Download or read book The Blanco River written by Wes Ferguson and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-22 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For eighty-seven miles, the swift and shallow Blanco River winds through the Texas Hill Country. Its water is clear and green, darkened by frequent pools. Wes Ferguson and Jacob Botter have paddled, walked, and waded the Blanco. They have explored its history, people, wildlife, and the natural beauty that surprises everyone who experiences this river. Described as “the defining element in some of the Hill Country’s most beautiful scenery,” the Blanco flows both above and below ground, part of a network of rivers and aquifers that sustains the region’s wildlife and millions of humans alike. However, overpumping and prolonged drought have combined to weaken the Blanco’s flow and sustenance, and in 2000—for the first time in recorded history—the river’s most significant feeder spring, Jacob’s Well, briefly ceased to flow. It stopped again in 2008. Then, in the spring of 2015, a devastating flood killed twelve people and toppled the huge cypress trees along its banks, altering not just the look of the river, but the communities that had come to depend on its serene presence. River travelers Ferguson and Botter tell the remarkable story of this changeable river, confronting challenges and dangers as well as rare opportunities to see parts of the river few have seen. The authors also photographed and recorded the human response to the destruction of a beloved natural resource that has become yet another episode in the story of water in Texas. To learn more about The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, sponsors of this book's series, please click here.

Download or read book Blanco County History written by John Stribling Moursund and published by Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum. This book was released on 1979 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Horse Draw Oil Shale Research Tract Rio Blanco County written by and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Texas Rangers Ranchers and Realtors written by Thomas O. McDonald and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 639 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A native Georgian, James Hughes Callahan (1812–1856) migrated to Texas to serve in the Texas Revolution in exchange for land. In Seguin, Texas, where he settled, he met and married a divorcée, Sarah Medissa Day (1822–1856). The lives of these two Texas pioneers and their extended family would become so entwined in the events and experiences of the nascent nation and state that their story represents a social history of nineteenth-century Texas. From his arrival as a sergeant with the Georgia Battalion, through the ill-fated 1855 expedition that bears his name, to his shooting death in a feud with a neighbor, Callahan was a soldier, a Texas Ranger, a rancher, and a land developer, at every turn making his mark on the evolving Guadalupe River Basin. Separately, Sarah’s family’s journey reflected the experience of many immigrants to Texas after its war of independence. Thomas O. McDonald traces the pair’s respective paths to their meeting, then follows as, together, they contend with conflict, troublesome social mores, the emergence of new industries, and the taming of the land, along the way helping to shape the Texas culture we know today. With a sharp eye for character and detail, and with a wealth of material at his command, author Thomas O. McDonald tells a story as crackling with life as it is steeped in scholarly research. In these pages the lives of the Callahan and Day families become a canvas on which the history of Texas—from revolution, frontier defense, and Indian wars to Anglo settlement and emerging legal and social systems—dramatically, inexorably unfolds.

Download or read book The Path to Power written by Robert A. Caro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-11-23 with total page 962 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Years of Lyndon Johnson is the political biography of our time. No president—no era of American politics—has been so intensively and sharply examined at a time when so many prime witnesses to hitherto untold or misinterpreted facets of a life, a career, and a period of history could still be persuaded to speak. The Path to Power, Book One, reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and urge to power that set LBJ apart. Chronicling the startling early emergence of Johnson’s political genius, it follows him from his Texas boyhood through the years of the Depression in the Texas hill Country to the triumph of his congressional debut in New Deal Washington, to his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate, and his attainment, nonetheless, of the national power for which he hungered. We see in him, from earliest childhood, a fierce, unquenchable necessity to be first, to win, to dominate—coupled with a limitless capacity for hard, unceasing labor in the service of his own ambition. Caro shows us the big, gangling, awkward young Lyndon—raised in one of the country’s most desperately poor and isolated areas, his education mediocre at best, his pride stung by his father’s slide into failure and financial ruin—lunging for success, moving inexorably toward that ultimate “impossible” goal that he sets for himself years before any friend or enemy suspects what it may be. We watch him, while still at college, instinctively (and ruthlessly) creating the beginnings of the political machine that was to serve him for three decades. We see him employing his extraordinary ability to mesmerize and manipulate powerful older men, to mesmerize (and sometimes almost enslave) useful subordinates. We see him carrying out, before his thirtieth year, his first great political inspiration: tapping-and becoming the political conduit for-the money and influence of the new oil men and contractors who were to grow with him to immense power. We follow, close up, the radical fluctuations of his relationships with the formidable “Mr. Sam” Raybum (who loved him like a son and whom he betrayed) and with FDR himself. And we follow the dramas of his emotional life-the intensities and complications of his relationships with his family, his contemporaries, his girls; his wooing and winning of the shy Lady Bird; his secret love affair, over many years, with the mistress of one of his most ardent and generous supporters . . . Johnson driving his people to the point of exhausted tears, equally merciless with himself . . . Johnson bullying, cajoling, lying, yet inspiring an amazing loyalty . . . Johnson maneuvering to dethrone the unassailable old Jack Garner (then Vice President of the United States) as the New Deal’s “connection” in Texas, and seize the power himself . . . Johnson raging . . . Johnson hugging . . . Johnson bringing light and, indeed, life to the worn Hill Country farmers and their old-at-thirty wives via the district’s first electric lines. We see him at once unscrupulous, admirable, treacherous, devoted. And we see the country that bred him: the harshness and “nauseating loneliness” of the rural life; the tragic panorama of the Depression; the sudden glow of hope at the dawn of the Age of Roosevelt. And always, in the foreground, on the move, LBJ. Here is Lyndon Johnson—his Texas, his Washington, his America—in a book that brings us as close as we have ever been to a true perception of political genius and the American political process.

