Lone Star Book Blog

Hunting Treasure

2011-11-27T09:23:00.003-06:00

OK, I admit it. I have hunted treasure. Not with a crazed obsession like some, but over the years I've gone to various purported locations of buried gold or silver and kicked around, looking for whatever I could find. Usually, the only thing I ended up uncovering was evidence that I had not been the first guy poking around in the vicinity.

Beyond having been an occasional if informal seeker of hidden wealth, I have always been a sucker for good treasure tales. I got hooked reading J. Frank Dobie's "Coronado's Children" when I was in the seventh grade, and the passion for this branch of folklore remains. I say "folklore" because as much as I love a good treasure story, I take them as that, just stories.

Given this briefly explained background, I was eager to start reading W.C. Jameson's new memoir, "Treasure Hunter." (Llano: Seven Oaks Publishing Co., $14.95.) And I certainly enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone else who likes tales of lost riches and those who have tried to find their own Mother Lode.

Jameson has written 70 books and numerous articles and essays, the bulk of them on treasure. But as he recounts in his new book, he also is a lifelong treasure hunter. He writes that he got involved in his first treasure hunt as a result of stealing strawberries from someone's garden in the El Paso Valley in the 1950s and that only the passage of time has slowed his pursuit of that which glitters or can be polished nicely. Not only has he sought, he says he has actually found tangible treasure.

For 203 pages, Jameson tells of his adventures in Texas and elsewhere. Readers will be disappointed that Jameson admits that he often doesn't use real names and hedges on providing detailed locations and in some cases, actual circumstances, but given that treasure hunting can involve trespassing or tax avoidance (assuming you find something), I suppose that's understandable.

Some of Jameson's books have been fiction, and this book reads as much like a novel as a memoir. One thing for sure, read it and you'll find yourself itching to go treasure hunting.

Book on Crestview brings back a lot of memories

2010-02-07T14:50:00.001-06:00

My home life didn’t quite stack up to “Leave It To Beaver” level in 1958, but all these decades later, it’s easy to understand why so many of us who were there tend to look back at the 1950s as an idyllic time.

You know. Safe streets. No TAKS tests or whatever they’re called now. Homemade Halloween candy. Life in the suburbs, at least in Austin, Texas, USA was generally good.

A year after Russia shocked the world by launching the first man-made satellite, I lived in the Crestview neighborhood in Austin. Just a block from our duplex was the Crestview Shopping Center that in one small area provided for most of our day-to-day needs. We could shop at a small grocery store (still in business all these years later), a drug store (yep, still here), a dry cleaners, and a hardware-variety store.

My grandparents lived in the same neighborhood, and I ended up inheriting their 1957-vintage house. My mother lived there for a time, followed by me. I sold it in 1999, though as housing prices began to mushroom, there were times I sure wished I had it back. That realistic transaction ended my legal connection to Crestview, but not my spiritual connection.

OK, that’s a brief introduction to set up my recommendation of a small book called “From Abercrombie to the Violet Crown, A History-in-Progress: Brentwood and Crestview, Austin, Texas” by Susan Burneson. (Available from the author at nimbus@austin.rr.com, $20.)

Those two neighborhoods did not develop until after World War II, but Burneson starts her story by tracing their history to an 1836 land grant. The “Abercrombie” part of her book’s title comes from the name given to a railroad stop in 1881 when the Austin and Northwestern Railroad came through the northeast corner of the future subdivision.

Anyone who grew up in either of these adjoining neighbors will find a lot of memories in Burneson’s 38-page book. And third- or fourth-generation occupants of all those hardwood floor homes will enjoy learning more about their heritage of their part of Austin.

Virtual Publicity Translates to Real Sales

2009-10-16T15:15:00.002-05:00

The first book tour I ever made was in 1980, when my biography of Fred Gipson, the Texas author who wrote the classic novel "Old Yeller," came out. I traveled from Amarillo to Beaumont, missing only El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley, in doing media interviews and other appearances. It took time and energy, but it paid off with a lot of ink and air time, which of course had been the goal.

Now, from the comfort of my home office in Austin, I'm off on a virtual book tour thanks to my friend Stephanie Barko, my Austin-based publicist. (Check out her Web site at www.authorsassistant.com)I am "appearing" at various Web sites popular with readers of books, from www.bookgasm.com to the Web site of Portland's legendary Powell's Book Store, www.powells.com to discuss the final book of my two-volume Texas Ranger history, "Time of the Rangers: The Texas Rangers from 1900 to Present." (New York: Forge Books, $27.95)

For those of you who'd like to travel along with me, here's my virtual itinerary:

10/13/09 Texas Pages Blog http://booksblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2009/10/mike-cox-coming-to-fort-worth-1.html

10/14 Books & Writers www.books-writers-news.com

10/15 Bookgasm www.bookgasm.com

10/16 GoodReads / History is not Boring Group www.goodreads.com/group/show/435.History_is_Not_Boring

10/16 GoodReads / Texas Readers Group www.goodreads.com/group/show/167.Texas_Readers

10/16-10/29 GoodReads www.goodreads.com/book/explore#

10/17 Western Americana Blog www.westernamericana.blogspot.com

10/19 Rough Edges Blog www.jamesreasoner.blogspot.com

10/26 Texas Escapes www.texasexcapes.com/TexasBooks/TexasBooks.htm

10/27 Powell's Blog www.powells.com/blog

10/29 Straight from Hel Blog www.straightfromhel.blogspot.com

10/31 Texas Scribbler Blog http://texasscribbler.com/blog

11/2 Bookzillion Blog www.bookzillion.com/trenches/

11/3 Writers in the Sky newsletter

11/4 Powell's newsletter www.powells.com/newsletter.html

11/4 Powell's.com www.powells.com/essays?header=Sub:%20Author%20Essays

11/14 Texas History Page Blog www.texas-history-page.blogspot.com

TBD Texana Review www.texanareview.com

On Tour, Literally and Virtually

2009-10-16T14:59:00.003-05:00

It's a literary cliche for a writer to write about his adventures while on the road trying to peddle his books through media interviews and assorted public appearances, but hey, when you're a writer, you write what you know.

