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Down in Texas by
Mike Cox | |
When
Texas experienced its second great oil boom in 1917, a word wrangler named Elmer
Fisk felt moved to poetry.
He wrote a piece of doggerel called "Down
in Texas" that captured what the rest of the nation wanted to believe about the
Lone Star State's petroleum boom towns, places like the aptly named Ranger in
Eastland County.
An internet search turns up nothing on Fisk except a
hobbyist's Web site collection of Western post card poetry, a long-extinct genre.
Whether Fisk wrote his poem for publication in a newspaper or magazine, or whether
he wrote it specifically for inclusion on a Texas post card is open to conjecture.
If Fisk was even a Texan, maybe he was a descendant of Greenleaf Fisk,
San Jacinto Battle veteran and early settler in Brown County. Folks named a community
in that county in Fisk's honor, and down in Travis County, some of his kinfolks
founded a long-vanished town north of Austin called Fiskville.
No matter
Elmer Fisk's genealogy, he penned a best seller with "Down in Texas." However
it found its way into print, his 236-word poem remained popular for the next couple
of decades. Bordered by 14 thumbnail images of oil derricks, gushers and oil field
fires, the penny post card could be purchased at any drug store or train station
in the state. It sold by the tens of thousands and went all over the world, fueling
the perception of Texas as a wild and wooly destination soaked in black gold.
Here's
Fisk's poem, long in the public domain: |
"Down
in Texas."
We're
down here in old Texas,
Where you never have the blues,
Where the bandits
steal the jitneys
And the marshals steal the booze;
Where the buildings
horn the skyline,
Where the populace is boost,
Where they shoot men just
for pastime,
Where the chickens never roost,
Where the stickup men are
wary
And the bullets fall like hail;
Where each pocket has a pistol
And
each pistol's good for jail;
Where they always hang the jury,
Where they
never hang a man
If you call a man a liar, you
Get home the best you can
Where
you get up in the morning,
In a world of snow and sleet
And you come
home in the evening
Suffocating in the heat;
Where the jitneys whiz about
you
And the street cars barely creep;
Where the burglars pick you pockets
While
you 'lay me down to sleep;'
Where the bulldogs all have rabies,
And the
rabbits they have fleas;
Where the big girls, like the wee ones,
Wear
their dresses to their knees;
Where you whisk out in the morning
Just
to give your health a chance;
Say 'Howdy' to some fellow who
Shoots big
holes in your pants;
Where wise owls are afraid to hoot
And birds don't
dare to sing,
For it's hell down here in Texas,
Where they all shoot on
the wing. |
("Jitney" was a common
term in the early part of the 20th century for a small car or bus that for a fee
carried passengers on a regular schedule.)
In
the early 1930s, as the state approached its centennial of independence from Mexico,
someone decided that Fisk's poem should be modified to reflect a somewhat better
view of Texas.
A card mailed from Houston in 1933, printed by Seawall
Specialty Co. of Houston and Galveston, contained this non-rhyming, upbeat afterword:
"But how different now-skyscrapers, beautiful parks and boulevards, fine
schools and beautiful churches, rich farms and prosperity everywhere-the land
of promise for the home seeker." |
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