A Texas Frontier

Download or read book Frontier Texas written by Robert F. Pace and published by TX A&m-McWhiney Foundation. This book was released on 2004-12-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The West Texas frontier-the area encompassing the region stretching from Fort Worth to the Caprock, from Palo Duro Canyon to the San Saba River-has been a crossroads of humanity for thousands of years. Each group of humans who trekked across its sun-drenched prairies had to contend with the challenges of life in an area that has always been a climatic, geographical, political, and cultural borderland. In addressing these challenges, the people of the frontier developed perseverance, toughness, and determination-all necessities for life on the Texas frontier. This book tells the epic story of this region and its many transitions throughout the centuries. It traces the struggles and triumphs of many groups as they tried to tame the region for their own purposes. Early humans hunted mammoths and other game in the region. Then came the Jumanos following the great bison herds, then the Apaches, the Comanches, the Spaniards, and the Texans. By 1845, with Texas' entrance into the United States, more formal efforts to tame the frontier brought forts and soldiers. Cattlemen and their herds shared the plains with the buffalo and the Plains Indians. Battles and ambushes, justice and injustice defined the struggle for the next several decades. The military abandoned the region during the Civil War, only to return with force upon its completion. The vast postwar expansion of the cattle industry and the systematic slaughter of the buffalo herds ensured that Americans would claim the region permanently and that the Plains Indians' dominance of the frontier had come to an end. By 1880 barbed wire, windmills, railroads, and towns demonstrated that the frontier had been permanently transformed.

Download or read book Lens on the Texas Frontier written by Lawrence T. Jones and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-27 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Photographs of Texas’ frontier past are valuable as both art and artifact. Recording not only the lives and surroundings of days gone by, but also the artistry of those who captured the people and their times on camera, the rare images in Lens on the Texas Frontier offer a documentary record that is usually available to only a few dedicated collectors. In this book, prominent collector Lawrence T. Jones III showcases some of the most interesting and historically important glimpses of Texas history included among the five thousand photographs in the collection that bears his name at the DeGolyer Library of Southern Methodist University. One of the nation’s most comprehensive and valuable Texas-related photography collections, the Lawrence T. Jones III Collection documents all aspects of Texas photography from the years 1846–1945, including rare examples of the various techniques practiced from its earliest days in the state: daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, and paper print photographs in various formats. The selections in the book feature cartes de visite, cabinet cards, oversized photographs, stereographs, and more. The subjects of the photos include Confederate and Union soldiers and officers in the Civil War; Mexicans, including ranking military officials from the Mexican Revolution; and a wide spectrum of Texan citizens, including African American, Native American, Hispanic, and Caucasian women, men, and children.

Download or read book The Texas Frontier and the Butterfield Overland Mail, 1858-1861 written by Glen Sample Ely and published by . This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of the antebellum frontier in Texas, from the Red River to El Paso, a raw and primitive country punctuated by chaos, lawlessness, and violence. During this time, the federal government and the State of Texas often worked at cross-purposes, their confused and contradictory policies leaving settlers on their own to deal with vigilantes, lynchings, raiding American Indians, and Anglo-American outlaws. Before the Civil War, the Texas frontier was a sectional transition zone where southern ideology clashed with western perspectives and where diverse cultures with differing worldviews collided. This is also the tale of the Butterfield Overland Mail, which carried passengers and mail west from St. Louis to San Francisco through Texas. While it operated, the transcontinental mail line intersected and influenced much of the region's frontier history. Through meticulous research, including visits to all the sites he describes, Glen Sample Ely uncovers the fascinating story of the Butterfield Overland Mail in Texas. Until the U.S. Army and Butterfield built West Texas's infrastructure, the region's primitive transportation network hampered its development. As Ely shows, the Overland Mail Company and the army jump-started growth, serving together as both the economic engine and the advance agent for European American settlement. Used by soldiers, emigrants, freighters, and stagecoaches, the Overland Mail Road was the nineteenth-century equivalent of the modern interstate highway system, stimulating passenger traffic, commercial freighting, and business. Although most of the action takes place within the Lone Star State, this is in many respects an American tale. The same concerns that challenged frontier residents confronted citizens across the country. Written in an engaging style that transports readers to the rowdy frontier and the bustle of the overland road, The Texas Frontier and the Butterfield Overland Mail offers a rare view of Texas's antebellum past.

Download or read book Frontier Forts of Texas written by Bill O'Neal and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2018 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With its vast size and long frontier period, Texas was the scene of more combat events between Native American warriors and Anglo soldiers and settlers than any other state or territory. The US Army, therefore, erected more military outposts in Texas, a tradition begun by Spanish soldados and their presidios. Settlers built blockhouses and even stockades, the most famous of which was Parker's Fort, the site of an infamous massacre in 1836. Successive north to south lines of Army forts attempted to screen westward-moving settlers from war parties, while border posts stretched along the Rio Grande from Fort Brown on the Gulf of Mexico to Fort Bliss at El Paso del Norte. Texas was the site of the first US Cavalry regiment employed against horseback warriors, as well as the experimental US Camel Corps. From Robert E. Lee to Albert Sidney Johnston to Ranald Mackenzie, the Army's finest officers served out of Texas forts, and 61 Medals of Honor were earned by soldiers campaigning in the Lone Star State.

Download or read book The US Army and the Texas Frontier Economy written by Thomas T. Smith and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventy million dollars in fifty-five years. From Texas' annexation in 1845 until the turn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army pumped at least that much or more into the economy of the fledgling state, a fact that directly challenges the popular heritage of Texas as the state with roots of pioneer capitalism and fervent independence. In The U.S. Army and the Texas Frontier Economy, 1845-1900, Thomas T. Smith sheds light on just who bankrolled the evolution of Texas into viable statehood. Smith draws on extensive research gathered from both government archives and Texas army posts in order to evaluate the symbiotic relationship between army quartermasters and the economy of the young state. Texas was the army's largest--and most costly--engagement, absorbing up to thirty percent of the total operating budget and channeling that currency into the commercial development of its frontier. Smith expands on historian Robert Wooster's theory that the military was engaged in an alliance with the political authority in Texas, and using documents such as army contracts for freighting, foraging, and fort leasing, he illustrates how federal fiscal activity spurred commercial growth for the citizens of Texas. Besides the obvious development of towns on the skirts of military bases and of roads between them, the establishment of military spending as a bedrock of the Texas economy and the protector of middle class interests shaped the future of the state's commercial prosperity. Writing with exceptional detail and clarity, Smith traces the emergence of the army's influence and includes analyses of information on army spending and development such as the introduction of army weather and telegraph services to the state, as well as accounts of real estate transactions involving the fort building program. Smith also accounts for army failures, maintaining that no one was truly prepared for the reality of western expansion. As an examination of the complex yet mutually beneficial economic relationship between the nation and the state, The U.S. Army and the Texas Frontier Economy, 1845-1900 is ideal for anyone interested in the early days of the state as well as in U.S. military and frontier history.

Download or read book A Texas Frontier written by Ty Cashion and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: diversification to form a ranching-based social and economic way of life. The process turned a largely southern people into westerners. Others helped shape the history of the Clear Fork country as well. Notable among them were Anglo men and women - some of them earnest settlers, others unscrupulous opportunists - who followed the first pioneers; Indians of various tribes who claimed the land as their own or who were forcibly settled there by the white government; and.

Download or read book Savage Frontier Volume 4 written by Stephen L. Moore and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: