Once called the "Fighting Colonel" of the Texas frontier, Ranald S. Mackenzie in the brief years of his career through the 1870s and early 1880s secured that land for the surging wave of settlers who turned the wilderness into a place of cattle ranches, productive farms, and prosperous towns. In this classic account of the dashing cavalryman's campaigns, first published in limited numbers in 1965, eminent historian Ernest Wallace brought to life an era of the frontier that continues to intrigue readers.
Mackenzie, after achieving an amazing record during the Civil War, rode onto the...

Many of the great Texas ranches established during the cattle boom of the 1880s became immediate business successes, but as time passed, many of them failed. Oil, Taxes, and Cats is the story of one of the survivors and of the family that kept it alive. David Mantz DeVitt, a young New York newspaperman, came to Texas in 1880 and became co-owner of the Mallet Ranch in 1895. Although he lacked practical experience in the livestock business, DeVitt managed to parlay his small investment into a 100,000-acre cattle operation that continues to operate today. DeVitt s two sons were killed in...

In 1925, when Rollie Burns turned sixty-eight, like many old-timers he decided it was time to write down his reminiscences of a long, full life on the West Texas plains. Born in 1857 in Missouri, he had been brought to Texas by his parents about the beginning of the Civil War, and he grew up near Denison, then the only shipping point on the cattle trail north and a fascinating place for boys who were to become cowboys. One month short of his sixteenth birthday Burns ran away from home to join a scouting expedition to the Texas Panhandle, and by the time he settled in the Lubbock area in 1881,...

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...

In 2010, the present Northwest Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church will celebrate its 100th anniversary. At its birth, the conference began with nearly two hundred strong churches and another two hundred part-time "school house" churches within its charge.
During its first forty years, it grew at a rapid pace; but, in the mid-1960s, began to experience a gradual decline which continues to this day. This study explores the conference's reasons for growth, the challenge of conflict and decline, and its efforts to find renewal and revival. At the same time, it celebrates the...