This book brings alive what one man feels about his childhood home. The place is West Texas, seen across a long vista in which today's events and people merge with the author's boyhood and young manhood. It is a harsh, remote country, where the weather is always very close and the horizon far away. The Brazos country of long-ago Fourth of July fishing expeditions; the grass-grown remains of a way station of the Butterfield Stage Line; the streets of Abilene; the sparse grazing lands under infinite skies-all are made resonant by a native son's affection and understanding. It is a way of...

Short as the life of the Southern Overland Mail turned out to beless than three years in its spanthe saga of the Butterfield Trail remains a romantic high point in the westward movement, forming familiar elements in historical plots, functioning as a vibrant backdrop against which mythic adventures, western thrillers, movie serials, and television spectacles have raced. A. C. Greene offers a history and guide to retrace that historic and romantic Trail.
Today, more than a century and a third after the first Butterfield coaches rolled, we are hard put to imagine how awesome, how fearful...