From the Biography file at the Austin History Center under Swisher Family.
Pioneer lady left a record. By Anita Brewer.
A Northern newspaper woman found love and romance in Austin in the 1870s but failed to find the fame and fortune she sought.
An interesting insight into the life of a fabulous Pioneer, Austin woman, Bella French Swisher, is available in the bound volumes of the American Sketchbook in the University of Texas. Eugene C Barker TX History Center.
Mrs Swisher, editor and publisher of the sketchbook, had many battles to fight, the stigma of being a career woman in an era when there was no place for women but in the home.
A woman editor’s problems
In the seven bound volumes of the magazine, the complete collection, in the University of Texas Library, Mrs Swisher gives a full account of the problems faced by a woman editor in the 1870s. In 1877, Bella French transplanted her American Sketch Book from Wisconsin to Austin. Just why she left the urban areas of the North to try her fortune in the wild new land of Texas is unknown. Even then, Texas may have offered a challenge for those in search of wealth and glory.
Bella French, writing in her Sketch Book soon after her arrival in Austin, said the aim of her magazine was to “provide the best possible medium by which people at a distance may become acquainted with this large and growing state, as well as one which will preserve to the state those historical incidents which increase in value, As time bears them farther from us.”
Although Texas may not have brought Bella French the fortune she was seeking, it did bring her romance. In October 1878,, Bella French was married to a prominent Austin personality, Colonel JM swisher. The Colonel was a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto, and contributed to early articles on the history of Austin and Texas to the Sketch Book.
Alibi for marriage.
Soon after her marriage, Mrs Swisher said she had taken a male partner because she found it impossible to run the Sketch Book without the assistance of an old settler who would set us right about names, dates, et cetera when giving historical sketches in the work. The Swisher French Union, However, was not entirely one of the one of convenience, to judge by a poem published to the Sketch Book, written by Colonel Swisher. The poem, “an answer to my wife’s request that I should write her a poem”, is full of thoughts more sentimental than modern day husbands write.
“How could I keep from loving thee, for since the day we met, my wife, thy kind and loving care for me has made a poem of my life”, Colonel Swisher wrote. He continued, “tis said the eyes interpret love., this I heard the oft declare, then look in mind, the truth to prove, and read in full thy poem there”.
Change of business
When financial problems became so involved that the magazine was late in coming out, the Swishers turned to another business. In 1881, Mrs Swisher opened a Thermo Water Cure Establishment, or Hot Air Bath and Hygiene Institute. It was advertised for sufferers from rheumatism, neuralgia, paralysis and kindred diseases. Mrs Swisher died in California in 1893,, two years after the Colonel’s death in Austin in 1891. A friend at the Barker History Center in Austin who was a librarian and author of a biography of Sam Houston, has compared Mrs Swisher’s publishing efforts with those of Mrs Frank Leslie. “Although she was neither as prolific in output nor as successful as Mrs Leslie, she had ability and versatility and determination “said the librarian, “from the Texas standpoint, her achievement was not in the field of literature, but of local history”.
October 5, 1955.
Jeanine Plumer
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