Back in 1904, Eugene Barker and Herbert Bolton gathered up ninety-one accounts spanning over 300 years. Accounts written by people on the ground in Texas. Accounts written by participants in our history, not just observers.

History has a way of putting the right man in the right place at the right time. William Fairfax Gray didn't know it when he set out for Texas in 1835, but he was about to document the events of the Texas Revolution in real time.

Fence cutters, land rushes, prairie fires, die-outs, drives along the Marcy and Goodnight trails, scarce water, Indian depredations, cattle thieves and bonus hunters...such were the realities of early cattle ranching on the South Plains of Texas.

Would you like to know about the noble men who risked everything to make Texas the oil capital of America? Well find another book, because this one's about gambling, pimps, prostitutes, crooked officials, hard drinking, liquor fueled brawling and the roughnecks at the center of it all...real life in Texas oil boomtowns. 

Originally published in 1883, Old Texas Cooking was a project of the Ladies' Association of the First Presbyterian Church in Houston. They called it: A Thorough Treatise on the Art of Cookery. 
Within are 801 recipes provided by 71 ladies and one gentleman. 

Contains detailed biographies of each of the sixty signers of the Declaration. Four hundred sixty-two pages in all. Lou Kemp follows each man from his earliest days, to his arrival in Texas, his work at the convention and during the Texas Revolution, and all the way to his last days on Earth. 

This valuable reference to Spanish and French land measures (and their English equivalents) used in North America was out of print for six decades after its original publication in 1946.

Of all the fighting units of the Civil War, Federal or Confederate, few were as renowned as Hood's Texas Brigade.  

Most of us never got the chance to talk to anyone who grew up in Texas before electricity and the internal combustion engine. And most of us don't have writings left behind by our ancestors telling us how they lived. That's why books like this are treasures.  

Twelve months after the Battle of San Jacinto, Chester Newell was sitting in the clapboard capitol, interviewing Houston, Lamar, Rusk, Wharton, and the rest. He filled notebooks with their words. He was even given unfettered access to the documents of the War Department.

The story of the Army's camel experiment in Texas was almost lost, except for what was contained in dusty government reports. But in 1929, a San Antonio lawyer by the name of Chris Emmett was on a hunting trip at Camp Verde. Emmett happened to stay in the same room once occupied by Robert E. Lee when he commanded the Department of Texas and the camel experiment.

Never more than seven ships, always underfunded and sometimes not funded at all...our little navy took the battle to the enemy and effectively turned the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of Texas.

In the 1920s, the law of oil and gas in Texas was a frontier: raw and unsettled. As Assistant Attorney General in charge of the land desk, Edgar Smith found himself a fascinated observer and an active player in some the most important cases in the history of Texas land and oil law.

Sgt. Sullivan spent twelve years riding for law and order, from 1888 to 1900. As you can imagine, a dozen years as a Texas Ranger leaves a man with a lot of stories. The kind of stories that make a listener lean forward in his seat.

187. That's the number set by Amelia Williams during her doctoral research in the late 1920s. We always knew the number was small, certainly less than 250, but she made it exact. All it took was poring over, one by one, tens of thousands of documents and manuscripts in the State Library and the General Land Office, as well as private collections. 

Maybe you already heard of Billy Dixon. If you have, you probably know him for the shot he made at the second battle of Adobe Walls, which is also up in the Panhandle and also happened in 1874. (1874 was a busy year for Billy.)

Let's start with the facts. This was the first biography of Sam Houston. It was published in 1846, just months after Texas entered the union and Houston took his seat in the United States Senate. . .

Certain history is supposed to stay buried these days. It needs to be hidden away, never talked about, unless to condemn it. Those old monuments? “They have to go,” say the high pitched voices.

"After the war between the states, the citizens of Texas realizing that the state was overrun with Indians and outlaws, following in the wake of war, found that the battles of its first great pioneers would have to be, in a measure, fought over again. Not for the independence of a republic, but, for the life and liberty of her people, guaranteed by the constitution, and compact of states."

These are the documents upon which the Republic and State of Texas were founded.

At four o'clock one April afternoon in 1836, some 900 men, unwashed, underfed, caked with mud and dressed in rags, began a slow walk through knee-high grass. A half hour later they crested a low hill. What they did in the next eighteen minutes made our world possible. 

"Meaty with the character of ready-to-fight but peace-seeking Texas pioneers. Sowell will some day be recognized as an extraordinary chronicler. A graphic book down to bedrock." - J. Frank Dobie on Rangers & Pioneers of Texas