Let's Cross Before Dark A History of the Ferries, Fords and River Crossings of Texas. My fascination and quest for researching the early-Texas river crossings was ignited by my deep admiration and respect for the courage, determination, and sheer bravery of the early European explorers that mapped these destinations and the pioneers and settlers that brought them to life. This intrigue is not inspired by some romantic interpretation of their heroism as much as it has been a product of my appreciation of their audacity, their strength, and their leadership in carving out livelihoods from a raw and unlawful wilderness. The earliest pathways of Texas were animal trails leading through forests and across prairies to springs, streams, and rivers, establishing easily navigated tracks. Native Americans adopted these footpaths, expanding them to include campsites at river crossings, linking hunting grounds and the villages that evolved and establishing trade and commerce. After 1700, Spanish explorers and their settlers adopted these same trade paths, widening them, clearing trees for horsemen, wagons, and soldiers. Today, these once heavily traveled and prominent river crossings exists only as dim traces advancing down river banks if at all. Their existence and importance has been eclipsed by new highway bridges and these early destinations of commerce have faded away with the passing of time. Their history has largely been drowned out by the incessant march toward improving toward improving infrastructure serving Texas. Bill Winsor Kelmar Ranch, 2022

Jessie James McCoy and his new wife Missy traveled in their covered wagon from Tenn. to Texas where they bought a piece of land and build a small cabin. One day while checking his traps in early April Jessie found himself transported into the future. How did he get there? Where was he? After meeting Lori in the future would he go back or stay?

18-year-old Bowie is the envy of his peers; the sharpest eye with a rifle, deadly as a viper in hand-to-hand combat, and set to marry the prettiest girl around. Papa Byrne, leader of the Fort Thunder militia, has high hopes for this rising star, sees him as the heir apparent to their Pacific Northwest island stronghold. That all changes when a plane crashes into the island. Its sole survivor is Alexis, an exotic young woman who looks nothing like the fair-skinned people back at the Fort. Bowie brings her back to the stronghold, throwing the fearful community into chaos. Even his parents worry about what this will mean... All fears are confirmed when an impromptu mission leaves a young cadet dead and Bowie wounded. Worse still, Bowie is being blamed for the death, framed by his former mentor and banished by a hung jury. The once favored son of Fort Thunder is about to have his eyes opened to the larger world - if he can live long enough to see it.

Winner of the Center for Fiction's 2016 First Novel Prize The hotly anticipated first novel by lauded playwright and The Wire TV writer Kia Corthron, The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter sweeps American history from 1941 to the twenty-first century through the lives of four men--two white brothers from rural Alabama, and two black brothers from small-town Maryland--whose journey culminates in an explosive and devastating encounter between the two families. On the eve of America's entry into World War II, in a tiny Alabama town, two brothers come of age in the shadow of the local chapter of the Klan, where Randall--a brilliant eighth-grader and the son of a sawmill worker--begins teaching sign language to his eighteen-year-old deaf and uneducated brother B.J. Simultaneously, in small-town Maryland, the sons of a Pullman Porter--gifted six-year-old Eliot and his artistic twelve-year-old brother Dwight--grow up navigating a world expanded both by a visit from civil and labor rights activist A. Philip Randolph and by the legacy of a lynched great-aunt. The four mature into men, directly confronting the fierce resistance to the early civil rights movement, and are all ultimately uprooted. Corthron's ear for dialogue, honed from years of theater work, brings to life all the major concerns and movements of America's past century through the organic growth of her marginalized characters, and embraces a quiet beauty in their everyday existences. Sharing a cultural and literary heritage with the work of Toni Morrison, Alex Haley, and Edward P. Jones, Kia Corthron's The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter is a monumental epic deftly bridging the political and the poetic, and wrought by one of America's most recently recognized treasures.