Texans are world-famous for spinning yarns and other tall tales, but Alexander Sweet was the only nineteenth-century Texas humorist to gain international fame. As such, he served as a role model for young Will Porter. Born in St. John, New Brunswick, in 1841, Sweet moved to San Antonio with his family in 1849. He fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, but became a lawyer and staunch Republican during Reconstruction. Sweet began writing for the San Antonio Express in 1869, then moved to the Galveston News, where his column "Galveston Siftings" gained him national fame.
In May 1881 he moved to Austin and started a weekly humor magazine, which he called Texas Siftings. The paper soon had a national circulation, and in 1884 Sweet moved it to New York. His 1884 book, Through Texas on a Mexican Mustang, was a bestseller here and in England and Germany. In 1887 a London edition was started. At its peak, Siftings had a circulation of 125,000. The success of Texas Siftings was an obvious inspiration for Will Porter's short-lived humorous weekly, The Rolling Stone. Sweet sold the Siftings in 1895 and returned to Texas. He soon returned to New York, where he became an editor with the Tammany Times. He died in New York in 1901.
In the summer of 1879, Sweet made a brief tour of a few Texas cities, including Austin. What follows is two sketches from that tour. The first is "Austin and San Antonio Compared," in which Sweet judges the quality of life, commerce, and postal service in Austin.
Austin is most emphatically a pretty city--perhaps the prettiest in Texas. In some respects it has advantages over San Antonio. There is in the first place the beautiful mountain scenery. Then the location of the city on a number of hills is calculated to please the eye, particularly at those heights crowned with family residences, the architecture of which is infinitely superior to that observable in the Alamo city, the styles being varied and tasty. In San Antonio when a man builds a fine house he selects a piece of ground to fit the house, that is of about the same size, and, consequently, he has to hang the family clothes out on the shrubbery in the front yard, the possible object being to entrance the passer by with the number and styles of the garments of the female members of the family. In Austin, however, the people do not appear to be so ostentatious (no intentional perpetration of a pun is designed); there appears an unwillingness to inform the public as to the extent and variety of their underwear. Possibly the Austinites do not wear many clothes in summer; but at any rate they build their houses on large lots, and have ample room for back yards and clothes-lines.
Like San Antonio, Austin is provided with water works, ice factories and street cars, also with gas, which, like that of the former city, is evidently not intended for illumination purposes. The street lamps are lit every night, there is, however, no positive necessity for shutting off the gas, as it is too feeble to make its escape. When it comes to rough pavements, Austin can not compete with the Alamo city. Austin is also in a hopeless minority as far as dust is concerned. San Antonio has finer dust than Austin, and several times as much of it; but to make up for this the glare from the Austin pavements throws that from the alleged San Antonio pavements in the shade-a green shade is usually worn. The reflected light from the Austin pavements is perfectly blinding, and is supposed to have something to do with blinding the legislature as to the true interests of the people. Austin is said to be the hottest place in Texas in the summer and the coldest in winter. The wind does not blow much except on capitol hill, where there is an unlirnited supply of the article, particularly before the legislature adjourned. This is a meteorological fact of great significance. It has been proposed to utilize this immense natural force in drawing the streetcars up to the capitol and in extracting water from a 1400 foot artesian well, one of the minor bores that are to be found in that neighborhood.
Austin, from a business point of view, is much duller than San Antonio. Commerce is never as unfrequented as the avenue almost always is. There are plenty of stores, but it takes a first-class detective, inspired with a sense of duty and a large reward to find a customer. It is like hunting plover early in the season, about forty hunters to each plover, and the game is infamously poor when bagged.
I went into a large store on the avenue and asked the proprietor, who was playing marbles with the cashier and the porter in the backyard, how trade was.
"Do you mean in the dry goods department?" he asked.
I told him "yes" and he sent for the manager of that department, who was asleep on the counter.
"How many yards of calico did you sell in June?"
"Seven and three-fourths yards," was the response.
"How many yards in the first week in July?"
"About two and a half yards."
"You can report," said the proprietor, "a heavy increase in the demand for prints, and that the market has an upward tendency."
He then called in the manager of the grocery department.
"How many quarts of beans were sold during the first week in June?"
The manager of the grocery department sent for the chief clerk of the saccharine warehouse, and he reported "six quarts."
