In Sutherland Springs, Texas, Richard B. McCaslin explores the rise and fall of this rural community near San Antonio primarily through the lens of its aspirations to become a resort spa town, because of its mineral water springs, around the turn of the twentieth century. Texas real estate developers, initially more interested in oil, brought Sutherland Springs to its peak as a resort in the early twentieth century, but failed to transform the farming settlement into a resort town. The decline in water tables during the late twentieth century reduced the mineral water flows, and the town faded. Sutherland Springs’s history thus provides great insights into the importance of water in shaping settlement. Beyond the story of resort spa aspirations lies a history of the community and its people itself. McCaslin provides a complete history of Sutherland Springs from early settlement through Civil War and into the twentieth century, its agricultural and oil-drilling exploits alongside its mineral water appeal, as well as a complete community history of the various settlers and owners of the springs/hotel. The contents include: Setting a pattern -- Losing a generation -- Another start uphill -- Building new Sutherland Springs -- Century of decline -- Endnotes.

Higher Education in Texas is the first book to tell the history, defining events, and critical participants in the development of higher education in Texas from approximately 1838 to 1970. Charles Matthews, Chancellor Emeritus of the Texas State University System, begins the story with the land grant policies of the Spanish, Mexicans, Republic of Texas, and the State of Texas that led to the growth of Texas. Religious organizations supplied the first of many colleges, years before the Texas Legislature began to fund and support public colleges and universities. Matthews devotes a chapter to the junior/community colleges and their impact on providing a low-cost education alternative for local students. These community colleges also played a major role in economic development in their communities. Further chapters explore the access and equity in educating women, African Americans, and Hispanics.

In the early 1900s, two families in Scurry and Kent counties in West Texas united in a marriage of fourteen-year-old Gladys Johnson to twenty-one-year-old Ed Sims. Billy Johnson, the father, set up Gladys and Ed on a ranch, and the young couple had two daughters. But Gladys was headstrong and willful, and Ed drank too much, and both sought affection outside their marriage. A nasty divorce ensued, and Gladys moved with her girls to her father’s luxurious ranch house, where she soon fell in love with famed Texas Ranger Frank Hamer. When Ed tried to take his daughters for a prearranged Christmas visit in 1916, Gladys and her brother Sid shot him dead on the Snyder square teeming with shoppers. One of the best lawyers in West Texas, Judge Cullen Higgins (son of the old feudist Pink Higgins) managed to win acquittal for both Gladys and Sid. In the tradition of Texas feudists since the 1840s, the Sims family sought revenge. Sims’ son-in-law, Gee McMeans, led an attack in Sweetwater and shot Billy Johnson’s bodyguard, Frank Hamer, twice, while Gladys—by now Mrs. Hamer—fired at another assassin. Hamer shot back, killed McMeans, and was no-billed on the spot by a grand …

Frank Reaugh (1860–1945; pronounced “Ray”) was called “the Dean of Texas artists” for good reason. His pastels documented the wide-open spaces of the West as they were vanishing in the late nineteenth century, and his plein air techniques influenced generations of artists. His students include a “Who’s Who” of twentieth-century Texas painters: Alexandre Hogue, Reveau Bassett, and Lucretia Coke, among others. He was an advocate of painting by observation, and encouraged his students to do the same by organizing legendary sketch trips to West Texas. Reaugh also earned the title of Renaissance man by inventing a portable easel that allowed him to paint in high winds, and developing a formula for pastels, which he marketed. A founder of the Dallas Art Society, which became the Dallas Museum of Art, Reaugh was central to Dallas and Oak Cliff artistic circles for many years until infighting and politics drove him out of fashion. He died isolated and poor in 1945. The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in Reaugh, through gallery shows, exhibitions, and a recent documentary. Despite his importance and this growing public profile, however, Rounded Up in Glory is the first full-length biography. Michael Grauer argues for Reaugh’s …

Luke Short perfected his skills as a gambler in locations that included Leadville, Tombstone, Dodge City, and Fort Worth. In 1883, in what became known as the "Dodge City War," he banded together with Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and others to protect his ownership interests in the Long Branch Saloon—an event commemorated by the famous "Dodge City Peace Commission" photograph. During his lifetime, Luke Short became one of the best known sporting men in the United States, and one of the wealthiest. The irony is that Luke Short is best remembered for being the winning gunfighter in two of the most celebrated showdowns in Old West history: the shootout with Charlie Storms in Tombstone, Arizona, and the showdown against Jim Courtright in Fort Worth, Texas. He would have hated that. The contents include: -The cowboy by birth -- Tall tales and short facts -- The gambler by choice -- Get out of Dodge! -- A plain statement & shots from Short -- The Dodge City peace commission -- The White Elephant in Panther City -- Sporting men of Fort Worth -- Dead man in a shooting gallery -- Mrs. Luke Short -- The war on the gambling fraternity -- State …

