Up the Trail

Up the Trail PDF Author: Tim Lehman
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421425912
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
How did cattle drives come about—and why did the cowboy become an iconic American hero? Cattle drives were the largest, longest, and ultimately the last of the great forced animal migrations in human history. Spilling out of Texas, they spread longhorns, cowboys, and the culture that roped the two together throughout the American West. In cities like Abilene, Dodge City, and Wichita, buyers paid off ranchers, ranchers paid off wranglers, and railroad lines took the cattle east to the packing plants of St. Louis and Chicago. The cattle drives of our imagination are filled with colorful cowboys prodding and coaxing a line of bellowing animals along a dusty path through the wilderness. These sturdy cowhands always triumph over stampedes, swollen rivers, and bloodthirsty Indians to deliver their mighty-horned companions to market—but Tim Lehman’s Up the Trail reveals that the gritty reality was vastly different. Far from being rugged individualists, the actual cow herders were itinerant laborers—a proletariat on horseback who connected cattle from the remote prairies of Texas with the nation’s industrial slaughterhouses. Lehman demystifies the cowboy life by describing the origins of the cattle drive and the extensive planning, complicated logistics, great skill, and good luck essential to getting the cows to market. He reveals how drives figured into the larger story of postwar economic development and traces the complex effects the cattle business had on the environment. He also explores how the premodern cowboy became a national hero who personified the manly virtues of rugged individualism and personal independence. Grounded in primary sources, this absorbing book takes advantage of recent scholarship on labor, race, gender, and the environment. The lively narrative will appeal to students of Texas and western history as well as anyone interested in cowboy culture.

Up the Trail

Up the Trail PDF Author: Tim Lehman
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421425912
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
How did cattle drives come about—and why did the cowboy become an iconic American hero? Cattle drives were the largest, longest, and ultimately the last of the great forced animal migrations in human history. Spilling out of Texas, they spread longhorns, cowboys, and the culture that roped the two together throughout the American West. In cities like Abilene, Dodge City, and Wichita, buyers paid off ranchers, ranchers paid off wranglers, and railroad lines took the cattle east to the packing plants of St. Louis and Chicago. The cattle drives of our imagination are filled with colorful cowboys prodding and coaxing a line of bellowing animals along a dusty path through the wilderness. These sturdy cowhands always triumph over stampedes, swollen rivers, and bloodthirsty Indians to deliver their mighty-horned companions to market—but Tim Lehman’s Up the Trail reveals that the gritty reality was vastly different. Far from being rugged individualists, the actual cow herders were itinerant laborers—a proletariat on horseback who connected cattle from the remote prairies of Texas with the nation’s industrial slaughterhouses. Lehman demystifies the cowboy life by describing the origins of the cattle drive and the extensive planning, complicated logistics, great skill, and good luck essential to getting the cows to market. He reveals how drives figured into the larger story of postwar economic development and traces the complex effects the cattle business had on the environment. He also explores how the premodern cowboy became a national hero who personified the manly virtues of rugged individualism and personal independence. Grounded in primary sources, this absorbing book takes advantage of recent scholarship on labor, race, gender, and the environment. The lively narrative will appeal to students of Texas and western history as well as anyone interested in cowboy culture.

Up the Trail from Texas

Up the Trail from Texas PDF Author: James Frank Dobie
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African American cowboys
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Cowboys who drove herds of Texas cattle up the Chisholm Trail have interested readers, both young and old, for more than seventy-five years. Now the true story of trail-driving has been written by J. Frank Dobie, authority on the history and tradition of range life in the West. In the period following the Civil War, longhorns were driven north by the hundreds of thousands each year to be sold in rollicky cow towns and to stock vast ranges taken from the buffaloes. Indians, scarcity of water, floods, lightning, stampedes--these were only some of the dangers confronting trail drivers. There were no fences. Grass was free--and so was life. Among the characters in the book are Joseph G. McCoy, who established the first cattle market in Abilene, Kansas--terminus of the Chisholm Trail Walter Billingsley, who bossed "the biggest trail herd" for mighty King Ranch; and Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, who blazed a trail to New Mexico. When he was young, Mr. Dobie knew many old-time trail drivers and took down their stories. Here he gives them, along with a wealth of information and anecdotes concerning the remuda men, chuck wagon cooks, trail bosses, cow horses, bell mares, longhorned steers and other types of trail-driving history. Here is the real story of the real cowboy of the old West at the peak of his career -- Book jacket.