Download or read book Daughters of Republic of Texas Vol I written by and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 1995-06-15 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Republic of Texas has a vivid past - its ancestors ventured west to settle an uneasy land - from exploration by the Spaniards to war with the Mexican government and its declaration of independence in 1836. Read about these ancestor's stories through hundreds of biographies with photographs of most. A comprehensive index provides easy reference for genealogical research.

Download or read book Six Shooters and Shifting Sands written by Bob Alexander and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2015-03-15 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many well-read students, historians, and loyal aficionados of Texas Ranger lore know the name of Texas Ranger Captain Frank Jones (1856-1893), who died on the Texas-Mexico border in a shootout with Mexican rustlers. In Six-Shooters and Shifting Sands, Bob Alexander has now penned the first full-length biography of this important nineteenth-century Texas Ranger. At an early age Frank Jones, a native Texan, would become a Frontier Battalion era Ranger. His enlistment with the Rangers coincided with their transition from Indian fighters to lawmen. While serving in the Frontier Battalion officers' corps of Company D, Frank Jones supervised three of the four "great" captains of that era: J.A. Brooks, John H. Rogers, and John R. Hughes. Besides Austin Ira Aten and his younger brothers Calvin Grant Aten and Edwin Dunlap Aten, Captain Jones also managed law enforcement activities of numerous other noteworthy Rangers, such as Philip Cuney "P.C." Baird, Benjamin Dennis Lindsey, Bazzell Lamar "Baz" Outlaw, J. Walter Durbin, Jim King, Frank Schmid, and Charley Fusselman, to name just a few. Frank Jones' law enforcing life was anything but boring. Not only would he find himself dodging bullets and returning fire, but those Rangers under his supervision would also experience gunplay. Of all the Texas Ranger companies, Company D contributed the highest number of on-duty deaths within Texas Ranger ranks.

Download or read book The Years of Lyndon Johnson The path to power written by Robert A. Caro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1983 with total page 964 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of the rise to national power of a desperately poor young man from Texas Hill Country. And, thanks to the narrative gifts of Robert Caro, we are beside Lyndon Johnson every step of the way - as he works on a road gang as a teenager; as he stands, gangling, awkward, terribly nervous on a wagon bed, begging Hill Country farmers to send him to Congress; as he suffers a heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate and, nonetheless, maneuvers himself into a position of power in Washington by the age of 31. In this riveting book, the first of three projected volumes on Johnson's life, we are brought as close as we have ever been to a true perception of political genius and of the workings of the American political process.

Download or read book Map Guide to the U S Federal Censuses 1790 1920 written by William Thorndale and published by Genealogical Publishing Com. This book was released on 1987 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genealogical research in U.S. censuses begins with identifying correct county jurisdictions ??o assist in this identification, the map Guide shows all U.S. county boundaries from 1790 to 1920. On each of the nearly 400 maps the old county lines are superimposed over the modern ones to highlight the boundary changes at ten-year intervals. Accompanying each map are explanations of boundary changes, notes about the census, & tocality finding keys. In addition, there are inset maps which clarify ??erritorial lines, a state-by-state bibliography of sources, & an appendix outlining pitfalls in mapping county boundaries. Finally, there is an index which lists all present day counties, plus nearly all defunct counties or counties later renamed-the most complete list of American counties ever published.

