A lively account of a harsh but beautiful landscape and the characters who have inhabited it. Learn the truth about Judge Roy Bean and a few other heroes and rogues.
T. Boone Pickens, legendary Texas oilman and infamous corporate raider from the 1980s, climbed the steps of the Reeves County courthouse in Pecos, Texas in early November 2016. He entered the solitary courtroom and settled into the witness stand for two days of testimony in what would be the final trial of his life. Pickens, who was 88 by then, had made and lost billions over his long career, but he’d come to Pecos seeking justice from several other oil companies. He claimed they cut him out of what became the biggest oil play he’d ever invested in—in an oil-rich section of far West Texas that was primed for an unprecedented boom. After years of dealing with the media, shareholders and politicians, Pickens would need to win over a dozen West Texas jurors in one last battle. To lead his legal fight, he chose an unlikely advocate—Chrysta Castañeda, a Dallas solo practitioner who had only recently returned to the practice of law after a hiatus borne of disillusionment with big firms. Pickens was a hardline Republican, while Castañeda had run for public office as a Democrat. But they shared an unwavering determination to win and formed a friendship that spanned their differences in age, politics, and gender. In a town where frontier justice was once meted out by Judge Roy Bean—“The Law West of the Pecos”—Pickens would gird for one final courtroom showdown. Sitting through trial every day, he was determined to prevail, even at the cost of his health. The Last Trial of T. Boone Pickens is a high-stakes courtroom drama told through the eyes of Castañeda. It’s the story of an American business legend still fighting in the twilight of his long career, and the lawyer determined to help him make one final stand for justice.
A vast and desolate region, the Texas–New Mexico borderlands have long been an ideal setting for intrigue and illegal dealings—never more so than in the lawless early days of cattle trafficking and trade among the Plains tribes and Comancheros. This book takes us to the borderlands in the 1860s and 1870s for an in-depth look at Union-Confederate skullduggery amid the infamous Comanche-Comanchero trade in stolen Texas livestock. In 1862, the Confederates abandoned New Mexico Territory and Texas west of the Pecos River, fully expecting to return someday. Meanwhile, administered by Union troops under martial law, the region became a hotbed of Rebel exiles and spies, who gathered intelligence, disrupted federal supply lines, and plotted to retake the Southwest. Using a treasure trove of previously unexplored documents, authors James Bailey Blackshear and Glen Sample Ely trace the complicated network of relationships that drew both Texas cattlemen and Comancheros into these borderlands, revealing the urban elite who were heavily involved in both the legal and illegal transactions that fueled the region’s economy. Confederates and Comancheros deftly weaves a complex tale of Texan overreach and New Mexican resistance, explores cattle drives and cattle rustling, and details shady government contracts and bloody frontier justice. Peopled with Rebels and bluecoats, Comanches and Comancheros, Texas cattlemen and New Mexican merchants, opportunistic Indian agents and Anglo arms dealers, this book illustrates how central these contested borderlands were to the history of the American West.
Tales Behind the Tombstones tells the stories behind the deaths (or supposed deaths) and burials of the Old West's most nefarious outlaws, notorious women, and celebrated lawmen. Readers will learn the story behind Calamity Jane's wish to be buried next to Wild Bill Hickok, discover how and where the Earp brothers came to be buried, and visit the sites of tombs long forgotten while legends have lived on.
For almost three hundred miles, the Pecos River cuts across far West Texas. It is an arid land, a land that in the last century offered danger and hardship to those who crossed it and those who settled it. Yet they came--army posts like Fort Stockton to challenge the Apaches' claim to the rugged land, settlers to supply the posts, cattlemen to eke out a living from the vast but sparse grazing ranges. They came and they stayed because the land held one overriding appeal: it was Texas' last frontier. The newcomers--cattlemen and sheepmen, individuals and corporations--included sturdy, law-abiding, industrious citizens, such as O.W. Williams, a renowned surveyor, jurist, and historian with a law degree from Harvard; Mexicans, both poor laborers and well-to-do entrepreneurs; kindly German merchants; fighting Irishmen; and fearless Anglo cowboys. There were also the gunslingers, including Sheriff A.J. Royal, who terrorized the citizenry, even after Texas Rangers had arrived, until he was mysteriously shot to death one afternoon, possibly by one of the town's leading men. The most detailed and thorough account available of the history of far West Texas, this tale is colored with human interest and drama. It will prove invaluable to scholars and richly rewarding to all those interested in the history of Texas and of the West.
