Sharps Rifles and Spanish Mules


Book Description

Reading almost like a western novel, this well-documented history of a frontier business enterprise reveals the turbulent career of a stagecoach line that stretched from San Antonio to El Paso and at times reached to Santa Fe and San Diego.




American Rifle


Book Description

George Washington insisted that his portrait be painted with one. Daniel Boone created a legend with one. Abraham Lincoln shot them on the White House lawn. And Teddy Roosevelt had his specially customized. Now, in this first-of-its-kind book, historian Alexander Rose delivers a colorful, engrossing biography of an American icon: the rifle. Drawing on the words of soldiers, inventors, and presidents, based on extensive new research, and encompassing the Revolution to the present day, American Rifle is a balanced, wonderfully entertaining history of this most essential firearm and its place in American culture. In the eighteenth century American soldiers discovered that they no longer had to fight in Europe’s time-honored way. With the evolution of the famed “Kentucky” Rifle—a weapon slow to load but devastatingly accurate in the hands of a master—a new era of warfare dawned, heralding the birth of the American individualist in battle. In this spirited narrative, Alexander Rose reveals the hidden connections between the rifle’s development and our nation’s history. We witness the high-stakes international competition to produce the most potent gunpowder . . . how the mysterious arts of metallurgy, gunsmithing, and mass production played vital roles in the creation of American economic supremacy . . . and the ways in which bitter infighting between rival arms makers shaped diplomacy and influenced the most momentous decisions in American history. And we learn why advances in rifle technology and ammunition triggered revolutions in military tactics, how ballistics tests—frequently bizarre—were secretly conducted, and which firearms determined the course of entire wars. From physics to geopolitics, from frontiersmen to the birth of the National Rifle Association, from the battles of the Revolution to the war in Iraq, American Rifle is a must read for history buffs, gun collectors, soldiers—and anyone who seeks to understand the dynamic relationship between the rifle and this nation’s history.




The Frontier Army in the Settlement of the West


Book Description

A reassessment of the military's role in developing the Western territories moves beyond combat stories and stereotypes to focus on more non-martial accomplishments such as exploration, gathering scientific data, and building towns.




American Studies


Book Description

This volume supplements the acclaimed three volume set published in 1986 and consists of an annotated listing of American Studies monographs published between 1984 and 1988. There are more than 6,000 descriptive entries in a wide range of categories: anthropology and folklore, art and architecture, history, literature, music, political science, popular culture, psychology, religion, science and technology, and sociology.




The Ranger Ideal Volume 1


Book Description

Established in Waco in 1968, the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum honors the iconic Texas Rangers, a service which has existed, in one form or another, since 1823. They have become legendary symbols of Texas and the American West. Thirty-one Rangers, with lives spanning more than two centuries, have been enshrined in the Hall of Fame. In The Ranger Ideal Volume 1: Texas Rangers in the Hall of Fame, 1823-1861, Darren L. Ivey presents capsule biographies of the seven inductees who served Texas before the Civil War. He begins with Stephen F. Austin, “the Father of Texas,” who laid the foundations of the Ranger service, and then covers John C. Hays, Ben McCulloch, Samuel H. Walker, William A. A. “Bigfoot” Wallace, John S. Ford, and Lawrence Sul Ross. Using primary records and reliable secondary sources, and rejecting apocryphal tales, The Ranger Ideal presents the true stories of these intrepid men who fought to tame a land with gallantry, grit, and guns. This Volume 1 is the first of a planned three-volume series covering all of the Texas Rangers inducted in the Hall of Fame and Museum in Waco, Texas.




The Odyssey of Texas Ranger James Callahan


Book Description

James Callahan entered Texas armed, a quixotic young man enlisted in the Georgia Battalion for the cause of independence. He barely survived the 1836 Battle of Refugio and the Goliad Massacre. Undaunted by the perils of his adopted home, he remained in the line of fire for the next twenty-one years, fighting to protect Texas settlers from Apaches, Comanches, Seminoles, Kickapoos, outlaws, mavericks and the Mexican army. As a Texas Ranger, he rode with the legendary men of Seguin and San Antonio. In 1855, he commanded the punitive expedition into Mexico that bears his name, a fiasco that has been shrouded by mystery and shadowed by controversy ever since. In this first-ever biography, Joseph Luther traces the tragic course of the wayfarer who crossed so much of the Texas frontier and created so much of its story.




New Mexico Territory During the Civil War


Book Description

In the summer of 1862 the Civil War was going badly for the North. The distant New Mexico Territory, however, presented a different situation. After an invading army of zealous Texas Confederates won the field at Valverde near Fort Craig, Colorado Volunteers fell on the Rebels at Glorieta Pass and crushed Confederate dreams of conquering New Mexico and the Far West. The Texans, hungry and disheartened, retreated, leaving uncertainty and social unrest in their wake.By the late summer of 1862, Gen. James Henry Carleton arrived from California, determined to impose federal control on the territory. Major Henry Davies Wallen and Captain Andrew Wallace Evans were appointed inspector general and assistant inspector general, respectively. Fearing a second Confederate invasion, Carleton had Wallen and Evans examine various routes the Rebels might use to invade the territory as well as a variety of logistical and operational issues. Tellingly, their reports repeatedly mention troop drunkenness and poor relations with the locals as primary problems. These inspection reports, edited by award-winning Civil War historl War years.ian Thompson, provide unique insight into the military, cultural, and social life of a territory struggling to maintain law and order.




Standing in the Gap


Book Description

"Large military posts have been examined in detail in numerous books written about the Texas frontier, but the importance of smaller outposts and picket stations has been generally overlooked. In Standing in the Gap, Loyd M. Uglow examines these smaller outposts in relation to the larger forts that controlled them and explores their significance in military strategy and the pacification of the frontier. The army's role in the settlement of West Texas has been, until now, explained through biographies of prominent officers and histories of both Indian campaigns and the larger forts. With only passing mention of outposts such as Grierson's Spring, Van Horn's Wells, and Pecos Station in these texts, the stories of minor posts have gone, for the most part, untold.".




From the Pass to the Pueblos


Book Description

El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the Royal Road of the Interior, was a 1,600-mile braid of trails that led from Mexico City, in the center of New Spain, to the provincial capital of New Mexico on the edge of the empire’s northern frontier. The Royal Road served as a lifeline for the colonial system from its founding in 1598 until the last days of Spanish rule in the 1810s. Throughout the Mexican and American Territorial periods, the Camino Real expanded, becoming part of a larger continental and international transportation system and, until the trail was replaced by railroads in the late nineteenth century, functioned as the main pathway for conquest, migration, settlement, commerce, and culture in today’s American Southwest. More than 400 miles of the original trail lie within the United States today, and stretch from present-day San Elizario, Texas to Santa Fe, New Mexico. This segment comprises El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro National Historic Trail. It was added to the United States National Trail System in 2000 and is still in use today. This book guides the reader along the trail with histories and overviews of places in New Mexico, West Texas and the Ciudad Juárez area. It includes a broad overview of the trail’s history from 1598 until the arrival of the railroads in the 1880s, and describes the communities, landscape, archaeology, architecture, and public interpretation of this historic transportation corridor.




Fort Bowie, Arizona


Book Description

Fort Bowie, in present-day Arizona, was established in 1862 at the site of the famous Battle of Apache Pass, where U.S. troops clashed with Apache chief Cochise and his warriors. The fort’s dual purpose was to guard the invaluable water supply at Apache Spring and to control Indians in the developing southwestern region. Douglas C. McChristian’s Fort Bowie, Arizona, spans nearly four decades to provide a fascinating account of the many complex events surrounding the small combat post. In a sweeping narrative, McChristian presents Fort Bowie in fresh contexts of national expansion and regional development, weaving in threads of early exploration, transcontinental railroad surveys, the overland mail, mining, ranching, and the conflict with the Apaches.