Anglo-Texan Adventurism and Manliness

During the periods of revolution and republic, thousands of U.S. citizens immigrated to Texas with hopes of making or re-making their fortunes. The booms and busts of the marketplace, racial chauvinism, or a sense of an American mission compelled them to cross over the Sabine with ambitions to prosper within the borderlands economy, or they brought their families and slaves to settle, farm, and establish communities. Among them, however, a conspicuous number joined the movement in a quest for adventure. This group of mostly young men certainly felt the same economic pressures and shared in their contemporaries’ chauvinism and mission, yet they based their choices upon desires, capricious and irrational. Adventurism, nevertheless, represented a significant cultural moment in the early nineteenth century, and their Texas experience revealed that motivations driven by emotion and whim operated as powerfully and pervasively as socio-economic imperatives

Sam W. Haynes and Cary D. Wintz, eds.,
Major Problems in Texas History
(Second Edition. Boston: Cengage, 2016), 210-215

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