You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Englishman Frank Collinson went to Texas in 1872, when he was seventeen, to work on Will Noonan’s ranch near Castroville. He lived the rest of his life in the southwestern United States, and at the age of seventy-nine began writing about the Old West he knew and loved. He had a flair for writing, a phenomenal memory, and a passion for truth that is evident in what he wrote and said. His writings for Ranch Romances, his letters, and transcriptions of his conversations have been arranged here in roughly chronological order, so that their importance for frontier history is readily apparent. Collinson ranged the West in his writings as he did in person, telling of the last tragic days of buffalo hunting on the Plains; clashes between hunters or cowboys and the Plains Indians; the character of trail drivers; and the definitive nature of violence, particularly at gun-point. J. Frank Dobie said of Collinson: "In the realm of frontier chronicles, the writing of educated Englishmen. . . men with the perspective of civilization, with imagination, and a lust for primitive nature, stand out. To this class of men belongs Frank Collinson."
Originally published as a hardback in 2003.
Loneliness pervaded the lives of pioneers on the American plains, including the empty expanses of West Texas. Most settlers lived in isolation broken only by occasional community gatherings such as funerals and religious revivals. In The Lonesome Plains, Louis Fairchild mines the letters and journals of West Texas settlers, as well as contemporary fiction and poetry, to record the emotions attending solitude and the ways people sought relief. Hungering for neighborliness, people came together in times of misfortune--sickness, accident, and death--and at annual religious services. In fascinating detail, Fairchild describes the practices that grew up around these two focal points of social lif...
None
George killed John Selman, and now the story of his life and his controversial killings while wearing the badge--show who he was tried 3 times and acquitted each time.
Presents an overview of the history of American labor using excerpts from primary source documents, short biographies of influential people, and more.
In the spring of 1874 a handful of men and one women set out for the Texas Panhandle to seek their fortunes in the great buffalo hunt. Moving south to follow the herds, they intended to establish a trading post to serve the hunter, or "hide men." At a place called Adobe Walls they dug blocks from the sod and built their center of operations After operating for only a few months, the post was attacked one sultry June morning by angry members of several Plains Indian tribes, whose physical and cultural survival depending on the great bison herd that were rapidly shrinking before the white men's guns. Initially defeated, that attacking Indians retreated. But the defenders also retreated leaving...
This is a history of the Comancheros, or Mexicans who traded with the Comanche Indians in the early Southwest. When Don Juan Bautista de Anza and Ecueracapa, a Comanche leader, concluded a peace treaty in 1786, mutual trade benefits resulted, and the treaty was never afterward broken by either side. New Mexican Comancheros were free to roam the plains to trade goods, and when Americans introduced, the Comanches and New Mexicans even joined in a loose, informal alliance that made the American occupation of the plains very costly. Similarly, in the 1860s the Comancheros would trade guns and ammunition to the Comanches and Kiowas, allowing them to wreck a gruesome toll on the advancing Texans.
A long needed account of the human invasion of this rugged Texas desert land.
Indian trader, rancher, harbor developer, oil impresario—these are the many worlds of one of the least chronicled but most fascinating characters of the American West. In the early, bustling years of the frontier, a brazen young man named William McDole Lee moved from Wisconsin to Kansas and then to Texas to forge a life for himself. Becoming a driving entrepreneurial force in Texas's development, Lee soon garnered the alliances and resources necessary to shape the financial destinies of disparate groups throughout the state. His story is expertly told in Donald F. Schofield's Indians, Cattle, Ships, and Oil. Beginning in 1869 as a trader to the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes and for...