Grover E. Murray Studies in the American Southwest

Over thousands of years, Native Americans in what is now Texas passed down their ways of roasting, boiling, steaming, salting, drying, grinding, and blending. From one generation to another, these ancestors of Texas's Mexican American community lent their culinary skills to combining native and foreign ingredients into the flavor profile of indigenous Texas Mexican cooking today. Building on what he learned from his own family, Adán Medrano captures this distinctive flavor profile in 100 kitchen-tested recipes, each with step-by-step instructions. Equally as careful with history, he details how hundreds of indigenous tribes in Texas gathered and hunted food, planted gardens, and cooked. Offering new culinary perspective on well-known dishes such as enchiladas and tamales, Medrano explains the complexities of aromatic chiles and how to develop flavor through technique as much as ingredients. Sharing freely the secrets of lesser-known culinary delights, such as turcos, a sweet pork pastry served as dessert, and posole, giant white corn treated with calcium hydroxide, he illuminates the mouth-watering interconnectedness of culture and cuisine. The recipes and personal anecdotes shared in Truly Texas Mexican illuminate the role that cuisine plays in identity and community.

The Edge Rover chronicles the expansive life of Isaac Slover, a fur trapper who was born in Pennsylvania during the Revolutionary War and who ranged throughout the early American West. The variety and extensiveness of Slover's encounters among Indigenous peoples and the Hispanic Southwest distinguish his experience from that of other "mountain men" of his time. A lifespan from 1777 to 1854 meant that Isaac Slover saw a transformed America, and he endured through frequently shifting borders, particularly in what became the young country's southwest region. Among his numerous adventures are a youth consumed by the Revolutionary War in Western Pennsylvania, then later farming in Kentucky, trapping and trading in New Mexico, and finally making his way to Southern California. Throughout, Slover sifted between cultures, jumped across borders, navigated conflict, and hid along the margins of history. Sparse evidence documents Slover's adventures, but what remains is meticulously compiled here for the first time by Timothy E. Green, who grew up with fireside tales of the mountain man's exploits. At any given stage of his life, Isaac Slover can be situated at a critical juncture in the history of the West, roving beyond the edges and back again. The Edge Rover is therefore a welcome addition to early American West biographies, showing that boundaries, borders, and identities during this early period could be as fluid and wild as the land itself.

A multi-faceted look at the freedman township of Blackdom, New Mexico, that repositions the community on the history of the American frontier

On a late November morning in 1864, Col. Kit Carson and his U.S. troops, under orders from the commander of the New Mexico Military Department, attacked Kiowa Chief Dohasan's winter village in the Texas Panhandle. Warriors retaliated with stiff resistance as their women and children escaped. Fighting proceeded down the Canadian River to the abandoned trading post of Adobe Walls as hundreds more Kiowas and Comanches joined the battle. Nearing sunset, Carson's troops burned Doh’san's village, and although remarkably few lives were lost in the battle itself, the enduring consequences were hardly insignificant. Well-known as an explorer, guide, and frontiersman, Carson's involvement at the First Battle of Adobe Walls has been overlooked. Beginning his research in the 1990s, Alvin Lynn set out to fill that void when he located and walked the 200-mile-long wagon road from Fort Bascom to Adobe Walls and collected 1,800 metal artifacts from 15 historic camps, including the burned Kiowa village. Among the recovered artifacts were fired friction primers verifying the placement of howitzers at the battle site. With nearly eighty battle site and artifact photographs taken by renowned photographer Wyman Meinzer, Kit Carson and the First Battle of Adobe Walls documents Carson's military expedition from Fort Bascom to Adobe Walls and Lynn's own journey more than a century later to discover what really happened.

In 1838 Texas vice president Mirabeau B. Lamar, flush from the excitement of a successful buffalo hunt, gazed from a hilltop toward the paradise at his feet and saw the future. His poetic eye admired the stunning vista before him, with its wavering prairie grasses gradually yielding to clusters of trees, then whole forests bordering the glistening Colorado River in the distance. Lamar's equally awestruck companions, no strangers to beautiful landscapes, shuffled speechlessly nearby. But where these men saw only nature's handiwork, Lamar visualized a glorious manmade transformation--trees into buildings, prairie into streets, and the river itself into a bustling waterway. And he knew that with the presidency of the Republic of Texas in his grasp, he would soon be in position to achieve this vision. The founding of Austin sparked one of the Republic's first great political battles, pitting against each other two Texas titans: Lamar, who in less than a year had risen to vice president from army private, and Sam Houston, the hero of San Jacinto and a man both loved and hated throughout the Republic. The shy, soft-spoken, self-righteous Lamar dreamed of a great imperial capital in the wilderness, but to achieve it faced the hardships of the frontier, the mighty Comanche nation, the Mexican army, and the formidable Houston's political might.

Just across the Rio Grande from West Texas in the state of Coahuila, Mexico, the mountain ranges of the Maderas del Carmen rise majestically. Often called magical or mystical, they have stirred imagination for centuries. Stories of bandits, Indians, ghosts, incredible flora and fauna, cool forests, waterfalls, and vast woodlands filter across the Rio Grande. Many people have dreamed of exploring this vast ecosystem, but few have made the trip. Bonnie McKinney is among the fortunate. In 2001 McKinney and her husband, Billy Pat McKinney, moved to the Carmens to manage the large conservation project spearheaded by CEMEX, the Monterrey-based cement and building materials conglomerate. Like those before her, she had been enthralled by the massive mountains with their cliffs of purple and gold in the sunset, and by horizon views of high forests. She, too, wondered what treasures the mountains held. Now she knows-and happily has reached out to share. Having lived and worked in the Carmens for more than a decade, McKinney has never been disappointed by these mountains, which never fail to surprise her. In intimate photographs and loving words McKinney takes readers on a fascinating armchair journey, introducing them to the incredible biodiversity of this jewel of northern Mexico.

The Great Western Trail (GWT) is a nineteenth-century cattle trail that originated in northern Mexico, ran west parallel to the Chisholm Trail, traversed the United States for some two thousand miles, and terminated after crossing the Canadian border. Yet through time, misinformation, and the perpetuation of error, the historic path of this once-crucial cattle trail has been lost. Finding the Great Western Trail documents the first multi-community effort made to recover evidence and verify the route of the Great Western Trail. The GWT had long been celebrated in two neighboring communities: Vernon, Texas, and Altus, Oklahoma. Separated by the Red River, a natural border that cattle trail drovers forded with their herds, both Vernon and Altus maintained a living trail history with exhibits at local museums, annual trail-related events, ongoing narratives from local descendants of drovers, and historical monuments and structures. So when Western Trail Historical Society members in Altus challenged the Vernon Rotary Club to mark the trail across Texas every six miles, the effort soon spread along the trail, in part through Rotary networks, from Mexico, across nine US states, and into Saskatchewan, Canada. This book is the story of finding and marking the trail, and it stands as a record of each community's efforts to uncover their own local history. What began as bravado transformed into a grass-roots project that, one hopes, will bring the previously obscured history of the Great Western Trail to light.

Few people have the opportunity to live and work in America's magnificent national parks, let alone in a wide diversity of those great parks. For thirty-two years, beginning when he was hired as a seasonal ranger until he retired in 1989, Roland H. Wauer's career took him to eight national parks, a regional office in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and to Washington, DC, as Chief of the Division of Natural Resources. In an "inside-out" look at his career, Wauer takes the reader on a wildlife adventure through a number of those parks, documenting his experiences with the birds and other animals in each one. An avid birder, he made significant contributions to what was known about bird populations and avian habitats, and he has worked on a number of research projects involving mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, fishes, invertebrates, and other wildlife species. Follow along with Wauer as he recalls flying squirrels, great gray owls, and Clark's nutcrakers at Crater Lake; Nelson's bighorns, prairie falcons, LeConte's thrashers, and sidewinders at Death Valley; flammulated and spotted owls at Zion; and mountain lions, javelinas, peregrine falcons, cave swallows, and Colima warblers at Big Bend.

In the 1880s, there wasn't much in Anson, Texas, in the way of entertainment for the area's cowhands. But Star Hotel operator M. G. Rhodes changed that when he hosted a Grand Ball the weekend before Christmas. A restless traveling salesman, rancher, and poet from New York named William Lawrence Chittenden, a guest at the Star Hotel, was so impressed with the soiree that he penned his observances in the poem "The Cowboys' Christmas Ball." Reenacted annually since 1934 based on Chittenden's poem, the contemporary dances attract people from coast to coast, from Canada, and from across Europe and elsewhere. Since 1993 Grammy Award-winning musical artist Michael Martin Murphey has played at the popular event. Paul Carlson defines the many people and events mentioned in Chittenden's poem and explains the Jones County landscape laid out in the celebrated work. The book covers the evolution of cowboy poetry and places Chittenden and his poem chronologically within the ever-changing western genre. Far more than a history of the Jones County dance, Dancin' in Anson: A History of the Texas Cowboys' Christmas Ball is a novel but refreshing look at a cowboy poet, his poem, and a joyous Christmas-time family event that traces its roots back nearly 130 years.

In December 1860, along a creek in northwest Texas, a group of U.S. Cavalry under Sgt. John Spangler and Texas Rangers led by Sul Ross raided a Comanche hunting camp, killed several Indians, and took three prisoners. One was the woman they would identify as Cynthia Ann Parker, taken captive from her white family as a child a quarter century before. The reports of these events had implications far and near. For Ross, they helped make a political career. For Parker, they separated her permanently and fatally from her Comanche husband and two of her children. For Texas, they became the stuff of history and legend. In reexamining the historical accounts of the "Battle of Pease River," especially those claimed to be eyewitness reports, Paul H. Carlson and Tom Crum expose errors, falsifications, and mysteries that have contributed to a skewed understanding of the facts. For political and racist reasons, they argue, the massacre was labeled a battle. Firsthand testimony was fabricated; diaries were altered; the official Ranger report went missing from the state adjutant general's office. Historians, as a result, have unwittingly used fiction as the basis for 150 years of analysis. Carlson and Crum's careful historiographical reconsideration seeks not only to set the record straight but to deal with concepts of myth, folklore, and memory, both individual and collective. Myth, Memory, and Massacre peels away assumptions surrounding one of the most infamous episodes in Texas history, even while it adds new dimensions to the question of what constitutes reliable knowledge.

In his pursuit of Texas terroir, the sense of place manifest in Texas wine country's sun-baked soils, variable climate, and human intervention, Russell Kane has traveled the state tasting wine, interviewing the major players in Texas wine culture, and reflecting on the state's extraordinary history and enterprising peoples. Here is the total immersion experience. Texas Wineslinger, the moniker now synonymous with Kane, sprouted from a blog of an Australian wine writer after Kane compared the big red wines that originate from the red sand and porous limestone common to both the Texas High Plains and Australia's Coonawarra wine region. Kane's reflections include explorations of Spanish missionary life and the sacramental wine made from Texas's first vineyard as well as the love for grapes and wine brought subsequently by German and Italian immigrants from their homelands. Kane also relates stories of the modern-day growers and entrepreneurs who overcame the lingering effects of temperance and prohibition-forces that failed to eradicate Texas's destiny as an emerging wine-producing region.