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Robert E. Lee in Texas introduces a little known phase ...)
Robert E. Lee in Texas introduces a little known phase of the great General’s career―his service in Texas during the four turbulent years just preceding the Civil War. In this account Carl Coke Rister takes us with Lee to his lonely posts on the border, and we share with him the hazardous and often fruitless chases after bands of American Indians and Mexicans. We see through the eyes of the “Academy man” the raw life on the frontier and hear through his own words his impressions of the country and people.
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Oil! Titan of the Southwest is the exciting yet unbiase...)
Oil! Titan of the Southwest is the exciting yet unbiased account of one of the most spectacular series of events in American history: the rush for oil riches in the great Mid-Continent and Gulf producing area, from the era of the Indians’ oil springs through the blustery years of wildcatting to the recent more orderly, but equally dramatic period of exploration and development.
Here is the story of the discovery and production of oil in this rich domain, embracing the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. More than a history of the development of an industry, this absorbing narrative relates the rise of the giant corporations, the struggles of the independents, the adoption of scientific methods, and the emergence of controls.
Comanche Bondage: John Charles Beales's Settlement Of La Villa De Dolores On Las Moras Creek In Southern Texas Of The 1830's
(With An Annotated Reprint Of Sarah Ann Horn's Narrative O...)
With An Annotated Reprint Of Sarah Ann Horn's Narrative Of Her Captivity Among The Comanches, Her Ransom By Traders In New Mexico And Return Via The Santa Fe Trail.
(A History Of The Coming Of The Settlers, Indian Depredati...)
A History Of The Coming Of The Settlers, Indian Depredations And Massacres, Ranching Activities, Operations Of White Desperadoes And Thieves, Government Protection, Building Of Railways, And The Disappearance Of The Frontier.
Land Hunger: David L. Payne and the Oklahoma Boomers
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The restless land hunger that drew thousands of men int...)
The restless land hunger that drew thousands of men into the Boomer Movement to open the “Oklahoma” district of Indian Territory to settlement is a phenomon of power and human determination. The movement was best expressed in the character of David L. Payne, an Oklahoma Boomer and border adventurer in the mold of Sam Houston or Buffalo Bill Cody. Payne was not content to settle down to the tedium of a sedentary life.
He was a border leader, searching for places where a restless spirit could meet the challenges of a hazardous life. American Indians of the “Five Civilized Tribes,” cattlemen, and the federal government offered strong opposition to opening the territory, but that only made Payne work with greater effort to force the opening of the unassigned lands to white settlement.
Land Hunger is more than a biography, because David Payne’s life from 1879 to 1884 was so dedicated to the Boomer cause. His story also portrays one of the most bizarre and exciting episodes of the frontier—the opening of the last lands in America available for free settlement—leading ultimately to the great land run of 1889 and the formation of the state of Oklahoma.
Payne’s death in 1884 inspired W. L. Couch and other Boomer leaders to carry on. Carl Coke Roster illuminates the role of Payne and other Boomers against the background of a raw and cruelly exacting frontier.
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No homeseekers were ever plagued with more bad luck tha...)
No homeseekers were ever plagued with more bad luck than those who followed the Englishman John Charles Beales to southern Texas late in 1834. On the banks of Las Moras Creek, not far from the Rio Grande, they established the colony of Dolores. Among them were the British-born Sarah Ann Horn and her husband and two small sons. For the pretty Sarah Ann, who shared her neighbors' fear of Comanche raids, the year or so in Dolores was a preview of a special hell to come. The threat of an invasion by Santa Anna, an uncongenial climate, a lack of trees for lumber, an unnavigable river, crop failures, and a scarcity of commodities contributed to the colonists' discouragement and discord.
In Comanche Bondage the distinguished southwestern historian Carl Coke Rister has written the history of the Dolores enterprise, drawing on Beale's journals and other documents, and including reports of the survivors. Leaving Dolores in the wake of news about the Alamo and Goliad disasters, the Horn family and their neighbors the Harrises headed toward Matamoras. They never arrived there. Later a broken Sarah Ann Horn told the horrifying story of the murder of the men and of the years of captivity she and Mrs. Harris and their children endured at the hands of the Comanches. Rister has edited and annotated her 1839 narrative, which complements and extends his account of Beales's folly.