Just back from a mini in-person tour to Fort Worth, where I signed copies of "Historic Photos of Texas Oil" at Neiman-Marcus for their annual In-Circle VIP party. Sold a good pile of books and met some interesting people.

Got up at 4 a.m. the following morning to drive home to Austin where a friend graciously drove me to Houston for a noon lecture to the Houston Heritage Society at the Tea Room in their complex at Sam Houston Park beneath the towers of downtown. With only minor technical concerns, presented a PowerPoint slide show of selected vintage oil patch images from the book (plus a selection of outtakes) and again, signed and sold books afterward.

Society educational director Elizabeth Martin gave my old friend Larry BeSaw and I a tour of the complex, and then we headed to a mutual friend's place for a little rest before the next appearance, another signing at Neiman-Marcus. Following that event at their Galleria store, we had a good sea food dinner (well, I did...Larry, having grown up in Gainesville near the Red River says something has to have two or four legs before he'll eat it) and then headed back to Austin. I'm glad he was driving, because by the time we'd reached Columbus, I had begun to nod off despite an enjoyable conversation.

Finally, with apologies to David Letterman, who has enough on his plate right now, the Top 3 most common lines from my oil book appearances:

1) Q: "Oh, are/were you in the oil bidness?"
A: "Yes, I am. I am an end-consumer of the product."

2) Q: "Did you take these pictures?"
A: "Do I really look that old?"

3) Q: "Are these books complimentary?"
A: "Of whom?"

In my next post, I'll talk about my virtual book tour.

2009 Texas Book Awards

2009-09-24T11:05:00.002-05:00

Just got word that the first volume of my Texas Ranger history, "The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821-1900" has been named a finalist for the 2009 Texas Book Award for non-fiction. The winning title will be announced at the Capitol on Halloween during the annual Texas Book Festival.

Meanwhile, volume 2, "Time of the Rangers: The Texas Rangers 1900 to Present," hit the bookstores August 18. So far, reviews (scarce as they are these days) have been favorable, as were the reviews for "Wearing the Cinco Peso."

Last time I checked, both volumes -- which amount to more than a quarter-million words and cover nearly 1,000 printed pages -- were selling very well.

Remembering Elmer Kelton (1926-2009)

2009-08-27T08:03:00.005-05:00

I first met Elmer Kelton in the spring of 1967 when my granddad took me to San Angelo to help me find a summer job before I started as a freshman journalism student at Angelo State University that fall.

Granddad took me by the offices of the Sheep and Goat Raiser Magazine to see if the editor might need a staff writer. The editor was Elmer, who had been there since 1963 after leaving the San Angelo Standard-Times. As he had when he worked as agriculture editor of the Standard-Times, Elmer spent much of his time on the road in his part of the state. But on this day, he actually happened to be in the office when we dropped by.

Elmer knew my granddad and greeted me graciously when Granddad introduced us. Though understanding a young man’s need to earn some money before and during college, Elmer didn’t have any jobs to offer. Even if he had, he surely realized I was a city boy who didn’t know a rambouillet from a ram, not to mention which end of a cow gets up first.

While he could not help my career at that point, he did later on, as I’ll explain in a bit.

I ended up landing a job as a reporter with the San Angelo Standard-Times, which probably served me better than a job with the Sheep and Goat Raiser’s Association would have.

Other than buying some of his Western paperbacks at the Angelo State University bookstore, I had no other dealings with Elmer until the 1970s. By that time I was a journeyman reporter working in Austin. In addition to covering the news, I periodically reviewed Texana for then book editor Bill Warren and reviewed several of Elmer's novels.

By the early 1980s, I had written a couple of non-fiction books and qualified for membership in the Western Writers of America. At conventions in Santa Fe and Amarillo, I got to listen to Elmer talk about his craft and to visit with him and his wife Anna.

At that Amarillo convention, I taped recorded him at length about his association with Houston Harte, long-time publisher of the San Angelo newspaper and head of the Harte-Hanks newspaper chain.

In 1993, I was elected to membership in the Texas Institute of Letters, which gave me more opportunity to interact with Elmer. Not that talking with him was all that hard to do. As anyone who ever had any contact with him knows, on the affability and humbleness scales, he went off the chart.

He was always happy to sign one of his books for someone, always answered his mail (and later, email) and almost always answered his own phone with a brisk and businesslike, “Kelton.”

As for book signing, as the cliché goes, the rarest of his 60-plus books are the unsigned ones. “I’d drive across town to autograph a book for somebody,” he told me once. Actually, he’d go farther than that.

No telling how many younger writers he helped with favorable blurbs or introductions to their works. In 1997, Elmer wrote the foreword for my book “Texas Ranger Tales” and later wrote a very kind blurb about the first of my two-volume history of the Texas Rangers.

He and I were both among the featured authors at the Texas Book Festival in 1998 and participated in a panel discussion together. Our session was held in one of the hearing rooms in the underground extension of the Capitol.

As we talked, my then four-year-old daughter Hallie squirmed in the audience next to her mom. When our time was up, my wife Linda came up to join me in visiting with Elmer and Anna.

At some point, after just about everyone but us had left the room, Linda realized that Hallie was no where to be seen. Had she decided to leave the committee room and wander off into the 667,000-square foot underground area. Had someone decided she was cute and kidnapped her?

Having raised two boys and a daughter and by then grandparents as well, Elmer and Anna joined us in our search. Just as we were about to call the police, we found little Hallie hiding under a chair in the back of the room.

We all had a relieved laugh about it, and from there on out, just about every time Elmer and I talked with each other, he’d bring that incident up with a smile and ask how Hallie was doing.

The last time I saw Elmer was at the Way Out West Book Festival in Alpine in August 2008. Early on the morning after the last event, he and Anna were up early (in the fashion of most West Texans) for the drive back to San Angelo.

I had some stuff I had intended to donate to the West Texas Collection at Angelo State on my way to Alpine, but had run out of time. Talking in the parking lot of the motel where all the writers had stayed, I asked him if he would mind dropping the material by the library for me—no rush—and he was happy to oblige.

