OLD TEXAS

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 21992, 16 January 1937, Page 15

OLD TEXAS

My Texas, 'Tis of Thee By Owen P. White. Putnam. 274 pp. (8/6 net.)

Mr White's memory and research revive the Texas of tumultuous history and bring it into bortd and continuity with a present which is splashed with the gaudy colours of Fergusonism and the rule of Governor Jimmie Allred. The result is an extraordinarily lively bookstrange and stirring and funny, hardboiled and sentimental, full of heroes and marvels, great deeds and scandalous ones, rich in its mixture of admiration and scorn, its sharp contrasts between power and pettiness, enterprise and convention, the scope of the New World and the narrowness of the Old Adam, rich in its relish of character, and in every page pungent and quick and thrilling, because the title of the book is true. "My Texas" is Mr White's confession and boast. He may be describing the. career of Luke Short, that amazing gunman and gambler who was, in the second capacity, completely "on the level" and in the first so quick that he won this praise from the great Bat Masterson for his greatest piece of play:

"I was standin' at the bar," he'd say, "talkin' to Luke and was tellin' him that Charley Storms wasn't such a bad feller after all, and that he ought not to have it in for him. Luke said he didn't, but that he hadn't started nothin' ■ and wasn't goin* to let nobody murder him if he could help it. I said, 'Charley ain't that kind of a man,' and right then damn if he don't walk into the saloon. His eyes was on Luke; his gun was up, and even at that he couldn't squeeze his trigger quick enough to beat Luke, who had to pull, cock, and fire."

He may be describing the great herd drives, in which, during a little more than 20 years, nearly 10,000,000 cattle went over the long trails to Kansas and further, and 35,000 men were engaged in the hazardous business. A million Texas ponies were sold into the north-western territories, in this time, and, in cattle and horses, more than a billion dollars' worth of livestock, grown wild on the plains, was marketed at enormous profit and corresponding risk. He may be describing the achievement of such a man as Colin Thomas, who began as a Federal trooper and ended as the king of a range twice as large as Massachusetts, and larger, and who had first to fortify himself in his kingdom but was careful to establish a peach-orchard within the fortress, for the production of "'a high-power brandy in glorification of whose merits some of the octogenarians are still chanting paeans." He may be recounting the last victory and the supreme surrender of "the Major," or the chequered history- of that philosopher and ripe beauty, Mrs Priestley. He may be making derisive comedy of the alcoholic progress of Texas, from the old freedom of giants to fill themselves with whiskey to capacity, matching that of their eight-gallon hats, to the new freedom in which, the dry amendment of the State being wiped out, Jimmie Allred promptly prohibited the licensing of bar-rooms.

As Jimmie has it fixe'd, everything is O.K. A dozen illegal saloons have now sprung up where only one legal one—selling to adult males only—could possibly have gotten along, so that the danger that Texas will go sober has been entirely averted.

Whatever the variety of Mr White's Texan theme, he does not falter or grow tame; and it is no conventional formula of praise to say that there is "not a dull page in the book."