"This is the story of me and my ranch friends, of the heritage that was ours, the way we worked, the tales we told, and the fun we had on America's largest, most progressive cattle ranch," says Frank Goodwyn. The creed of the King Ranch cattlemen was simple: "If you want to make a kid into a cowboy, start him out as soon as he can sit on a horse." Being the son of the foreman on the Norias Division of the ranch, Goodwyn started working cattle every summer at an early age. Except for the bookkeeper and the bachelor boss Caesar Kleberg, the Goodwyns were usually the only Anglos present. Goodwyn...

John Coffee Hays helped to forge the legend of what a Texas Ranger was. Arriving in Texas in 1836 but just missing the famous battles of the Texas Revolution, nineteen-year-old Hays soon had Sam Houston urging him to join a new group of Rangers. Once out on the frontier, Hays's careful planning and bold-indeed, sensational-forays against the Comanches soon earned him a colorful reputation and a host of nicknames. At twenty-three Hays was commissioned a captain, and between skirmishes and battles his survey party marked out much of the area around San Antonio. Hays was pivotal in the ultimate...

John Leonard Riddell was a medical doctor, geologist, and botanist who traveled from New Orleans through Texas in 1839, surveying the Texas Hill Country for a group of businessmen searching for the lost San Saba silver mine. By joining the expedition, which of course did not find the mine, Riddell became the first trained scientist--preceding even Ferdinand Roemer--to visit the area of the Edwards Plateau and to provide a detailed description of the botany and geology along his route.
James O. Breeden has here annotated the lively diary Riddell kept on his Hill Country trip and an article...

Texas A&M University has many unique traditions, but the annual muster ceremony held on April 21 is among the most hallowed. No other gathering brings more former students together for a single event, marked by Aggies in more than four hundred locations worldwide. Aggies originally observed San Jacinto Day--the victory on April 21, 1836, by the Texans over Santa Anna--with club activities. During the WWII defense of Corregidor in Manila Bay the muster tradition gained broader significance. Surrounded, pounded by several quarter-ton shells a minute, and with little hope of relief that April of...

Texans faced two foes as the Civil War began in 1861: the Union armed forces and the Plains Indians. In this breakthrough volume, David Paul Smith demonstrates that through the efforts of the Home Guard and the Texas Rangers, the Texas frontier held its own during the eventful war years, in spite of a number of factors that could easily have overwhelmed it. David Paul Smith is a history teacher at Highland Park High School in Dallas; his special interests include the American Civil War, the antebellum South, and the Texas frontier.

Historians have amply recorded the battles and the Anglo-Americans' military, economic, and political domination of the Mexican lands after 1836. But few studies have documented the reverse flow in the interchange while Anglo and Mexican co-existed under the Mexican flag in the previous years. Andres Tijerina's book, focusing on Texas between 1821 and 1836, provides background facts for a better understanding of the exchange of land, power, culture, and social institutions that took place between the Anglo-American frontier and the Hispanic frontier during those critical years. To be sure,...

The twentieth century brought industrialization to Texas cities. For Mexican workers in the state, this meant worsening economic conditions, widespread discrimination, and an indifferent or at times hostile Anglo labor movement. Faced with such challenges, Mexicans often looked to each other or toward Mexico for support and inspiration in building a largely autonomous, occasionally trans-border labor movement. In this first book-length examination of the earliest organized efforts by Mexican-origin workers in Texas, Emilio Zamora challenges the usual, stereotypical depiction of Mexican...

F. Todd Smith's new narrative picks up the story of these tribes begun in his volume The Caddo Indians: Tribes at the Convergence of Empires, 1542-1854. Their relations with the United States government, the state of Texas (whose role in Indian policy was distinctive because of its previous status as a sovereign nation), and officials of Indian Territory, as well as their ongoing struggles with other tribes similarly being forced from traditional lands, make compelling reading. Smith documents the process by which the Caddos and Wichitas increasingly lost control of their own fate and came to...

German immigrant Dutch Wurzbach lived the frontier history of Texas from the arrival of his family in Galveston in 1846 through the Council House Treaty, a stint with the Texas Rangers, service in the Confederate army, and another fifty years in the Lone Star State.
Eight-year-old Dutch immigrated to Texas with his family in 1846. After the death of his mother, he worked for a while for Texas Indian agent R. S. Neighbors, then ran away to San Antonio. Over the next few years, he faced Indian attacks, broke mules for the U.S. Army, met Big Foot Wallace and other famous frontiersmen,...