And that, to me, sums up the man. In addition to being a fine writer and gentleman (two traits not always connected), he was always happy to oblige.

Small Books

2009-08-05T15:49:00.008-05:00

The invention of pocketbooks, those ubiquitous paperbacks no vacationer would go to the beach without, changed the publishing world in the late 1940s.

Now, several Texas book publishers (and one from across the Red River) are trying a new format: a pocketbook-sized hardback. Until someone comes up with a better generic description, let's just call 'em small books. The books are coming from academic, regional and, fittingly, small presses.

The leader in this recent innovation, at least in number of titles published so far, is Texas Christian University Press. They've brought out seven smalls to date, with another due out this fall. They call the series Texas Small Books. Each runs from 84 to 88 pages and sell for $9.95.

The one that's had the most resonance with me so far is Midland writer Patrick Dearen's "Lone Star Lost: Buried Treasures in Texas."

Dearen has dug up 10 new tales of old treasure and previously unpublished pictures to go with them for an enjoyable read that will make you want to go metal detector shopping long before you're finished reading it. This is a solid gold book from a long-time pro writer.

Other titles from TCU Press include "State Fare: An Irreverant Guide to Texas Movies" by Don Graham; "Extraordinary Texas Women" by recently retired press director Judy Alter; "Texas Country Singers" by Phil Fry and Jim Lee; "Great Texas Chefs" also by Alter; "Texas Football Legends" by Carlton Stowers and "Braggin' on Texas" by Sherrie S. McLeRoy.

Alter says that from a publisher's standpoint, the little books are fun to produce. The idea behind them is to have a title priced low enough to be an impulse purchase that will bring Texas subjects to a broad, popular audience. So far, she says, sales have been good.

From State House Press, operated by McMurray College in Abilene, is "Buffalo Days: Stories from J. Wright Mooar" as told to James Winford Hunt and edited by Robert F. Pace. This 126-page small book (though slightly larger than the TCU titles) sells for $19.95.

That's pretty pricey for this size book, but for those interested in the 1870s Texas buffalo hunting era, there's a lot of good content here. The book is a compilation of stories that originally appeared in the old Holland's magazine in 1933.

The smallest of the small books I've seen so far is Allan G. Kimball's information-packed "The Big Bend Guide," published by Great Texas Line Press in Fort Worth. Measuring only about three by three inches, the 104-page softcover book sells for a downright reasonable $5.95 -- a lot less than a cheeseburger in a lot of places.

While diminutive, Kimball's book contains plenty of useful information for anyone planning a visit to the 800,000-plus-acre Big Bend National Park or any of the beautiful country around it. The literature of the Big Bend is almost as extensive as its rugged desert and mountain terrain, but Kimball's guide is the best small source I've seen.

Perusing it, I was amazed at how much information he was able to pack in. Of course, he's an old newspaper guy like me, so no wonder. On top of that, his grandfather rode with the U.S. Cavalry when it protected the Big Bend from Mexican bandits and probably was involved in naming Panther Peak, below which sits the national park headquarters. He knows the park well.

The book includes 10 top travel tips, 10 top hikes, top intineraries, a check lists for motorists, a list of Web sites and bibliography. There's also a section on Big Bend area place names. (Insider's tip: Marathon, Texas is pronounced MaraTHAN, not MaraTHON.)

To give the University of Oklahoma Press its due, a couple of years ago it released "A Texas Cowboy's Journal: Up the Trail to Kansas in 1868" by Jack Bailey. Bailey is the first person known to have kept a diary on a cattle drive from Texas to the railroad in Kansas, but it stayed in private hands and unpublished until the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum acquired it and got well-known Western historian-writer David Dary to edit and annotate it. The 111-page semi-small book sells for $17.95.

Finally, from Bright Sky Press, is "Historic Texas Book of Days" by Yvonne Bruce and Ann Bruce Henaff. Covering every day of the year in unumbered pages, this book also sells on the high end for its size at $19.95. But it is beautifully illustrated and contains some intriguing Old Farmer's Almanac-style facts particular to the four seasons in Texas. Unfortunately, the book does not predict when the Central and South Texas drought will end.

Lone Star eccentrics

2008-10-29T14:56:00.001-05:00

Twenty-three million people, give or take a few, live in Texas. And some of them are not like you and me. In fact, some of them are downright eccentric.

While eccentric can be a nice word for weird, not all eccentrics are weird. But all eccentrics are different, marching to the proverbial beat of their own drummer.

Mineral Wells educator-writer John Kuhn is just out with his first book, a look at a hundred or so living and dead Lone Star eccentrics, from the poker playing Amarillo Slim to the late border blaster radio personality Wolfman Jack. Fittingly enough, he calls the book “Texas Eccentrics.” (Atriad Press, 272 pages, $19.95.)

For organizational purposes, Kuhn grouped his characters into five broad moderately alliterative categories: Bizarre Businesspeople, Peculiar Personalities, Strange Sports Figures, Atypical Artists and Other Oddballs.

To put things in perspective, Kuhn starts the book with an introductory essay on eccentricism Texas-style, which is definitely more noticeable here than some other places. He does not miss the irony that he lives and works in a town once famous for a hotel called the Crazy Water.

Reading “Texas Eccentrics” will give you plenty of material for witty chit chat and possibly serve to remind you that compared with some others, you’re downright normal.

One downside to the book is that it offers no list of sources, a slight eccentricity than can be forgiven in favor of the interesting reading it offers.

Ghost Stories

2008-10-29T14:04:00.001-05:00

The weather’s cool and the Halloween decorations are up. What better time to sit by the fire place and read a few ghost stories?

Ghost stories have been around since Shakespeare struggled as a budding young playwright and even before, but for generations, the majority of the tales passed by word of mouth. Finally, folklorists and others began capturing them and giving them true immortality in print.

Over the last decade or so, ghost books have become something of a haunted cottage industry. We still speak of spooks, but now we write of frights. A quick count of Texas ghost books shows at least 16, though I’m sure I’ve missed some titles.

