Texas Jack: America’s First Cowboy Star is a biography of John B. “Texas Jack” Omohundro, the first well-known cowboy in America. A Confederate scout and spy from Virginia, Jack left for Texas within weeks of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. In Texas, he became first a cowboy and then a trail boss, jobs that would inform the rest of his life. Jack lead cattle on the Chisholm and Goodnight-Loving trails to New Mexico, California, Kansas and Nebraska. In 1868 he met James B. “Wild Bill” Hickok in Kansas and then William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody in Nebraska at the end of the first major cattle drive to North Platte. Texas Jack and Buffalo Bill became friends, and soon the scout and the cowboy became the subjects of a series of dime novels written by Ned Buntline.

Discusses the history, natural resources, places of interest, and famous citizens of the Lone Star state.

"Thirty years ago, I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in a sexual act of rape, being carried during the prenatal period by an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied, and brought into association with people whom I should never have chosen." Shortly after its 1925 publication, Gertrude Beasley's ferociously eloquent feminist memoir was banned and she herself disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Though British Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell called My First Thirty Years "truthful, which is illegal" and Larry McMurtry pronounced it the finest Texas book of its era, Beasley's words have been all but inaccessible for almost a century—until now. Beasley penned one of the most brutally honest coming-of-age historical memoirs ever written, one which strips away romantic notions about frontier women's lives at the turn of the 20th century. Her mother and sisters braved male objectification and the indignities of poverty, with little if any control over their futures. With characteristic ferocity, Beasley rejected a life of dependence, persisting in her studies and becoming first a teacher, then a principal, then a college instructor, and finally a foreign correspondent. Along the way, Beasley becomes a strident activist for women's rights, socialism, and sex education, which she sees as key to restoring bodily autonomy to women like those she grew up with. She is undaunted by authority figures but secretly ashamed of her origins and yearns to be loved. My First Thirty Years is profoundly human and shockingly candid, a rallying cry that cost its author her career and her freedom. Her story deserves to be heard. Praise for My First Thirty Years: "For almost a century in Texas literary circles, Gertrude Beasley's 1925 memoir has been more a legend than a book... The tangled history of My First Thirty Years, and Beasley's horrific personal fate, are case studies in society's merciless treatment of women of her era who gave voice to socially unspeakable truths. The memoir's republication this month, which makes it widely available for the first time in 96 years, is a long-overdue moment of reckoning. It's also a rich gift to the Texas literary canon."—Texas Monthly "We should all be as fierce, loud, and convinced of our own self-worth as Gertrude Beasley was. This story of a justifiably angry woman living ahead of the world she lived in will resonate deeply today."—Soraya Chemaly, activist and award-winning author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger "Gertrude Beasley's 1925 memoir grabs the reader by the arm and holds tight, speaking with a voice as compelling as if she had just put down her pen this morning. Feminist, socialist, and acute observer of both herself and the world around her, Beasley gives us stories that illuminate the costs of poverty and of being a woman. To read My First Thirty Years is to be in conversation with an extraordinary mind."—Anne Gardiner Perkins, author of Yale Needs Women

In ten impassioned essays, veteran Texas environmental advocates and conservation professionals step outside their roles as lawyers, lobbyists, administrators, consultants, and researchers to write about water. Their personal stories of what the springs, rivers, bottomlands, bayous, marshes, estuaries, bays, lakes, and reservoirs mean to them and to our state come alive in the landscape photography of Charles Kruvand. Allied with the Texas Living Waters Project (a joint education and policy initiative of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Environmental Defense Fund, among others), editor Ken Kramer joins his fellow activists in a call to keep rivers flowing, to protect wildlife habitat, and to save tax dollars by using water efficiently and sustainability. INSIDE THIS BOOK:Introduction: the Living Waters of Texas—Ken KramerWhere the First Raindrop Falls—David K. LangfordSpringing to Life: Keeping the Waters Flowing—Dianne WassenichHooked on Rivers—Myron J. HessFalling in Love with Bottomlands: Waters and Forests of East Texas—Janice BezansonOn the Banks of the Bayous: Preserving Nature in an Urban Environment—Mary Ellen WhitworthA Taste of the Marsh—Susan Raleigh KaderkaBays and Estuaries of Texas: An Ephemeral Treasure?—Ben F. Vaughan IIIRio Grande: Fragile Lifeline in the Desert—Mary E. KellyLeaving a Water Legacy for Texas—Ann Thomas HamiltonTexas Water Politics: Forty Years of Going with the Flow—Ken Kramer

Every area of the world can be mapped out for adventure, and brilliant babies love the sophistication of traveling by train.

With more than sixty million copies of her books sold worldwide, "New York Times bestselling author Fern Michaels writes big, bold, provocative stories of love and heartbreak, drama and desire that are impossible to put down. Standing out amongst her most treasured works is the breathtaking Texas series. Now for the first time in a new hardcover edition comes "Texas Rich, the extraordinary novel that introduces the unforgettable Coleman family- and the brilliant heroine who began a powerful American dynasty. Young and pretty Billie Ames naively fell for the exciting pilot Moss Coleman at the Philadelphia Navy Yard during World War II. Within a few months she was pregnant, married, and traveling across the country to Austin . . . to the 250,000-acre spread known as Sunbridge and into the tantalizing world of the Texas rich. In a vast land dominated by the industrious Colemans, Billie fights to maintain control of herself and her marriage. This is the captivating story of four generations. There's Moss, living in the shadow of a father whose obsession with power overshadows the needs of his only son; Jessica, the doomed mother who gave up everything to become the perfect Coleman wife; Moss and Billie's children, struggling against the family's legacy while desperately trying to live up to insurmountable expectations; and the grandchildren, heirs to a tarnished empire who just might fulfill their dreams. Most of all this is the triumphant story of Billie Ames Coleman, a woman of courage and strength who holds them all together even as her own life falls apart. In the hands of consummate storyteller Fern Michaels, "Texas Rich sweeps across the twentieth century with seductiveintensity and fiery passion in a tale as magnificent as the land that inspired it.