In 2010 Written in Blood: The History of Fort Worth’s Fallen Lawmen, Volume 1, told the stories of thirteen Fort Worth law officers who died in the line of duty between 1861 and 1909. Now Richard F. Selcer and Kevin S. Foster are back with Volume 2 covering another baker’s dozen line-of-duty deaths that occurred between 1910 and 1928. Not counting the two officers who died of natural causes, these are more tales of murder, mayhem, and dirty work from all branches of local law enforcement: police, sheriff’s deputies, constables, and special officers, just like in Volume 1. This era was, if anything, bloodier than the preceding era of the first volume. Fort Worth experienced a race riot, two lynchings, and martial law imposed by the U.S. Army while Camp Bowie was operating. Bushwhacking (such as happened to Peter Howard in 1915) and assassinations (such as happened to Jeff Couch in 1920) replaced blood feuds and old-fashioned shootouts as leading causes of death among lawmen. Violence was not confined to the streets either; a Police Commissioner was gunned down in his city hall office in 1917. Even the new category of “vehicular homicide” claimed a lawman’s life.

Authors Bob Alexander and Donaly E. Brice grappled with several issues when deciding how to relate a general history of the Texas Rangers. Should emphasis be placed on their frontier defense against Indians, or focus more on their role as guardians of the peace and statewide law enforcers? What about the tumultuous Mexican Revolution period, 1910-1920? And how to deal with myths and legends such as One Riot, One Ranger? Texas Rangers: Lives, Legend, and Legacy is the authors’ answer to these questions, a one-volume history of the Texas Rangers. The authors begin with the earliest Rangers in the pre-Republic years in 1823 and take the story up through the Republic, Mexican War, and Civil War. Then, with the advent of the Frontier Battalion, the authors focus in detail on each company A through F, relating what was happening within each company concurrently. Thereafter, Alexander and Brice tell the famous episodes of the Rangers that forged their legend, and bring the story up through the twentieth century to the present day in the final chapters.

Historians Chuck Parsons and Donaly E. Brice present a complete picture of N. O. Reynolds (1846-1922), a Texas Ranger who brought a greater respect for the law in Central Texas. Reynolds began as a sergeant in famed Company D, Frontier Battalion in 1874. He served honorably during the Mason County "Hoo Doo" War and was chosen to be part of Major John B. Jones's escort, riding the frontier line. In 1877 he arrested the Horrells, who were feuding with their neighbors, the Higgins party, thus ending their Lampasas County feud. Shortly thereafter he was given command of the newly formed Company E of Texas Rangers. Also in 1877 the notorious John Wesley Hardin was captured; N.O. Reynolds was given the responsibility to deliver Hardin to trial in Comanche, return him to a safe jail during his appeal, and then escort him safely to the Huntsville penitentiary. Reynolds served as a Texas Ranger until he retired in 1879 at the rank of lieutenant, later serving as City Marshal of Lampasas and then County Sheriff of Lampasas County.

Start your engines and follow the backroads, the historical paths, and the scenic landscape that were fashioned by geologic Ice Ages and traveled by Big Thicket explorers as well as contemporary park advocates—all as diverse as the Big Thicket itself. From Spanish missionaries to Jayhawkers, and from timber barons to public officials, you will meet some unusual characters who inhabited an exceptional region. The Big Thicket and its National Preserve contain plants and animals from deserts and swamps and ecosystems in between, all together in one amazing Biological Crossroad. The fifteen tours included with maps will take you through them all. Visitors curious about a legendary area will find this book an essential companion in their cars. Libraries will use the book as a reference to locate information on ghost towns, historic events, and National Preserve features. “A result of a prodigious amount of local research as well as a great deal of driving and tramping around, this book might end up as a classic.”—Thad Sitton, author of Backwoodsmen: Stockmen and Hunters along a Big Thicket River Valley

Bernard A. Booker, wry old Maine codger and unofficial mayor of Ell Pond, is the subject of Booker’s Point, an oral history-inspired portrait-in-verse. Weaving storytelling, natural history, and the poetry of place, the collection evokes the sensibility of rural New England and the pleasures of a good story.