One of the newest in this growing boo-oeuvre is Brian Righi’s “Spirits of Dallas: The Haunting of Big D.” (Schiffer, 176 pages, $14.95.)

No book on Dallas ghosts would be complete with a chapter on the White Rock Lake Ghost, one of Texas’ prime ghost tales. I won’t spoil the story here, but if you visit that part of Dallas at night, best not to pick up any hitchhikers.

Righi also writes about Hotel Adolphus, Big D’s finest hostelry since 1912. Yep, it’s haunted, but no doubt by the more affluent of the spirit set. They seem to favor where the old ballroom used to be on the 19^th floor.

He also covers supposedly haunted Preston Road, a busy thoroughfare first blazed by pre-Columbian people and later declared the national road of the Republic of Texas as well as assorted other haunted buildings, houses and of course cemeteries.

In addition to telling all the ghost stories connected to Dallas he could, pardon the expression, dig up, Righi lists area paranormal investigation groups, ghost tours and commercial and fund-raising haunted houses.

To borrow from one of the author’s sub-titles, a reader gets plenty of “boo for the buck” with this book.

Salt Warriors

2008-09-29T08:19:00.005-05:00

Thomas Zickefoose had a notably unusual last name and one other distinction. When he died at 93 in 1942, the last participant in the El Paso Salt War was gone.

Of course, the Salt War is almost as little-known as ex-Texas Ranger Zickefoose. The “war” played out over a 12-week period in 1877 in San Elizario, one of the small communities along the Rio Grande at El Paso del Norte, the Pass of the North, eventually incorporated into the city of El Paso.

The war was born of a dispute over a substance almost as important as water: salt. Everyone knows salt makes food taste better and can aggravate hypertension, but salt also is important in preserving meat (which was critical before refrigeration), curing hides and extracting silver from ore.

Early Anglo explorers noted the presence of an extensive salt lake beneath the Guadalupe Mountains, but people had been using that salt supply as long as anyone had lived in the El Paso valley.

Trouble quickly developed when an Austin banker and his son-in-law laid legal claim to the salt beds.

C.L. “Doc” Sonnichsen wrote a book on the Salt War in 1961. For 47 years that title stood as the definitive book on that bloody conflict. But no more. From now on, the DB will be Paul Cool’s “Salt Warriors” (Texas A&M University Press, $24.95.)

A well-respected historian, the late Dr. Sonnichsen only devoted 61 pages to the conflict. Cool, on the other hand, has given the episode near encyclopedic treatment.

While Sonnichsen proved the story could be told in fewer words, it is a complicated tale. Cool has done a great job not only of mining for new information, but putting it all into a book that’s both comprehensive and readable.

In researching the subject exhaustively, the author not only turned up new material while reversing some long-standing misperceptions, outright errors or embellishments, he came to see the Salt War as more than a feud over property rights. He casts it as an insurrection.

And though the events he describes happened more than 130 years ago, the cultural tensions that helped fuel the war remain to this day along the border.

In his final chapter, Cool tells what became of all the major players who survived the initial hostilities. That’s where he notes Zickefoose’s death. As Cool wrote, “He was probably the last ‘salt warrior’ to have traded bullets in San Elizario over what Boundary Commissioner John Russell Bartlett had called ‘nothing but the saline incrustations of a dried up lake.”

Finally, either I’m getting older or A&M Press used mighty small type to get all of the author’s information into 360 pages, but other than that, “Salt Warriors” is a Cool book – literally and figuratively.

Two solid new books on early Texas

2008-06-16T15:35:00.000-05:00

Every wordsmith interested in writing about the events of yesterday should print the following quotation, frame the words, and hang them in view of their computer:

“No harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read.”

Those words come from David McCullough, best-selling writer of books on important figures of the past, but I read them in the introduction to a good book by another fine writer-historian, Stephen Hardin.

Hardin’s book is “Texian Macabre: A Melancholy Tale of a Hanging in Houston.” (Abilene: State House Press, 325 pages, $24.95.)

Hardin found McCullough’s quote useful in explaining what he hoped to accomplish with his new book: Use an interesting story to help readers better understand what Texas, particularly the nascent city of Houston, was like during its days as an independent republic.

The story focuses on David James Jones, a survivor of the Goliad massacre (see below) and obviously a committed participant in the Battle of San Jacinto, who went from war hero to convicted murderer in little over a-year-and-a-half.

Beyond that, “Texian Macabre” sheds light on the state of law enforcement back when Texans called themselves Texians. (Answer: Pretty lax until the movers and shakers got exercised over the conduct of “rowdy loafers” like Jones, who had the honor of being the guest of honor at one of Texas’ earlier legal hangings.)

Reading Hardin’s overview of the art and science of hanging, and its affect on the human body, will possibly break you of ever wearing a neck tie again if you are a man. No matter one’s gender, if hanging still were the official means of execution in Texas, Hardin’s description of it would surely serve as a crime deterrent.

The detailed pen-and-ink drawings of Gary S. Zaboly, who also illustrated Hardin’s excellent history of the Texas Revolution, “Texas Iliad,” further enhance Hardin’s quite readable story. Another plus is the reader-friendly design of the book – a reasonable-sized typeface with ample “leading” between lines.

While Hardin definitely tells a macabre story in this book, it’s a fun to read, thoroughly researched look at life in the Bayou City 171 years ago. Definitely, no harm has been done to history in the writing of this excellent book.

* * *

More formal in tone than Hardin’s book, but no less well-searched and presented, is Jay A. Stout’s “Slaughter at Goliad: The Mexican Massacre of 400 Texas Volunteers.”

Published by the prestigious Naval Institute Press, the 242-page book sells for $29.95.

Though not as well known as the fall of the Alamo or the Texas victory at San Jacinto, at Goliad on March 27, 1836 more Texians lost their lives than in any other engagement during the revolution that freed Texas from Mexico. In fact, as Stout points out, for a good while the massacre of most of Col. James Fannin’s men (and his subsequent brutal execution only two feet in front of a firing squad) stood as one of the largest one-day military losses in American history.

Stout is a former Marine Corps fighter pilot, obviously schooled in military tactics and strategy. While the Texas Revolution did not involve the kind of warfare he participated in at supersonic speed, his background brings a lot to this book.