Download or read book My Stories All True written by Pamela A. LeBlanc and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-25 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J. David Bamberger has been profiled in the New York Times and the New Yorker, interviewed on NPR, and featured in a National Geographic video. He and his Texas Hill Country ranch have been the subject of many articles and two books published by Texas A&M University Press. In My Stories, All True, Bamberger, now in his nineties, tells the story of his life as an entrepreneur and conservationist in his own way. He recounts to journalist and friend Pamela LeBlanc how he made a living as a vacuum cleaner salesman, struck it rich as a partner in a wildly successful chain of fried chicken restaurants, and bought, then brought back to life, the “sorriest piece of land” in Blanco County, Texas—the rural oasis he calls Selah, Bamberger Ranch Preserve. For more than a year, Bamberger and LeBlanc roamed the preserve—five thousand acres nursed back to environmental health with money earned from the sale of Church’s Chicken—as Bamberger reminisced about losing his father in a steel factory accident; gathering mushrooms to sell to neighbors when he was a kid; making a living as a door-to-door salesman; running a multimillion-dollar restaurant business; rubbing shoulders with the likes of Sam Walton, Jane Goodall, and Lady Bird Johnson; and, finally, turning to his land for the work that has earned national acclaim. With a storyteller’s flair and insightful commentary from LeBlanc, Bamberger shares the tales of a remarkable life—as a resourceful country boy, a savvy entrepreneur, and a consummate conservationist whose vision has set the standard for the restoration of nature on private lands worldwide.

Download or read book Blue Bloods in Blue Jeans written by Marguerite Harrington Benedict and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2012-08-05 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Switzerland, England, and Ireland they came and landed on the east coast of the New World. When the West beckoned, they answered the clarion call. By boat, on horseback, in covered wagons, and on foot they came to Texas and New Mexico. Their trials, struggles, successes, failures, and tragedies are my legacy. The value system of these western pioneers-adventurers, soldiers, ranchers, miners, cowboys, cowgirls, and entrepreneurs-formed the warp and woof of my life which began in the New Mexico Territory one year before New Mexico became a state. New Mexico and I grew up together; our histories are intertwined. Marguerite Harrington Benedict

Download or read book Texas Stories I Like to Tell My Friends written by T. Lindsey Baker and published by ACU Press. This book was released on 2011-05-10 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An entertaining collection of colorful stories from Texas history that give readers plenty of reason to laugh, cry, and gain an even greater understanding of the people and moments that have been a part of the Texas story. "It looked like millions of stars were shooting down to the ground," said Julia Palmer Roberts, with "streaks of fire flying in every direction." The 1833 meteor shower struck fear into the hearts of people across America, including Julia's family in Texas, who met the phenomenon on their knees, praying for help during what they were sure was the end of the world. Julia's is just one of the stories that author and historian T. Lindsay Baker relates in Texas Stories I like to Tell My Friends. Baker has been finding and telling stories from Texas history for decades. Even before he published his popular Ghost Towns of Texas books, Baker was writing a regular column for the local newspaper in Thurber, Texas, inviting readers to laugh and cry with stories from years-gone-by. Texas Stories I like to Tell My Friends brings those stories together for readers all over. This volume focuses on stories that originated in the 1800s, bringing out many details about pioneering, slavery, the Civil War, and forgotten moments in time like the forming of a ghost town, a failed railway strike, the tracking of a horse thief, and more. Alternately startling and enlivening but always interesting, Texas Stories provides a valuable reading experience for anyone interested in the stories of people who came before us.

Download or read book Ella Elgar Bird Dumont written by Ella Elgar Bird Dumont and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-07-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A crack shot, expert skinner and tanner, seamstress, sculptor, and later writer—a list that only hints at her intelligence and abilities—Ella Elgar Bird Dumont was one of those remarkable women who helped tame the Texas frontier. First married at sixteen to a Texas Ranger, she followed her husband to Comanche Indian country in King County, where they lived in a tepee while participating in the final slaughter of the buffalo. Living off the land until the frontier was opened for ranching, Ella and Tom Bird typified the Old West ideals of self-sufficiency and generosity, with a hesitancy to complain about the hard life in the late 1800s. Yet, in one important way, Ella Dumont was unsuited for life on the frontier. Endowed with an instinctive desire and ability to carve and sculpt, she was largely prevented from pursuing her talents by the responsibilities of marriage and frontier life and later, widowhood with two small children. Even though her second marriage, to Auguste Dumont, made life more comfortable, the realities of her existence still prevented the fulfillment of her artistic longings. Ella Bird Dumont’s memoir is rich with details of the frontier era in Texas, when Indian depredations were still a danger for isolated settlers, where animals ranged close enough to provide dinner and a new pair of gloves, and where sheer existence depended on skill, luck, and the kindness of strangers. The vividness and poignancy of her life, coupled with the wealth of historical material in the editor’s exhaustive notes, make this Texas pioneer’s autobiography a very special book.

