullock Museum

I'm no stranger to the Bob Bullock Museum here in Austin.  In fact, just like the hordes of kids running around last tuesday when we visited, I too wandered the exhibits as a school trip to look at all the mannequins and reach out to touch anything labelled "PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH."  What can I say?  Kids will be kids.  But now that I've returned and actually taken the time to read the displays and examine the artifacts, I feel a resurgence in my interest in Texan history.

A floor mural of the diversity of Texan history.
Photo by me.

I mean, we are a state very proud to have once been called an independent nation.  But I'm jumping ahead of myself.  The exhibits starts with the entrance of the European and in my opinion it says something about our current culture.  In all truth, there were humans in Texas long before the Spanish Conquistadores but we always tend to marginalize their history.  I understand part of it is due to the way they recorded history so we have less direct knowledge.  But I think there's also a tendency to over-emphasize the culture of the Spanish, French, and English who later arrived on Texan shores.  However, the Bob Bullock Museum does a good job of explaining the drastic changes which occurred with the arrival of the Europeans.  In some ways, Native American life was improved by the changes like the introduction of the horse.  They also enjoyed a relatively fair trade with the French who were not so much colonialists as backwoodsmen.  But, according to one of the educational videos playing on the first floor,"by 1790, about 2,800 hardy Spanish settlers called Tejas home."

Personally, I tend to enjoy the parts of history displayed on the second floor a little bit more.  I hate to say it but war is a more interesting topic that simply settlement of the land.  And the second floor of the Bullock history museum covers the whole of the Texan revolution.  From the early shots out of the "Come and Take It" cannon through the 18 minute battle of San Jacinto.  Nothing like some video clips of re-inacted battles to catch the attention of museum-goers.  However, on the same floor it goes on to display some other interesting changes in the grand ol' state.  For one, I had no idea the nursing school in Galveston was founded in 1890.  And it was around this same time that Texas began to gain an influx of some rather unusual cultures.  Russians, Swiss, Czechs, Scots, and Italians all immigrated to this state and settled in to call it home.  When I read this, I was reminded of Fredericksburg and the very German history of the town.  We tend to think of Texas as just cowboys, dustbowls, and oil.  But there's really a lot more to the story than just the traditional myths.

The quaint town of Fredericksburg.
http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/ed19/d644a/

In fact, Texas has a varied economic basis.  According to the monopoly-like Q&A on the ground of the third floor, Texas exports shrimp, cotton, textiles, rice, oil, sugar cane, pine, citrus, cinnabar, and angora sheep wool.  While we might have been a predominantly cotton based industry in the 1800s, the discovery of oil propelled Texas towards a more industrial-based economy instead of soley relying on agriculture.

And (my personal favorite part of the third floor) as WWII enveloped the nation, Texas became a prime training ground for fighter pilots.  Even women were allowed to enter the air as either WASP or test pilots for new aircraft.  It was a changing socio-political scene which helped with the gender equality battles that were to be fought afterwards.

Female pilots helped pioneer the way into the sky during WWII.
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/images/story/FemalePilots.jpg

So, while I wasn't the sugar-crazed primary school student running from picture to picture this time around, some of my childish amazement remains.  We are a state of immigrants and natives, of agriculturalists and industrialists, of religious conviction and technological advancements.  And no museum can really hold all of the interesting facts there are about Texas, though the Bob Bullock makes a worthy attempt.  And next time I travel to another city like San Antonio or Dallas or even Fredericksburg, I'll be reminded of the diversity which makes up the whole.