Leaving Fort Worth, Texas, heading west on Highway 287, drivers will see a sign that reads, "Amarillo 303." Where I grew up, in Michigan, there were no signs that read "303 miles" to anywhere. We could reach Kentucky to the South or Canada to the North in fewer miles. Like many Midwestern families, mine believed that a 100-mile drive into northern Michigan was far enough for a week-long vacation, maybe two weeks if General Motors had been generous that year. In Texas, however, everything is big, especially distance. All of New England can fit comfortably in the Texas panhandle—although no New Englander would actually feel comfortable there—and there is room enough for Pennsylvania in Central Texas, even if Philadelphians would struggle a bit with the accent.

Louis Fairchild wants us to think about how the distance and emptiness of west Texas roughly a century ago contributed to a deep sense of loneliness. In The Lonesome Plains: Death and Revival on an American Frontier, Fairchild argues that funerals and revival meetings were the two most important institutions for ameliorating the effects of the vast empty plains. His sources include frontier memoirs, many of them by women, and his own oral history interviews conducted in the mid-1980s. The result is a snapshot of what life was like on the Texas frontier during the period from about 1870 through the first decade of the 20th century. And if the west Texas frontier appears rather static in this account—there's no sense of significant change over that 40-year span—perhaps that's the way it was.

In memoir after memoir, as Fairchild shows, loneliness loomed large. Men and women recall going weeks and sometimes months without seeing anyone outside their own family, and no wonder. The first census of the Texas panhandle, in 1880, counted roughly 1600 residents scattered over 25,000 square miles, with six counties having no inhabitants at all. This amounts to a per-square-mile population density of .06. American historians will recall from their readings of Frederick Jackson Turner that the 1890 census taker pronounced the frontier closed, since there was no longer a western line beyond which there were fewer than two people per square mile. But clearly the frontier lived on well past 1890 in many pockets of the West. Reading Fairchild's report of a 14:1 male-female ratio in the panhandle, we can believe the ranch hand who reported that a woman who arrived in his area in 1887 was the first he had seen in four years. A Fourth of July picnic in 1879 included five women, all the females in a three-county area around Chillicothe. No wonder several women in Fairchild's interviews and memoirs reported their longing for female companionship.

All this amounts to loneliness aplenty. People were so thrilled to see a fellow human being that they were more than willing to feed, clothe, and house anyone who happened through their land. In one of Fairchild's stories the woman of the house wakes her boarder (another woman) in the middle of the night, announcing, "You have slept long enough, I am lonesome for someone to talk to." Others longed for companionship so intensely they sought refuge with the animals, sleeping among the cattle, sheep, or even chickens. As is well documented elsewhere, men found liquid solace in saloons. From south Texas to Kansas, the towns that dotted the cattle drive trails were notorious for hard drinking and hard brawling, especially during the brief period of the cattle drives and open range. Most of Fairchild's subjects came later, after the west had settled down, but Fairchild's west Texas was even more intensely lonely than it had been during the heyday of the drives.

If the loneliness failed to do in frontier settlers, there were many other hazards. While some memoirists and interviewees recalled that "we never got sick," the threat of tuberculosis, typhoid, malaria, and other ailments was deadly when they hit. Doctors and medicine were scarce; child mortality was especially prevalent. It is estimated that one out of five children never reached age five in the Midwest of the 19th century, and things were probably worse on the Texas frontier. In addition to diseases there were accidents of all kinds—falling into a fire or boiling pot of water, wagon mishaps, dangerous river crossings, firearms accidents, and many more dangers. Life was indeed precarious and insecure.

The heart of Fairchild's book deals with how death and revivals brought people of the Texas frontier together, alleviating for a while the tedium and loneliness and offering consolation for suffering and death. With no funeral homes from which to purchase caskets, families had to build a crude box in which to place the body. Often the body would be laid out for viewing as the casket was constructed. Digging the grave was an ordeal on the dry and nearly rock-hard soil of Texas. The salutary effect of all this labor was that it provided a ready excuse to drop regular work and come together as a community. As Fairchild writes, "Even though settlers might be widely dispersed, deaths and burials were a community affair, and if death had been preceded by sickness, neighbors were usually already there and helping."

At the time of the actual burial there was a religious service, but not necessarily with a preacher presiding or even a Bible at hand. Fairchild, like many historians of the West, suggests that the irreligion of frontier life could be attributed in no small part to a lack of churches and clergy. Eastern denominations, especially Methodists and Baptists, tried desperately to keep pace with western migration. In the more settled communities, where there were churches, the preacher often came to the home of the deceased to conduct the funeral, which included the singing of Psalms and hymns.

Revivals had a distinctive character on the frontier. Fairchild describes these events as "half vacation, half revival." They afforded men and women an occasion to take time off from work. Women would prepare much of the food beforehand so that the protracted meeting itself became a time of leisure, gossip, and the exchange of recipes. This was an opportunity to see other women and to enjoy the rare luxury of conversation and relaxation. Likewise children, usually isolated on their own farm with only their siblings for company, experienced at revival time new friendships with others their own age. Understandably, this became a time of fun and, for teenagers especially, mischievous pranks and practical jokes. A favorite trick was switching babies. One of Fairchild's subjects recalled a young couple headed home from a revival only to discover along the way that they had the wrong child.

But revivals were more than just vacations. American revivalism is essentially a preaching method, pioneered successfully in churches in the First Great Awakening, then made into a central part of American Protestantism, complete with camp meetings, during the Second Great Awakening. From then on, through the period Fairchild has studied, revivalists were often professional itinerants, and they were usually louder and more dramatic than pastors of churches. Even so, Fairchild's example of the preacher who could be heard a mile away from the camp strains credulity, and another testimony he cites, in which a man claimed that on a quiet evening the revival preacher could be heard two miles away, clearly belongs to the genre of the Tall Tale.

The Lonesome Plains is an interesting and largely persuasive work of religious social history. A puzzling feature of the book has to do with Fairchild himself. On the dust jacket he is listed as a professor of psychology at West Texas A&M, yet there is no mention of how he happened to write a historical work, nor is there anywhere in the book an overt attempt to synthesize historical and psychological methodologies in an interdisciplinary way. Considering the psychohistory of the 1970s and 1980s, perhaps this is just as well. I am puzzled, however, so the next time I am in the panhandle for a revival or funeral, I intend to stop by and ask Fairchild why he wrote this book. After all, it's a mere 400 lonely, desolate miles from my home in Waco to his in Canyon.

Barry Hankins is associate professor of history and Church-State Studies at Baylor University. He is the author of Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture (Univ. of Alabama Press).

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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