The Texas Panhandle-its eastern edge descending sharply from the plains into the canyons of Palo Duro, Tule, Quitaque, Casa Blanca, and Yellow House-is as rich in history as it is in natural beauty. Long considered a crossroads of ancient civilizations, the twenty-six northernmost Texas counties lie on the southern reaches of the Great Plains, w...

Explores the rough-and-tumble world of frontier justice, Texas style.

A reassessment of the military's role in developing the Western territories moves beyond combat stories and stereotypes to focus on more non-martial accomplishments such as exploration, gathering scientific data, and building towns.

First published in 1984, Robert Utley's The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890, is considered a classic for both students and scholars. For this revision, Utley includes scholarship and research that has become available in recent years. What they said about the first edition: "[The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890] provides an excellent synthesis of Indian-white relations in the trans-Mississippi West during the last half-century of the frontier period."--Journal of American History "The Indian Frontier of the American West combines good writing, solid research, and penetrating interpretations. The result is a fresh and welcome study that departs from the soldier-chases-Indian approach that is all too typical of other books on the topic."--Minnesota History "[Robert M. Utley] has carefully eschewed sensationalism and glib oversimplification in favor of critical appraisal, and his firm command of some of the best published research of others provides a solid foundation for his basic argument that Indian hostility in the half century following the Mexican War was directed less at the white man per se than at the hated reservation system itself."--Pacific Historical Review Choice Magazine Outstanding Selection

Who were the black cowboys? They were drovers, foremen, fiddlers, cowpunchers, cattle rustlers, cooks, and singers. They worked as wranglers, riders, ropers, bulldoggers, and bronc busters. They came from varied backgrounds—some grew up in slavery, while free blacks often got their start in Texas and Mexico. Most who joined the long trail drives were men, but black women also rode and worked on western ranches and farms. The first overview of the subject in more than fifty years, Black Cowboys in the American West surveys the life and work of these cattle drivers from the years before the Civil War through the turn of the twentieth century. Including both classic, previously published articles and exciting new research, this collection also features select accounts of twentieth-century rodeos, music, people, and films. Arranged in three sections—“Cowboys on the Range,” “Performing Cowboys,” and “Outriders of the Black Cowboys”—the thirteen chapters illuminate the great diversity of the black cowboy experience. Like all ranch hands and riders, African American cowboys lived hard, dangerous lives. But black drovers were expected to do the roughest, most dangerous work—and to do it without complaint. They faced discrimination out west, albeit less than in the South, which many had left in search of autonomy and freedom. As cowboys, they could escape the brutal violence visited on African Americans in many southern communities and northern cities. Black cowhands remain an integral part of life in the West, the descendants of African Americans who ventured west and helped settle and establish black communities. This long-overdue examination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black cowboys ensures that they, and their many stories and experiences, will continue to be known and told.

In 1863, the thirteen-year-old boy who would come to be called Comanche Jack was sent to the well to fetch water. Instead, he joined a wagon train bound for Santa Fe. Thus began the exploits of Simpson E. “Jack” Stilwell (1850–1903), a man generally known for slipping through Indian lines to get help for some fifty frontiersmen besieged by the Cheyenne at Beecher Island in 1868. Daring as his part in the rescue might have been, it was only one noteworthy episode of many in Comanche Jack Stilwell’s life—a life whose rollicking story is finally told here in full. In his later years, Stilwell crafted his own legend as a celebrated raconteur. Authors Clint E. Chambers (whose grandfather was Stilwell’s nephew) and Paul H. Carlson scour the available primary and secondary sources to find the unvarnished truth and remarkable facts behind the legend. In a crisp, fast-paced style, the narrative follows Stilwell from his precocious start as a teenage runaway turned teamster on the Santa Fe Trail to his later turns as lawyer, judge, U.S. marshal, hangman, and associate of Buffalo Bill Cody. Along the way, he learned Spanish, Comanche, and sign language, scouted for the U.S. Army, and became a friend of George A. Custer and an avowed, if failed, avenger of his kid brother Frank, an outlaw killed by Wyatt Earp. Unfolding against the backdrop of the Civil War, cattle drives, the Indian Wars, the Oklahoma land rush, and the rough justice of the Wild West, Comanche Jack Stilwell takes a true American character out of the shadows of history and returns to the story of the West one of its defining figures.

The Texas state constitution of 1876 set aside three million acres of public land in the Texas Panhandle in exchange for construction of the state’s monumental red-granite capitol in Austin. That land became the XIT Ranch, briefly one of the most productive cattle operations in the West. The story behind the legendary XIT Ranch, told in full in this book, is a tale of Gilded Age business and politics at the very foundation of the American cattle industry. The capitol construction project, along with the acres that would become XIT, went to an Illinois syndicate led by men influential in politics and business. Unable to sell the land, the Illinois group, backed by British capital, turned to cattle ranching to satisfy investors. In tracing their efforts, which expanded to include a satellite ranch in Montana, historian Michael M. Miller demythologizes the cattle business that flourished in the late-nineteenth-century American West, paralleling the United States’ first industrial revolution. The XIT Ranch came into being and succeeded, Miller shows, only because of the work of accountants, lawyers, and managers, overseen by officers and a board of seasoned international capitalists. In turn, the ranch created wealth for some and promoted the expansion of railroads, new towns, farms, and jobs. Though it existed only from 1885 to 1912, from Texas to Montana the operation left a deep imprint on community culture and historical memory. Describing the Texas capitol project in its full scope and gritty detail, XIT cuts through the popular portrayal of great western ranches to reveal a more nuanced and far-reaching reality in the business and politics of the beef industry at the close of America’s Gilded Age.

The Historical Dictionary of the American Frontier covers early Euro-American exploration and development of frontiers in North America but not only the lands that would eventually be incorporated into the Unites States it also includes the multiple North American frontiers explored by Spain, France, Russia, England, and others. The focus is upon Euro-American activities in frontier exploration and development, but the roles of indigenous peoples in these processes is highlighted throughout. The history of this period is covered through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on explorers, adventurers, traders, religious orders, developers, and indigenous peoples. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the development of the American frontier.

Motorists traveling along State Highway 104 north of Tucumcari, New Mexico, may notice a sign indicating the location of Fort Bascom. The post itself is long gone, its adobe walls washed away. In 1863, the United States, fearing a second Confederate invasion of New Mexico Territory from Texas, built Fort Bascom. Until 1874, the troops stationed at this site on the Eroded Plains along the Canadian River defended Hispanic and Anglo-American settlements in eastern New Mexico and far western Texas against Comanches and other Southern Plains Indians. In Fort Bascom, James Bailey Blackshear presents the definitive history of this critical outpost in the American Southwest, along with a detailed view of army life on the late-nineteenth-century western frontier. Located in the middle of what General William T. Sherman called “an awful country,” Fort Bascom’s hardships went beyond the army’s efforts to control the Comanches and Kiowas. Blackshear shows the difficulties of maintaining a post in a harsh environment where scarce water and forage, long supply lines, poorly constructed facilities, and monotonous duty tested soldiers’ endurance. Fort Bascom also describes the social aspects of a frontier assignment and the impact of the Comanchero trade on military personnel and objectives, showing just how difficult it was for the army to subdue the Southern Plains Indians. Crucial to this enterprise were logistics, including procurement from civilian contractors of everything from beef to hay. Blackshear examines the strong links between New Mexican Comancheros and Comanches, detailing how the lure of illegal profits drew former military personnel into this black-market economy and revealing the influence of the Comanchero trade on Southwestern history. This first full account of the unique challenges soldiers faced on the Texas frontier during and after the Civil War restores Fort Bascom to its rightful place in the history of the U.S. military and of U.S.-Indian relations in the American Southwest.

Cowboys are an American legend, but despite ubiquity in history and popular culture, misperceptions abound. Technically, a cowboy worked with cattle, as a ranch hand, while his boss, the cattleman, owned the ranch. Jacqueline M. Moore casts aside romantic and one-dimensional images of cowboys by analyzing the class, gender, and labor histories of ranching in Texas during the second half of the nineteenth century. As working-class men, cowboys showed their masculinity through their skills at work as well as public displays in town. But what cowboys thought was manly behavior did not always match those ideas of the business-minded cattlemen, who largely absorbed middle-class masculine ideals of restraint. Real men, by these standards, had self-mastery over their impulses and didn’t fight, drink, gamble or consort with "unsavory" women. Moore explores how, in contrast to the mythic image, from the late 1870s on, as the Texas frontier became more settled and the open range disappeared, the real cowboys faced increasing demands from the people around them to rein in the very traits that Americans considered the most masculine. Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.