The author looks at the players on both sides, assessing what was in it for them and the quality (or lack) of leadership. In a particularly nice touch, the book is illustrated with black and white shots of modern-day re-enactors portraying the events covered in the book. Given that military re-enactors pride themselves on historical accuracy in terms of uniform and gear, it’s as if you’re look at vintage photographs even though photography did not exist back then. The book also features detailed maps.

Overall, “Slaughter at Goliad” is full of rich detail, including something not commonly known about Col. Fannin’s widow. In the summer of 1836, she tried to assassinate the captured Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna at Velasco.

She did not succeed, I’m sure to the regret of many Texans at the time and not a few even today.

Roundin' up Ranger books

2008-06-06T14:30:00.000-05:00

Only slightly newer than a brush-scarred Winchester Model 1895 with a rusty barrel, the concept of “One Ranger, One Riot” sure doesn’t hold when it comes to books about the Texas Rangers.

In little more than a year, eight non-fiction books dealing with individual Rangers or general Ranger history have been published. For serious collectors, genealogy buffs or those who simply enjoy reading about the Rangers from the days of the Wild West to modern times, here’s a round up of the latest additions to the Ranger bibliography:

Lawmen on the Texas Frontier: Rangers and Sheriffs by Candice DuCoin. (Round Rock: Riata Books, 260 pages, $30.)

This well-researched book shows that law enforcement tends to run in families, particularly the Jones family of Texas. Augustus H. Jones, the author’s great-great-great grandfather, rode as a volunteer Ranger in the 1830s. His nephew, Captain Frank Jones, died in a gunfight with Mexican outlaws along the Rio Grande near El Paso in 1893. While the story of his demise is well known, far less known is that the captain was one of seven brothers who served as Rangers. DuCoin did a great job in this book of “keeping up with the Jones’.”

Captain J.A. Brooks Texas Ranger by Paul N. Spellman. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 272 pages, $24.95.)

One of the “four great captains” as proclaimed by former Adjutant General W.W. Sterling, Brooks transitioned from brush country Ranger commander to legislator to judge of the South Texas county named in his honor. A solid biography from Spellman, whose first book was a biography of Capt. John H. Rogers.

Unbridled Cowboy: Joseph B. Fussell, edited by E.R. Fussell. (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 278 pages, $19.95 in softcover.)

For Ranger history aficionados, this is a book best not judged by its title. Texan Joe Fussell ran away from home as a teenager and made his living primarily as a cowpuncher before becoming a career railroad man. In between, sometime after 1903, he worked for Capt. W.J. McDonald as an undercover Ranger to ferret out cattle rustlers.

Though not a Ranger when he did it, he rode alone into Mexico to exact revenge on cattle thieves who had killed a friend of his and nearly killed him. In the late 1940s, near the end of his life, Fussell wrote this memoir. The manuscript remained unpublished until his grandson took it up.

Having been invited to read this book before publication, I was asked to write a blurb for it. I happily did and will repeat what I said: “This is one of the most compelling memoirs I have ever read. Portions of the book, particularly [Fussell’s] sanguinary trip to Old Mexico, read like something from a Larry McMurtry novel.”

Captain Ransom, Texas Ranger: An American Hero, 1874-1918 by Pat Goodrich. (Nappanee, IN: Evangel Publishing, 243 pages, $18 in softcover.) This book is about Capt. Henry Ransom. Born the year the Frontier Battalion was organized, he became a Ranger for the first time in 1905. Later, he commanded a Ranger company in the Rio Grande Valley during the turbulent and controversial days of Mexican Revolution. In 1918, he was shot to death in a Sweetwater hotel. Written by the captain’s granddaughter, this book profits from her access to family papers and photographs as well as from archival sources.

Law on the Last Frontier: Texas Ranger Arthur Hill by S.E. Spinks. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 265 pages, $28.50.)

Hill became a Ranger in 1947 when Col. Homer Garrison headed the Department of Public Safety and served until he retired in 1974. With the exception of a brief stint as sergeant of Company B in Dallas, he spent his entire career in Alpine. Spinks, who is married to Hill’s grandson, did an excellent job on this book. She also benefited from access to family papers.

I got to know Hill when I worked as a reporter for the San Angelo Standard-Times in the 1960s. One day in 1968 my editor dispatched me to Eldorado to cover an outbreak of oilfield vandalism connected to a labor dispute. When I got there, I found Hill and Ranger A.Y. Allee Jr., who worked out of Ozona. When I jokingly asked Allee why it took two Rangers for just one oilfield “riot,” he said, “Arthur’s here for the riot, I’m here to keep my eye on you.”

While that’s one incident not included in Spinks’ book, just about every other aspect of Hill’s long career is covered in this well-done biography.

One Ranger Returns by Joaquin Jackson with James L. Haley. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 237 pages, $24.95.)

This is Jackson’s sequel to his first memoir, a book which broke long-standing sales records for UT Press. In this highly readable follow-up, Jackson and Haley cover everything from the still-unsolved 1938 Frome murder near Van Horn to the 1966 farm worker’s strike in the Rio Grande Valley. If you read the first book, you’ll want this one.

Finally, two general histories of the Rangers have been published:

Lone Star Lawmen: The Second Century of the Texas Rangers by Robert Utley. (New York: Oxford University Press, 416 pages, $30.)

This is the second volume of former National Park Service historian Utley’s scholarly, no-punches-pulled history of the Rangers. In this volume, he takes the Ranger story to the turn of the 21^st century. Like its predecessor, the book is well-researched. He calls it as he sees it.

The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821-1900 by Mike Cox. (New York: Forge Books, 496 pages, $25.95.)

I won’t stoop to review my own book, but I’m not above plugging it. Let’s just say it’s gotten good reviews from readers more objective than the author. I’m putting the final touches on the second volume, which will carry the history of the Rangers through the creation of the new Company G along the lower Rio Grande border.

Why we all should celebrate Cinco de Mayo

2008-05-05T17:10:00.000-05:00

Ask most Americans what happened on May 5, 1862 and they’re likely to guess it had something to do with the Civil War. Assuming they know when the Civil War occurred. Or that we had one.

