Smith relates the political history of the two tribes, details life and agricultural work on the reservation, chronicles federal attempts to introduce an education system to the Indians, and traces the effect of hostile tribes and unscrupulous whites on the reservation experiment. Using primary documents, he traces the history of the Wichitas and Caddos through the Civil War, when they were forced to take refuge in Union-controlled Kansas, to the sharing of reservation land with their former enemies, the Kiowas and Comanches. He describes in detail the efforts of the two tribes to adapt to white ways, developing a life within the confines of the reservation experience that borrowed from Euro-American culture while retaining many of their own traditions.

This landmark volume provides the most comprehensive overview to date of the prehistory and archaeology of the Caddo peoples. The Caddos lived in the Southeastern Woodlands for more than 900 years beginning around A.D. 800–900, before being forced to relocate to Oklahoma in 1859. They left behind a spectacular archaeological record, including the famous Spiro Mound site in Oklahoma as well as many other mound centers, plazas, farmsteads, villages, and cemeteries. The Archaeology of the Caddo examines new advances in studying the history of the Caddo peoples, including ceramic analysis, reconstructions of settlement and regional histories of different Caddo communities, Geographic Information Systems and geophysical landscape studies at several spatial scales, the cosmological significance of mound and structure placements, and better ways to understand mortuary practices. Findings from major sites and drainages such as the Crenshaw site, mounds in the Arkansas River basin, Spiro Mound, the Oak Hill Village site, the George C. Davis site, the Willow Chute Bayou Locality, the Hughes site, Big Cypress Creek basin, and the McClelland and Joe Clark sites are also summarized and interpreted. This volume reintroduces the Caddos’ heritage, creativity, and political and religious complexity.

Author David La Vere offers a complete chronological and cultural history of Texas Indians from twelve thousand years ago to the present day. He presents a unique view of their cultural history before and after European arrival, examining Indian interactions-both peaceful and violent-with Europeans, Mexicans, Texans, and Americans.

As America's most self-conscious section, the South has exercised an important and often decisive influence on U.S. foreign relations, but the extent of this influence has been largely unexplored by historians. In this groundbreaking study, Joseph A. Fry provides a comprehensive overview of the South's role in U.S. international involvement from 1789 to 1973, revealing the enormous impact of southern pressure on broader national interests. In a gracefully written and engaging narrative, Fry chronicles the South's numerous foreign policy opinions over time, including its opposition to closer relations with Great Britain and war with France in the 1790s, its leadership in the War of 1812, its flawed diplomatic attempts during the years of the Confederacy, and its fifty-year protest against the increasingly assertive Republican-dominated political agenda following the Civil War. With the election of Woodrow Wilson, Fry shows, the South reversed its tendency toward isolationism and consistently supported Wilson's activist foreign policies. The South sustained this interventionist mind-set into the 1970s, ardently supporting cold war containment policy. Fry is careful to note that southerners seldom presented a completely united front on foreign affairs. Yet even while disagreeing among themselves, he argues, they consistently viewed the world through a distinctly southern lens and acted on a variety of perceived common interests, including a dedication to honor and patriotism, a determination to protect slavery, a proclivity for personal violence, a commitment to partisan politics, a concern for economics, and a preoccupation with race. Though the South's foreign policy opinions varied widely through the years, Fry's extraordinary work affirms that Dixie has always held considerable clout on the world stage.

"The team of the "Grand Expedition," as it was optimistically named, was the first to send its findings on the newly annexed territory to the president, who received Dunbar and Hunter's detailed journals with pleasure. They include descriptions of flora and fauna, geology, weather, landscapes, and native peoples and European settlers, as well as astronomical and navigational records that allowed the first accurate English maps of the region and its waterways to be produced. Their scientific experiments conducted at the hot springs may be among the first to discover a microscopic phenomena still under research today."--Jacket.

This book takes readers on a literary ride across the Lone Star State. J. Frank Dobie tells true stories of rattlesnakes and buried treasure, Jodi Thomas finds romance in the oilfields.

In 1863, the thirteen-year-old boy who would come to be called Comanche Jack was sent to the well to fetch water. Instead, he joined a wagon train bound for Santa Fe. Thus began the exploits of Simpson E. “Jack” Stilwell (1850–1903), a man generally known for slipping through Indian lines to get help for some fifty frontiersmen besieged by the Cheyenne at Beecher Island in 1868. Daring as his part in the rescue might have been, it was only one noteworthy episode of many in Comanche Jack Stilwell’s life—a life whose rollicking story is finally told here in full. In his later years, Stilwell crafted his own legend as a celebrated raconteur. Authors Clint E. Chambers (whose grandfather was Stilwell’s nephew) and Paul H. Carlson scour the available primary and secondary sources to find the unvarnished truth and remarkable facts behind the legend. In a crisp, fast-paced style, the narrative follows Stilwell from his precocious start as a teenage runaway turned teamster on the Santa Fe Trail to his later turns as lawyer, judge, U.S. marshal, hangman, and associate of Buffalo Bill Cody. Along the way, he learned Spanish, Comanche, and sign language, scouted for the U.S. Army, and became a friend of George A. Custer and an avowed, if failed, avenger of his kid brother Frank, an outlaw killed by Wyatt Earp. Unfolding against the backdrop of the Civil War, cattle drives, the Indian Wars, the Oklahoma land rush, and the rough justice of the Wild West, Comanche Jack Stilwell takes a true American character out of the shadows of history and returns to the story of the West one of its defining figures.