Gamblers, Gunmen & Rogues: Old West Austin

For a few rough decades, Austin was a frontier town with faro tables on its main street and a gunfighter wearing the city marshal's badge. This driving tour follows the rogues' gallery of that era: Ben Thompson, the English-born gambler and gunman who ran a Congress Avenue saloon and then, improbably, kept the peace as marshal; William Sydney Porter, the mild bank teller convicted of embezzlement who reinvented himself in prison as the world-famous writer "O. Henry"; the grand Driskill Hotel bar where cattlemen and politicians made and lost fortunes over cards; the wide Avenue that staged it all; and Mount Bonnell, the wild-country lookout where frontier legends like "Bigfoot" Wallace supposedly took cover. It is Austin before it was respectable — told straight, with the tall tales flagged as tall tales.