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Between 1880 and 1940, Navajo and Ute families and westward-trending Anglos met in the ""bullpens"" of southwestern trading posts to barter for material goods. As the products of the livestock economy of Navajo culture were exchanged for the merchandise of an industrialized nation, a wealth of cultural knowledge also changed hands. In Both Sides of the Bullpen, Robert S. McPherson reveals the ways that Navajo tradition fundamentally reshaped and defined trading practices in the Four Corners area...

Many stories have been written about the exploits of Billy the Kid, the charismatic outlaw of the Old West. Some have been pure fiction, designed to entertain and excite. Purple prose writers began chronicling the exploits of Billy as early as the late 1870s. Others have been biographical, researched by historians or recorded by those who knew him, including his murderer, Sheriff Pat Garrett. But there was once a different side to the famous gunfighter, a softer more artistic side that seems at...

When the gun smoke cleared, four men were found dead at the hardware store in a rural East Texas town. But this December 1934 shootout was no anomaly. San Augustine County had seen at least three others in the previous three years, and these murders in broad daylight were only the latest development in the decade-long rule of the criminal McClanahan-Burleson gang. Armed with handguns, Jim Crow regulations, and corrupt special Ranger commissions from infamous governors 'Ma' and 'Pa' Ferguson, the...

In Why Texans Fought in the Civil War, Charles David Grear provides insights into what motivated Texans to fight for the Confederacy. Mining important primary sources-including thousands of letters and unpublished journals-he affords readers the opportunity to hear, often in the combatants' own words, why it was so important to them to engage in tumultuous struggles occurring so far from home. As Grear notes, in the decade prior to the Civil War the population of Texas had tripled. The state wa...

The deputy sheriff or sheriff of a county often is perceived as the lone officer protecting the citizens of a small town. Country Cop is the riveting story of one such deputy sheriff, Barry Goodson, and his experiences with the Parker County Sheriff's office in the 1990s and early 2000s in North Texas. Goodson puts the reader in his patrol car to vicariously share what it is like to be in county law enforcement. He reveals his officer's skills, which include the ability to identify an offender i...

For more than a century, trading posts in the American Southwest tied the U.S. economy and culture to those of American Indian peoples - and in this capacity, Hubbell Trading Post, founded in 1878 in Ganado, Arizona, had no parallel. This book tells the story of the Hubbell family, its Navajo neighbors and clients, and what the changing relationship between them reveals about the history of Navajo trading. Drawing on extensive archival material and secondary literature, historian Erica Cottam...

In May 1936 Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace wrote to Caroline Henderson to praise her contributions to American ""understanding of some of our farm problems."" His comments reflected the national attention aroused by Henderson's articles, which had been published in Atlantic Monthly since 1931. Even today, Henderson's articles are frequently cited for her vivid descriptions of the dust storms that ravaged the Plains. Caroline Henderson was a Mount Holyoke graduate who moved to Oklahoma...

Roscoe Martin's study of the People's Party in Texas was a pioneering analysis of the state populist movements and long considered one of the best. The People's Party was an influential force in United States politics in the last decade of the nineteenth century, especially in the western and southern states. Martin's study of third-party politics in Texas, as well as being an important work in Texas history, provides much insight into the national radical movement of the 1890s.

In The Hoggs of Texas: Letters and Memoirs of an Extraordinary Family, 1887-1906, Virginia Bernhard delves into the unpublished letters of one of Texas's most extraordinarily families and tells their story. In their own words, which are published here for the first time. Rich in details, the more than four hundred letters in this volume begin in 1887 in 1906, following the family through the hurly-burly of Texas politics and the ups-and-downs of their own lives. The letters illuminate the litt...