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Reviews 261 spirit of Pete Barnum, Rufus Steele, and Will Barnes,who realistically reported their mustanging experiences during the early decades of this century and commonly valued the mustang only for its potential as a working saddle horse. Like them, Paskett is concerned with the day-to-day experiences of mustang­ ing, a profession he followed for several years. Paskett’smatter-of-fact purpose, to portray the life of the mustanger as he actually lived it, is the source of this book’s strengths and limitations. Like other profit-minded mustangers, Paskett defines professional success in terms of total mustangs corralled per expedition. Paskett’s practical empha­ sis is exemplified by his speculation in “Mustangs on the Range” on the possi­ bility of rounding up two hundred or more mustangs in one triumphant drive. In contrast to idealized western legend, which features macho mustangers selectively pursuing a single defiant stallion leader and ignoring the many mares and yearlings, Paskett’s narratives focus on the businesslike trapping of the entire herd. For Paskett, quantity is all important; quality an insignificant matter. Nor does Paskett’s tale-telling respect the romantic convention of the stallion’s heroic nobility. He refuses to spare his stallion protagonists from moments of indignity as he uses the most pragmatic means available of taking away their freedom. The best example of his practical approach to mustanging is contained in the tale “The Love Trap,” where Paskett describes capturing an especially elusive mustang stallion by playing upon his amorous weaknesses. He cleverly uses his own saddle mare to arouse the stallion’s ardor and then ropes him during the subsequent encounter. Dobie, for one, would never have related such a humiliating incident. Although the lay reader may be disappointed by these matter-of-fact and occasionally repetitious tales, the social historian and the western literary scholar should find Paskett’s book an invaluable introduction to the realities of mustanging. PAMELA KAY KETT Moorhead State University Alex Sweet’s Texas: The Lighter Side of Lone Star History. By Alexander Edwin Sweet. Edited by Virginia Eisenhour. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. 202 pages, $9.95, $19.95.) Of Alexander Edwin Sweet (1841-1901), the most recent editor of his work has written, “It seems tragic that a humorist of such great fame in the nineteenth century could be so completely forgotten in the twentieth.” It is especially surprising, moreover, that a journalist and humorist who scored one of the great successes of the nineteenth century with his “Texas Siftings” 262 Western American Literature columns has scarcely been heard of even among Texas literature buffs. Sweet grew up in San Antonio where he briefly practiced law before he turned his hand to journalism. Writing first for the San Antonio Express, in 1874 he moved his “San Antonio Siftings” column to the San Antonio Herald. In 1877, he was hired by the Galveston Daily News, and in 1878 he was made associate editor of that paper. In 1880, he moved to Austin where he purchased the Austin Weekly Review which he remodelled into his own paper, Texas Sift­ ings, which rapidly reached a circulation of 50,000 copies. By 1884, Sweet and his partner (John Armoy Knox) moved Texas Siftings, whose circulation by now numbered 150,000 copies, to New York. For a brief period, there was even a British edition printed in London. Alexander Sweet died in 1901. Despite his immense popularity, and the extensive sales of three books which were essentially gleanings from the “Siftings” columns, he was very rapidly forgotten. He deserves to be remembered, and this collection edited byVirginia Eisenhour serves that purpose admirably. It is as a humorist that Sweet deserves to be remembered, and that is the themewhich serves as the basis of this selection from the columns of the “Texas Sifter.” In the course of his journalistic career, Sweet had occasion to hone his comic skills at the expense of his pet peeves—newspaper boys, peddlers, lawyers, dentists, honorary and unearned titles, the postal system, inadequate roads,dirty streets, unqualified legislators,chili con carne, Mexicans, Irishmen, drunks and so on. A happy hunting ground of wit awaits the new wanderer into these sprightly columns...

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