Profiles one of the leading pioneers of nineteenth-century Texas, who served in the Cherokee War and the Civil War and helped tame the frontier.

In the 1820s, Texas was a wilderness. Settlers thought it was uninhabited although rich with wild game. But many Native American tribes lived in Texas and were at war with the Spanish in Mexico. Mexico ignored Texas and did not try to inhabit this wilderness. Finally, in the late 1820s and early 1830s Stephen F. Austin was allowed to bring in three hundred Anglo settlers and Texas began to be civilized. But to start there was only one town, no roads, no bridges, no planted fields. Texas was starting from ground zero but started fast. They tamed the wilderness and fought the Indians. They got their independence from Mexico and became a Republic, soon a U S state. They established a stable government similar to the one in the US and developed the infrastructure for business and international commerce. In less than eighty years Texas had tamed the wild frontier and became a modern state in the United States. C. Herndon Williams has found forty-two stories that chart this progress.

The West Texas frontier-the area encompassing the region stretching from Fort Worth to the Caprock, from Palo Duro Canyon to the San Saba River-has been a crossroads of humanity for thousands of years. Each group of humans who trekked across its sun-drenched prairies had to contend with the challenges of life in an area that has always been a climatic, geographical, political, and cultural borderland. In addressing these challenges, the people of the frontier developed perseverance, toughness, and determination-all necessities for life on the Texas frontier. This book tells the epic story of this region and its many transitions throughout the centuries. It traces the struggles and triumphs of many groups as they tried to tame the region for their own purposes. Early humans hunted mammoths and other game in the region. Then came the Jumanos following the great bison herds, then the Apaches, the Comanches, the Spaniards, and the Texans. By 1845, with Texas' entrance into the United States, more formal efforts to tame the frontier brought forts and soldiers. Cattlemen and their herds shared the plains with the buffalo and the Plains Indians. Battles and ambushes, justice and injustice defined the struggle for the next several decades. The military abandoned the region during the Civil War, only to return with force upon its completion. The vast postwar expansion of the cattle industry and the systematic slaughter of the buffalo herds ensured that Americans would claim the region permanently and that the Plains Indians' dominance of the frontier had come to an end. By 1880 barbed wire, windmills, railroads, and towns demonstrated that the frontier had been permanently transformed.

“Few people realize that in the area of law, Texas began its American journey far ahead of most of the rest of the country, far more enlightened on such subjects as women’s rights and the protection of debtors.” Thus James Haley begins this highly readable account of the Texas Supreme Court. The first book-length history of the Court published since 1917, it tells the story of the Texas Supreme Court from its origins in the Republic of Texas to the political and philosophical upheavals of the mid-1980s. Using a lively narrative style rather than a legalistic approach, Haley describes the twists and turns of an evolving judiciary both empowered and constrained by its dual ties to Spanish civil law and English common law. He focuses on the personalities and judicial philosophies of those who served on the Supreme Court, as well as on the interplay between the Court’s rulings and the state’s unique history in such areas as slavery, women’s rights, land and water rights, the rise of the railroad and oil and gas industries, Prohibition, civil rights, and consumer protection. The book is illustrated with more than fifty historical photos, many from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It concludes with a detailed chronology of milestones in the Supreme Court’s history and a list, with appointment and election dates, of the more than 150 justices who have served on the Court since 1836.

Sixteen women tell their stories, providing a personal history of the state of Texas.