Red River Story


Book Description

The people in this story all lived. The settlers dreamed of a home of their own and land to farm. The half-Indian buffalo hunters dreamed of a land kept open for their wild, free way of life. And the great fur companies, there in the wilderness of the northern Great Plains where the Assiniboine River joined the Red, cared only for profit....




Red River


Book Description

This is a new release of the original 1948 edition.




Red River


Book Description

Hailed as "powerful," "accomplished," and "spellbinding," Lalita Tademy's first novel Cane River was a New York Times bestseller and the 2001 Oprah Book Club Summer Selection. Now with her evocative, luminous style and painstaking research, she takes her family's story even further, back to a little-chronicled, deliberately-forgotten time...and the struggle of three extraordinary generations of African-American men to forge brutal injustice and shattered promise into a limitless future for their children... For the newly-freed black residents of Colfax, Louisiana, the beginning of Reconstruction promised them the right to vote, own property-and at last control their own lives. Tademy saw a chance to start a school for his children and neighbors. His friend Israel Smith was determined to start a community business and gain economic freedom. But in the space of a day, marauding whites would "take back" Colfax in one of the deadliest cases of racial violence in the South. In the bitter aftermath, Sam and Israel's fight to recover and build their dreams will draw on the best they and their families have to give-and the worst they couldn't have foreseen. Sam's hidden resilience will make him an unexpected leader, even as it puts his conscience and life on the line. Israel finds ironic success-and the bitterest of betrayals. And their greatest challenge will be to pass on to their sons and grandsons a proud heritage never forgotten-and the strength to meet the demands of the past and future in their own unique ways. An unforgettable achievement, a history brought to vibrant life through one of the most memorable families in fiction, Red River is about fathers and sons, husbands and wives-and the hopeful, heartbreaking choices we all must make to claim the legacy that is ours.




Red River Rising


Book Description

The gripping, true-life story of one of the most destructive floods in U.S. history and its effect on one city and its citizens.




Battles of the Red River War


Book Description

Battles of the Red River War unearths a long-buried record of the collision of two cultures. In 1874, U.S. forces led by Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie carried out a surprise attack on several Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa bands that had taken refuge in the Palo Duro Canyon of the Texas panhandle and destroyed their winter stores and horses. After this devastating loss, many of these Indians returned to their reservations and effectively brought to a close what has come to be known as the Red River War, a campaign carried out by the U.S. Army during 1874 as a result of Indian attacks on white settlers in the region. After this operation, the Southern Plains Indians would never again pose a coherent threat to whites’ expansion and settlement across their ancestral homelands. Until now, the few historians who have undertaken to tell the story of the Red River War have had to rely on the official records of the battles and a handful of extant accounts, letters, and journals of the U.S. Army participants. Starting in 1998, J. Brett Cruse, under the auspices of the Texas Historical Commission, conducted archeological investigations at six battle sites. In the artifacts they unearthed, Cruse and his teams found clues that would both correct and complete the written records and aid understanding of the Indian perspectives on this clash of cultures. Including a chapter on historiography and archival research by Martha Doty Freeman and an analysis of cartridges and bullets by Douglas D. Scott, this rigorously researched and lavishly illustrated work will commend itself to archeologists, military historians and scientists, and students and scholars of the Westward Expansion.




The Red River in Southwestern History


Book Description

In The Red River in Southwestern History, Carl Newton Tyson traces the river’s history from the time of early Spanish and French explorers to the present day, leading his readers to a new appreciation of the river and the region. From the Staked Plains of the Texas Panhandle the river flows down to buffalo and prairie dog country and through the Cross Timbers. It continues eastward to the Great Bend and through the cypresses of Louisiana’s bayou country, joining the Mississippi River south of Natchez. Whereas the Red River was a source of water to the Spaniards as they searched for gold, at Natchitoches, French trader Louis Juchereau de St. Denis traded with the Caddo Indians. Conflicts soon developed between French traders and Spaniards in Texas as they competed for land along the Red. Years later, the Red River featured again as part of the settlement in the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty, negotiated by Spanish minister Luis de Onís y Gonzales and U.S. secretary of state John Quincy Adams, which finally brought to an end the western boundary disputes between Spain and the United States lingering since the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. In 1852 Randolph Marcy discovered the source of the Red River—a mountain rivulet cutting a deep canyon through the Staked Plains. Marcy’s testimony in the Greer County border dispute between Oklahoma and Texas was key to the U.S. Supreme Court decision favoring Oklahoma. In the decades between 1930 and 1970, dams were built along the Red by the U.S. Corps of Engineers to control floods, generate electricity, and create lakes for recreation along the Oklahoma-Texas border.




The Red River Campaign and Its Toll


Book Description

The Red River Campaign in the spring of 1864 was one of the most destructive of the Civil War. The agricultural wealth of the Red River Valley tempted Union General Nathaniel P. Banks to invade with 30,000 troops in an attempt to seize control of the river and confiscate as much cotton as possible from local plantations. After three months of chaos, during which the countryside was destroyed and many slaves freed themselves, Banks was defeated by a smaller Confederate force under General Richard Taylor. This book takes a fresh look at the fierce battles at Mansfield and Pleasant Hill, the Union army's escape from Monett's Ferry and the burning of Alexandria, and explains the causes and consequences of the war in Central Louisiana.




The Story of the Prairies


Book Description







By the Sweat of His Brow


Book Description

“If I had promised to be a priest and kept my word, today I would be . . . a feted-up, high-living hypocrite in the so-called vineyard of the Lord, and not a farmer . . . earning his bread by the sweat of his brow.” Defying his Catholic parents’ insistence that he join the clergy, twenty-year-old R. M. Probstfield emigrates from the Rhineland to Minnesota. After some continental rambling and the federal government forcing Native Americans from the Red River Valley, a decade toiling for the Hudson’s Bay Company persuades him that the Valley’s rich soil offers opportunity, and as one of the earliest settlers establishes Oakport Farm near the well-timbered Red River. Documented from a multi-generational journal and illustrated with vintage photographs, By the Sweat of His Brow sets the Probstfield family’s daily activities in the context of state and national agricultural, social, and political history and opens a window on rural life at the eastern edge of the Great Plains from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. This meticulously researched, eminently readable book colorfully depicts a complicated patriarch, loving wife, and eleven children eking out a living. It will appeal to history buffs and scholars alike.