*These are great frontier rough-and-tough anecdotes.
Houston Chronicle writers are in an exalted state of post-shock
Slogging past mud-splattered tents, half-finished houses and roofless buildings in a clearing hacked out of a pine forest, Audobon made his way to the "mansion" of newly elected President Sam Houston. A gathering of Cabinet members welcomed their distinguished guest into a rough 12-by-16 log cabin consisting of two rooms separated by a dog run. Audobon couldn't help but notice how cluttered and filthy everything was, in the anteroom and in the president's private chamber. While impressed with Sam Houston, he would recall that "the place of his abode can never be forgotten."
Hanging around town for a few days, Audobon wandered into the roofless capitol building. When Congress assembled six days after his arrival, he noted that it had rained the night before and the floor was a muddy lake. Lawmakers glanced down at their wet boots and soaked pant legs and at the soggy, smudged papers on their desks and promptly adjourned.
(...)
Austin writer Jeffrey Stuart Kerr compiled several of these early-Houston anecdotes for his 2013 book, "Seat of Empire: The Embattled Birth of Austin, Texas," including the following from a young Texas immigrant named Granville Rose. When Rose and his buddies wandered into a swarm of mosquitoes "as large as grasshoppers," they jumped into the bayou to escape, only to discover that the water was aboil with alligators. Their mad scramble to shore left one of their party stranded on the opposite bank, so the others found a canoe to ferry him back across. As the vessel nosed into the bank, a large panther sprang out of the brush and bounded away.
"Houston is now one of the muddiest and most disagreeable places on earth," another early-day visitor, John Winfield Scott Dancy, observed in 1838.
Why would Lubbock and Rose and an ever-growing number of immigrants have made their way to one of the muddiest and most disagreeable places on earth? Many, of course, had been wooed by two young New York promoters, brothers touting "an abundance of excellent spring water and enjoying the sea breeze in all its freshness," a city that's "handsome and beautifully elevated, salubrious and well-watered." Despite the fact that one of those brothers, John Kirby Allen, died at 28 of a "bilious fever," (possibly yellow fever or malaria), people yearning to start anew kept coming.
If the Allen brothers' advertising genius helps explain why people came, we still have to wonder why they stayed in what sounds like a god-forsaken, pestilential swamp....
