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  • Texas | Columns | "Texas Tales"

    Journalist Describes
    Physical Texas in 1910

    by Mike Cox
    Mike Cox

    F ew journalists of his time could wax from vitriol to humor as well as J.S. “K. Lamity” Bonner.

    Born in Bell County in 1856, in the early 1900s Bonner began publishing a weekly magazine. “K. Lamity’s Harpoon.” As he explained on the masthead of each issue, “Minnows Are Safe; I Am Out After Whales.” By 1910, the Austin publisher claimed a national circulation of 20,000. Subscriptions sold for $1 a year, or individual issues could be bought at news stands for a dime.

    In the fall of that final year of the 20th century’s first decade, Bonner felt moved to tell his out-of-state readers a bit about Texas. He called the piece “The Truth About Texas.”

    He opened his essay with the proposition that if those who lived in the chillier, more populated states took a 30-day trip to the Lone Star State, 50 percent of them “would go back home, sell out everything they owned, and come back to this state as fast as steam could bring them.”

    In fact, the word-loving journalist continued, if they merely understood what Texas was like, all those out-of-staters would do that even without seeing the state first.

    Then Bonner took a verbal swing at a perception that some non-residents still have about Texas:

    “To the average man who has never been out of the northern or eastern states, the word ‘Texas’ has always represented a vast area of wild country, sparsely settled, where inhabitants wore leggings, spurs, two six shooters, two breast plates (one in front and one behind), take their liquor straight, and their meals on horseback.”

    Alas, Bonner continued, the days of six shooter duels with numerous dead men stacked up and “wild and wooly cowboys shooting out the lights” had passed forever in Texas.

    The truth, he noted, is that Texas had never been half as bad as it had been portrayed. And then the editor set out to paint a by-the-numbers picture of Texas.

    The first consideration, of course, was Texas’s size.

    “It startles the average man when he is told that this one state alone is much larger than the entire Republic of France, larger than the whole German Empire, and is only exceeded in area by one of the United States dominions—the Territory of Alaska.”

    All that land covered 265,780 square miles (the modern figure, thanks to better surveying technology, is 268,820 square miles.) The state’s water surface covered 3,490 square miles. (This was before Texas started building lakes. The figure today is 7,364 square miles of water, at least when there’s no drought going on.)

    Though he claimed elsewhere in this issue that he had been “riding the water wagon for three or four years,” Bonner had been known to take a drink or two or three. That’s surely why he felt compelled to note that: “[Texas’s] whiskey and beer surface formerly covered 265,780 square miles, but has been very much reduced through the continued and strenuous efforts of the opponents of the liquor traffic.”

    Still on the subject of water, Bonner added that Texas Gulf coast extended 350 miles as the crow flies. (Again, the more accurate figure today is 367 miles, but when actual shoreline is measured, the number of 3,300 miles.)

    By 1910, all that land and water had been divided into 245 counties. (The legislature would politically dissect that land a bit more before it got finished. Today, Texas has 254 counties.)

    Then Bonner offered an analogy quite appropriate for his day, when automobiles still competed with horses and buggies as a preferred mode of transportation:

    “If a man mounted upon a good horse, that traveled 25 miles a day, should ride in a straight line across the state at its greatest length, it would take him 33 days to reach his destination. If he crossed it at its greatest width, he would be on the road 30 days.”

    Just to make sure he had made his point about how big Texas was, Bonner offered as further evidence that a string stretched from New York to Chicago “would be too short to reach from Texline, Texas to Brownsville, Texas. When a tramp hits Texas at Texline, and walks to Brownsville, he is usually from four to six inches shorter than when he first reaches the state.”

    Bonner also discussed the state’s climate (so mild that a newcomer “is liable to hurt himself eating ice cream in the winter…”), the attractiveness of its women, and the quality of its agricultural land, be it for farming or ranching.

    On top of everything else, good land was still cheap in Texas. Ever the impartial journalist, Bonner made sure to stress in his article that in touting the state’s many plus factors, he certainly wasn’t trying to peddle any Texas land. But by pure coincidence, page 32 of this issue featured a full-page ad paid for by the National Loan & Realty Co. of Austin, a business that offered for sale “A Few Bargains in Some Good Tracts of Texas’s Best Lands.”

    No doubt, a whale of a deal for Harpoon readers.


    © Mike Cox - August 1, 2013 column
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