Dani Davis wants a place to call home. With quaint country charm, quirky residents, and business potential, Miller's Creek seems like the perfect place to start over. . .except for the cowboy who gives her a ride into town. Then malicious rumors and a devastating discovery propel her down a road she never expected to travel. Cowboy mayor Steve Miller is determined to rescue his dying hometown. When vandals threaten the downtown renovation, he can't help but suspect Dani whose strange behavior has become fodder for local gossips. Can Steve and Dani call a truce for a higher cause, and in the process help Dani discover the true meaning of home?

On the eve of its centennial, Carol Dawson and Roger Allen Polson present almost 100 years of history and never-before-seen photographs that track the development of the Texas Highway Department. An agency originally created “to get the farmer out of the mud,” it has gone on to build the vast network of roads that now connects every corner of the state. When the Texas Highway Department (now called the Texas Department of Transportation or TxDOT) was created in 1917, there were only about 200,000 cars in Texas traveling on fewer than a thousand miles of paved roads. Today, after 100 years of the Texas Highway Department, the state boasts over 80,000 miles of paved, state-maintained roads that accommodate more than 25 million vehicles. Sure to interest history enthusiasts and casual readers alike, decades of progress and turmoil, development and disaster, and politics and corruption come together once more in these pages, which tell the remarkable story of an infrastructure 100 years in the making.

Trammel’s Trace tells the story of a borderlands smuggler and an important passageway into early Texas. Trammel’s Trace, named for Nicholas Trammell, was the first route from the United States into the northern boundaries of Spanish Texas. From the Great Bend of the Red River it intersected with El Camino Real de los Tejas in Nacogdoches. By the early nineteenth century, Trammel’s Trace was largely a smuggler’s trail that delivered horses and contraband into the region. It was a microcosm of the migration, lawlessness, and conflict that defined the period. By the 1820s, as Mexico gained independence from Spain, smuggling declined as Anglo immigration became the primary use of the trail. Familiar names such as Sam Houston, David Crockett, and James Bowie joined throngs of immigrants making passage along Trammel’s Trace. Indeed, Nicholas Trammell opened trading posts on the Red River and near Nacogdoches, hoping to claim a piece of Austin’s new colony. Austin denied Trammell’s entry, however, fearing his poor reputation would usher in a new wave of smuggling and lawlessness. By 1826, Trammell was pushed out of Texas altogether and retreated back to Arkansas Even so, as author Gary L. Pinkerton concludes, Trammell was “more opportunist than outlaw and made the most of disorder.”

In the spring of 1844, a fiery political conflict erupted over the admission of Texas into the Union. This hard-fought and bitter controversy profoundly changed the course of American history. Indeed, as Joel Silbey argues in Storm Over Texas, it marked the crucial moment when partisan differences were transformed into a North-vs-South antagonism, and the momentum towards Civil War leaped into high gear. Silbey, one of America's most renowned political historians, offers a swiftly paced and compelling narrative of the Texas imbroglio, which included an exceptional cast of characters, from John C. Calhoun and John Quincy Adams, to James K. Polk and Martin Van Buren. We see how a series of unexpected moves, some planned, some inadvertent, sparked a crisis that intensified and crystallized the North-South divide. Sectionalism, Silbey shows, had often been intense, but rarely widespread and generally well contained by other forces. After Texas statehood, it became a driving force in national affairs, ultimately leading to Southern secession and Civil War. With subtlety, great care, and much imagination, Joel Silbey shows that this brief political struggle became, in the words of an Alabama congressman, "the greatest question of the age"--and a pivotal moment in American history.

Amasa Clark's Journey: The Road from New York to Texas In 1847, at the age of 21, Amasa Clark answered the call to arms and joined the United States Army near Troy, New York. Little did he know that he was beginning an odyssey that would take him to fight in the Mexican War and ultimately leave him in Texas to become one of that state's most important pioneers. Amasa Clark became a freighter, a shingle-maker, and a successful farmer. He showed that fruit trees, particularly pear trees, would grow in the Central Texas climate and soil. He worked at the Alamo and hunted with the Indians before trading a yoke of oxen and a six-shooter for a farm near Bandera, Texas. This book chronicles his life in he 1800's including the War in Mexico, an attack by robbers near San Antonio, friendly and unfriendly Indians, working with the camels at Camp Verde, the difficult years of the Civil War, three marriages and nineteen children. This Texana book endeavors to give color and dimension to Amasa Clark's life by weaving his story with the history and culture of early New York and Texas.

Johnny Texas has more to fear from greedy, dishonest men than from wild animals during a six-hundred-mile trip to Mexico and back over the Old San Antonio Road.

With over 30 carefully selected scenic drives, this book offers myriad ways to explore the Land of Enchantment. Pass through the foothills of the Sangre De Cristo Mountains, stop in the ghost town of Madrid, or gaze at the immense caves of Carlsbad Caverns National Park.