Bryan & all, Perhaps you have forgotten, but looking at a map of current day Texas, roughly the entire western half of the state was virtually uninhabited by anyone except the native tribes in 1861-1865; most of this land was not even formed into counties until after the war. One of the dissatisfactions Texas had with the U.S./Union was the perceived broken promise of adequate help with "the Indian problem", which had been making too much of her land uninhabitable. When today's western (and that would include the panhandle-south plains) area of Texas was settled, who settled it? For the most part, ex-Confederates and/or their descendants. If you stop and think about it, the distinctive Texas tongue is nothing more or less than a modified version of the speech patterns found in the Old South and there's a good reason for that.

While Texas is often considered in a league all her own, much of that comes from self-description, istm, & stems in great part from pride of having been a nation on her own for those few years. Still, the sympathies found amongst multi-generational Texans here in the western counties have traditionally been with the South. The "western" influence came more from the fact that this area contained vast expanses of ranchland and the Old Mexican influence of the traditional vaquero (much of which is still obvious, even today, in the rural areas).

When I was growing up (more decades ago than I want to think about - I'm gettin' old!), the term "yankee" was still a denigrative epithet verbalized with considerable disgust. I remember a couple from Maine who moved in here back in the 40s and stayed. Took a really long time for the locals to stop looking sideways at them and stop treating them as "other". Sad maybe, but true. This was not the case with those who came in from the "acceptable region" of the U.S. (The South.)

I'm just sayin'...

Penny