Excerpt from A Journey Through Texas; Or a Saddle-Trip on the South-Western Frontier: With a Statistical Appendix At the same time, I do not desire to engage in it, as I hardly need assure you, in a spirit at all inconsistent with a desirable friendship. Rather, in explaining the significance which, in my own mind, attaches to my narrative of facts, relative to the question upon which we have the misfortune to be divided in judgment, I shall hope 'to lessen. Instead of aggravating, the causes of our difference. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

In a brilliant collaboration between writer and subject, Witold Rybczynski, the bestselling author of Home and City Life, illuminates Frederick Law Olmsted's role as a major cultural figure at the epicenter of nineteenth-century American history. We know Olmsted through the physical legacy of his stunning landscapes -- among them, New York's Central Park, California's Stanford University campus, and Boston's Back Bay Fens. But Olmsted's contemporaries knew a man of even more extraordinarily diverse talents. Born in 1822, he traveled to China on a merchant ship at the age of twenty-one. He cofounded The Nation magazine and was an early voice against slavery. He managed California's largest gold mine and, during the Civil War, served as the executive secretary to the United States Sanitary Commission, the precursor of the Red Cross. Rybczynski's passion for his subject and his understanding of Olmsted's immense complexity and accomplishments make his book a triumphant work. In A Clearing in the Distance, the story of a great nineteenth-century American becomes an intellectual adventure.

A collection of illustrated black-and-white engravings depicting the history of Texas from 1554 to 1900 presented chronologically and featuring a brief introduction to the historical background of each era.

Ferdinand Lindheimer was already renowned as the father of Texas botany when, in late 1852, he became the founding editor of the Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung, a German-language weekly newspaper for the German settler community on the Central Texas frontier. His first year of publication was a pivotal time for the settlers and the American Indians whose territories they occupied. Based on an analysis of the paper’s first year—and drawing on methods from documentary and narrative history, ethnohistory, and literary analysis—Daniel J. Gelo and Christopher J. Wickham deliver a new chronicle of the frontier in 1853. In keeping with Lindheimer’s background as a naturalist, the natural resources available are a constant subject for reporting. One special concern is the availability and ownership of wood, so essential for building lumber, fencing, and fuel. Most dramatically, the discovery of trace amounts of gold encouraged prospecting by German and Anglo settlers, which later influenced decisions to remove Indians to reservations. The activities of the area’s Indian peoples emerge in weekly details not found in other sources. Some Lipan Apaches are killed when the army does not learn of their peaceful intentions; restitution is made at Fredericksburg. A settler named Gadt is murdered, and Tonkawas are suspected. A horse raid southeast of San Antonio is blamed on the Lipans but turns out to be the work of non-Indians in disguise. The Delawares are driven temporarily to Indian Territory. Comanche men leave their families at Fort Chadbourne to embark on a raid against the Lipans. The Penateka band of Comanches honors the peace agreement they signed with the Germans six years earlier, but their days in the region are numbered. Lindheimer enhances the reportage with lengthy features on related subjects and exerts a strong editorial voice as he seeks to influence the development of a distinctive Texas German identity. His work, explained in this new study, will appeal not only to students of Texas history and ecology, Indigenous populations, immigration, intercultural encounters, and nineteenth-century Americana, but also to general readers who enjoy the rediscovery of hidden history.

The historical record of the Rio Grande valley through much of the nineteenth century reveals well-documented violence fueled by racial hatred, national rivalries, lack of governmental authority, competition for resources, and an international border that offered refuge to lawless men. Less noted is the region’s other everyday reality, one based on coexistence and cooperation among Mexicans, Anglo-Americans, and the Native Americans, African Americans, and Europeans who also inhabited the borderlands. War and Peace on the Rio Grande Frontier, 1830–1880 is a history of these parallel worlds focusing on a border that gave rise not only to violent conflict but also cooperation and economic and social advancement. Meeting here are the Anglo-Americans who came to the border region to trade, spread Christianity, and settle; Mexicans seeking opportunity in el norte; Native Americans who raided American and Mexican settlements alike for plunder and captives; and Europeans who crisscrossed the borderlands seeking new futures in a fluid frontier space. Historian Miguel Ángel González-Quiroga draws on national archives, letters, consular records, periodicals, and a host of other sources to give voice to borderlanders’ perspectives as he weaves their many, varied stories into one sweeping narrative. The tale he tells is one of economic connections and territorial disputes, of refugees and bounty hunters, speculation and stakeholding, smuggling and theft and other activities in which economic considerations often carried more weight than racial prejudice. Spanning the Anglo settlement of Texas in the 1830s, the Texas Revolution, the Republic of Texas , the US-Mexican War, various Indian wars, the US Civil War, the French intervention into Mexico, and the final subjugation of borderlands Indians by the combined forces of the US and Mexican armies, this is a magisterial work that forever alters, complicates, and enriches borderlands history. Published in association with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas