Texas Tales and Tall Ships, Vol. 1: Texas History from 1528-1945 the End of WW 2 By: Malcom Lee Johnson Texas Tales & Tall Ships is a well-documented book on the history of the region of the United States now known as Texas, covering the time period from 1528 when Cabeza de Vaca arrived, to the end of World War II in 1945. This well-referenced and educational look into the past is an important work for understanding the history of Texas and how it has evolved into the Lone Star State.
Texas Tales and Tall Ships, Vol. 2 By: Malcolm Lee Johnson Texas Tales & Tall Ships is a well-documented book on the history of the region of the United States now known as Texas, covering the time period from 1528 when Cabeza de Vaca arrived to the end of World War II in 1945. This well-referenced and educational look into the past is an important work for understanding the history of Texas and how it has evolved into the Lone Star State.
Cold facts and impersonal statistics may be the bacon of Texas history, but the tall tales and interesting side stories are the sizzle. In this book, C.F. Charlie Eckhardt presents some of the Texas history sizzle that is often ignored when pure historians write about the Lone Star State. He adds to the flavor of Texas history with tales about such things as the first Texas revolution, the first English speaking person in Texas, and the little known counterrevolution of 1838-1840. Charlie examines the expulsion of the Cherokees from Texas and provides details of some of the more famous Indian fights. Charlie also shows his romantic side with the legend of the famous Yellow Rose of Texas.
Texans are fiercely proud of their “Lone Star” flag. It has flown from foxholes, been displayed at military bases around the world, and even been to space. Most Americans don’t even know that the state has had a grand total of fifty-nine different flags over the course of its great history. Texas and Her Fifty-Nine Flags explores the standards for a different approach to a history of Texas. Throughout each chapter, the author provides a story taken from history texts, research and anecdotes collected during his teaching and travels, which took fifteen years. This unique history of Texas will captivate the reader from the first Spanish flag through revolutions and pirates, to the “Bonnie Blue Flag” of the Civil War.
The cult-y pocket-size field guide to the strange and intriguing secrets of the Mojave—its myths and legends, outcasts and oddballs, flora, fauna, and UFOs—becomes the definitive, oracular book of the desert For the past five years, Desert Oracle has existed as a quasi-mythical, quarterly periodical available to the very determined only by subscription or at the odd desert-town gas station or the occasional hipster boutique, its canary-yellow-covered, forty-four-page issues handed from one curious desert zealot to the next, word spreading faster than the printers could keep up with. It became a radio show, a podcast, a live performance. Now, for the first time—and including both classic and new, never-before-seen revelations—Desert Oracle has been bound between two hard covers and is available to you. Straight out of Joshua Tree, California, Desert Oracle is “The Voice of the Desert”: a field guide to the strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros, out there in the sand. Desert Oracle is your companion at a roadside diner, around a campfire, in your tent or cabin (or high-rise apartment or suburban living room) as the wind and the coyotes howl outside at night. From journal entries of long-deceased adventurers to stray railroad ad copy, and musings on everything from desert flora, rumored cryptid sightings, and other paranormal phenomena, Ken Layne's Desert Oracle collects the weird and the wonderful of the American Southwest into a single, essential volume.
The middle Texas coast, known locally as the Coast Bend, is an area filled with fascinating stories. From as early as the days of de Vaca and La Salle, the Coastal Bend has been a site of early exploration, bloody conflicts, legendary shipwrecks and even a buried treasure or two. However, much of the true history has remained unknown, misunderstood and even hidden. For years, local historian C. Herndon Williams has shared his fascinating discoveries of the area's early stories through his weekly column, "Coastal Bend Chronicle." Now he has selected some of his favorites in Texas Gulf Coast Stories. Join Williams as he explores the days of early settlement and European contact, Karankawa and Tonkawa legends and the Coastal Bend's tallest of tall tales.
From its earliest days of human habitation, the Texas coast was home to seemingly endless clouds of ducks, geese, swans, and shorebirds. By the 1880s Texas huntsmen, or market hunters, as they came to be called, began providing meat and plumage for the restaurant tables and millinery salons of a rapidly growing nation. A network of suppliers, packers, distribution centers, and shipping hubs efficiently handled their immense harvest. At the peak of Texas market hunting in the late 1890s, Rockport merchants shipped an average of 600 ducks a day in a five-month shooting season, and in the last year of legal market hunting, an estimated 60,000 ducks and geese were shipped from Corpus Christi alone. Market men employed efficient methods to harvest nature’s bounty. They commonly hunted at night, often using bait to concentrate large numbers of waterfowl. The effectiveness of the hunt was improved when side-by-side double barrel shotguns and large-gauge swivel guns gave way to repeating firearms, with some capable of discharging as many as eleven shells in a single volley. Their methods were so efficient that, by the late 1800s, Texas sportsmen and others blamed the alarming decline of coastal waterfowl populations on the market hunter’s occupation. In 1903, after a long fight and many failures, the first migratory bird game law passed the Texas legislature. Though the fight would continue, it was the beginning of the end of the year-round slaughter. Most market hunters quit, and those who didn’t became outlaws. In this book, R. K. Sawyer chronicles the days of market hunting along the Texas coast and the showdown between the early game wardens and those who persisted in commercial waterfowl hunting. Containing an abundance of rare historical photographs and oral history, Texas Market Hunting: Stories of Waterfowl, Game Laws, and Outlaws provides a comprehensive and colorful account of this bygone period.
