Always in His Heart: Owen Payne White and Old El Paso

Owen Payne White, colorful Texas writer who popularized the Old West in history, fiction, and investigative reporting, brought threats of lawsuits to his publishers, and brought the frontier and Old El Paso onto the national literary scene of the 1920s and 1930s. Photograph from the Owen Payne White Papers, 1923-1051, MS 112, C. L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department, the University ofTexas at El Paso. Always in His Heart: Owen Payne White and Old El Paso By Garna L. Christian* TO LAWYERS AND DOCTORS, HIS LIBEL-PRONE WRITINGS AND fragile health must have seemed a steady source of income; to El Pasoans, he was the man who put their town on the national map; to thousands of readers of the New York Times, Collier's, and American Mercury, he was a source for scandals and firsthand accounts of old-fashioned shootouts; even to his friends, the gaunt, irascible Texanturned -New Yorker was "Rattlesnake Pete," a man to be handled with care. Born in El Paso on June 9, 187g, Owen Payne White transcended the Old and New West like a Larry McMurtry hero, although today his audiences have disappeared and his out-of-print books lie in university special collections beyond the scrutiny ofgeneral readers.1 Owen Payne White was a good friend, a decades-long political reporter who pursued his stories relentlessly, a traveling companion of governors and vice presidents, and a muckraker whose venom spared neither robber baron industrialists nor "New Deal nitwits." He gained national prominence in 1923 with the publication of Out oftL· Desert, TL· Historical Romance ofEl Paso. The second history of El Paso written in English, Out oftL· Desert appeared twenty-two years after William Wallace Mills's groundbreaking Forty Years at El Paso. An unlikely success, Out of * Garna L Christian is a professor of history at the University of Houston-Downtown and a Fellow of the Texas State Historical Association. 1 Herbert Gambrell, "Ratdesnake Pete," Saturday Review ofLiterature, 5 (May 16, 1942), 31 (quotation ). The best sources on Owen Payne White are the Owen Payne White Papers (C. L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Dept., University ofTexas at El Paso; cited hereafter as SSC), and vertical files at the El Paso Public Library, the El Paso County Historical Society, and the Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin (cited hereafter as CAH). See also "Owen Payne White," The Handbook of Texas Online, www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/WW/fwh26.html; John Gordon Knight, "Owen Payne White, El Paso's First Writer of Renown," Password (Summer, 1965), 53-56. White's writings, particularly The Autobiography ofa Durable Sinner (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1942), offer valuable insights and information, although they are sometimes at odds widi contemporary accounts. Vol. CXII, no. 2 Southwestern Historical Quarterly October 2008 1 74Southwestern Historical QuarterlyOctober tL· Desert caught die attention of the Sunday New York Times editor Lester Markel and Mercury mogul H. L. Mencken, a libertarian like White. Thus, at age forty-four, with little experience or training, White embarked on a successful reportorial career in which he never wrote without a byline or lacked a market. His goals as a reporter were twofold: to tell, without embellishment, the story of frontier America into which he had been born; and to expose hypocrisy wherever he found it—most commonly in political chambers, on pulpits, and among the clientele of bootleggers.2 In fewer than twenty years, White went from recorder of local events and history to prominent author and correspondent for national magazines . Increasingly, his work brought him both controversy and fame. Like his predecessor, William Wallace Mills, White wrote his history of El Paso in the Anglophile tradition of the day. The work engendered both widespread literary praise and consternation among Hispanics, the majority population group in Far West Texas. His dozens of articles and books condemned modernity, corporate influence, and political graft, which he felt undermined American integrity, and often enraged readers . Victims of his scorn included notables, for example, a Texas lieutenant governor-elect, a Republican National Committee member, and a powerful United States senator; and they often threatened or initiated litigation against him and his employers, once in a suit for...