Real places telling real stories, notes and possibly rants, from museums I visited recently...

"Real Places telling real stories"...  It is the motto of the Texas Historical Commission... You can look it up at www.thc.state.tx.us ...  I discovered this on a recent road trip across Texas...

It's a noble goal... I think the AASLH (American Association for State and Local History) would approve... they would probably extend said motto to "Real places and things telling real stories"... But even without adding the "and things" I think rational people, would expect any authentic site might include real things.

In light of the above, stated goal, I have to question a sign I found In the Lantry Opera house, Judge Roy Bean's home... Just up the hill behind the Jersey Lilly, his saloon and courthouse.  We stopped in Lantry Texas on said road trip...

Langtry Texas is a long way from anywhere... it is a mile off Hwy 90, which is itself a long way off I-10, the interstate...  The railroad once passed through Langtry, as did an earlier version of Hwy 90, but both have relocated away from town... Leaving the town to die...

The Texas Department of Transportation has put a Travel Information Center in Langtry, "An oasis of information for travelers" as well as to maintain and interpret The Judge Roy Bean Historical site...   (note, Department of Transportation, not Historical Commission, but both are Texas agencies, and hopefully are sharing notes…), I suspect they (the Department of Transportation) opened the center out of guilt, and to appease the locals after abandoning the town...

So, back to Langtry and its Travel Information Center...  The center is housed in a very nice building with very nice clean restrooms... The lobby has a counter with a guest book and a very nice lady, eager to hand out Texas travel guides and maps ( we had received ours in the mail before leaving home, Texas wants you to have travel information... It is important)   She also offered "Don't Mess With Texas" stickers... There were racks and racks of brochures for sites, activities, places to stay...  Further back were well thought out historic displays, display cases with artifacts from the site and interactive panels (sadly, many of the interactive features were broken)

Out back, outside stood the two historic buildings... The Jersey Lilly and the Opera House... Both are real historic building, on their original site (signs tell us so)...  So appear to meet the criteria from the Historical Commission’s motto ("Real places telling real stories", in case you have forgotten).

Then, the story starts to get lost...  Yes, the Jersey Lilly is a building built by Judge Roy Bean, but it is a smaller later Jersey Lilly, built to replace the original which burned in 1896...  Inside, we find a counter serving as a bar, a few dusty  bottles on a shelf behind, a table and two chairs and a sign...  

Original Jersey Lilly

You are now in the original Jersey Lilly saloon.

On this exact site and in this very building

Judge Roy Bean dispensed hard liquor and

harsh justice, all part of his Law West of

The Pecos.

Texas Department of Transportation

This brings to mind the Mascot Saloon in Skagway Alaska, now part of the Klondike Gold Rush visitor center, where they will interpret what a beer tastes like, but don’t serve beer… here in the Jersey Lilly, a famous bar, the Texas Highway Department does neither…   In the Billiard room instead of a Billiard table, we find two and a half of the legs from the Judges billiard table, in a pile in the middle of the room, and a sign telling us so...  The building is apparently original, but feels more like a movie set.

Up the hill stands the Opera House, not a real opera house, but instead, the Judge's home... He called it the opera house, so we are not questioning what it is called, but instead, how it is presented.  Inside is a bed and a stove and another sign reading in part...  "... This cast-iron wood-burning stove and its smoke stack stand in the exact location as did Judge Roy Bean’s stove, when he called the Opera House “home.” Both pieces are near replicas of the ones used in Texas during the 19^th century. ". (The italics are mine…) The sign is almost apologetic in tone...  (it reads like it was written by some sad low level staffer from the historic commission, sad because of the poor artifacts and limited interpretive vision he or she was forced to work with)  And, I believe sadly misguided in its honesty... This is Judge Roy Bean's bedroom, and I don't want to see "typical"... I want either see authentic, or have whiskey bottles rolling around on the floor and a shotgun standing in the corner.  They have saved the (real) buildings, they open them to the public, but little in their interpretation of the place speaks to the judge or his legend, and only peripherally about life west of the Pecos....

