It makes a lot of difference who is the sheriff in the town of Lariat. When Grubb was sheriff, Kurt Dodd and his men ran wild. Cattle rustling was a business to them, and they went about it in a business-like fashion. Save for the valor and alertness of Bob Lee and his Texas men, they’d have wiped out the whole Tomlinson outfit. When Bob Lee becomes sheriff, the war on the rustlers begins in earnest. Bob is elected to the tune of barking six-guns, and after his election the gunfire only increases, as Kurt Dodd’s gang try to drop him dead. In the fights for his life and for the safety of cattlemen, the only man Bob wants at his back is Dick Markley. Dick chooses a job that offers better money than sheriff’s deputy, improving his chances to win the hand of one Miss June Tomlinson, leaving Bob to fight off Dodd’s men without his help. Bob is faced with some difficult decisions: between love and friendship, friendship and his job, his life and his personal sense of justice; Bob will make choices that’ll forever alter his destiny.

A dazzling collection of interviews with heroic and notorious men of the Lone Star state.

Winner of the Caughey Western History Prize Winner of the Robert G. Athearn Award Winner of the Lawrence W. Levine Award Winner of the TCU Texas Book Award Winner of the NACCS Tejas Foco Nonfiction Book Award Winner of the María Elena Martínez Prize Frederick Jackson Turner Award Finalist “A page-turner...Haunting...Bravely and convincingly urges us to think differently about Texas’s past.” —Texas Monthly Between 1910 and 1920, self-appointed protectors of the Texas–Mexico border—including members of the famed Texas Rangers—murdered hundreds of ethnic Mexicans living in Texas, many of whom were American citizens. Operating in remote rural areas, officers and vigilantes knew they could hang, shoot, burn, and beat victims to death without scrutiny. A culture of impunity prevailed. The abuses were so pervasive that in 1919 the Texas legislature investigated the charges and uncovered a clear pattern of state crime. Records of the proceedings were soon filed away as the Ranger myth flourished. A groundbreaking work of historical reconstruction, The Injustice Never Leaves You has upended Texas’s sense of its own history. A timely reminder of the dark side of American justice, it is a riveting story of race, power, and prejudice on the border. “It’s an apt moment for this book’s hard lessons...to go mainstream.” —Texas Observer “A reminder that government brutality on the border is nothing new.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

Provides biographical sketches of the men and women who discovered, explored, and settled Spanish Texas from 1528 to 1821, including profiles of religious figures, governors, pioneers, Indian agents, and army captains.

Men of note who hail from Texas are featured, with full-body representation and three carefully researched costumes. Figures shown include key political leaders like Sam Houston, Stephen F. Austin, and Comanche leader Quanah Parker, boxer Jack Johnson, aviator Howard Hughes, movie stars Larry Hagman and Audie Murphie, musicians Willie Nelson and George Strait, and military heroes Davy Crockett and Juan Sequin. Paper doll artist Tom Tierney has penned and illustrated hundreds of paper doll books and he takes pride in meticulous research of the costumes. He has recently returned to Texas, where he is opening a Paper Doll store and museum.

Cowboys are an American legend, but despite ubiquity in history and popular culture, misperceptions abound. Technically, a cowboy worked with cattle, as a ranch hand, while his boss, the cattleman, owned the ranch. Jacqueline M. Moore casts aside romantic and one-dimensional images of cowboys by analyzing the class, gender, and labor histories of ranching in Texas during the second half of the nineteenth century. As working-class men, cowboys showed their masculinity through their skills at work as well as public displays in town. But what cowboys thought was manly behavior did not always match those ideas of the business-minded cattlemen, who largely absorbed middle-class masculine ideals of restraint. Real men, by these standards, had self-mastery over their impulses and didn’t fight, drink, gamble or consort with "unsavory" women. Moore explores how, in contrast to the mythic image, from the late 1870s on, as the Texas frontier became more settled and the open range disappeared, the real cowboys faced increasing demands from the people around them to rein in the very traits that Americans considered the most masculine. Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.

Here are long shadows. Cast as inherited notions of what it means to be a man, Kevin Grauke s Shadows of Men is a defining meditation on maleness, masculinity, and manhood. The fathers, sons, husbands, and lovers of this ambitious first collection occupy a suburban terrain where insecurity, uncertainty, and inadequacy all project a disquieting shade. Their floundering may demarcate the thirteen stories humor and poignancy, but a dignified, near-elegiac portrayal of the modern man resonates. The shadows reach is long, and these characters may stumble and lose their way, but Grauke s empathetic clarity sweeps the unsettling land."