Texas Women on the Cattle Trails

Texas Women on the Cattle Trails PDF Author: Sara R. Massey
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781585445431
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Tells the stories of sixteen women who drove cattle up the trail from Texas during the last half of the nineteenth century.

The Trail Drivers of Texas

The Trail Drivers of Texas PDF Author: John Marvin Hunter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cattle trade
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description


A Texas Cowboy's Journal

A Texas Cowboy's Journal PDF Author: Jack Bailey
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 080618227X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
In this earliest known day-by-day journal of a cattle drive from Texas to Kansas, Jack Bailey, a North Texas farmer, describes what it was like to live and work as a cowboy in the southern plains just after the Civil War. We follow Bailey as the drive moves northward into Kansas and then as his party returns to Texas through eastern Kansas, southwestern Missouri, northwestern Arkansas, and Indian Territory. For readers steeped in romantic cowboy legend, the journal contains surprises. Bailey’s time on the trail was hardly lonely. We travel with him as he encounters Indians, U.S. soldiers, Mexicans, freed slaves, and cowboys working other drives. He and other crew members—including women—battle hunger, thirst, illness, discomfort, and pain. Cowboys quarrel and play practical jokes on each other and, at night, sing songs around the campfire. David Dary’s thorough introduction and footnotes place the journal in historical context.

Lonesome Dove

Lonesome Dove PDF Author: Larry McMurtry
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 068487122X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 872

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Book Description
Bestselling winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize, Lonesome Dove is an American classic. First published in 1985, Larry McMurtry's epic novel combined flawless writing with a storyline and setting that gripped the popular imagination, and ultimately resulted in a series of four novels and an Emmy-winning television miniseries. Now, with an introduction by the author, Lonesome Dove is reprinted in an S&S Classic Edition. Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry, the author of Terms of Endearment, is his long-awaited masterpiece, the major novel at last of the American West as it really was. A love story, an adventure, an American epic, Lonesome Dove embraces all the West -- legend and fact, heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settiers -- in a novel that recreates the central American experience, the most enduring of our national myths. Set in the late nineteenth century, Lonesome Dove is the story of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana -- and much more. It is a drive that represents for everybody involved not only a daring, even a foolhardy, adventure, but a part of the American Dream -- the attempt to carve out of the last remaining wilderness a new life. Augustus McCrae and W. F. Call are former Texas Rangers, partners and friends who have shared hardship and danger together without ever quite understanding (or wanting to understand) each other's deepest emotions. Gus is the romantic, a reluctant rancher who has a way with women and the sense to leave well enough alone. Call is a driven, demanding man, a natural authority figure with no patience for weaknesses, and not many of his own. He is obsessed with the dream of creating his own empire, and with the need to conceal a secret sorrow of his own. The two men could hardly be more different, but both are tough, redoubtable fighters who have learned to count on each other, if nothing else. Call's dream not only drags Gus along in its wake, but draws in a vast cast of characters: -- Lorena, the whore with the proverbial heart of gold, whom Gus (and almost everyone else) loves, and who survives one of the most terrifying experiences any woman could have... -- Elmira, the restless, reluctant wife of a small-time Arkansas sheriff, who runs away from the security of marriage to become part of the great Western adventure... -- Blue Duck, the sinister Indian renegade, one of the most frightening villains in American fiction, whose steely capacity for cruelty affects the lives of everyone in the book... -- Newt, the young cowboy for whom the long and dangerous journey from Texas to Montana is in fact a search for his own identity... -- Jake, the dashing, womanizing exRanger, a comrade-in-arms of Gus and Call, whose weakness leads him to an unexpected fate... -- July Johnson, husband of Elmira, whose love for her draws him out of his secure life into the wilderness, and turns him into a kind of hero... Lonesome Dove sweeps from the Rio Grande (where Gus and Call acquire the cattle for their long drive by raiding the Mexicans) to the Montana highlands (where they find themselves besieged by the last, defiant remnants of an older West). It is an epic of love, heroism, loyalty, honor, and betrayal -- faultlessly written, unfailingly dramatic. Lonesome Dove is the novel about the West that American literature -- and the American reader -- has long been waiting for.

