Midnight raids, blazing six-shooters, and dangling ropes played frequent and vital roles in the taming of the West. And in this true account of justice--and sometimes vengeance--on the frontier, Wayne Gard ably relates how determined frontiersmen and heroic women achieved order before they had formal law. Colorful Roy Bean, most famous of the frontier oracles, who dispensed liquor with one hand and justice with the other, stalks through the pages, along with Sam Houston, Watt Moorman, Judge Almond (who would not tolerate long speeches by lawyers because they cut down on his fine), the feuding Grahams and Tewksburys, and Jacksons and Goodbreads, with their violent outbreaks of killing. Frontier Justice was among the books chosen by a committee of distinguished scholars for inclusion in the permanent White House Liberty of important American books on the nation's history.
Presents a history of the route which became the "Main Street" of the Texas cattle trade after the Civil War and remained until after its closing in 1884
What makes a Texan tick? The answer can be found not in military and political histories, but in the social history of the people of Texas—the story of their long, heroic battle to conquer challenging conditions as America’s frontier pushed westward. Pioneer settlers grappled with summer droughts and winter blizzards, often fighting for their lives against Comanche Indians or wild animals. Unknown diseases killed the livestock. Prairie fires destroyed fields and pastures, and clouds of grasshoppers devoured crops. To beat these odds, early settlers had to be as tough as the rawhide they braided into quirts or lariats—for only the strong survived. All Texans shared in the hard life of the frontier. Picture, if you will, a circuit-riding preacher swimming his horse across swollen streams to conduct a camp meeting. A doctor as he rides fifty miles or more through rough country to set a broken bone or deliver a baby, or a schoolteacher risking her life to protect her pupils during an Indian raid. Or a newspaper editor, shot in the back for telling the painful truth. These—any many more—were the people who built Texas. Wayne Gard portrays them in informal sketches of pioneer life on the Texas frontier, illuminating the still-emerging Texas character. What makes a Texan tick? You’ll find part of the answer in Rawhide Texas.
The world is bobbing around," said Sam Bass the day he died. The day was Sunday, July 21, 1878?Sam's twenty-seventh birthday. Sam had done considerable bobbing around himself. He had been a cowboy, a gambler, a highwayman, and a train robber before he met his fate at Round Rock. His coups were many; his fame legendary. And the strangest thing of all is that he never killed a man until that last gunfight.
The Old Chisholm Trail charts the evolution of the major Texas cattle trails, explores the rise of the Chisholm Trail in legend and lore, and analyzes the role of cattle trail tourism long after the end of the trail driving era itself. The result of years of original and innovative research—often using documents and sources unavailable to previous generations of historians—Wayne Ludwig’s groundbreaking study offers a new and nuanced look at an important but short-lived era in the history of the American West. Controversy over the name and route of the Chisholm Trail has persisted since before the dust had even settled on the old cattle trails. But the popularity of late nineteenth-century Wild West shows, dime novels, and twentieth-century radio, movie, and television western drama propelled the already bygone era of the cattle trail into myth—and a lucrative one at that. Ludwig correlates the rise of automobile tourism with an explosion of interest in the Chisholm Trail. Community leaders were keenly aware of the potential economic impact if tourists were induced to visit their town rather than another, and the Chisholm Trail was often just the hook needed. Numerous “historical” markers were erected on little more than hearsay or boosterish memory, and as a result, the true history of the Chisholm Trail has been overshadowed. The Old Chisholm Trail is the first comprehensive examination of the Chisholm Trail since Wayne Gard’s 1954 classic study, The Chisholm Trail, and makes an important—and modern—contribution to the history of the American West. Winner, 2018 Elmer Kelton Book of the Year, sponsored by the Academy of Western Artists
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