Reviewed by: Barrier to the Bays: The Islands of the Texas Coastal Bend and Their Pass by Mary Jo O’Rear Thomas Blake Earle Barrier to the Bays: The Islands of the Texas Coastal Bend and Their Pass. By Mary Jo O’Rear. Gulf Coast Books. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2022. Pp. xii, 248. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-62349-940-2.) Completing her trilogy on the Texas coastal bend, Mary Jo O’Rear’s Barrier to the Bays: The Islands of the Texas Coastal Bend and Their Pass brings much-needed attention to the coastal South. O’Rear’s latest contribution argues for the importance of the littoral in integrating the region into national and international economies. The primary focus of the book is the centuries-long effort by coastal residents to make the islands, lagoons, and estuaries of the region more amenable to maritime traffic. While nineteenth-century boosters may have claimed that Corpus Christi was destined to be a great port because of its natural advantages—a sheltered bay and shoreside cliffs—it took tremendous effort to make it so. Students and scholars of other Gulf Coast ports could find it useful to follow O’Rear’s lead by explaining how ports are not natural features but manmade infrastructure. O’Rear focuses her study on the chain of barrier islands—Padre, Mustang, Harbor, St. Joseph, and Matagorda—and estuarine bays—Baffin, Corpus Christi, Aransas, Copano, San Antonio, and Matagorda—that form Texas’s coastal bend. What Barrier to the Bays may lack in geographic scope is made up for in temporal expanse. Peering into the prehistoric past, O’Rear describes the natural process that created the barrier islands as silt accreted to form a chain of unstable islands subject to shifting tides and winds. Over the course of two chapters O’Rear jumps to the mid-nineteenth century, giving scant coverage of the millennia of Native American, Spanish, and Mexican engagement (or lack thereof) with the region. The U.S.-Mexico War marks a turning point in O’Rear’s narrative. The conflict brought sustained American attention to the coastal bend. Over the next century, enterprises like cattle ranching on Padre Island, turtle fishing in Aransas Bay, and oil shipment through Harbor Island transformed the coastal bend from a frontier region to a significant commercial node. Two related [End Page 169] themes emerge in describing this transformation: the importance of built infrastructure and the ecological vulnerability of the region. While the bays and islands of the coastal bend offered advantageous settings for ports to ship the produce of the region to faraway markets, this environment had to be remade to ensure safe and efficient navigation. Dredging channels, erecting jetties, and building breakwaters were necessary, not to mention costly, undertakings to turn natural features into commercial assets. “It was the Coastal Bend,” O’Rear tells readers, “that epitomized waterway alteration in the late 1800s” (p. 85). The creation of this infrastructure took its toll on the environment. When the Army Corps of Engineers detonated thousands of pounds of dynamite to remove Old Government Jetty, which had created a sandbar that impeded traffic through Aransas Pass, “wildlife died by the thousands, fish bladders punctured, shellfish fragmented, larvae decimated, and octopuses pulverized. . . . [T]he longtime habitat had been shock-waved into smithereens” (p. 102). This kind of carnage was a predictable result as the coast was made (and remade) to accommodate maritime traffic. Barrier to the Bays will strike some readers as out-of-date. Infelicitous turns of phrase and ahistorical assertions mar the book’s earlier chapters. O’Rear describes the genocide of coastal Native Americans as a “demise” that was “inevitable” (p. 21). Elsewhere, she euphemistically claims that Confederate partisans were driven to “defend [the] Southern lifestyle” without mentioning slavery (p. 41). Furthermore, Barrier to the Bays lacks the argumentative verve and historiographical intervention readers may expect from an academic monograph. But students of the region, and the coastal South more generally, will still find much to admire in O’Rear’s careful work in mining local archives to tell a story rooted in a specific place. Thomas Blake Earle Texas A&M University at...
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Sep 27, 2024
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