In The Shadow Of The Chinatis

Winner, 2020 Al Lowman Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas County or Local History There is a deep and abiding connection between humans and the land in Pinto Canyon—a remote and rugged place near the border with Mexico in the Texas Big Bend. Here the land assumes a certain primacy, defined not by the ephemera of plants and animals but by the very bedrock that rises far above the silvery flow of Pinto Creek— looming masses that break the horizon into a hundred different vistas. Yet, over time, people managed to survive and sometimes even thrive in this harsh environment. In the Shadow of the Chinatis combines the rich narratives of history, natural history, and archeology to tell the story of the landscape as well as the people who once inhabited it. Settling the land was difficult, staying on it even more so, but one family proved especially resilient. Rising above their meager origins, the Prietos eventually amassed a 12,000-acre ranch in the shadow of the Chinati Mountains to become the most successful of Pinto Canyon’s early settlers. But starting with the tense years of the Great Depression, the family faced a series of tragedies: one son was killed by a Texas Ranger, and another by the deranged son of Chico Cano, the Big Bend’s most notorious bandit. Ultimately, growing rifts in the family forced the sale of the ranch, marking the end of an era. Bearing the hallmarks of an epic tragedy, the departure of the Prieto family signaled a transition away from ranching towards a new style of landownership based on a completely different model. Today, Pinto Canyon’s scenic and scientific value increasingly overshadows the marginal economics of its past. In the Shadow of the Chinatis reveals a rich tapestry of interaction between humans and their environment, providing a unique examination of the Big Bend region and the people who call it home.

Celia Smith Hill’s journal provides a glimpse of hardscrabble life in far West Texas during the first half of the twentieth century. Hill’s family moved to Texas from Tennessee in the late 1800s. After her death, Bill Wright and Marianne Wood researched the history of the area and interviewed family and friends to provide context for Hill’s colorful tale of endurance in an unforgiving landscape. Hill’s family suffered lean times during the Depression before cinnabar—mercury ore—was discovered on her family’s property. During World War II, the Fresno Mines supplied one tenth of all the mercury produced in the United States. After graduating college, Celia began a peripatetic teaching career that lasted decades, marrying and losing two husbands along the way. Finally, living alone along the most remote western border of Texas, Celia spent her later years selling snacks to the occasional visitor. Bill Wright met Celia at her La Junta General Store in Ruidosa, where she told him about her unfinished journal. With this book Bill fulfills his promise to share her courageous and fascinating life with others.

Texas, 1878. Somewhere dark in the Texas Hill Country, lies a 50-year-old cache of gold and silver buried there by knife fighter Jim Bowie before he went to die at the Alamo. The hoard is protected by the spirits of the dead Comanche and a living Apache chief, Choya, who is riding north with a massed war party their goal is the undermanned Fort Bowie....and vengeance. Only one man, Wes Harper, the Shadow Rider, can stop them but he has enough trouble on his hands with the Murchison bunch, a beautiful Mexican woman and a crooked partner. Fighting for his life and the survival of his ranch against the Apache, Wes finds the odds stacked against him. Only an iron will and hot lead will buy him time.

Runner-up, 2019 Texas Old Missions and Forts Restoration Book Award, sponsored by the Texas Old Missions and Forts Restoration Association (TOMFRA) Most general histories of the Civil War pay scant attention to the many important military events that took place in the Lower Rio Grande Valley along the Texas-Mexico border. It was here, for example, that many of the South’s cotton exports, all-important to its funding for the war effort, were shuttled across the Rio Grande into Mexico for shipment to markets across the Atlantic. It was here that the Union blockade was felt perhaps most keenly. And it was here where longstanding cross-border rivalries and shifting political fortunes on both sides of the river made for a constant undercurrent of intrigue. And yet, most accounts of this long and bloody conflict give short shrift to the complexities of the ethnic tensions, political maneuvering, and international diplomacy that vividly colored the Civil War in this region. Now, Christopher L. Miller, Russell K. Skowronek, and Roseann Bacha-Garza have woven together the history and archaeology of the Lower Rio Grande Valley into a densely illustrated travel guide featuring important historical and military sites of the Civil War period. Blue and Gray on the Border integrates the sites, colorful personalities, cross-border conflicts, and intriguing historical vignettes that outline the story of the Civil War along the Texas-Mexico border. This resource-packed book will aid heritage travelers, students, and history buffs in their discovery of the rich history of the Civil War in the Rio Grande Valley.

The first look at the prehistory of Texas by 16 professional archaeologist.

A RACE WITH DEATH! The mighty bridge crossing the Rio Grande was to be the final step in the completion of the railroad and the taming of the West. But when Ranger Walt Slade saw the plans, he knew there was a sinister enemy at work -- for the bridge was being built deliberately so that it would collapse at the first flood! Tracking his hidden adversary, facing ambush, arson, and dynamite blasts, the undercover ace of the Texas Rangers fights through until he and his quarry come face to face in a Gunsight Showdown.

Offering a field-tested analytic method for identifying faunal remains, along with helpful references, images, and examples of the most commonly encountered North American species, Identifying and Interpreting Animal Bones: A Manual provides an important new reference for students, avocational archaeologists, and even naturalists and wildlife enthusiasts. Using the basic principles outlined here, the bones of any vertebrate animal, including humans, can be identified and their relevance to common research questions can be better understood. Because the interpretation of archaeological sites depends heavily on the analysis of surrounding materials—soils, artifacts, and floral and faunal remains—it is important that non-human remains be correctly distinguished from human bones, that distinctions between domesticated and wild or feral animals be made correctly, and that evidence of the reasons for faunal remains in the site be recognized. But the ability to identify and analyze animal bones is a skill that is not easy to learn from a traditional textbook. In Identifying and Interpreting Animal Bones, veteran archaeologist and educator April Beisaw guides readers through the stages of identification and analysis with sample images and data, also illustrating how specialists make analytical decisions that allow for the identification of the smallest fragments of bone. Extensive additional illustrative material, from the author’s own collected assemblages and from those in the Archaeological Analytical Research Facility at Binghamton University in New York, are also available in the book’s online supplement. There, readers can view and interact with images to further understanding of the principles explained in the text.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Britain's greatest and most mysterious artist, was the son of a Convent Garden barber and a woman who died in Bethlehem mental hospital. During his lifetime (1775-1851), Turner achieved fame and fortune for a range of work encompassing seascape and landscape, immensely powerful oil paintings and intimate watercolors. His friend and colleague C. R. Leslie remembered him thus: "Turner was short and stout, and had a sturdy, sailor-like walk. He might be taken for the captain of a steamboat at first glance; but a second would find more in his face than belongs in any ordinary mind. There was the peculiar keenness of expression in his eye that is only seen in men of constant habits of observation." For this new biography, the first comprehensive narrative of Turner's life in a generation, Anthony Bailey has searched through the archives, studied the scholarly literature, made use of much research done in the last thirty years, and looked at almost all of Turner's sketchbooks as well as many of his paintings and watercolors. He has uncovered fresh material and put together other facts, previously known, to shed new light on those complicated and secretive man. Anthony Bailey has set out to write a biography of the man, not a book about his paintings, and J.M.W. Turner comes vividly to life in theses pages. Both reclusive and gregarious, private and vainglorious, tough and vulnerable, a long-tern bachelor who fathered two daughters, Turner was full of contradictions, and Anthony Bailey rises masterfully to the challenge of describing them here.