"How much during the first week in July?"
"Three quarts," was the response.
The proprietor then told me confidentially that there was a falling off of fifty per cent, owing to the legislators not taking any sugar in their [tea?], but to write the News that molasses was steady with an upward tendency.
If the Austin postoffice was swept, cleaned out and ventilated (that's what it needs most, ventilation) it would pass muster as a neglected pig pen. It is worse than the San Antonio postoffice used to be. I did not think it was possible for any postoffice to be as bad as that until I visited Austin. The populace in pursuit of letters and papers have to feel their way into a little blind alley of a room, and if it is after sundown they have to feel for their lock boxes. I was told some of the citizens, who having failed in business, have sufficient wealth to hire lock boxes, make marks on their boxes, or drive nails into them so they can find them in the dark. I was told there was going to be a new postoffice built. It is to be hoped this is so. If more money is needed people who have occasion to visit Austin would rejoice at the opportunity of contributing to the end in view, merely to sustain the peace and dignity of the state, for without the slightest exaggeration the Austin postoffice will not compare favorably with that of such towns as Gonzales, Cuero or Seguin.
In regard to the management of the office, I heard many complaints that the convenience of the public was not consulted, etc., on the justness of which I am not prepared to give an opinion, as complaints against postofficers are frequent. In San Antonio, for instance, if one of the clerks forgets to call a man by his proper title of "colonel," or "major," or "judge," or if the mail is not distributed in the lock-boxes ten minutes before the train arrives, the people set up a howl that will make half a dozen welkins ring. Hence, speaking about matters in general, I am unable to say what provocation, if any, the Austinite has to grumble, for he does grumble as if he had the toothache about that postoffice, but there is certainly one arrangement, or disarrangement, in sending off the San Antonio mail that needs an amendment at once. In most places where there is a regularly ordained postmaster you can get your letters off if they are posted half an hour before the train leaves. This is, I believe, a rule that prevails everywhere except at Austin. The letters that are to go by the San Antonio stage, which leaves at 7 o'clock in the morning, have to be posted before 9 o'clock of the evening previous, or they lie over until the next San Antonio stage leaves, 24 hours afterwards. I posted a letter addressed to San Antonio at 9:30 P.M. on Sunday, and that letter did not leave Galveston [sic] till Tuesday morning. If the San Antonio postoffice was managed that way, people out on the Medina would think there was a sangerfest [sic] going on in town. The Medina river is at no point nearer than sixteen miles to San Antonio. This will give the reader some assistance in guessing at the cubic dimensions of the popular feeling that would arise; but in Austin most of the people have got used to it, and rather seem to like it. I met one man who had not become acclimated to that style of postal facilities. I told him about the letter I posted Sunday night lying over in the Austin postoffice until Tuesday morning. At first he did not believe it, and when I expressed a perfect willingness to make affidavit to it, he was as mad as a defeated candidate. He pranced about and jumped up and down, and murmured like a rushing tornado, "What I hate is this darned partiality that is shown strangers. If an Austin man had put that letter in the postoffice too late, it would be there yet."
In some matters Austin is ahead of San Antonio, but the postoffice is not one of them.
As befits a state like ours, the Texas Capitol is the largest of state capitols, second in size only to the one in Washington, D.C. These impressive details aside, it is also one of the Fifty's most impressive statehouses, a grand Renaissance Revival palace that nearly always outshines those mortals who inhabit it for the first 120 days of every odd year and special sessions in between.
The present granite capitol replaced the much smaller, limestone "colonial" capitol, which was built in 1852. Originally designed as a grand palace, the colonial capitol emerged as considerably less. On his summer 1879 visit to Austin, Alex Sweet visited the colonial capitol and wrote about what he saw there in "Portraits at the Capitol."
There are half a dozen oil paintings in the capitol, but only some of them are capital pictures. The paintings are all portraits of distinguished men. N. B. I didn't notice any portraits of any of the members of the glorious sixteenth [legislature] among them. The pictures in the senate, like everything else, are supposed to be better than those in the house. On the wall in the house, to the right of the speaker's chair, is a large picture of Gov. Houston. He is sitting down with his hat and cane in his hand, enveloped in the ample folds of a large cloak. Austin is said to be the coldest place in Texas. The likeness is excellent. It agrees exactly with the kind of man Houston was. You see a face full of intense energy amounting almost to savagery, a bold, fearless glance, and above all you perceive the massive intellect. There can be no hesitation in pronouncing the verdict: here is a natural born ruler of men.