In 2009 Fort Worth unveiled an elaborate, million-dollar memorial to its fallen police and firefighters going all the way back to the city’s beginnings in 1873. Fifty-eight of the ninety-five names on the memorial were policemen. Written in Blood is a more inclusive version of that idea because it covers more than just members of the Fort Worth Police Department; it includes men from all branches of local law enforcement who died defending law and order in the early years: policemen, sheriffs, constables, “special officers,” and even a police commissioner. Richard F. Selcer and Kevin S. Foster tell the stories of thirteen of those early lawmen—an unlucky number to be sure. They range from Tarrant County Sheriff John B. York through Fort Worth Police Officer William “Ad” Campbell covering the years from 1861 to 1909. York was the first local lawman to die—in a street fight. Campbell was last in this era—shot-gunned in the back while walking his beat in Hell’s Half-Acre. Co-authors Selcer and Foster bring academic credentials and “street cred” to the story, explaining how policemen got (and kept) their jobs, what special officers were, and the working relationship between the city marshal’s boys and the sheriff’s boys.

In his debut collection, Jordan Windholz recasts devotional poetics and traces the line between faith and its loss. Other Psalms gives voice to the skeptic who yet sings to the silence that "swells with the noise of listening." If faith is necessary, this collection suggests, it is necessary as material for its own unmaking. Without a doubt, these are poems worth believing in, announcing, as they do, a new and necessary voice in American poetry. The contents include: Parable -- Myth -- ( psalm ) -- A necessary angel recalls unearthing its terrestrial existence -- The psalm's parable -- Epiphany -- The nomads -- The incarnation -- Of apocalypse -- A prayer -- ( psalm ) -- Gospel -- Ruminant -- The parable's psalm -- ( psalm ) -- Hymn -- Fable -- Intercessory -- Evangel -- Other psalms -- The same old story -- The transfiguration -- The talk -- Bestiary -- The shepherd's song -- Of revelation -- Psalm, stunted -- The heretic.

Texan Identities rests on the assumption that Texas has distinctive identities that define “what it means to be Texan,” and that these identities flow from myth and memory. What constitutes a Texas identity and how may such change over time? What myths, memories, and fallacies contribute to making a Texas identity? Are all the myths and memories that define Texas identity true or are some of them fallacious? Is there more than one Texas identity? The discussion begins with the idealized narrative and icons revolving around the Texas Revolution, most especially the Alamo. The Texas Rangers in myth and memory are also explored. Other essays expand on traditional and increasingly outdated interpretations of the Anglo-American myth of Texas by considering little known roles played by women, racial minorities, and specific stereotypes such as the cattleman. The contents include: Texan identities / Light Townsend Cummins and Mary L. Scheer -- Line in the sand, lines on the soul / Stephen L. Hardin -- Unequal citizens / Mary L. Scheer -- The Texas Rangers in myth and memory / Jody Edward Ginn -- On becoming Texans / Kay Goldman -- Ethel Tunstall Drought / Light Townsend Cummins -- W. W. Jones of …

Captain Frank Jones, a famed nineteenth-century Texas Ranger, said of his company’s top sergeant, Baz Outlaw (1854-1894), “A man of unusual courage and coolness and in a close place is worth two or three ordinary men.” Another old-time Texas Ranger declared that Baz Outlaw “was one of the worst and most dangerous” because “he never knew what fear was.” But not all thought so highly of him. In Whiskey River Ranger, Bob Alexander tells for the first time the full story of this troubled Texas Ranger and his losing battle with alcoholism. In his career Baz Outlaw wore a badge as a Texas Ranger and also as a Deputy U.S. Marshal. He could be a fearless and crackerjack lawman, as well as an unmanageable manic. Although Baz Outlaw’s badge-wearing career was sometimes heroically creditable, at other times his self-induced nightmarish imbroglios teased and tested Texas Ranger management’s resoluteness. Baz Outlaw’s true-life story is jam-packed with fellows owning well-known names, including Texas Rangers, city marshals, sheriffs, and steely-eyed mean-spirited miscreants. Baz Outlaw’s tale is complete with horseback chases, explosive train robberies, vigilante justice (or injustice), nighttime ambushes and bushwhacking, and episodes of scorching six-shooter finality. Baz met his end in a …