Land Hunger David L Payne And The Oklahoma Boomers
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Carl Coke Rister was an American historian of the Anglo-American Southwest.
Background
Carl Coke Rister was born on June 30, 1889 at Hayrick, Coke County, Texas, the son of Craton Rister, a carpenter and weekend Baptist preacher, and Sarah Parker Rister. He grew to manhood in the hard-scrabble area of western Texas among people who firmly believed in the literal interpretation of the Bible and an actual heaven and hell. Smoking, drinking, and dancing were considered mortal sins, and salvation depended upon one's unswerving faith in God. Coke County was in a region that had vivid memories of bands of Comanches slipping away from their Oklahoma reservation and raiding isolated farms and ranches. Although he eventually acquired a national reputation as a historian and writer, Rister never completely overcame his narrow religious background and his misgivings about the Indians.
Education
As a student at Baptist-supported Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas (1911 - 1915), Rister developed into an above-average left-handed pitcher and later turned down a contract to play minor-league baseball. The catcher on the same school baseball team, Eugene Holman, later became president of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Holman's rise to power and wealth reinforced Rister's faith in success stories of the type popularized by Horatio Alger and in the free-enterprise capitalistic system. After he received the M. A. in history in 1919, he returned to Texas.
Rister returned to George Washington University instead and completed the Ph. D. in 1925.
Career
A few weeks after graduating, Rister accepted a teaching position in McCaulley, Texas.
Mattie Rister assisted her husband on every major research project, playing the role of critic as well as alter ego. In 1917 the Risters moved to Washington, D. C. , where he worked in the Treasury Department and attended night school at George Washington University.
Back at Hardin-Simmons he devoted much of his time to research and writing. His first article, "Fort Griffin, " based upon one of the chapters in his dissertation, appeared in West Texas Historical Association Year Book (1925).
This also was the subject of his last major work, Fort Griffin on the Texas Frontier (1956). The Southwestern Frontier, 1865-1881 appeared in 1928 and led to an associate professorship (1929 - 1935) and a full professorship (1935 - 1945) at the University of Oklahoma. All of Rister's subsequent writings concerned the Southwest. He was not a great stylist, but his publications were carefully researched and documented.
He lectured without notes and generally omitted personal anecdotes and attempts at humor. Nevertheless, he was far from dull. As more and more publications appeared, Rister's reputation spread beyond the University of Oklahoma.
He served as chairman of the department of history (1944 - 1945) before the Oklahoma regents appointed him research professor, a title he retained until 1951, when he went to Texas Technological College in Lubbock, Texas, to fill the newly created chair of distinguished professor of history.
Rister's many honors included the presidency of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (1949 - 1950) and offices in several regional and national historical associations. Rister's first significant work, The Greater Southwest (with R. N. Richardson), appeared in 1934 and has often been imitated. A social history of the vast region south of the forty-second parallel and west of the ninety-eighth meridian, it covers the 400-year period from the arrival of the Spaniards to the beginning of the twentieth century. Western America: The Exploration, Settlement, and Development of the Region Beyond the Mississippi (written with LeRoy Hafen) covers the same period but a wider area.
It has been used, with revisions, as a college textbook since 1941 and, like most of Rister's other publications, is factual rather than interpretive. The extensive bibliography is useful but not as analytical as that in Ray Allen Billington's Westward Expansion (1949).
Achievements
Rister wrote on a wide range of Southwestern subjects, from Indians, land speculators, frontier traders, missionaries, military posts, Philip Sheridan, and Robert E. Lee, to the petroleum industry. Oil! Titan of the Southwest (1949) was made possible by a $30, 000 grant from the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Some called it Rister's most distinguished and ambitious book, while other critics dismissed it as corporation propaganda. In any case it reflected an enormous amount of travel, interviews, and research in primary sources, and won the Texas Institute of Letters prize of $1, 000 in 1950.
