Relates the adventures of Bigfoot Wallace as he travels to Texas, participates in battles against Mexico, serves time as a hostage, and pioneers in the American West.
The story of William "Big-Foot" Wallace, the Texas Ranger and famous hunter. Written using notes furnished by Big-Foot himself. Includes adventures and fighting with American Indians
Lori Simmons detail her adventures continuing her dad's, Don Wallace, 28 years of Bigfoot research in Bigfoot Country with some of the top legendary Bigfoot researchers and scientists.
The thrilling adventures of traveler, rancher, and fighter “Big-Foot” Wallace in a bygone era of the American frontier. Amid the embroiling conflicts of frontiersmen, Mexicans, and war in Texas, 1837, William “Big-Foot” Wallace left his hometown of Virginia to avenge the deaths of his brother and cousin, soldiers executed by Mexicans. Upon joining the Texas Rangers, Wallace was swept into the clashes at Salado Creek, Hondo River, and the Battle of Monterrey during the Mexican-American War. Measuring at 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighing 240 pounds, Big-Foot Wallace embodied the iron nerves and indomitable spirit of the Texan frontiersman. In one of his most famous and harrowing experiences during the Mier expedition, Wallace was captured by the Mexican army, blindfolded, and forced to draw from a pot of black and white beans to determine whether he would be imprisoned or executed. Wallace drew a white bean and lived. After the war, he returned from the wilderness to clean, civilized Virginia, and spent the rest of his days as a storytelling, yarn-spinning rancher. John Duval, fellow Texas Ranger and Wallace’s best friend, gives a thrilling but factual account of the man’s life in a simple but engaging narrative style, combining action, suspense, and dry Texan humor. Wallace’s hairbreadth escapes and larger-than-life story are the perfect representation of the Old West in all its perils, comedy, and romance. Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
In 1835, Texas offered young men like John C. Duval a chance for action and glory. That year he and his brother, Burr, the sons of a former governor of Florida, organized a volunteer company called the "Mustangs." Like Davy Crockett, they were fired up "to give the Texans a helping hand on the road to freedom" from Mexican rule. The first chapters of Early Times in Texas lead up to the Goliad Massacre on Palm Sunday 1836, in which Burr (referred to as Captain D?) was killed. John was luckier. After a hair-raising escape from Goliad, he wandered across the countryside, dodging the Mexicans and living by his wits.ø ø The diary that Duval kept during these exciting months was the basis for Early Times in Texas, which was published more than fifty years later, in 1892. In the intervening years he was a Ranger known as "Texas John" and later was recognized as one of Texas's first men of letters, the author of The Adventures of Big-Foot Wallace
Last August, two men in rural Georgia announced that they had killed Bigfoot. The claim drew instant, feverish attention, leading to more than 1,000 news stories worldwide—despite the fact that nearly everyone knew it was a hoax. Though Bigfoot may not exist, there’s no denying Bigfoot mania. With Bigfoot, Joshua Blu Buhs traces the wild and wooly story of America’s favorite homegrown monster. He begins with nineteenth-century accounts of wildmen roaming the forests of America, treks to the Himalayas to reckon with the Abominable Snowman, then takes us to northern California in 1958, when reports of a hairy hominid loping through remote woodlands marked Bigfoot’s emergence as a modern marvel. Buhs delves deeply into the trove of lore and misinformation that has sprung up around Bigfoot in the ensuing half century. We meet charlatans, pseudo-scientists, and dedicated hunters of the beast—and with Buhs as our guide, the focus is always less on evaluating their claims than on understanding why Bigfoot has inspired all this drama and devotion in the first place. What does our fascination with this monster say about our modern relationship to wilderness, individuality, class, consumerism, and the media? Writing with a scientist’s skepticism but an enthusiast’s deep engagement, Buhs invests the story of Bigfoot with the detail and power of a novel, offering the definitive take on this elusive beast.
In 1874, Napoleon Augustus Jennings moved to Texas to join the Rangers under the command of L. H. McNelly. A year later, Jennings was thrown into the conflict between the native Spanish speaking Americans and the English speaking whites who came to settle the area. In an era of cattle thieving and terror, we follow Jennings through the southern border of Texas and find a vivid portrait of life in the late 19th century in one of the most lawless and hardest places to live in the United States.
William A. Wallace (1816?1899) went from his native Virginia to Texas in 1836, shortly after the battle of San Jacinto, "for the purpose . . . of taking pay out of the Mexicans for the murder of his brother and cousin." His experiences as a hunter, Indian fighter, member of the Mier Expedition (1842?1844), defender of the "old Republic" in the Mexican War, and Texas Ranger were chronicled by his comrade John C. Duval in this free-hand biography, first published in 1870. Because Duval, as the editors note, felt free to adapt his materials in order to make the book more interesting and used many novelistic devices, "in his own way he achieves something of the effect of the twentieth-century school of biographers. He makes his characters live." Although Part I, dealing with Big-Foot's adventures as a hunter and Indian fighter, is a mixture of fact and fiction, Part II, the account of his role in the Mier Expedition, is unretouched, told from the point of view of an actual participant, and "stands as the most realistic straight narrative of this dramatic chapter in Texas history. [It] is the heart of the biography. The Indian adventures are a prologue for it; and Part III, the final comedy of Big-Foot in the settlements, makes an epilogue." In this classic of early Texas, the reader will recognize three literary traditions of the nineteenth century: the journals and memoirs of the pioneers; the romantic adventure story; and the broadly humorous yarn of the American frontier.