Wyatt Earp is one of the most legendary figures of the nineteenth-century American West, notable for his role in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. Some see him as a hero lawman of the Wild West, whereas others see him as yet another outlaw, a pimp, and failed lawman. Roy B. Young, Gary L. Roberts, and Casey Tefertiller, all notable experts on Earp and the Wild West, present in A Wyatt Earp Anthology an authoritative account of his life, successes, and failures. The editors have curated an anthology of the very best work on Earp—more than sixty articles and excerpts from books—from a wide array of authors, selecting only the best written and factually documented pieces and omitting those full of suppositions or false material. Earp’s life is presented in chronological fashion, from his early years to Dodge City, Kansas; triumph and tragedy in Tombstone; and his later years throughout the West. Important figures in Earp’s life, such as Bat Masterson, the Clantons, the McLaurys, Doc Holliday, and John Ringo, are also covered. Wyatt Earp’s image in film and the myths surrounding his life, as well as controversies over interpretations and presentations of his life by various …

Pinned down by a posse, the wounded outlaw’s companions urged him to escape through the gulch. “Don’t wait for me,” he replied, “I’m all in and might as well end it right here.” Placing his revolver to his right temple, he pulled the trigger for the last time, thus ending the life of the notorious “Kid Curry” of the Wild Bunch. It is long past time for the publication of a well-researched, definitive biography of the infamous western outlaw Harvey Alexander Logan, better known by his alias Kid Curry. In Wyoming he became involved in rustling and eventually graduated to bank and train robbing as a member—and soon leader—of the Wild Bunch. The core members of the gang came to be Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, George “Flatnose” Currie, Elzy Lay, Ben “the Tall Texan” Kilpatrick, Will Carver, and Kid Curry. Kid Curry has been portrayed as a cold-blooded killer, without any compassion or conscience and possessed of limited intelligence. Curry indeed was a dangerous man with a violent temperament, which was aggravated by alcoholic drink. However, Smokov shows that Curry’s record of kills is highly exaggerated, and that he was not the blood-thirsty killer as many have claimed. Mark …

On a chilly October afternoon in 1881, two brothers named Tom and Frank McLaury were gunned down on the streets of Tombstone, Arizona, by the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday. The deadly event became known as the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and in a quirk of fate, the brothers’ names became well-known, but only as bad men and outlaws. Did they deserve that reputation? The McLaurys in Tombstone, Arizona: An O.K. Corral Obituary explores this question, revealing details of their family background and the context of their lives on the frontier. Paul Lee Johnson begins their story with the McLaury brothers’ decision to go into the cattle business with an ambition to have their own ranch. When they moved to Arizona, they finally achieved that goal, but along the way they became enmeshed with the cross-border black market that was thriving there. As “honest ranchers” they were in business with both the criminal element as well as the legitimate businesses in Tombstone. Another principal in this story was an older brother, William, who set aside his law practice in Fort Worth to settle his brothers’ affairs, and associated himself with the prosecution of the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday. …

Biographical account of Nashville Franklyn “Buckskin Frank” Leslie, a deadly gunfighter, describing where Leslie came from and how he died. Chapters describe his life in Arizona, including gun fights and people that he killed, his marriages, and other notable events. Index starts on page 233.

Perhaps no other industrial technology changed the course of Mexican history in the United States—and Mexico—than did the coming of the railroads. Tens of thousands of Mexicans worked for the railroads in the United States, especially in the Southwest and Midwest. Extensive Mexican American settlements appeared throughout the lower and upper Midwest as the result of the railroad. Only agricultural work surpassed railroad work in terms of employment of Mexicans. In Traqueros, Jeffrey Marcos Garcílazo mined numerous archives and other sources to provide the first and only comprehensive history of Mexican railroad workers across the United States, with particular attention to the Midwest. He first explores the origins and process of Mexican labor recruitment and immigration and then describes the areas of work performed. He reconstructs the workers’ daily lives and explores not only what the workers did on the job but also what they did at home and how they accommodated and/or resisted Americanization. Boxcar communities, strike organizations, and “traquero culture” finally receive historical acknowledgment. Integral to his study is the importance of family settlement in shaping working class communities and consciousness throughout the Midwest.

