Texas Cowboys Celebrate the Fourth of July
[The Texas cowboy] often celebrates the glorious Fourth in a Kansas town and in the middle of winter.
Alexander E. Sweet & John A. Knox
Texans have a sense of humor as big and broad as the size of Texas and as eclectic and eccentric as the shape of Texas. Novelist John Steinbeck discovered this truth when he made his famous drive across America and published his equally famous book about it: Travels with Charley in Search of America. Steinbeck noted, “The Texas joke . . . is a revered institution, beloved and in many cases originating in Texas.”
Two of the original originators of Texas humor came from the pens of Alexander E. Sweet, “the dean of Texas humor,” and John A. Knox. From 1881 to 1895 they published Texas Siftings, a weekly magazine of vignettes that kept the rest of America and part of Europe informed as to the funny doings of Texans and Texas. Eastern dudes and European dandies gobbled up the magazine like they might a plate of barbecue or a bowl of chili. At its height, from 1886 to 1891, Texas Siftings sold 150,000 copies a week at newsstands and in railcars.
Neither man was born in Texas, nor even in the United States. Sweet was born in Canada and Knox was born in Ireland. But as the saying goes, they got to Texas as fast as they could. Though not natives, they loved their adopted state and their adopted country. They combined this love in an Independence Day piece on how Texas cowboys celebrate the Fourth of July.
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Although the cowboy is undoubtedly a cow-catcher, he does not travel on a railroad train when he catches cows, but on the back of a pony. The cow-catcher on the locomotive is an entirely different sort of institution, but it is just as careless about whose cattle it picks up as the cow-catcher on the pony is said to be. When the cow-catcher on wheels picked up a cow or a yearling, the railroad company has to pay three or four times its value; but when the cowboy comes across a stray maverick, it is very difficult to persuade him that it did not belong to him in the first place.
The cowboy can always be found hid under a large hat. . . . The reason he wears a hat of this size, is because no longer ones are made. The same remark applies to his spurs, which are large enough to be mistaken for the spurs of a mountain. We do not know why the cowboy always leaves his swallow-tails coat, black stove-pipe hat and kid gloves at home when he goes out on the trail, but, perhaps, he is afraid he might stampede the herd if he undertook to head them off in that garb.
There is one toy, however, which the cowboy never leaves at home when he goes to Kansas, and that is his pistol. He uses it to celebrate the Fourth of July with, and he always celebrates the great National holiday whenever he can procure the materials to celebrate with, and he is very apt to procure them if they are on the place. The reason the cowboy celebrates the great natal day of American independence so much, is because he is overloaded with patriotism. Traveling on the road, without an almanac, the cowboy manages to forget what the day of the month is, so, to be sure, he celebrates the day whenever he gets to town. If the cowboy were provided with almanacs, so that he could tell when to celebrate the Fourth, it would be a good idea, and perhaps assist in removing the impression that the cowboy drinks whiskey and shoots off his pistol from other than patriotic motives.
If the cowboy were to cease celebrating so much, his breath would not be as strong as it is. It is so strong, occasionally, that if he would only tie a slip knot in the end of it, he could rope and hold a steer with it. He often celebrates the glorious Fourth in a Kansas town and in the middle of winter. At least he makes it so hot for everybody in the town that the citizens think, from the sultriness, that July cannot be very far off.
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John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America (Penguin Books, 1986), 230.
Alexander E. Sweet and John A. Knox, Sketches from Texas Siftings (reprint: Copano Bay Press, 2018), 26–28.
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YEE-HAH! HAPPY FOURTH!