Big-Foot Wallace was a genuine buckskin-wearing, musket-packing, big-knife-in-the-belt, Indian-fighting, bear-wrassling frontiersman. He came to Texas just after the battle of Goliad and joined the Somervell and Mier expeditions, landing him in Mexican prisons. He fought with Jack Hays in the Mexican War and later commanded a Ranger company of his own. J. Frank Dobie said this of Wallace:...
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Jefferson Davis was the U. S. secretary of war in 1855, and he was a big thinker. Pondering the challenges of westward expansion, he thought that camels might prove the perfect beast of burden for crossing arid expanses. And so he dispatched a ship to the Mediterranean and the Black Sea to bring back camels for testing in Texas. We offer three books on the subject of the U. S. army's... |
Julia Nott Waugh's Castroville and Henry Castro was the original and definitive book on the Castro Colony of Texas. Spawned by a Sam Houston brainstorm, the colonization project meant to bring thousands of French and German immigrants to the western frontier of the Republic of Texas. In some measure it succeeded; in other measures it approached a debacle. The Castro colonists... |
Noah Smithwick's memoir, The Evolution of a State, is indisputably one of the greatest of the Texas pioneer stories. His accounting rings more true than many. He came to Texas just behind the Austin colonists in 1827, at the age of nineteen, and remained until pushed out by the Civil War in 1861. During that span, he witnessed four flags fly over Texas: Mexican, Republic, State, and... |
This is the story of the founding of New Braunfels, Fredericksburg, Boerne, Comfort, and the other German settlements of the Texas Hill Country. Refugees from economic and social strife in Germany, followed by idealistic communalists and liberal political refugees, came to the Hill Country looking for freedom and opportunity. Landing on the windswept shores of Matagorda Bay, they... |
First published in 1925, Eugene C. Barker's treatment of the life of Stephen F. Austin remains the definitive study of the founder of Texas. Widely considered to be the finest single piece of historical writing done in Texas, it is comprehensive, balanced, and analytical. While its academic standards are impeccable, it stands out for its readability, bringing Austin and his time to... |