WASP of the Ferry Command is the story of the women ferry pilots who flew more than nine million miles in 72 different aircraft—115,000 pilot hours—for the Ferrying Division, Air Transport Command, during World War II. In the spring of 1942, Col. William H. Tunner lacked sufficient male pilots to move vital trainer aircraft from the factory to the training fields. Nancy Love found 28 experienced women pilots who could do the job. They, along with graduates of the Army’s flight training school for women—established by Jacqueline Cochran—performed this duty until fall 1943, when manufacture of trainers ceased. In December 1943 the women ferry pilots went back to school to learn to fly high-performance WWII fighters, known as pursuits. By January 1944 they began delivering high performance P-51s, 47s, and 39s. Prior to D-Day and beyond, P-51s were crucial to the air war over Germany. They had the range to escort B-17s and B-24s from England to Berlin and back on bombing raids that ultimately brought down the German Reich. Getting those pursuits to the docks in New Jersey for shipment abroad became these women’s primary job. Ultimately, more than one hundred WASP pursuit pilots were engaged in this vital …

The Texas-Mexico border is trouble. Haphazardly splashing across the meandering Rio Grande into Mexico is—or at least can be—risky business, hazardous to one’s health and well-being. Kirby W. Dendy, the Chief of Texas Rangers, corroborates the sobering reality: “As their predecessors for over one hundred forty years before them did, today’s Texas Rangers continue to battle violence and transnational criminals along the Texas-Mexico border.” In Riding Lucifer’s Line, Bob Alexander, in his characteristic storytelling style, surveys the personal tragedies of twenty-five Texas Rangers who made the ultimate sacrifice as they scouted and enforced laws throughout borderland counties adjacent to the Rio Grande. The timeframe commences in 1874 with formation of the Frontier Battalion, which is when the Texas Rangers were actually institutionalized as a law enforcing entity, and concludes with the last known Texas Ranger death along the border in 1921. Alexander also discusses the transition of the Rangers in two introductory sections: “The Frontier Battalion Era, 1874-1901” and “The Ranger Force Era, 1901-1935,” wherein he follows Texas Rangers moving from an epochal narrative of the Old West to more modern, technological times. Written absent a preprogrammed agenda, Riding Lucifer’s Line is legitimate history. Adhering to facts, the author is …

In 1874, the Texas legislature created the Frontier Battalion, the first formal, budgeted organization as an arm of state government of what historically had been periodic groups loosely referred to as Texas Rangers. Initially created to combat the menace of repeated raids of Indians from the north and from Mexico into frontier counties, the Battalion was led by an unusual choice: a frail, humorless Confederate veteran from Navarro County, John B. Jones. Under Jones’s leadership, the Battalion grew in sophistication, moving from Indian fighting to capturing Texas’s bad men, such as John Wesley Hardin and Sam Bass. Established during the unsettled time of Reconstruction, the Rangers effectively filled a local law enforcement void until competency was returned to local sheriffs’ and marshals’ offices. Numerous books cover individual Texas Rangers of note, but only a few have dealt with the overall history of the Rangers, and, strangely, none about Jones specifically. For the first time, author Rick Miller presents the story of the Frontier Battalion as seen through the eyes of its commander, John B. Jones, during his administration from 1874 to 1881, relating its history—both good and bad—chronologically, in depth, and in context. Highlighted are repeated budget and funding problems, …

Although spare, sweeping landscapes may appear “empty,” plains and prairies afford a rich, unique aesthetic experience—one of quiet sunrises and dramatic storms, hidden treasures and abundant wildlife, infinite horizons and omnipresent wind, all worthy of contemplation and celebration. In this series of narratives, photographs, and hand-drawn maps, Tyra Olstad blends scholarly research with first-hand observation to explore topics such as wildness and wilderness, travel and tourism, preservation and conservation, expectations and acceptance, and even dreams and reality in the context of parks, prairies, and wild, open places. In so doing, she invites readers to reconsider the meaning of “emptiness” and ask larger, deeper questions such as: how do people experience the world? How do we shape places and how do places shape us? Above all, what does it mean to experience that exhilarating effect known as Zen of the plains?

Established in Waco in 1968, the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum honors the iconic Texas Rangers, a service which has existed, in one form or another, since 1823. They have become legendary symbols of Texas and the American West. Thirty-one Rangers, with lives spanning more than two centuries, have been enshrined in the Hall of Fame. In The Ranger Ideal Volume 1: Texas Rangers in the Hall of Fame, 1823-1861, Darren L. Ivey presents capsule biographies of the seven inductees who served Texas before the Civil War. He begins with Stephen F. Austin, “the Father of Texas,” who laid the foundations of the Ranger service, and then covers John C. Hays, Ben McCulloch, Samuel H. Walker, William A. A. “Bigfoot” Wallace, John S. Ford, and Lawrence Sul Ross. Using primary records and reliable secondary sources, and rejecting apocryphal tales, The Ranger Ideal presents the true stories of these intrepid men who fought to tame a land with gallantry, grit, and guns. This Volume 1 is the first of a planned three-volume series covering all of the Texas Rangers inducted into the Hall of Fame and Museum in Waco, Texas.