newsCurious Texas

Why is Texas so big —and why are we so obsessed with its size? Curious Texas investigates

Yes, Texas is a big place - and its bigness informs our identity as Texans.

On our state's 182nd birthday, we're asked: Why is Texas so big — and why are we so obsessed with its size?

The question comes from 7-year-old Lily, who wrote in looking for answers from Curious Texas, a project from The Dallas Morning News that invites you to join in our reporting process. The idea is simple: You have questions, and our journalists are trained to track down answers.

Texas is big, which is less an observation than a statement of the woefully obvious. The sky is blue; water is wet; Texas is very, very big. In the casual language of subconscious association, Texas is bigness itself.

This story is part of Curious Texas, a special project from The Dallas Morning News. You ask questions, our journalists find answers.

Before we tackle "why," a quick refresher on comparative geograpy. The Lone Star State is roughly the same size as Turkey or Pakistan or France. You could fit any of the following in Texas: four Floridas, or two Californias, or 28 Vermonts, or an astonishing 221 Rhode Islands.

The distance from El Paso to Beaumont is about one-third the length of the Mississippi River.

If you drove from the northwest corner of the Panhandle to the boot toe just below Brownsville, you'd have covered more miles than it would take you to get from Nashville to Philadelphia. You'd have gone one-three-hundredth of the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

Yes, our state is freaking enormous.

The same quirks of history that make Texas something of a stand-alone story in the cultural and political evolution of the North American continent contribute to its sheer size. A vast outback thinly populated by Native American tribes, it was passed between nations as a kind of bargaining chip for centuries before declaring its independence from Mexico on March 2, 1836.

Its brief status as an independent (albeit debt-ridden) nation gave it peculiar leverage on joining the United States in 1845. Under terms of the agreement, Texas entered the union whole, with a proviso that it could be subdivided into as many as five smaller states down the road.

Why didn't it? Well, it wasn't for lack of trying. For nearly 100 years, various political factions suggested for one reason or another that the Lone Star state be subdivided. Some thought it too big for one state government to manage; other proposals arose from the bitter 19th century politics of American slavery.

At one point, West Texans, who thought the eastern part of the state was getting all the good roads and building projects and so forth, floated the notion of splitting off into a separate state of their own. Snarky East Texans suggested the new state be named "Cactaea" — "land of the prickly pear."

Yet all of these movements petered out — as Texas' size was steadily incorporated into the state's cultural view of itself.

Wilbert Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel, the flour magnate turned hillbilly singer who became one of our most colorful governors (and that's saying a great deal), saluted the sprawling state's geographic diversity in his self-composed campaign theme, "Beautiful Texas":

O beautiful, beautiful Texas

Where the beautiful bluebonnets grow

We're proud of our forefathers

Who fought at the Alamo

You can live on the plains or the mountains

Or down where the sea breezes blow

And you're still in beautiful Texas

The most beautiful place that I know.

Our official state song, "Texas, Our Texas," is a 1924 collaboration between an English-born music professor named William Marsh and a patriotic Fort Worth church lady named Gladys Yoakum Wright. Their lyric was even more direct in linking size to state pride:

Texas, our Texas! All hail the mighty State!

Texas, our Texas! So wonderful, so great!

Largest and grandest, Withstanding ev'ry test;

O Empire wide and glorious, You stand supremely blest.

It's said that John Philip Sousa called this "the finest state song he ever heard." It was surely the most bombastic: Ours is so wide, so glorious, so much larger than all those puny, skimpy, undersized states. When Edna Ferber's 1952 potboiler Giant was published, everybody knew the place she was talking about.

OK, OK. We know what you're thinking: What about Alaska?

Purchased in the 1880s at the fire-sale price of $7.2 million, the vast northern territory didn't register much in the Texan consciousness. Not, at least, until 1959, when it became the 49th state, putting an end to Texas' pride of first-in-size.

A more humble people might have gracefully bowed out, might have conceded the crown, might have quit forking hay with all that we're-so-darn-big business.

We did not. Alaska may be more than twice our size — as long as you count the parts that are perpetually frozen or habitable only by bears — but we brushed it off like a pesky gnat. A single word in the state song was changed — "largest" became "boldest," which sounds more badass anyway.

It makes the rest of the country, and quite possibly the rest of the world crazy, but "big" is intrinsic not only to our geography, but to our view of ourselves: Our ambitions, our personalities, our confidence. "Texas-sized" is a commonly understood modifier, while "Alaska-sized" is not.

Finally, size contributes to our hard-wired perception that Texas is as much a presence as it is a place.

In an early novel, the great Texas writer Larry McMurtry describes his hero's reflections as he crosses the state line into New Mexico:

"Then I really felt Texas. It was all behind me, looming there over the car, not a state or a stretch of land but some giant, some genie, some god, towering over the road. I really felt it."

We know that feeling. We share it. Yes, Texas is big — and in more ways than square miles. It's our identity.

Tell us: 


No question is too big or too small. Let's get started!



In the meantime, you can provide feedback here.

Answering your questions

Answering your questions

Get the answers to the the biggest questions about the culture, people and institutions of North Texas.

By signing up you agree to our privacy policy

BlueConic Segments

BlueConic Profile Data