Winner of the Summerfield G. Roberts Award, this provocative revisionist look at a Mexican official long vilified in Texas gives a new perspective on specific events involving Juan Davis Bradburn. It also helps to explain early stages of the Texas war for independence in terms of the refusal of Anglo settlers to accept the "un-American" laws and customs of Mexican Texans.

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This brief and entertaining history of the Texas Longhorn details the development of the first distinct American breed of beef cattle. The Spanish herds that had roamed Texas for generations, when mixed with English Longhorns brought by Anglo settlers in the early 1800s, yielded a rangy hybrid that could thrive in Texas’ climate and was ideally suited to ranchers’ aspirations. Almost extinct by the turn of the century, the Texas Longhorn was preserved by the efforts of just a few people who recalled with fondness the days when the cattle had thundered on the trails. Some U.S. Forest Service officials, several ranchers, and even a folklorist—J. Frank Dobie—gathered the animals for breeding and successfully managed the small herds until they stabilized and began to increase. The Texas Longhorn Breeders Association of America was formed in 1964 to preserve and promote the breed, and a growing interest in improving health by eating leaner meat has spurred renewed interest in the lean Longhorn as more than just a nostalgic novelty.

In the spring of 1883 Apache raiders massacred Judge H.C. McComas and his wife Juniata and kidnapped their six-year-old son Charley as the family traveled on a desolate road in southwestern New Mexico Territory. At the time, the circumstances leading to this tragic incident were not fully understood. In Massacre on the Lordsburg Road, historian Marc Simmons brings to light one of the last massacres of the Indian wars, revealing exactly why and how the three McComases met their deaths. Simmons recounts the raids leading up to the massacre and Gen. George Crook's subsequent Sierra Madre campaign. This was the first use of the "Hot Pursuit Treaty" signed between the United States and Mexico in 1882, allowing troops of either country to follow hostile Indians across the border. The reason why a reputably wise and able man like Judge McComas would lead his family into such grave danger, the pursuit of the Apaches into Mexico by General Crook, and the ironic circumstances of Charley McComas' death during an attack by Crook's troops on the Apache camp illustrate that past events were as complex and sometimes as confusing as those today. Though academically thorough in its exploration, the popular style of delivery of Massacre on the Lordsburg Road will capture and hold the interest of general readers of Indian history.

For the Plains Indians, the period from 1750 to 1890, often referred to as the traditional period, was an evolutionary time. Horses and firearms, trade goods, shifting migration patterns, disease pandemics, and other events associated with extensive European contact led to a peak of Plains Indian influence and success in the early nineteenth century. Ironically, that same European contact ultimately led to the devolution of traditional Plains Indian society, and by 1870 most Plains Indian peoples were living on reservations. In The Plains Indians Paul H. Carlson charts the evolution and growth of the Plains Indians through this period of constant change. Carlson examines, among other aspects of these tribal groups, the horse and bison culture, the economy and material culture, trade and diplomacy, and reservation life. In its examination of cultural change, The Plains Indians relies heavily on Indian voices and stresses an Indian viewpoint. Carlson argues that the Plains Indians were neither passive recipients of these cultural changes nor helpless victims. They took what was new and adapted it to and integrated it into their own culture. Even when faced with a significantly altered life on the reservations, the Plains Indians, "without abandoning their cultural base[,] . . . adopted sedentary lifeways and shifted toward new life patterns, new sodalities, and different characteristics of community." Carlson also investigates the role of the environment in the lives of the plains tribal groups. The ecological exploitation of bison was an integral part of their society; both their material and spiritual worlds depended on bison. The Plains Indians, while not living in perfect harmony with the environment, to some extent adjusted their hunting practices, religious ceremonies, and social organization to the seasons, the bison, and other environmental factors, such as the herding requirements of their horses. The Plains Indians is a clear, well written narrative history of the Plains Indians during a vital and well known era in Indian and American history. Those interested in Indian anthropology and history will value this cohesive overview of Plains Indian society and culture.

In 1821, although Spain claimed what is now Texas, American Indian groups occupied it. Less than forty years later, they had been largely displaced, and their subsistence economy, supplemented by raiding and trade, had been replaced by an Anglo-Texan agricultural economy linked to a rapidly expanding and industrializing capitalist system. For the Karankawas and the Tonkawas, the period from 1821 to 1859 was particularly devastating. Once thriving communities, the Karankawas survived only as scattered individuals after a small remnant on the banks of the Rio Grande was massacred, and the few remaining Tonkawas had been pushed across the Red River into Indian Territory. Kelly Himmel has written an account of this conquest that gives new understanding of the processes. He explores geopolitical and economic factors, as well as the role of individual and collective human actors and the effects of cultural orientations of the conquered and conquering groups toward each other. Among his findings is the importance of geopolitical location. During the early Spanish period, the coastal Karankawas offered a buffer against French, English, and Anglo-American intrusion into Texas. Later, during the early days of Anglo-American settlement, the Tonkawas provided a barrier against the Wichitas and Comanches. For both groups, when the threat to their European-origin allies ended, so did the alliances. In considering the social construction of the “other,” he describes how early trade patterns predisposed Anglo-Texans to characterize Karankawas as cannibals, while viewing the Tonkawas, for whom much stronger evidence of cannibalism exists, as harmless beggars and petty thieves. Through the detailed analysis of factors such as these, Himmel not only portrays a period in the history of these two peoples that has been largely unstudied, but also offers lucid explanations of the framework of Anglo-Texan conquest. Historians, sociologists, and anthropologists will find new insight and information in this valuable addition to the literature on Texas Indians and Texas history.

White Painted Woman appears in ancient myths of the Chiricahua Apaches as the virgin mother of the people and the origin of women’s ceremonies. Such Chiricahua myths and traditions have closely prescribed the roles of women in relation to their husbands and children, to relatives and extended families, and to the band or tribe. One of those roles is to safeguard and hand on to the next generation the lore and customs of the people. In this way, Chiricahua women have served as safekeepers of a heritage that is now endangered. For more than a decade, H. Henrietta Stockel has moved with remarkable freedom and intimacy among the Chiricahuas, especially in the women’s friendship circles. With their permission and even blessing, she has observed and recorded aspects of their traditional culture that otherwise might be lost to history.Chiricahua Apache Women and Children, written in a familiar, personal style, focuses on the duties and experiences of historical Chiricahua Apache women and the significant influences they have exerted within the family and the tribe at large.After beginning with a look at creation myths, Stockel turns to family patterns and roles. She describes in detail the puberty ceremony she has repeatedly witnessed, a ceremony little known by those outside the band. Stockel looks also at the alternative lifestyle, also culturally prescribed, of four women warriors. She concludes with Mildred Cleghorn, a contemporary “woman warrior” who was chairperson of the Fort Sill Chiricahua/Warm Springs Apache Tribe in Oklahoma for nearly twenty years and who was also Stockel's close friend and “Apache mother.” Beautifully complemented with thirty-two black-and-white illustrations of women, children, and family life, Chiricahua Apache Women and Children offers a vivid glimpse into traditional Chiricahua Apache women’s lifestyles.

All Texans, or their ancestors, started as something else. The families that came here molded the state and were molded by it. Anne H. Sutherland explores just how the experiences of two of the early Anglo land-grant families—the Robertsons and the Sutherlands—shaped Texas events and how they handed down those experiences from one generation to another, transforming two Scots-Irish families into what in hindsight we have branded Anglo-Texans. The story of these two pioneering families, told through their letters, poems, diaries, and oral histories, embodies western expansion and political upheaval. Settling in central and southeast Texas, these families struggled to build a new Texas and make a life for their children. The Texas revolution and the Civil War acted as catalysts for the emergence of their Texan identity. A unique blend of family and Texas history, Sutherland’s Made in Texas: A Family Tale positions personal stories as windows of insight onto Texan identity. She peels back the layers of family tradition and textbook history to show how her forebears experienced the transforming events of the settlement of Texas and its war for independence. As new generations emerged, each contributed its own anecdotes and historical context from the time period. By placing the families within Texas history, Sutherland effectively and innovatively traces identity from the early nineteenth century to today. As settlers in the western wilderness, the Robertsons, the Sutherlands, and others like them actively shaped Texas, even as they were changed themselves.

Strategically located at the western edge of the Atlantic World, the French post of Natchitoches thrived during the eighteenth century as a trade hub between the well-supplied settlers and the isolated Spaniards and Indians of Texas. Its critical economic and diplomatic role made it the most important community on the Louisiana-Texas frontier during the colonial era. Despite the community’s critical role under French and then Spanish rule, Colonial Natchitoches is the first thorough study of its society and economy. Founded in 1714, four years before New Orleans, Natchitoches developed a creole (American-born of French descent) society that dominated the Louisiana-Texas frontier. H. Sophie Burton and F. Todd Smith carefully demonstrate not only the persistence of this creole dominance but also how it was maintained. They examine, as well, the other ethnic cultures present in the town and relations with Indians in the surrounding area. Through statistical analyses of birth and baptismal records, census figures, and appropriate French and Spanish archives, Burton and Smith reach surprising conclusions about the nature of society and commerce in colonial Natchitoches.

The term “filibuster” often brings to mind a senator giving a long-winded speech in opposition to a bill, but the term had a different connotation in the nineteenth century—invasion of foreign lands by private military forces. Spanish Texas was a target of such invasions. Generally given short shrift in the studies of American-based filibustering, these expeditions were led by colorful men such as Augustus William Magee, Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, John Robinson, and James Long. Previous accounts of their activities are brief, lack the appropriate context to fully understand filibustering, and leave gaps in the historiography. Ed Bradley now offers a thorough recounting of filibustering into Spanish Texas framed through the lens of personal and political motives: why American men participated in them and to what extent the US government was either involved in or tolerated them. “We Never Retreat” makes a major contribution by placing these expeditions within the contexts of the Mexican War of Independence and international relations between the United States and Spain.

Although Sam Houston would eventually emerge as the dominant shaper of the developing Texas Republic's destiny, many visions competed for preeminence. One of Houston's sharpest critics, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, is the subject of this fascinating edition of letters from the period. Donald E. Willett offers new annotation and analysis to these letters from Johnston's colleagues, friends, and supporters—first collected and edited by contrarian scholar Margaret Swett Henson, but never before published.

The Texas Left. Some would say the phrase is an oxymoron. For most of the twentieth century, the popular perception of Texas politics has been that of dominant conservatism, punctuated by images of cowboys, oil barons, and party bosses intent on preserving a decidedly capitalist status quo. In fact, poor farmers and laborers who were disenfranchised, segregated, and, depending on their ethnicity and gender, confronted with varying levels of hostility and discrimination, have long composed the "other" political heritage of Texas. In The Texas Left, fourteen scholars examine this heritage. Though largely ignored by historians of previous decades who focused instead on telling the stories of the Alamo, the Civil War, the cattle drives, and the oilfield wildcatters, this parallel narrative of those who sought to resist repression reveals themes important to the unfolding history of Texas and the Southwest. Volume editors David O'Donald Cullen and Kyle G. Wilkison have assembled a collection of pioneering studies that provide the broad outlines for future research on liberal and radical social and political causes in the state and region. Among the topics explored in this book are early efforts of women, blacks, Tejanos, labor organizers, and political activists to claim rights of citizenship, livelihood, and recognition, from the Reconstruction era until recent times.

In 1945 the hot wind from a nuclear explosion at Trinity Site on a nearby missile range raged across the Mescalero Apache Reservation in south-central New Mexico, killing hundreds of head of livestock and causing sickness among the descendants of some of the most famous Apache heroes in American history. In many ways, this disaster typified what these Apaches had come to expect from the federal government: attention was often accompanied by undesired results. Four thousand Apaches of the Mescalero, Chiricahua, and Lipan bands now live on this reservation. In twelve remarkable oral history interviews, three generations of Mescalero, Chiricahua, and Lipan Apaches reflect on the trials of the past, the challenges of the present, and hope for the future. A common thread among all of the interviewees is a collective memory of their people as formidable enemies of the U.S. government in the not-too-distant past. Author and ethnographer H. Henrietta Stockel has structured these interviews to encompass three groups of Mescalero Apache society: the elders, the “warriors” (middle-aged), and the “horseholders,” or young apprentices.