https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/is-texas-southern-western-or-truly-a-lone-star/
Is Texas Southern, Western, or Truly a Lone Star?
By John Nova Lomax
Mar 3, 2015
Its that time of year again, that time when old-school, mainly Anglo Texans celebrate, commemorateand in some extreme casesreenact the fall of the Alamo, the massacre at Goliad, and the decisive victory at San Jacinto. William Barrett Traviss letter from the Alamo is dusted off and forwarded around the Internet, along with Davy Crocketts zinger about where you all could go (Hell) and where he was going (Texas).
Meanwhile, here in Houston, Go Texan Day has just come and gone, which found office workers nervously hoping that they could still squeeze into last years gingham dress or tight-fittin Wranglers, and schoolkids of every race, color, and creed clomping around their school halls in cowboy boots most will never wear again. Roads normally clogged with motorized traffic were instead all a-clop with the hooves of hundreds of horses, as the spur-janglin trail riders and trundling chuckwagons finally arrived at their Memorial Park campsite after many miles of hard riding on paved roads. Go Texan Day kicks off the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, twenty days and nights of cattle auctions, bull-riding and barrel-racing, and (mostly) country music concerts, all in honor of Houstons venerable heritage as one of the Americas great Western cowtowns.
The trouble is, the whole thing is built on a big fat piece of historical fiction. Houston was never a cowtown, at least not in any meaningful sense, and it never even pretended to be for the first century of its existence. The same goes for Dallas, which, while only 32 miles from Fort Worth, the real Cowtown, and situated on the very edge of what we have come to see as the American West, was always, like Houston, much more about cotton than cattleat least until Spindletop blew in.
The same went for the entire state of Texas east of what is now Interstate 35, which was where the vast majority of the people lived and was every much a part of the King Cotton economy as Alabama or Mississippi. Counties were named in honor of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, John C. Calhoun, Stonewall Jackson, and John Bell Hood. Most towns of any size sported a prominent monument to its Confederate dead, and up until the early twentieth century, Dallasites and Houstonians saw themselves as just as Southern as Memphians or New Orleanians.
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I'd say East of I-35 is Southern.
