Eugene C. Barker - in Search of Stephen F. Austin

In Search of Stephen F. Austin

Barker was a member of the editorial board of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association and served in 1923 as president of the organization. He focused his studies on Texas history, then a wide-open field. Before he began writing his biography of Austin he assembled Austin’s papers from the period 1765–1836, which were published by the American Historical Association in four volumes between 1924 and 1928. His The Life of Stephen F. Austin was published in 1925 and is still considered a classic, the best single piece of scholarship yet done on a Texas topic. Though Barker greatly admired Austin, there is little praise of his subject because of Barker’s strict principles of' historical objectivity. He wrote of Austin:

“He was a man of warm affections, and loved the idea of home, but he never married. Texas was home and wife and family to him. He died on a pallet on the floor of a two-room clapboard shack, a month and twenty-four days past his forty-third birthday. His work was done, but he was denied the years so hardly earned for the enjoyment of its fruits. . . . “