Something probably did occur on that day during the Civil War, but what makes the date lastingly significant is what took place in Mexico. On that date, Cinco de Mayo, Mexican soldiers surprised even themselves in defeating a major military component of one of the most powerful nations in the world – France.

Those who do recognize Cinco de Mayo as a major Mexican holiday also celebrated in the Lone Star state still wrongly think the day is our sister republic’s version of the Fourth of July. Cinco de Mayo does not mark a declaration of independence. Rather, it celebrates an event that helped sustain Mexican independence. And even though Mexico won the Battle of Puebla on that day, it still had five years of guerilla warfare ahead before the country’s invaders returned to the land of wine and soufflés.

That’s a very general summary of the thrust of a well-researched and well-written book by Austin author Donald W. Miles, “Cinco de Mayo: What Is Everybody Celebrating?” (Lincoln: iUniverse, 278 pages, $20.95.)

Like many problems, the French misadventure in Mexico – a tragicomedy if there ever was one -- started over money. Mexico owed France a bundle (as it did Great Britain and Spain). All three nations broke off diplomatic relations and sent troops to Mexico. But France’s Napoleon III was after more than a defaulted loan payment. Sending the largest force, he had hopes of resurrecting his nation’s long-held dream of a French empire in the New World. After all, the U.S. with its Monroe Doctrine was preoccupied in bloody national fratricide.

On May 5, 1862, however, Napoleon’s plan began to go awry. Texas-born Mexican Gen. Ignacio Zaragosa, at the town of Puebla, soundly defeated 6,000 attacking French soldiers. In fact, the French lost one man out of six.

While Texans who bother to give this episode any thought might see the French intrusion into Mexico as merely interesting, what happened back then was potentially a much bigger deal not only to Texas, but the whole United States.

Napoleon not only wanted the French tri-color forever flying over Mexico, he hoped to cozy up to the South and help them win against the North. Of course, while paying lip service to the Confederacy, he might just help himself to Texas while he was at it.

A Confederate diplomat in Belgium wrote President Jefferson Davis: “He [Napoleon III] will remain anxious for us to believe that he is silently our friend. Mexico first, and then Mexico as she was previous to her dismemberment [the Texas Revolution] is the resolutely and faithfully cherished and at which he aims.”

Miles does an excellent job of telling a complicated story, breaking each chapter of his book into a series of readable vignettes that are as entertaining as they are informative. He also has an eye for interesting detail and fascinating characters, from the boozy ranking French diplomat in Mexico (the same Pierre Saligny who occupied the French embassy in Austin during the early days of the Republic of Texas) to Princess Agnes Salm-Salm, who took her clothes off to try to convince a Mexican officer to release French-imposed Emperor Ferdinand Maximilian from prison following the collapse of his regime.

A couple of good examples of the interesting detail Miles turned up in his research (much of it at the Benson Latin American collection at the University of Texas) come in his description of the early stages of the fight at Puebla.

The French expected to march into Puebla unopposed. When the first Mexican artillery round exploded in their midst, one of the French commanders thought the Mexicans had merely fired a respectful salute. Even when it became obvious that they would have to charge uphill toward the highly-fortified town, the French rank-and-file took a coffee-and-pastry break.

I knew I was hooked on the book when browsing around before really getting serious about paging through it, I found a scene where a Mexican woman mooned French soldiers from the window of a convent. (No, the author did not explain whether the woman was a patriotic nun or just some senora strongly opposed to French intervention.) Whoever she may have been, the French found it tremendously insulting and began firing at the window. The woman dropped her skirt and disappeared, her point made.

With Miles’ new book, Texans now have two ways to celebrate Cinco de Mayo – with food, drink and festivities or by partaking of a good read.

Texas authors winners/finalists for Spur Awards

2008-03-31T05:07:00.000-05:00

Four writers with Texas roots will be presented Spur Awards or recognized as finalists by the Western Writers of America at the organization's annual meeting this summer.
Georgetown historian Robert Utley will get a Golden Spur for his "Lone Star Lawmen: The Second Century of the Texas Rangers." (Oxford University Press.) His book won in the Best Western Nonfiction Contemporary category.
A history professor at Victoria College, Stephen L. Hardin was a finalist in the Best Western Nonfiction Historical competition for his "Texian Macabre: The Melancholy Tale of a Hanging in Early Houston." (State House Press.)
A Breckenridge writer, Mike Kearby, was a finalist in the Best Western Juvenile Fiction category for his book, "Ambush at Mustang Canyon." (Trails End Books.)
Finally, Texas native Arturo O. Martinez, who now lives in New Jersey, was a finalist in the same category for his "Pedrito's World." (Texas Tech University Press.)
These recognitions and others will be presented in Scottsdale, AZ on June 14.

"A Few Good Horses"

2008-03-13T11:23:00.000-05:00

The moment I read that Pierce Burns’ daddy sold a cow back during the Depression to pay for his honeymoon, I knew he had written a book that would hold my attention. And while selling a cow to fund a wedding trip to San Antonio may sound like something out of a novel, it’s from a non-fiction work that is both a well-done memoir and a family history.

Burns’ self-published story of a Brown County ranching family (and some of their horses) had hardly been shipped from the printer when mainstream book publishing got rocked by yet another round of phony memoir exposures. It’s easy enough to understand why a writer would fake a memoir in the hope of making money, but it’s less easy to grasp why editors aren’t a bit more cautious when they read a manuscript.

Fortunately, “A Few Good Horses” (Gap Creek Press, $24.95; copies may be ordered from the author’s Web site at www.pierceburns.com) is clearly the real thing, even though the 174-page hardback is full of characters and incidents that would do a novelist proud.

A good for instance is story of the night the author’s father woke up next to a dead man. In the spring of 1915, George Pierce Burns and a wealthy rancher named John Bryson traveled from Comanche County to Concho County to do some branding and stock-separating on Bryson’s ranch.

Bryson’s son lived on the place, and Burns, Bryson, and two other men bunked for the night at the son’s ranch house. Apparently, the four of them had only two beds. Burns shared with Bryson.

