| As everything else here, the title is a piece out of Texas' rather formidable literary past. The original Texas Siftings was an eight-page magazine begun in 1881 at Austin by Alexander Edwin Sweet. It became America's most successful humor publication, largely because of Sweet's sardonic writing style, but perhaps as much for his subject. Texas always has interested outsiders. |
| Sweet wrote short pieces - "sketches" was the term in vogue then - on whatever interested him, like the sociability of horned frogs ( "a lizard traveling incognito") and what he could invent, such as Texans' inalienable fight to be robbed on stagecoach trips. |
| Anyone curious about this seminal Texas author may track down Alex Sweet's Texas (University of Texas Press, 1986) or read him in the original by examining the full set of Texas Siftings available in archives of the library of the University of Texas at Arlington. |
| That's where I began: in libraries, browsing - "sifting" - through old Texas books and publications. I would find something I liked and make a note of it. In one book would be a short, cogent anecdote by a cowboy remembering his cattle drive days; in another, an English lady traveler decrying Texas frontier wives' penchant for dipping snuff. Here was an abandoned Texas slang word worth rescuing; there, a frontier recipe needing a fresh audience, or a clever criticism ripe for resurrection - "Texas is an Elysium of rogues," a Kentuckian wrote in 1833. |
| Soon, my little smidgens of Texas history and lore grew into columns, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram has been printing them ever since. Alex Sweet's old title was just lying around, gathering dust on a library shelf, so I put it to work again. |
| The mass of Texas writings is, to understate, substantial. We are a wordy bunch, always have been, and for almost two centuries outsiders, intrigued by all the commotion down here in the Southwest, have come to inspect, dissect, cuss and praise. From the beginning, there was something about Texas, and Texans, that required the world's attention. Texas is a heroic story, the stuff of dreams and myths. Born of an impossible revolution, settled by peoples from somewhere else, Texas engendered the epic American notion of freedom and independence, of self-sufficiency and derring-do. Texas, above all else, has been a spiritual adventure - and the whole grand chronicle is there on library shelves, in newspaper clippings, old letters, written memories. There's little about Texas that hasn't already been said or written, and Texas Siftings is a kind of social catalog to much of it. |
| What's here is a celebration of Texas and Texans, and there is a seriousness to it- a letter to his mother from a Texas Ranger about to be hanged at a Mexico City prison in 1843; the death of a Frenchman during a West Texas buffalo hunt in 1875; the massacre of Indians at Dove Creek. But there's also much that's less than solemn: if our history includes the name of the first white child born in the Panhandle (Joseph Wood in 1877), then certainly we should know the name of the first mule born in Lampasas County (Mag); why cowboy hat |
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