Land grant disputes from the nineteenth century have divided and embittered some people for most of the twentieth century. In an attempt to bring final resolution to lingering controversies in New Mexico and throughout the West, in 2000 the U.S. Congress pledged to review disputed claims in the next few years. The Pecos Grant is illustrative of legal and administrative wrangling over land grants. To ensure that a U.S. Senate Committee understood the complexity of the Pecos Grant, New Mexico lawyer and historian Ralph Emerson Twitchell told them in 1923: "There are so many things in connection with this entire business that twenty King Solomons cannot unravel the knot." Yet in this book Hall does sort through the conflicting claims in the over one hundred years of Spanish, Mexican, and American legal maneuvers, legislative stalemates, and private sales involving this 18,000 acre square of land.
Once upon a time in the Old West, Slash and Pecos were two of the wiliest robbers this side of the Rio Grande. Now they’re fighting three of the nastiest killers this side of Hell. . . . Johnstone Country. Where Two Guns Kill Better Than One. Not many men get a second chance at life. But thanks to a chief U.S. marshal who needs their help, the bank-robbing duo of Jimmy “Slash” Braddock and Melvin “Pecos Kid” Baker are on the right side of the law. As unofficial marshals, they’ve agreed to pick up three prisoners from a Milestown jail and escort them to Denver. Sounds easy enough—until they learn the prisoners are an unholy trio of sadistic cutthroat killers known as Talon, “Hellraisin’” Frank, and the Sioux called Black Pot. And they’ve managed to escape before Slash and Pecos even show up . . . The three convicts have turned Milestown into their own savage slayground. Drinking, killing, ravaging—and worse—they’re painting the town red with blood and burning it to the ground. Slash and Pecos manage to stop them in a nick of time. But getting these three to Denver is another story—because the trio’s leader has offered a thousand-dollar bounty to anyone who can kill Slash and Pecos. This is going to be one wicked ride that Slash and Pecos will never forget—if they live to tell about it . . . Live Free. Read Hard.
Rising at 11,750 feet in the Sangre de Cristo range and snaking 926 miles through New Mexico and Texas to the Rio Grande, the Pecos River is one of the most storied waterways in the American West. It is also one of the most troubled. In 1942, the National Resources Planning Board observed that the Pecos River basin “probably presents a greater aggregation of problems associated with land and water use than any other irrigated basin in the Western U.S.” In the twenty-first century, the river’s problems have only multiplied. Bitter Waters, the first book-length study of the entire Pecos, traces the river’s environmental history from the arrival of the first Europeans in the sixteenth century to today. Running clear at its source and turning salty in its middle reach, the Pecos River has served as both a magnet of veneration and an object of scorn. Patrick Dearen, who has written about the Pecos since the 1980s, draws on more than 150 interviews and a wealth of primary sources to trace the river’s natural evolution and man’s interaction with it. Irrigation projects, dams, invasive saltcedar, forest proliferation, fires, floods, flow decline, usage conflicts, water quality deterioration—Dearen offers a thorough and clearly written account of what each factor has meant to the river and its prospects. As fine-grained in detail as it is sweeping in breadth, the picture Bitter Waters presents is sobering but not without hope, as it also extends to potential solutions to the Pecos River’s problems and the current efforts to undo decades of damage. Combining the research skills of an accomplished historian, the investigative techniques of a veteran journalist, and the engaging style of an award-winning novelist, this powerful and accessible work of environmental history may well mark a turning point in the Pecos’s fortunes.