Frontier Texas


Book Description

The West Texas frontier-the area encompassing the region stretching from Fort Worth to the Caprock, from Palo Duro Canyon to the San Saba River-has been a crossroads of humanity for thousands of years. Each group of humans who trekked across its sun-drenched prairies had to contend with the challenges of life in an area that has always been a climatic, geographical, political, and cultural borderland. In addressing these challenges, the people of the frontier developed perseverance, toughness, and determination-all necessities for life on the Texas frontier. This book tells the epic story of this region and its many transitions throughout the centuries. It traces the struggles and triumphs of many groups as they tried to tame the region for their own purposes. Early humans hunted mammoths and other game in the region. Then came the Jumanos following the great bison herds, then the Apaches, the Comanches, the Spaniards, and the Texans. By 1845, with Texas' entrance into the United States, more formal efforts to tame the frontier brought forts and soldiers. Cattlemen and their herds shared the plains with the buffalo and the Plains Indians. Battles and ambushes, justice and injustice defined the struggle for the next several decades. The military abandoned the region during the Civil War, only to return with force upon its completion. The vast postwar expansion of the cattle industry and the systematic slaughter of the buffalo herds ensured that Americans would claim the region permanently and that the Plains Indians' dominance of the frontier had come to an end. By 1880 barbed wire, windmills, railroads, and towns demonstrated that the frontier had been permanently transformed.




The Other Texas Frontier


Book Description

“One is tempted to say that wherever there was a frontier in America there was a counterfrontier and that the main purpose of this counterfrontier was not only to help man grow or dig or catch or kill his livng but also to put this man in communication with the traditions of his kind and thereby secure to his descendants the benefits of the free mind.” —Harry Huntt Ransom The reflections of Harry Huntt Ransom (1908–1976) in The Other Texas Frontier present an alternative to the stereotypical picture of the brash, blustery heroes of the Texas frontier. Here, in six highly readable essays, Ransom posits a thesis of the counterfrontier: a quiet settling of the land by thoughtful, undramatic citizens who, he says, were the other Texans—the Texans without guns. Three of the essays are profiles of gifted men from Texas’ nineteenth century: Ashbel Smith, physician, diplomat, and first president of the Board of Regents of the University of Texas; Sherman Goodwin, physician, horticulturalist, bibliophile (and Ransom’s own grandfather); and Swante Palm, Swedish immigrant, bibliographer, and generous patron of the University of Texas libraries. Harry Huntt Ransom, one of Texas’ most accomplished men of letters and for forty-one years an integral part of the University of Texas System as professor, dean, president, and chancellor, leaves an extraordinary legacy to Texas for both his educational and literary service. Though educated out of state, he returned to his native Texas after completion of his PhD at Yale to teach, research, and write in the fields of copyright law, literary history, and bibliography. As founder of the Humanities Research Center, he was squarely in the tradition of the men he was writing about. Compiled and edited after Ransom’s death by his wife, Hazel H. Ransom, the literary sketches of The Other Texas Frontier form a book that Ransom himself had outlined but had not completed.




Lens on the Texas Frontier


Book Description

Photographs of Texas’ frontier past are valuable as both art and artifact. Recording not only the lives and surroundings of days gone by, but also the artistry of those who captured the people and their times on camera, the rare images in Lens on the Texas Frontier offer a documentary record that is usually available to only a few dedicated collectors. In this book, prominent collector Lawrence T. Jones III showcases some of the most interesting and historically important glimpses of Texas history included among the five thousand photographs in the collection that bears his name at the DeGolyer Library of Southern Methodist University. One of the nation’s most comprehensive and valuable Texas-related photography collections, the Lawrence T. Jones III Collection documents all aspects of Texas photography from the years 1846–1945, including rare examples of the various techniques practiced from its earliest days in the state: daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, and paper print photographs in various formats. The selections in the book feature cartes de visite, cabinet cards, oversized photographs, stereographs, and more. The subjects of the photos include Confederate and Union soldiers and officers in the Civil War; Mexicans, including ranking military officials from the Mexican Revolution; and a wide spectrum of Texan citizens, including African American, Native American, Hispanic, and Caucasian women, men, and children.




Savage Frontier Volume 4


Book Description




The Texas Frontier and the Butterfield Overland Mail, 1858-1861


Book Description

This is the story of the antebellum frontier in Texas, from the Red River to El Paso, a raw and primitive country punctuated by chaos, lawlessness, and violence. During this time, the federal government and the State of Texas often worked at cross-purposes, their confused and contradictory policies leaving settlers on their own to deal with vigilantes, lynchings, raiding American Indians, and Anglo-American outlaws. Before the Civil War, the Texas frontier was a sectional transition zone where southern ideology clashed with western perspectives and where diverse cultures with differing worldviews collided. This is also the tale of the Butterfield Overland Mail, which carried passengers and mail west from St. Louis to San Francisco through Texas. While it operated, the transcontinental mail line intersected and influenced much of the region's frontier history. Through meticulous research, including visits to all the sites he describes, Glen Sample Ely uncovers the fascinating story of the Butterfield Overland Mail in Texas. Until the U.S. Army and Butterfield built West Texas's infrastructure, the region's primitive transportation network hampered its development. As Ely shows, the Overland Mail Company and the army jump-started growth, serving together as both the economic engine and the advance agent for European American settlement. Used by soldiers, emigrants, freighters, and stagecoaches, the Overland Mail Road was the nineteenth-century equivalent of the modern interstate highway system, stimulating passenger traffic, commercial freighting, and business. Although most of the action takes place within the Lone Star State, this is in many respects an American tale. The same concerns that challenged frontier residents confronted citizens across the country. Written in an engaging style that transports readers to the rowdy frontier and the bustle of the overland road, The Texas Frontier and the Butterfield Overland Mail offers a rare view of Texas's antebellum past.




Getting Away with Murder on the Texas Frontier


Book Description

Explores the rough-and-tumble world of frontier justice, Texas style.




Salado, Texas


Book Description

A thoroughly researched book about Salado, Texas. Charlie Turnbo researched and interviewed countless books and people to tell the history of Salado.




Frontier Forts of Texas


Book Description

With its vast size and long frontier period, Texas was the scene of more combat events between Native American warriors and Anglo soldiers and settlers than any other state or territory. The US Army, therefore, erected more military outposts in Texas, a tradition begun by Spanish soldados and their presidios. Settlers built blockhouses and even stockades, the most famous of which was Parker's Fort, the site of an infamous massacre in 1836. Successive north to south lines of Army forts attempted to screen westward-moving settlers from war parties, while border posts stretched along the Rio Grande from Fort Brown on the Gulf of Mexico to Fort Bliss at El Paso del Norte. Texas was the site of the first US Cavalry regiment employed against horseback warriors, as well as the experimental US Camel Corps. From Robert E. Lee to Albert Sidney Johnston to Ranald Mackenzie, the Army's finest officers served out of Texas forts, and 61 Medals of Honor were earned by soldiers campaigning in the Lone Star State.




The Captured


Book Description

On New Year's Day in 1870, ten-year-old Adolph Korn was kidnapped by an Apache raiding party. Traded to Comaches, he thrived in the rough, nomadic existence, quickly becoming one of the tribe's fiercest warriors. Forcibly returned to his parents after three years, Korn never adjusted to life in white society. He spent his last years in a cave, all but forgotten by his family. That is, until Scott Zesch stumbled over his own great-great-great uncle's grave. Determined to understand how such a "good boy" could have become Indianized so completely, Zesch travels across the west, digging through archives, speaking with Comanche elders, and tracking eight other child captives from the region with hauntingly similar experiences. With a historians rigor and a novelists eye, Zesch's The Captured paints a vivid portrait of life on the Texas frontier, offering a rare account of captivity. "A carefully written, well-researched contribution to Western history -- and to a promising new genre: the anthropology of the stolen." - Kirkus Reviews




The Texas Panhandle Frontier


Book Description

The Texas Panhandle-its eastern edge descending sharply from the plains into the canyons of Palo Duro, Tule, Quitaque, Casa Blanca, and Yellow House-is as rich in history as it is in natural beauty. Long considered a crossroads of ancient civilizations, the twenty-six northernmost Texas counties lie on the southern reaches of the Great Plains, w...