When young Kirvin Kade Legett arrived in Buffalo Gap, Texas, in 1879, his principal assets were a good horse and saddle and a license to practice law. When the Texas and Pacific Railroad, building west from Fort Worth, missed Buffalo Gap, the young attorney moved on to Abilene, then a tent city with only two items for sale, "a train ticket to git away or a drink to make you willing to stay." The man and the country were to grow up together.Legett's early clients were buffalo hunters, bone collectors, sheepherders, cattlemen, and farmers, but he eventually handled cases of statewide and even...

Son of a north Texas wheat- and cotton-farming family, Marvin Jones grew up with strong agrarian roots and a taste for Democratic politics. Elected to Congress in 1916, he joined the Texas delegation and learned the political ropes from John Nance Garner. Named to the House Agriculture Committee, Jones later became its chairman and directed the destiny of New Deal agricultural legislation in the House of Representatives.
Jones's Panhandle district lay in the 1930s Dust Bowl. As Roosevelt's chairman of the Agriculture Committee, he fought for New Deal farm legislation--low-interest loans...

The myth of the cowboy is powerful in American folklore, but the real life of the cowboy was hard, lonely, and rewarding, if one was seeking the less tangible rewards of being close to nature. The modern cowboy or ranch hand uses different methods but works the land with the same love as the icons of the Old West did. John Lincoln went from bookkeeper to president of the Matador Cattle Company, and his view along the way to the top plus his digging into the company founder's files provide the basis for this look at one modern ranching enterprise and its workers. The founder of the Matador...

San Antonio, Texas, lies geographically and culturally at the crossroads of Mexico, Texas, and the larger United States. During the Great Depression it lay also at the crossroads of these cultures' myths, memories, and identities. Between 1929 and 1941, in this city's West Side barrio, a generation of Mexican immigrants developed into a new middle class and forged an identity that has shaped Southwestern experience since then: the identity of the Mexican American.
Richard Garcia presents an innovative study of the tension between change and continuity in thought, culture, and community...

For almost three hundred miles, the Pecos River cuts across far West Texas. It is an arid land, a land that in the last century offered danger and hardship to those who crossed it and those who settled it. Yet they came--army posts like Fort Stockton to challenge the Apaches' claim to the rugged land, settlers to supply the posts, cattlemen to eke out a living from the vast but sparse grazing ranges. They came and they stayed because the land held one overriding appeal: it was Texas' last frontier.
The newcomers--cattlemen and sheepmen, individuals and corporations--included sturdy,...

When D Burns arrived at the mighty Pitchfork Ranch as the new manager in 1942, he walked straight into the hostility of a lot of longtime hands who did not want to take orders from an outsider. Gradually, though, D and his wife, Mamie, won allies and made a place for themselves on the historic spread. For the next twenty-three years Mamie jotted down stories about the cowhands, the cooks and gardeners at the Big House, the many guests, and her own lively family.
Her stories reveal life as it was on an isolated ranch during the war years and the years of change that followed. The Pitchfork...

From Sam Maverick's arrival in Texas to his death in 1870, he participated in many of the most momentous events of the state's early history, including the Siege of Bexar and the defense of the Alamo. He accumulated a fabled land empire and inspired the term "maverick" to denote an unbranded calf or an independent person. Sam's wife, Mary--by some accounts the first AngloAmerican woman to settle in San Antonio--lived through the stresses and tragedies of pioneer family life, chronicling them with emotional intensity and immediacy of detail. Together Sam and Mary founded a Texas family dynasty...

"They came, they saw, they liked it," Stanley Marcus recalls of 1936 - the year "the rest of America discovered Texas." That year, in the midst of the nation's depression, the Lone Star State extravagantly celebrated the centennial of its independence from Mexico with fervor, fanfare, and hoop-la. Spawned by pride, patriotism, and a large measure of economic self-interest, the 1936 centennial observances marked a high tide of ethnocentrism in Texas and etched a new image of the state.
In 1923 the Advertising Clubs of Texas launched the centennial movement to advertise the state...