Violence in the Hill Country
Violence in the Hill Country

Author: Nicholas Keefauver Roland

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2021-02-09

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1477321756

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In the nineteenth century, Texas’s advancing western frontier was the site of one of America’s longest conflicts between white settlers and native peoples. The Texas Hill Country functioned as a kind of borderland within the larger borderland of Texas itself, a vast and fluid area where, during the Civil War, the slaveholding South and the nominally free-labor West collided. As in many borderlands, Nicholas Roland argues, the Hill Country was marked by violence, as one set of peoples, states, and systems eventually displaced others. In this painstakingly researched book, Roland analyzes patterns of violence in the Texas Hill Country to examine the cultural and political priorities of white settlers and their interaction with the century-defining process of national integration and state-building in the Civil War era. He traces the role of violence in the region from the eve of the Civil War, through secession and the Indian wars, and into Reconstruction. Revealing a bitter history of warfare, criminality, divided communities, political violence, vengeance killings, and economic struggle, Roland positions the Texas Hill Country as emblematic of the Southwest of its time.

Berlandier
Berlandier

Author: James Kaye

Publisher: Trafford Publishing

Published: 2010-11-29

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 1426984960

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Berlandier: A French Naturalist on the Texas Frontier tells the history of Jean Louis Berlandier (1805-1851), remembered as one of the most enlightened naturalists of the American Southwest. He was one of the first to investigate the natural history of the Gulf Coastal Plain, the Rio Grande Valley, the Balcones Escarpment and the Edwards Plateau. Students of Texas biology have learned about Berlandier through such species as the Texas Green-Eyed Sunflower, Texas Windflower, Texas Tortoise, and the Rio Grande Leopard Frog. Between 1826 and 1828, Berlandier collected these species for the Academy of Natural Sciences, Geneva, and studied the Indians of Texas for the Mexican Ministry of the Interior, resulting in his scholarly treatise, The Indians of Texas, in 1830. Berlandiers plant collections are in twenty-seven world herbaria, and many hundreds of his insects, mollusks, reptiles, birds, and mammals are in prestigious institutions such as the Smithsonian and the United States National Museum. Most of the Indian material collected by Berlandier is in the Gilchrest Museum, and the wealth of his writing resides in the libraries of Yale, Harvard, Texas A&M, and the University of Texas. His diary, the most important of his writings, consists of more than 1,500 pages, currently housed in the Library of Congress; it serves as the basis of this history of his life and work.

The Other Texas Frontier
The Other Texas Frontier

Author: Harry Huntt Ransom

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2014-12-15

Total Pages: 75

ISBN-13: 1477306307

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“One is tempted to say that wherever there was a frontier in America there was a counterfrontier and that the main purpose of this counterfrontier was not only to help man grow or dig or catch or kill his livng but also to put this man in communication with the traditions of his kind and thereby secure to his descendants the benefits of the free mind.” —Harry Huntt Ransom The reflections of Harry Huntt Ransom (1908–1976) in The Other Texas Frontier present an alternative to the stereotypical picture of the brash, blustery heroes of the Texas frontier. Here, in six highly readable essays, Ransom posits a thesis of the counterfrontier: a quiet settling of the land by thoughtful, undramatic citizens who, he says, were the other Texans—the Texans without guns. Three of the essays are profiles of gifted men from Texas’ nineteenth century: Ashbel Smith, physician, diplomat, and first president of the Board of Regents of the University of Texas; Sherman Goodwin, physician, horticulturalist, bibliophile (and Ransom’s own grandfather); and Swante Palm, Swedish immigrant, bibliographer, and generous patron of the University of Texas libraries. Harry Huntt Ransom, one of Texas’ most accomplished men of letters and for forty-one years an integral part of the University of Texas System as professor, dean, president, and chancellor, leaves an extraordinary legacy to Texas for both his educational and literary service. Though educated out of state, he returned to his native Texas after completion of his PhD at Yale to teach, research, and write in the fields of copyright law, literary history, and bibliography. As founder of the Humanities Research Center, he was squarely in the tradition of the men he was writing about. Compiled and edited after Ransom’s death by his wife, Hazel H. Ransom, the literary sketches of The Other Texas Frontier form a book that Ransom himself had outlined but had not completed.

The Conquest of Texas
The Conquest of Texas

Author: Gary Clayton Anderson

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2019-02-14

Total Pages: 789

ISBN-13: 0806164417

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This is not your grandfather’s history of Texas. Portraying nineteenth-century Texas as a cauldron of racist violence, Gary Clayton Anderson shows that the ethnic warfare dominating the Texas frontier can best be described as ethnic cleansing. The Conquest of Texas is the story of the struggle between Anglos and Indians for land. Anderson tells how Scotch-Irish settlers clashed with farming tribes and then challenged the Comanches and Kiowas for their hunting grounds. Next, the decade-long conflict with Mexico merged with war against Indians. For fifty years Texas remained in a virtual state of war. Piercing the very heart of Lone Star mythology, Anderson tells how the Texas government encouraged the Texas Rangers to annihilate Indian villages, including women and children. This policy of terror succeeded: by the 1870s, Indians had been driven from central and western Texas. By confronting head-on the romanticized version of Texas history that made heroes out of Houston, Lamar, and Baylor, Anderson helps us understand that the history of the Lone Star state is darker and more complex than the mythmakers allowed.

The Texas Frontier and the Butterfield Overland Mail, 1858-1861
The Texas Frontier and the Butterfield Overland Mail, 1858-1861

Author: Glen Sample Ely

Publisher:

Published: 2023-08-15

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780806193199

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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.

A Crooked River
A Crooked River

Author: Michael L. Collins

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2018-04-12

Total Pages: 479

ISBN-13: 0806161574

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During the turbulent years of the Civil War and Reconstruction, a squall of violence and lawlessness swept through the Nueces Strip and the Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas. Cattle rustlers, regular troops, and Texas Rangers, as well as Civil War deserters and other characters of questionable reputation, clashed with Mexicans, Germans, and Indians over unionism, race, livestock, land, and national sovereignty, among other issues. In A Crooked River, Michael L. Collins presents a rousing narrative of these events that reflects perspectives of people on both sides of the Rio Grande. Retracing a path first opened by historian Walter Prescott Webb, A Crooked River reveals parts of the tale that Webb never told. Collins brings a cross-cultural perspective to the role of the Texas Rangers in the continuing strife along the border during the late nineteenth century. He draws on many rare and obscure sources to chronicle the incidents of the period, bringing unprecedented depth and detail to such episodes as the “skinning wars,” the raids on El Remolino and Las Cuevas, and the attack on Nuecestown. Along the way, he dispels many entrenched legends of Texas history—in particular, the long-held belief that almost all of the era’s cattle thieves were Mexican. A balanced and thorough reevaluation, A Crooked River adds a new dimension to the history of the racial and cultural conflict that defined the border region and that still echoes today.