In some ways think they should have been showing clips from the movie, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, staring Paul Newman....  while not accurate, would at least spoken to the legend which is the judge.  Instead, I left with the story of a town, abandoned by the railway and highway, left to die, only kept alive by the IV drip which is the Texas Department of Highways Tourist Information Center...   I think the story, the legend of the Judge was here, just untold... I learned some things about him, but I had to work for it...  It felt as if they were afraid to celebrate their somewhat unconventional history.

Later the same day, the Ladies and I were in San Antonio...  Home of The Alamo... Little remains of the original... Just the iconic mission church, a portion of one of the barracks, and a few likely reconstructed walls.  The iconic church is much changed from its appearance during the battle... The site is run by a non-profit group, Daughters of the Republic of Texas, Inc. … the Daughters clearly have a passionate point of view…  Unfortunatly, that point of view is not based on history, but instead on hero worship.

Even before the fighting, the church building was a ruble filled ruin.  It's arched front facade, incomplete... Most of the fighting took place in the mostly missing barracks and now developed courtyard.  By my reckoning, the site of the long barracks, where some of the fearsest hand to hand fighting took place, where many of the 186 men died, is now occupied by Ripley's Believe it or Not...  At a different battle field, from a different war, Lincoln spoke of ground consecrated by the blood of the brave men who fought there...  I guess that didn’t work out here.

Today, the ruble is missing, the church has a roof, and on the Daughter’s web site, is called The Shrine, nearby,  a former fire station, which would have stood just feet outside the wall is now a part of the complex, used as a gift shop...  Within the church, aka The Shrine,  the message is hero worship, with brass plaques with the names of the men who died defending this place and the many flags of Texas displayed... In a sense, it is still a place of worship, not a church, but instead worshiping the memory of the State of Texas, and 187 or so men who died here.  The image of church as historic shrine is not an accident... Men are told to remove their hats upon entering...

Strangely, while we were there, and informal visual survey suggested that nearly half the visitors were of Hispanic ancestry… arguably their ancestors were on the “wrong” side… but they were here to worship the Texas heroes, heads bared with the rest of us…

There are Interpretive panels in the surviving barracks building.  There are artifacts in cases in the gift shop...  The interpretive panels while pretty well done seem removed, almost an afterthought... The artifacts in the gift shop are overwhelmed by Alamo and Texas themed retail opportunities... Within the gift shop display cases, the labels are faded, dated, and in some cases missing...  One pistol had broken free of its mount, and had slipped to the bottom of the case.  The staff are consumed with guarding the place, selling audio tours, taking souvenir photos, selling T-shirts, anything but discussing what happened here.  I found a single docent, likely a volunteer, standing by a model of the buildings as they were during the battle, explaining how the battle progressed... He had a crowd around as he answered questions...  The stories he told were compelling… real… and sadly, unique within the site.

I came away from the Alamo with little knowledge of what really happened there...

A couple of years ago, on a previous cross country road trip, Steph and I and on that trip, Kelly, visited the Custer Battlefield... Site of the equally iconic Custer's Last Stand...  Like the men of the Alamo, Custer and his company was wiped out.  Of course, Custer was the aggressor, the men of the Alamo, the defenders... Custer and his men did not know they were riding into a valley of death... The men of the Alamo knew they were likely to become martyrs for their cause, much as the Spartan warriors of Thermopile, buying time for Greece. 

In any account, at the Custer battlefield, complete with its military cemetery, and white marble markers where each cavalry man fell, (and more recently with red granite to show where Indians fell) they have chose to tell the story of the battle, increasingly from both sides, how it progressed, causes, outcomes...

The Custer site could easily be turned into a monument, even a shrine to the US cavalry and the taming of the (wild) west (and in the past probably was), or to rant against the injustices suffered by the plains Indians (of which there were many).  Instead, they have used the place to tell the story about what happened here.  Causes, effects, greater outcomes are acknowledged, discussed, but the story told is about the place...

Now, on this road trip, I visited two sites, glad that I did, but sad at what I found, and how we remember our history, and tell its stories...