Tag Archives: Gary S. Zaboly

Overloaded with antique adjectives and enough typos to make an honest proofreader weep, this narrative Texas history (subtitle: The Melancholy Tale of a Hanging in Early Houston) by renowned historian Stephen L. Hardin is nevertheless an entertaining look at the mudhole and (yellow) fever swamp that was the Republic’s first capital. Gary S. Zaboly’s gritty drawings–especially his bird’s eye view map (apparently unavailable on the Web) of the squalid little town on sluggish Buffalo Bayou–complement the period photographs of the major players. It’s a view of early Texas that chauvanistic natives would rather outsiders didn’t see (such as the shack two-room clapboard shanty that was President Sam Houston’s first executive mansion) and a caution that even battlefield heroics can’t guarantee a happy postwar life. Get a copy and be appalled, amused and advised.