Download or read book Washington on the Brazos written by Richard B. McCaslin and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-10 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Washington on the Brazos: Cradle of the Texas Republic, noted historian Richard B. McCaslin recovers the history of an iconic Texas town. The story of the Texas Republic begins and ends at Washington, but the town’s history extends much further. Texas leaders gathered in the new town on the west bank of the Brazos in March 1836 to establish a new republic. After approving a declaration of independence and constitution, they fled as Santa Anna's army approached. The government of the Republic of Texas returned there in 1842, but after the United States annexed Texas in 1846, Austin replaced Washington as the capital of the Lone Star State. The town became a thriving river port in the 1850s, when steamboat cargoes paid for many new buildings. But the community steeply declined when its leaders decided to rely on steamers rather than invest in a railroad line, although German immigrants and African American residents kept the town alive. Later, Progressive Era plans for historic tourism focused the town’s central role in the Texas Republic brought renewed interest, and a state park was founded. The Texas centennial in 1936 and the hard work of citizens’ organizations beginning in the 1950s transformed this park into Washington-on-the-Brazos, the state historic site that serves today as the primary focus for preserving the history of the Republic of Texas.

Download or read book Cumulative List of Organizations Described in Section 170 c of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 1200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Lone Star Rising written by Robert Dallek and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1991-08-15 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like other great figures of 20th-century American politics, Lyndon Johnson defies easy understanding. An unrivaled master of vote swapping, back room deals, and election-day skulduggery, he was nevertheless an outspoken New Dealer with a genuine commitment to the poor and the underprivileged. With aides and colleagues he could be overbearing, crude, and vindictive, but at other times shy, sophisticated, and magnanimous. Perhaps columnist Russell Baker said it best: Johnson "was a character out of a Russian novel...a storm of warring human instincts: sinner and saint, buffoon and statesman, cynic and sentimentalist." But Johnson was also a representative figure. His career speaks volumes about American politics, foreign policy, and business in the forty years after 1930. As Charles de Gaulle said when he came to JFK's funeral: Kennedy was America's mask, but this man Johnson is the country's real face. In Lone Star Rising, Robert Dallek, winner of the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his study of Franklin D. Roosevelt, now turns to this fascinating "sinner and saint" to offer a brilliant, definitive portrait of a great American politician. Based on seven years of research in over 450 manuscript collections and oral histories, as well as numerous personal interviews, this first book in a two-volume biography follows Johnson's life from his childhood on the banks of the Pedernales to his election as vice-president under Kennedy. We see Johnson, the twenty-three-year-old aide to a pampered millionaire Representative, become a de facto Congressman, and at age twenty-eight the country's best state director of the National Youth Administration. We see Johnson, the "human dynamo," first in the House and then in the Senate, whirl his way through sixteen- and eighteen-hour days, talking, urging, demanding, reaching for influence and power, in an uncommonly successful congressional career. Dallek pays full due to Johnson's failings--his obsession with being top dog, his willingness to cut corners, and worse, to get there-- but he also illuminates Johnson's sheer brilliance as a politician, the high regard in which key members of the New Deal, including FDR, held him, and his genuine concern for minorities and the downtrodden. No president in American history is currently less admired than Lyndon Johnson. Bitter memories of Vietnam have sent Johnson's reputation into free fall, and recent biographies have painted him as a scoundrel who did more harm than good. Lone Star Rising attempts to strike a balance. It does not neglect the tawdry side of Johnson's political career, including much that is revealed for the first time. But it also reminds us that Lyndon Johnson was a man of exceptional vision, who from early in his career worked to bring the South into the mainstream of American economic and political life, to give the disadvantaged a decent chance, and to end racial segregation for the well-being of the nation.

Download or read book Hutchins Hutchens Descendants of Strangeman Hutchins Born 1707 of the James River in Virginia and Surry Yadkin County North Carolina written by Rita Hineman Townsend and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 980 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nicholas Hutchins, the father of Strangeman Hutchins, ". . . is the earliest member of the Hutchins family of whom we have positive proof. He was a Quaker living in Henrico County, Virginia in 1699." Descendants lived throughout the United States. Strangeman Hutchins (1707-1792), son of Nicholas Hutchins, was born in Henrico Co., Va. and died in Surry Co. now Yadkin Co., N.C. He married ca. 1731 Elizabeth Cox (1713-1816), daughter of Richard Cox and Mary Trent. All their children were born in Virginia. Descendants lived in Virginia, North Carolina, Utah, Oregon, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, California, Arkansas, Kansas, Colorado, Texas, Iowa and elsewhere.