The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 62, July 1958 - April, 1959 Page: 6

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

the Washington Hotel at Galveston. It is unlikely that the
Almanac had an ad for the hotel at which she stayed in Beaumont.
The only tavern at that picturesquely located town was less adapted
to the accommodation of man than of beast. There was but one guest-
chamber, and its only entrance was through a combination of office,
bar, smoking, and lounging room, presided over by the landlord, a
kindly, hunchbacked dwarf, whose wife, a comely intelligent woman,
by the way, was the first "dipper" I ever saw.15
Frederick Law Olmstead had, in 1857, reported meeting "some
cultivated, agreeable and talented persons" in Austin, but his
remembrance of his hotel there was not equally pleasant.
We arrived in a norther, and were shown, at the hotel to which we
had been recommended, into an exceedingly dirty room, in which
two of us slept with another gentleman, who informed us that it was
the best room in the house. The outside door, opening upon the
ground, had no latch, and during the night it was blown open by
the norther, and after we had made two ineffectual attempts to bar-
ricade it, was kept open till morning. .. When the breakfast-bell
rang, we all turned out in haste, though our boots were gone and
there was no water.16
In 1850 the greatest number of Texans, 40,107, belonged in the
age bracket of twenty to thirty years, with 186,797 under forty
years of age and only 54,697 over forty. White males of military
age, eighteen to forty-five, numbered 92,145. As to sex, even the
most unprepossessing unmarried girl scarcely stood a chance to re-
main an old maid with an excess of 15,704 males in 1850 and
36,000 in 1860. As Betty Paschal O'Connor expressed it: "There
were more men than women in Texas; every woman, pretty or
ugly, could marry some sort of man; therefore morality was de-
manded of her, and after marriage her flirtations were at an end."17
Farming or planting was of course the chief industry. Improved
farm land totaled 2,650,781 acres. In 1850 some 25,299 men were
engaged in agriculture as compared with 7,327 in commerce, trade,
and mechanics. The state reported 983 manufacturing establish-
ments employing 3,449 persons in 186o, when the Census broke
15Ibid., 69.
6Frederick Law Olmstead, A Journey through Texas; or a Saddletrip on the
Southwestern Frontier: With a Statistical Appendix (New York, 1857), 111.
17Mrs. T. P. O'Connor, I Myself (New York, 1914), 47-48.