Movies chronicle Houston's history
Houston Chronicle
HOUSTON-- It was blistered by the summer sun, warmed in winter by rotgut whiskey. Mud-mired horses died and rotted in the streets. Men of affronted honor settled scores with knife or pistol, and every morning prostrate bodies littered the tent town's thoroughfares.
The lucky ones were dead; the not so lucky, victims only of the dubious libations at Kessler's Round Tent Saloon, awoke to find their noses chewed by rats.
Sound like hell?
No, it was only Houston.
The Bayou City's back pages, dating to the few years in the 1830s when it was the Republic of Texas capital, are the subject of Houston: A Nation's Capitol, the first of eight video documentaries tracing the state's history from the advent of Anglo settlement to its 1845 annexation by the United States.
The documentary, produced by Houston Arts and Media, a nonprofit which chronicles regional history and culture, debuted recently at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Earlier this month, it won the Platinum Remi Award for documentaries at Houston's 44th annual WorldFest International Film Festival.
The work will be screened at additional venues in coming months and, eventually, available, along with the other segments, for broadcast. Other episodes of the Birth of Texas series currently are in production.
At the project's core, said Houston Arts and Media president Mike Vance, is storytelling.
"Texas history is deep and varied," Vance said, noting that the Houston documentary focuses on intriguing details that illuminate the larger historical picture. "We're very good at telling stories, and we always try to include a lot of different voices to move things along."
Houston: A Nation's Capitol is a virtual tour of the city's historic sites, some of them now vacant lots, led by McMurry University history professor Stephen Hardin.
Early Texans, Hardin said, endured conditions that would make modern residents "just curl up and die."
Houston, he said, was a hamlet of shacks and tents, the latter most notoriously represented by the Round Tent Saloon, a Main Street establishment whose chief civic contribution was debauchery.
"Remember, these people never experienced air conditioning," Hardin said. "It might not have seemed as terrible to them, having never experienced anything better. They were tougher than we are, more inured to hardship."
The town was vermin- and mosquito-ridden. Early Houstonian and future Texas governor Francis Lubbock once arrived at his home with his face so disfigured from mosquito bites that his wife failed to recognize him, Hardin said.
From mosquito-born diseases like malaria and yellow fever to duels on Main Street, death was omnipresent. "A lot of them," Hardin said, "just died."
