For the Plains Indians, the period from 1750 to 1890, often referred to as the traditional period, was an evolutionary time. Horses and firearms, trade goods, shifting migration patterns, disease pandemics, and other events associated with extensive European contact led to a peak of Plains Indian influence and success in the early nineteenth century. Ironically, that same European contact ultimately led to the devolution of traditional Plains Indian society, and by 1870 most Plains Indian peoples were living on reservations. In The Plains Indians Paul H. Carlson charts the evolution and...

In this little classic, first published in 1977, Ray A. Billington outlines the threecenturylong process of westering that forged the American characteristics of resourcefulness, individualism and democracy, and upward social mobility.
"The American Frontiersman" looks at the mountain men of the fur trade who succumbed to the wilderness world in which they found themselves and in which they were forced to begin the climb upward to civilization once more. In "The Frontier and American Culture" the author suggests that although many backwoodsmen seceded from civilization, others made a...

In the spring of 1883 Apache raiders massacred Judge McComas and his wife and kidnapped their six-year-old son, Charley on a desolate road in southwestern New Mexico Territory, all victims of revenge sought by the Apaches for Gen. George Crook's campaign. Marc Simmons brings to light one of the last massacres of the Indian wars.

Historian David La Vere has culled from the Indian-Pioneer Histories housed in the Indian Archives of the Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City a wealth of vivid detail about life among the former Texas Indian peoples. The oral histories that make up this collection were gathered during the Great Depression by the Works Progress Administration. From the 112 bound volumes that resulted, Dr. La Vere has gathered all the material pertinent to the Indians who came from Texas into an exceptional picture of the details of daily life-war and raiding, hunting and planting, foodways dress,...

Tejanos (Texans of Mexican heritage) were instrumental leaders in the life and development of Texas during the Mexican period, the war of independence, and the Texas Republic. Jesus F. de la Teja and ten other scholars examine the lives, careers, and influence of many long-neglected but historically significant Tejano leaders who were active and influential in the formation, political and military leadership, and economic development of Texas. In Tejano Leadership in Mexican and Revolutionary Texas, lesser-known figures such as Father Refugio de la Garza, Juan Martin Veramendi, Jose Antonio...

Margaret Swett Henson examines the actions of John Davis Bradburn, an American-born man whose early involvement in filibustering brought him to the Mexican state of Coahuila-Texas and won him Mexican citizenship in the Mexican army. Although he was branded as an arrogant, unprincipled tyrant by Anglo Texans of his time and later historians for his 1832 arrest of William Barret Travis, Henson concludes that Bradburn was simply doing his duty as a Mexican career officer. Winner of the Summerfield G. Roberts Award, when it was first published in 1982, this provocative revisionist look at a...

In 1821, although Spain claimed what is now Texas, American Indian groups occupied it. Less than forty years later, they had been largely displaced, and their subsistence economy, supplemented by raiding and trade, had been replaced by an Anglo-Texan agricultural economy linked to a rapidly expanding and industrializing capitalist system.

For the Karankawas and the Tonkawas, the period from 1821 to 1859 was particularly devastating. Once thriving communities, the Karankawas survived only as scattered individuals after a small remnant on the banks of the Rio Grande was massacred, and the...

In the late seventeenth century, General Alonso de Leon led five military expeditions from northern New Spain into what is now Texas in search of French intruders who had settled on lands claimed by the Spanish crown. Lola Orellano Norris has identified sixteen manuscript copies of de Leon's meticulously kept expedition diaries. These documents hold major importance for early Texas scholarship. Some of these early manuscripts have been known to historians, but never before have all sixteen manuscripts been studied.

In this interdisciplinary study, Norris transcribes, translates, and...

Historians Walter L. Buenger and Walter D. Kamphoefner present a revised and annotated translation of William Andreas Trenckmann's memoirs as a revealing window into the lives of German Texans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.