Big Country

By Donald Day

Subjects: History, Description and travel

Description: One of the volumes in the American Folkways series. Not many have written as easily about Texas, so breezily, or so witily as Mr. Day in this broad, panoramic portrait of state and people. The swift pace, the vivid flavoring may obscure for some the fad that there is a solid, meaty merit in nearly every chapter. Few volnmell in the American Folkways series have had so much pungency, so much genuine gusto and spirit. Mr. Day almost makes his typewriter drawl in Texas style; he stresses the anecdotal, the odd (or since this is Texas, the gargantuan) custom,the salty individualist. The book has much of the variety and conglomeration of the state itself. A Texan, he would have you know, is a "citizen of a state of mind." And he quotes a Negro who has told a stranger:" But then. everything is bigger here than in the United States." That feeling still prevails. To the standard historian the author may seem a bit brusque in the going over he gives early Texas, but Mr. Day packs a great deal of fact and general trend in his first few pages. Inevitably he ommits edifying detail; some statements are overbroad. But he tells a lot, for instance with this quotation: "Too many Houstons would have made Texasa a hell of a place; but without the one Sam Houston, Texas would have heen in a hell of a fix." One may wonder, however, at a remark attributed to Jefferson Davis in an address to Texans in the Army of Northern Virginia: "The troops from other states have reputations to make; you Texans have one to "sustain!" The most valuable parts of the book are the authoritative, richly factual pictures of special places of Texas.