Finding Birds on the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail

Finding Birds on the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail PDF Author: Ted Eubanks
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1603443924
Category : Bird watching
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
The Texas coast offers rich avian treasures for expert birders and beginners alike, if only they know where to look. For those familiar with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's maps to the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail, this book on the Upper Texas Coast offers more--more information, more convenient and detailed maps, more pictures, more finding tips, and more birding advice from one of the trail's creators, Ted Lee Eubanks Jr., and trail experts Robert A. Behrstock and Seth Davidson. For those new to the trail, the book is the perfect companion for learning where to find and how to bird the very best venues on this part of the Texas coast. In an opening tutorial on habitat and seasonal strategies for birding the Upper Texas Coast, the authors include tips on how to take advantage of the famous (but elusive) fallouts of birds that happen here. They then briefly discuss the basics of birding by ear and the rewards of passive birding before turning to the trail itself and each of more than 120 birding sites from the Louisiana-Texas border, through Galveston and Houston, to just south of Freeport. Advice oninding bird groups While not intended as a field identification guide, the book contains more than 175 color photographs of birds and their coastal habitat, giving readers an excellent feel for the trail's diversity and abundance. Whether you are making your annual spring pilgrimage to Texas, leisurely traveling with the family along the coast, or wondering what to do during a layover in Houston, using this book as your guide to the trail will greatly enhance your birding experience.

Along the Texas Forts Trail

Along the Texas Forts Trail PDF Author: B. W. Aston
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574410350
Category : Automobile travel
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
A travel guide to the Texas Forts Trail, providing historical background on each of the eight forts along the route, and including information for tourists on independent motels, inns, and restaurants, as well as listings of festivals, specialty shops, and other points of interest.

How to Get Rich on a Texas Cattle Drive

How to Get Rich on a Texas Cattle Drive PDF Author: Tod Olson
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1426305257
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
Draws from personal accounts to describe the fictional experiences of a fifteen-year-old cowhand who travels along the Chisholm Trail on a cattle drive.

The Old Chisholm Trail

The Old Chisholm Trail PDF Author: Wayne Ludwig
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1623496713
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
The Old Chisholm Trail charts the evolution of the major Texas cattle trails, explores the rise of the Chisholm Trail in legend and lore, and analyzes the role of cattle trail tourism long after the end of the trail driving era itself. The result of years of original and innovative research—often using documents and sources unavailable to previous generations of historians—Wayne Ludwig’s groundbreaking study offers a new and nuanced look at an important but short-lived era in the history of the American West. Controversy over the name and route of the Chisholm Trail has persisted since before the dust had even settled on the old cattle trails. But the popularity of late nineteenth-century Wild West shows, dime novels, and twentieth-century radio, movie, and television western drama propelled the already bygone era of the cattle trail into myth—and a lucrative one at that. Ludwig correlates the rise of automobile tourism with an explosion of interest in the Chisholm Trail. Community leaders were keenly aware of the potential economic impact if tourists were induced to visit their town rather than another, and the Chisholm Trail was often just the hook needed. Numerous “historical” markers were erected on little more than hearsay or boosterish memory, and as a result, the true history of the Chisholm Trail has been overshadowed. The Old Chisholm Trail is the first comprehensive examination of the Chisholm Trail since Wayne Gard’s 1954 classic study, The Chisholm Trail, and makes an important—and modern—contribution to the history of the American West. Winner, 2018 Elmer Kelton Book of the Year, sponsored by the Academy of Western Artists​