Marvels Of The Texas Plains

Assemble a composite portrait of the Texas plains through these historic tales. Many thousands of years ago, Clovis Man hunted huge mammoths here. More recently, Waylon Jennings drew his musical inspiration here. In the intervening time, the Texas prairie has been the backdrop for the wildest of Wild West shootouts, landmark legal battles and epic achievements in sports, music and medicine. Familiar icons like Roy Orbison and Dan Blocker, as well as forgotten characters like Charlie "Squirrel-Eye" Emory and John "the Catfish Kid" Gough all helped shape the colorful history of the Texas Plains. Who shot the sheriff? Who was the earliest American? Who invented the slam dunk? Author Chuck Lanehart answers these questions and many more in a wide-ranging collection of stories.

Accept an invitation to the boundary-pushing heritage of the Texas Plains, from the first American Thanksgiving feast in the 1500s to Amarillo's iconic seventy-two-ounce steak challenge five hundred years later. Even the limitless horizons of the Panhandle couldn't contain the notes of musical pioneers like Mac Davis, Bobby Keys and the Velvets. Take a dip in Lubbock's oldest swimming hole or share a sip with Pinkie Roden, the benevolent bootlegger of West Texas. Keep an eye out for longballs from Justiceburg's "Stormin' Norman" Cash and stray bats in Doodlebug Line's Clarity Tunnel. Join Chuck Lanehart as he tracks the long-standing traditions and unexpected twists of life on the Texas Plains.

My son asked me to write the things I did while growing up. The two chapters I thought I could write became forty-four chapters. My memories are happy moments, as I grew up during the Depression in a wonderful Christian home six miles south of Littlefield, Texas. The moment my Father saw me, he called me his Plains Angel. My Mother was a kind and thoughtful person with a precious disposition and always spoke with positive words. Living with my brothers and sisters was like having my best friends with me at all times. Life was great even with the sandstorms turning our daylight to darkness, planting black-eye peas instead of cotton because of little rainfall, gathering eggs from tall haystacks, hoeing cotton from dawn to dusk, and learning how to preserve fruits, vegetables, and meat for our winter food. My Father was a great farmer and helped provide electricity and a party-line telephone system to our rural community. He is known as Mr. REA (Rural Electrification Administration) in Littlefield, Texas. I researched my Littlefield School system in 1913 and found Mr. George W. Littlefield had donated land for a one-room school building. Ms. Willie Armstrong taught school in April, May, and June with a yearly salary of forty dollars. My dream to help children and fill their lives with sunshine came true the day I began my teaching career in Plainview, Texas. After writing about World War I, World War II, and the following wars, I have a better understanding what my two brothers and other family members must have endured. I am thankful my three wonderful sons – Terry, Dale, and Randy with their adventures at home, church, school, Scout trips, did not have to experience the pain of war. My life has been blessed with a wonderful husband, three great sons that are successful, a great daughter-in-law, and two precious grandchildren, Trevor and Lane. My joyful memories growing up on a Littlefield farm with my wonderful family gave me the foundation I needed for my life’s adventures and accomplishment. Bonnie Faye James Gaston

Twenty years ago, Dan Flores's "Caprock Canyonlands" became one of the first books ever to treat the flat, arid landscape of the southern High Plains as a place of uncommon beauty and enduring spirit. Now a classic, "Caprock Canyonlands" has been favorably compared by readers to the work of such icons of nature and environmental writing as William Bartram, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and Henry David Thoreau. Containing the author's stunning photography, a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx, author of "Brokeback Mountain," an afterword by environmental historian Thomas R. Dunlap, and a new preface by the author, this twentieth anniversary edition makes available to a new generation of readers Flores's knowledgeable and heartfelt narrative of the canyons and badlands of eastern New Mexico and western Oklahoma and Texas. He evokes the history and natural history that shaped the region, drawing upon geology, mythology, botany, art, history and natural history that shaped the region, drawing upon geology, mythology, botany, art, history, and literature. ""Caprock Canoynlands" keeps its place on our bookshelves . . . for its exploration of a deeply human activity: the search for the beauty of the earth, the depth and strength of our ties to it, and the ways those appear in a particular landscape . . . here illuminated by love."--from the afterword by Thomas R. Dunlap

Elizabeth Bacon Custer aimed to glorify her "martyred" husband, George Armstrong Custer's memory through this incredible history. It is a recounting of the times that Custer spent in Kansas and Texas as told by a devoted wife. In addition, this book presents the readers with a vivid picture of the army a year after the civil war.

Clarity, focus, and startling detail are the stuff of lasting images--in poetry or photography. Who better, then, to illuminate what would elude us than a native state photographer and native state poet laureate? Selected from hundreds of photographs and poems, these pairs show surprising harmony of vision and insights about the vast, wide plains, their dramatic colors, and the calm, vigorous people who thrive beneath their sprawling skies, accepting the risks and splendor of it all. Together and on their own, these photos and poems astonish and delight, stagger and jostle, each resonating with texture and joy.