On the opposite side of the speaker's chair is a large oil painting of Washington. It is the stereotyped picture you have seen all your life, one holding a sheathed sword, while with the right he makes a motion, which may either refer to his refusal to act on a petition to commute that lies on that table, or may be intended to scare off the impetuous bootblacks with which Austin is infested, or may mean "No, gentlemen; I make it a point never to enter a saloon by daylight."
Everybody may suit himself as to what that gesture means. The face of the father of his country is all O.K., having evidently been taken from a three-cent postage stamp. The coloring is really good. I make this assertion without any hesitation, as all the correspondents of the great northern papers have said so too.
There is also a picture of Gen. Tom Green, a fine manly face, in which frankness and tenderness are touchingly blended. From the senate I went over into the house. Imagine my consternation at seeing Washington, whom a moment before I had left in the senate, gesticulating at the bootblacks, standing on guard in the identically same position to the left of the speaker of the house. There could be no mistake about it. There was the tall, commanding figure, the same postage stamp cast of features, the same defiant refusal to commute, or whatever the gesture may mean, only he had changed some of his clothes.
"How many George Washingtons do you keep on the premises at one time," I asked of a legislator, pointing to the picture.
"That's not Washington; that's Sam Houston," he replied.
"What's he doing with Washington's head on, and that's Washington's ruffled shirt; however, they both have it on at once. And he is shoving away the bootblacks just the same way that Wash. did when he was Austin. Washington and Sam Houston were not twins, were they?"
You see I carne to Austin to find out about matters and things, and was bound to ask questions. But what do you think that legislator told me when I wanted to know all about Washington and Sam Houston! He said this was the first legislature he had ever attended, and wasn't much acquainted with the Austin people, except those at the bank.
"What bank?" I queried.
"Why, down at the faro bank, of course."
After I had fanned myself for a while I got Mr. Thornton to take me up stairs and introduce me to the fossils of the jurassic period, and other extinct curiosities--I had seen the governor already.
After I had recovered my equilibrium I returned and gazed at the other pictures. Opposite the speaker is the picture of the president of the republic of Texas, Hon. Henry Smith, who has an aquiline cast of features almost suggestive of Hebrew descent. But what a world of determination there is in the compressed mouth, and how suggestive of combativeness is the position of the head, held on one side. Whenever a man or a dog holds his head on one side, unless it be from rheumatism, you may rely on it he will not only bite, but hold on afterwards, and that was just the kind of statesman Henry Smith was--and plenty of brains with it all.
[Mirabeau B.] Lamar's picture is over the speaker's head. He looks as wild as Smith looks fierce. Suavity and sagacity seem to be the predominant traits.
There is also an alleged life size picture of David Crockett, dressed in buckskin, and accompanied by a rifle and two dogs. The dogs look natural enough, and there is a great deal of fidelity in the likeness of the rifle; but when it comes to David himself, he does not fill out the bill. The forehead, eyes and hair are those of a female, and not the Medusa-like front of the female on the commute, but of a good-natured and better looking female. And here in the full blaze of the nineteenth century are we to suppose that David Crockett, for whom even hungry "bars" had an intuitive awe, actually parted his hair in the middle, like the effeminate youth of the present day who sucks the end of a cane? What a vast amount of trouble, hunting enough remains to put together to hold an inquest on, the coroner would have if the original David Crockett were to appear in the flesh and meet, by chance, the imaginative artist who painted his picture! The mouth is so large it looks like it might be partial to watermelon.
On November 9, 1881, the colonial capitol burned to the ground after a janitor started a trash fire. Its passing was not especially mourned; indeed plans were already afoot to build a new capitol; the fire merely sped things up a few years. Sweet, who had just founded the humorous weekly Texas Siftings, wrote a none-too-kind epitaph after the fire: "The venerable edifice that bore such a startling resemblance to a large sized corn crib, with a pumpkin for a dome, and whose walls have so often resounded with legislative eloquence, reminding the distant hearer of a dog barking up a hollow log, is gone."