Reliable accounts of battles, wars, adventures, forays, murders, and massacres together with biographical sketches of many of the most noted Indian fighters and frontiersmen of Texas.

This volume, first published in 1889, is one of the most thorough accounts of Indian warfare in Texas.

The book leads the reader through the past to the present and here leaves him amid active and progressive men who are advancing, along with him, toward the future. Including, as it does, lives of men now living, it constitutes a connecting link between what has gone before and what is to come after. It is therefore fitting that it should be dedicated to a prominent man of our day in preference to one of former times. The matter presented, in the nature of things, is largely biographical. There can be no foundation for history without biography. History is a generalization of particulars. It presents wide extended views. To use a paradox, history gives us but a part of history. That other part which it does not give us, the part which introduces us to the thoughts, aspirations and daily life of a people, is supplied by biography. The men whose deeds are recorded in this book were or are deeply identified with Texas, and the preservation in this volume in enduring form of some remembrance of them—their names, who and what they were—has been a pleasant task to one who feels a deep interest and pride in Texas—its past history, its heroes and future destiny.

This is not your grandfather’s history of Texas. Portraying nineteenth-century Texas as a cauldron of racist violence, Gary Clayton Anderson shows that the ethnic warfare dominating the Texas frontier can best be described as ethnic cleansing. The Conquest of Texas is the story of the struggle between Anglos and Indians for land. Anderson tells how Scotch-Irish settlers clashed with farming tribes and then challenged the Comanches and Kiowas for their hunting grounds. Next, the decade-long conflict with Mexico merged with war against Indians. For fifty years Texas remained in a virtual state of war. Piercing the very heart of Lone Star mythology, Anderson tells how the Texas government encouraged the Texas Rangers to annihilate Indian villages, including women and children. This policy of terror succeeded: by the 1870s, Indians had been driven from central and western Texas. By confronting head-on the romanticized version of Texas history that made heroes out of Houston, Lamar, and Baylor, Anderson helps us understand that the history of the Lone Star state is darker and more complex than the mythmakers allowed.

The author uses letters, journals, and travel accounts to show the early attitudes toward the uses of indigenous birds and mammals of Texas. Surviving on nature's bounty and remorselessly exterminating her threats--wolves, cougars, and other wily critters--settlers exploited Texas' pristine fecundity. Some species benefited from disturbed environments; others were unable to adjust to human presence and disappeared. By the 1880s concern about the diminishing numbers of many preferred species led to enactment of game laws and other efforts to protect and manage wildlife. Today, the author argues, habitat change is the most pressing issue confronting conservationists.

These 43 true stories of Indian troubles on the Texas frontier were compiled and published originally by Hilory Bedford in 1905. He was an eyewitness and participant in many of the heartbreaking and terrifying events, and the rest he got straight from the mouths of those who were there or from their surviving kin.