Fountain Goodlet Oxsheer--like "Slaughter" or "Goodnight"--was an unusual and appealing name for one of Texas' most dynamic cattle ranchers. Once the baron of an intricate network of ranches that stretched from Oklahoma and the Texas Staked Plains down to northern Mexico, Oxsheer prospered, endured, and sought to run his empire and live by his own code of ethics. But the great ranching era ended, and twentieth-century phenomena such as world war and materialistic lifestyles joined the Dust Bowl tempest to obscure his renown and obliterate his fortune.
The forgotten cattle king is brought...

The architecture of an area reflects and indeed embodies its history. When a significant portion of that architecture is lost, so is the grasp later generations have on their heritage. With more than 250 historical photographs and drawings and thoughtful commentary, Willard Robinson recaptures for Texans the cultural history of their state through the architecture that is gone.
This handsome volume is unique in picturing comprehensively both public and private buildings and in illustrating the entire history of the state's architecture, unhindered by the difficulties of finding extant...

Travel between southwestern towns at the turn of the century was an arduous experience. There were no longer any stagecoaches to carry travelers. Railroads did criss-cross the region, but they did not go through every burg. Motor cars were appearing, but not everyone could afford them. W. B. Chenoweth saw this void in transportation service. He designed a six-cylinder "motor driven stage coach," and in 1907 he coaxed a few passengers into the vehicle for a trip from Colorado City to Snyder, Texas.
As soon as passengers became used to Chenoweth's noisy coaches, the dusty paths, and, most...

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,...