About 10:30 p.m., a loud noise jarred Burns awake.

“John,” he said, “were those shots?”

Bryson didn’t reply. Burns reached over to shake him awake and felt something wet and warm. When the lights came on, they saw the rancher was dead, his face covered in blood. Turns out Bryson had been shot three times, apparently by someone firing through an open window.

Burns and the other men saddled up and followed a set of horse tracks for several miles before a rain shower made it impossible to trail the killer further. Later, the sheriff arrested a man for the murder. Before he could be tried, he committed suicide in jail.

Equally compelling is the story of a family member who married the love of his life only to see her die in childbirth. On her death bed, she asked him to promise that he would never remarry and he made the pledge.

But a couple of years later, he met another pretty lady. One thing led to another and soon their wedding date was at hand. But the groom did not show up at the altar.

Ruminating on his pledge, he decided he just couldn’t break his vow to his first wife. Instead, he saddled his horse, stuffed a whiskey bottle into his saddlebag and rode off.

That, according to family story, started him on the way to his eventual alcoholism. He later changed his mind and married the woman he had stood up, but turned out his first instinct had been correct. The marriage definitely did not proceed to happily thereafter.

Based both on memory, interviews and research “A Few Good Horses” is a good read, a story-filled telling of a Texas family’s history.

Wizardry Writing

2007-05-29T06:34:00.000-05:00

I am not a poet and I know it, which aside from the old “Roses are red, violets are blue” formula, is about as far as I can go in things poetical. In freshman English at Angelo State University, I got tripped up on iambic pentameter and haven’t figured it out yet.

But you don’t have to be a poet to enjoy good poetry. You don’t even have to know what iambic pentameter is to spot the difference between pleasing rhyme and doggerel.

When longtime Austinite Mariann Wizard asked if I would be interested in reviewing her autobiography in poems, “Sixty,” I hesitated. My reviews mostly concentrate on non-fiction Texana, I told her. Still, she offered to send a copy for me to take a look at and I agreed. (Interestingly enough, she was an old friend of cartoonist-historian Jack Jackson, discussed in the previous entry in this blog.)

One reason I assented was that I knew something of her story. A bright Fort Worth girl, she came to the University of Texas in the 1960s and soon got swept up in what came to be called “the Movement.”

Actually, Wizard did most of the sweeping. She was one of the founders of the iconoclastic underground newspaper called The Rag in 1966 (merely possessing the first issue got me unceremoniously thrown off campus at Sidney B. Lanier High School) and was married to another figure in Austin’s nascent civil rights and anti-war movement, George Vizard.

In 1967, Vizard was murdered while working as a clerk in a convenience store in then North Austin. Some years later, when police arrested a suspect in her husband’s death, I was involved in the newspaper coverage. Later still, I reviewed a true crime book written about the case.

One of the 60 poems in this collection, written a year after his slaying, deals with Vizard. Others range from a topic familiar to all Austinites – traffic congestion – to the seasons. A few of the poems are as steamy as a late May afternoon after a thunderstorm. All of them, from traditional verse to haiku, invite reading and reflection.

In addition to Wizard’s wizardry words, her longtime friend Scout Stormcloud took the color images that add to the book’s visual appeal.

Published by Lulu.com, an on-line publisher, the 100-page book is available for $39.95 or at $15.95 for a digital download. For more details, contact Wizard at awizard@awizardslife.com

New Texas History Movies published

2007-05-29T06:29:00.000-05:00

One day in the fall of 1959, as a fifth grader at Austin’s T.A. Brown Elementary School, I watched as my teacher passed out a red and blue softcover booklet called “Texas History Movies.”

The booklet, through pen and ink cartoons with dialog and captions, told the history of the Lone Star State in comic book form. I’m sure most of my fellow classmates felt like I did, hardly able to believe that our teacher would be giving us a comic book. I had piles of Donald Duck and Classics comics at home, but we weren’t allowed to have them at school. They were comic books, after all. Now our teacher was handing out comic books.

I pored over “Texas History Movies,” which began as a cartoon series in the Dallas Morning News in the late 1920s, with every bit as much relish as I would have shown for the annual 25 cent Donald Duck summer vacation special issue. And like hundreds of thousands of Texas school children, I learned a lot about Texas history in a very palatable way. It was like eating chocolate brownies laced with tasteless medicine.

Nearly a half century later, I now know that I was among the last group of Texas school kids to get that book. The same year I received it, its longtime distributor, Mobile Oil, decided to discontinue it. For years, the oil company which had a flying red horse as its logo gave the book away free to Texas school districts.

In explaining its decision to drop the book, the giant company cited economics, and the fact that the booklet no longer fit its world-wide business plan. The real reason, of course, was the criticism Mobil already had begun to receive about the book’s politically incorrect language and themes. The term “politically correct” had not even been coined yet, but with a text unchanged since the 1930s, the book was Anglo-centric to say the least.

That lack of diversity – harshly demonstrated in places – was a product of its times. I doubt seriously if it inflamed any more racism on the part of its young readers than may already have existed, courtesy of their parents and grandparents. The main effect it had was to get school kids caught up in what has always been a pretty compelling story. In fact, I feel safe in betting that “Texas History Movies” fostered more historians than it did racists.

Now, thanks to the late Jack Jackson (who also read the book as a youngster) and the Texas State Historical Association, a modern cartoon history of Texas done in the spirit of “Texas History Movies” is available for a new generation of Texas children. As its title implies, “The New Texas History Movies” is a new book from the ground up, with drawings and text by Jackson. While it is now deemed politically correct (TSHA produced a sanitized version of the original back in the 1970s) and thus not likely to corrupt the innocent young minds of grade schoolers and middle school pupils, the new book is still interesting and in places, funny.

The 48-page softcover is available for $9.95. (To read more about the book or to order copies, go to the TSHA Web site at www.tsha.utexas.edu)

In addition to his drawings, Jackson wrote a five-page essay, “A Bit of History about Texas History Movies,” to close out the book. As he pointed out, the original comic book had a strong influence on his career.

