The author of Texas Dames shares a new collection of profiles featuring the incredible women who helped build the Lone Star State. Texas would not be Texas without the formidable women of its past. Beneath the sunbonnets and Stetsons, the women of the Lone Star State carved out ranches and breathed new life into arid spreads of land. When husbands, sons and fathers fell, bold Texas women were there to take the reins. Throughout the centuries, the women of Texas's ranches defended home and hearth with cannon and shot. They rescued hostages. They nurtured livestock through hard winters and long droughts and drove them up the cattle trails. They built communities and saw to it that faith and education prevailed for their children and their communities. Join author Carmen Goldthwaite in an inspiring survey of fierce Lone Star ladies.

Most people may think of ranchers and cowboys as men. But although they are under-chronicled, ranch women work from dark to dark, keeping step with hired hands, brothers, fathers and husbands. They blaze trails through unforgiving scrub. They cook supper and feed bulls. At any given time, they wear the hats--and the gloves--of geologist, veterinarian, lawyer and mechanic. They are fierce and feminine and powerful. Photojournalist and writer Alyssa Banta spent over a year following more than a dozen Texas women through their grueling daily routines, from the messy confines of the working chute to the sprawling reaches of the back pasture. The result of this unprecedented access is an intimate portrait of the challenges and achievements of the ranch women of the Lone Star State, along with the land and livestock that sustain them.

A critical survey of over 150 years of Texas women writers, including fiction and nonfiction authors, poets, and dramatists.

Women Writers of the American West, 1833–1927 recovers the names and works of hundreds of women who wrote about the American West during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of them long forgotten and others better known novelists, poets, memoirists, and historians such as Willa Cather and Mary Austin Holley. Nina Baym mined literary and cultural histories, anthologies, scholarly essays, catalogs, advertisements, and online resources to debunk critical assumptions that women did not publish about the West as much as they did about other regions. Elucidating a substantial body of nearly 650 books of all kinds by more than 300 writers, Baym reveals how the authors showed women making lives for themselves in the West, how they represented the diverse region, and how they represented themselves. Baym accounts for a wide range of genres and geographies, affirming that the literature of the West was always more than cowboy tales and dime novels. Nor did the West consist of a single landscape, as women living in the expanses of Texas saw a different world from that seen by women in gold rush California. Although many women writers of the American West accepted domestic agendas crucial to the development of families, farms, and businesses, they also found ways to be forceful agents of change, whether by taking on political positions, deriding male arrogance, or, as their voluminous published works show, speaking out when they were expected to be silent.

Tanna Barker is a world champion barrel racer. But her personal life has been less of a success, and she’s feeling adrift. After her mother’s unexpected death, her father has remarried, and sold the Texas ranch she called home. Now a rodeo injury has left the restless spitfire holed up in Muddy Gap, unsure what her next move should be. Until she meets her match in a wild, wild cowboy Veterinarian August Fletcher has always put his job first. He’s never found a woman who could handle his on-the-road lifestyle. But when sassy, sexy Tanna blows into town, he finally finds the woman of his fantasies. And there’s something between them, but she claims she’s been burned by love ’em and leave ’em road dogs before. How can Fletch prove that he’s in it for the long haul, and that their sizzling relationship is better than winning any rodeo medal? It’ll take some sweet persuasion to convince Tanna that Muddy Gap is where she belongs.

Tells the stories of sixteen women who drove cattle up the trail from Texas during the last half of the nineteenth century.

This history chronicles the 19th century plan to reintroduce wild bison into Western Montana and the rise of Roosevelt’s conservation movement. In the late 1800s, the rapid depletion of the American bison population prompted calls for the preservation of wildlife and wild lands in North America. Following a legendary hunt for the last wild bison in central Montana, Dr. William Hornady sought to immortalize the West's most iconic species. Activists like Theodore Roosevelt rose to the call, initiating a restoration plan that seemed almost incomprehensible in that era. This thoroughly researched history follows the ambitious project from the first animals bred at the Bronx Zoo to today's National Bison Range. Glenn Plumb, a former chief wildlife biologist for the National Park Service, and Keith Aune, the former Wildlife Conservation Society director of bison programs, demonstrate how the success of bison repopulation bolstered Roosevelt's broader conservation efforts.

This work provides factual accounts of women of the Old West in contrast to their depictions on film and in fiction. The lives of Martha Calamity Jane Canary and Belle The Bandit Queen Starr are first detailed; one discovers that Starr was indeed friends with notorious bank robbers of the time, including Jesse James and Cole Younger, but was herself primarily a cattle and horse thief. Wives and lovers of some of the West's most famous outlaws are covered in the second section along with real-life female entertainers, prostitutes and gamblers. Native Americans, entrepreneurs, doctors, reformers, artists, writers, schoolteachers, and other such respectable women are covered in the third section.

Updated and revised (first edition, 1977) history of the women of the West, telling of their contributions and describing how they broke convention by ranching, trail-driving, and rodeoing. Extensive bibliography. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR