Description

Winchester Press [Published Date: 1971]. Hard cover, 248 pp. No other printings listed. Very Good in good+ dust jacket. Green cloth covered boards with silver lettering on spine. Light scuffing and fading to edges of covers. Binding tight. Previous owner's book plate on rear paste-down. Otherwise pages are clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has a few small nicks and tears and light creasing to edges and corners and light overall scuffing. Price clipped. Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. [From front jacket flap] Here is a saddlebag of true tales little known outside the Southwest, written as adventure history should be written - with accuracy and imagination. There is no other single book exactly like this; to match it one would have to buy a small library of Texana. It covers the colorful episodes that conventional brief histories of Texas ignore. These tales tell how the great explorer La Salle died in a Texas canebrake; how filibusters joined with Mexican patriots in an ill-fated Texas revolt long before the Battle of the Alamo; and how the Lone Star navy sailed what became the Texas Main. Too few people know the epic of the prisoners of Perote, the Confederate battles in New Mexico, how Dick Dowling's Irish gunners balked a Yankee fleet on the Sabine River, or that the last Civil War skirmish happened in deep South Texas after Lee had surrendered. To most readers these action-packed pages by a leading Southwestern historian will bring a new concept of the early years of Texas. Here are the real stories of the Comancheros of the Staked Plains, the tragic slaughter of the last buffalo, and the heroic struggle to clear an unbelievable log jam in the Red River. There is conflict, too, in the story of the Salt War feud near old El Paso. Outlaws are not ignored, but they are debunked in a roundup of gunfighters who met bizarre deaths. The book ends with a wild boxing escapade in the Fitzsimmons-Maher championship match on a Rio Grande sandbar below Judge Roy Bean's saloon. If you believe that Texas history consisted of only the Alamo, the Rangers, cattle kings, and Sam Bass - this book will take you down a dozen new trails.