The Dust Bowl era of Oklahoma was still very much the Wild West, and Bud Ballew was its most controversial and effective deputy sheriff. He spent a decade chasing criminals, making daily appearances in newspapers, and proving his determination and finesse with a revolver. Bud Ballew participated in more gun battles than Wyatt Earp and killed more men than Billy the Kid. Bud Ballew’s story comes to life in a riveting biography set in the early days of gritty Oklahoma (celebrating its state centennial this year), with never-before-published black-and-white photos as well as archival news stories.

Novelist Larry McMurtry loaned a collection of glass plate negatives to the University of Texas Press for investigation. "Most appear to be the work of pioneer woman photographer Alice Snearly and her brother-in-law Lon Kelly, who worked in the heart of Comanche territory on the Texas-Oklahoma border. These images preserve the "interim" generation of Comanches ... who endured reservation life and forced moves to individual allotments of farm and ranch land .. A few images of Anglo settlers and towns complete the picture of life in Indian Territory at this moment of change."--Publisher description.

This Volume Number 6 contains folklore of the Texas-Mexican Vaquero; Tales and Rhymes of a Texas Household; Lore of the Llano Estacado; Names in the Old Cheyenne and Arapahoe Territory; Nicknames in Texas Oil Fields; The Devil's Grotto; Myths of the Tejas Indians; Ballads and songs of the Frontier Folk; several essays on cowboys songs, etc.

A modern-day explorer's guide to the Old West From the famed Oregon Trail to the boardwalks of Dodge City to the great trading posts on the Missouri River to the battlefields of the nineteenth-century Indian Wars, there are places all over the American West where visitors can relive the great Western migration that helped shape our history and culture. This guide to the Great Plains states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas--one of the five-volume Finding the Wild West series--highlights the best-preserved historic sites as well as ghost towns, reconstructions, museums, historical markers, statues, and works of public art that tell the story of the Old West. Use this book in planning your next trip and for a storytelling overview of America’s Wild West history.

The first systematic inquiry into the Texas Rangers did not begin until 1935 with Walter Prescott Webb’s publication The Texas Rangers. Since then numerous works have appeared on the Rangers, but no volume has been published before that covers the various historians of the Rangers and their approaches to the topic. Editors Bruce A. Glasrud and Harold J. Weiss Jr. gather essays that profile individual historians of the Texas Rangers, explore themes and issues in Ranger history, and comprise archival research, biographies, and autobiographies. Several approaches in Texas historiography have influenced the writings on the Texas Rangers and serve to organize the chapters in the volume. Traditionalists (Chuck Parsons, Stephen L. Moore, and Bob Alexander) stress the revered happenings in the nineteenth century that brought about the Lone Star state and its empire-building Ranger force. To these historical writers the Texas Rangers were part of a golden age. Revisionists (Robert M. Utley, Louis R. Sadler, and Charles H. Harris) pull back from this adulation, emphasize the importance of overlooked ethnic and racial groups, and point out misbehavior on the part of Rangers. They also want to separate fact from fiction. Some Ranger historians (Frederick Wilkins and Mike Cox) straddle both traditional and revisionist approaches in their works. The final group, Cultural Constructionalists (Gary Clayton Anderson, Américo Paredes, and Monica Muñoz Martinez), continue the work of Revisionists and focus on an interconnected past that includes theoretical approaches and the study of memory and regional identities. Several themes emerge throughout the book. One is how the Rangers changed from unorganized mounted militia, dragoons in the modern sense, to organized cavalry forces with six-shooter firepower who served as a military arm of the state and nation. A second is how the dichotomous views of the Rangers—as either patriot warriors or bloody avengers—left their imprint on Anglo and Hispanic society. This divergent examination especially derived from incidents in the US-Mexican War, the period from 1910 to 1920, and the lower Rio Grande valley in the 1960s. And yet another theme is how the Rangers first resisted and fought against, yet ultimately absorbed, all creeds and colors into their ranks over two hundred years as they evolved into police officers: Anglo, Black, Hispanic, Indian, and women Rangers.