Sadly, this was Jackson’s last work. He died by his own hand a year ago, his body found in the family cemetery near Stockdale in South Texas.

Hopefully this book will influence new generations of Texas kids. Who knows? Maybe it will inspire another child to become as solid an artist and historian as Jackson.

"Lone Star Pasts"

2007-05-01T18:30:00.000-05:00

Mike Cox “Texana” for April 2007

This is a slightly revised version of my April 2007 “Texana” column in the Austin American-Statesman.

For Texans immersed in their state’s colorful history, March and April are the High Holy Days.

Texas’ declaration of independence from Mexico gained approval at Washington-on-the-Brazos on March 2, 1836. The Alamo fell on March 6. The final big date in the Texas version of the holy days is April 21, the anniversary of Sam Houston’s defeat of Santa Anna at San Jacinto.

Scores if not hundreds of books have been published on Texas’ emergence as a sovereign nation. Taking a different approach, Texas A&M University Press has published a book about how we remember not only that epoch but the entire Texas story. Edited by Gregg Cantrell and Elizabeth Hayes Turner, “Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas” ($45 hardback, $19.95 paper) is a collection of 11 essays by an assortment of scholars that explore our collective memory.

OK, it will be difficult to say more about this book until getting “collective memory” defined. In his foreword, historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage puts it this way:

“Scholars have adopted the conceit of ‘historical memory’ [AKA collective memory] to describe the amorphous and varied activities that groups have employed to recall the past. Recently, older notions of memory as a passive process of storing and retrieving objective recollections of lived experiences have given way to an understanding of memory as an active, on-going process of ordering the past.”

Got that? In other words, no one has yet disputed the fact that a large Mexican army overwhelmed the Alamo and killed most of its Texan combatants. But ever since then, Texans and the world have remembered the Alamo in their own way. And those memories have continued to evolve.

Further, to get back to Brundage, collective memory is not merely the recollection of a somewhat-mutually-agreed-upon past, but “rather the product of intentional recreation. Collective remembering forges identity, justifies privileges, and sustains cultural norms.”

That history can be used to achieve things both worthy and unworthy is what makes this an important, if Ivory Tower-ish topic of study. Indeed, again in Brundage’s words, “the confluence of history, memory, power, and identity…vexes our postmodern age.”

Clearly, “Lone Star Pasts” is not light reading for anyone interested in learning more about Texas’ yesterdays. Its essays, if at times burdened with overly dense academic speak, demonstrate that we built our history and that it is a monument still under construction. The design changes with the times and for specific reasons. To continue the metaphor, the historical monument we have raised could even be razed at some point, replaced by a whole new line of thinking. Beyond metaphor, we even debate whether to remove or change long-standing monuments.

“Lone Star Pasts” needs to be read by anyone who may feel compelled to wade in the next time there’s a fight about the modern propriety of an old monument to a Civil War figure once considered a hero but by some seen as a defender of slavery or whether a state five generations removed from the Civil War should be apologizing for slavery, an institution no living person has anything but a collective, constructed “memory” of.

Hopefully, the last great military battle has long since been fought on Texas soil, but it seems we are always ready to get into a word fight about how we should remember those conflicts and the circumstances which preceded them.

Particularly interesting is Cantrell’s essay, “The Bones of Stephen F. Austin: History and Memory in Progressive-Era Texas.” The largest wave of nostalgia for Texas history swept over the state in the mid-1930s, climaxed by a centennial celebration in 1836. But as Cantrell shows, the first surge in historical recognition came early in the second decade of the 20^th century, highlighted by the exhumation of Texas colonizer and Capital City’s namesake for reburial in the State Cemetery.

As some hundred politicians, reporters and Austin relatives looked on, the first bone handed up from the grave was his “almost perfectly preserved” skull. First to hold it was Austin’s grandniece. Watching the scene, a reporter for the Galveston News tried to one-up Shakespeare’s Hamlet with this passage:

“The great brain cavity of the illustrious colonizer and diplomat was filled with the soil for which he suffered and endured and pleaded and it seemed appropriate that the clear and prophetic brain which once planned, organized, nurtured, directed and preserved this state should in the process of time be supplanted by some of its rich, warm earth.”

Austin’s bones went into a new casket which lay in state in the Capitol before being reburied on the highest spot in the State Cemetery, a prominence now called Republic Hill.

Gov. O.B. Colquit played a big part in getting Austin the recognition that most Texans still agree that he deserves. In fact, he pushed for and signed legislation getting other monuments placed across the state, including a statue at Sam Houston’s grave in Huntsville.

Colquitt also battled the Daughters of the Texas Revolution over how the Alamo should be preserved (whether as historically accurate as possible or as a memorial park). The DRT won, but at least we continue to remember that old mission and what happened there. The same, apparently, cannot be said for arguably the most powerful Texan of the 20^th century – President Lyndon B. Johnson.

As Ricky Floyd Dobbs shows in his essay, “Lyndon, We Hardly Remember Ye: LBJ in the Memory of Modern Texas,” with the passage of time (he has been dead since 1973, out of the White House since early in 1969) Johnson is losing name recognition in his home state. As Dobbs put it, “Lyndon Johnson doesn’t fit Texas anymore.”

If that is really the case, no telling how our collective memory will be transformed by the time the next big occasion to reinvent ourselves comes along – the 2036 bicentennial of Texas.

Here goes

2007-05-01T17:12:00.000-05:00

Never let it be said that an old dog can't learn new tricks. Of course, it may take an old dog longer to learn a new trick, but I'm still able to get up and walk to the feed bowl.

After some 40 years of talking about Texas books in Texas newspapers, I hope to expand into the new medium of the blogosphere. My hope will be that word of this site will spread and we can get a real good conversation going about Texas books. I am literally learning as I go here, so we'll see what happens.

My plan, at this point, is to update this blog as frequently as I can. I encourage comments, suggestions, suggested books to write about, and, of course, your opinion on Texas books.

I am primarily interested in talking about mainstream Texas books...titles from commercial publishers, regional presses and academic presses. I certainly will talk about well-done self-published books, however.