As a young teamster on a pack-mule train, the author saw the Rio Grande's Big Bend for the first time in 1916, and it captured his imagination forever. After half a century of photography, his superlative collection of nine thousand images ended up at the University of Texas at Austin, and in 1976 more than one hundred of these were reproduced in this book, a critically acclaimed work that until now has long been out of print.

Travel deeper into the Texas outback with writer-historian Mike Cox as he recounts the lesser-known stories from Alpine, Fort Davis and Marfa. Revisit the grandeur of Alpine's Holland Hotel, peer through the telescope at the McDonald Observatory and dip your toes in the water hole at Ernst Tinaja, if you dare. Travel back to a time when the Comanche Trail stretched one thousand miles from Kansas to Mexico, making the Big Bend difficult to defend and impossible to resist trying. Celebrate Cinco de Mayo, the anniversary of Benito Juarez's decisive defeat of the French at Pueblo in 1867. If nothing else, come for the lore and history that is as extensive in the Big Bend region as the mountain passes and desert stretches themselves.

Having first visited the Big Bend in 1928, Kenneth B. Ragsdale has been digging around in and writing about the region for decades. In Big Bend Country: Land of the Unexpected, he takes a nostalgic retrospective journey through the times and places of this increasingly popular corner of West Texas to say goodbye to those who made the history, created the myths, and lived the legends.?Building his stories around themes of compassion, conflict, and compromise, he profiles both famous and relatively unknown figures. He tells stories of curanderas (healers), charity workers, a woman who practiced medicine without a license, and another who started a private lending library in her store to encourage rural, poor children to read. In contrast to these stories, he chronicles blood feuds, shootouts, and the violence bred in wild, relatively lawless spaces.?Ragsdale?s stories cover a half-century, roughtly 1900 to 1955, from wagon trains to the filming of an epic movie, a time in which the face of the Big Bend changed: the quicksilver mines closed, a national park was established, isolation and cattle gave way to vacation ranchettes and tourists. ?Big Bend Country is a well-done and useful work and should be welcomed by all lovers of that wonderful country.? ?Dallas Morning News ?If you?ve never been to Big Bend, Ken Ragsdale?s new book will make you want to go there.??Austin American-Statesman.

Most people visit Big Bend National Park and have a wonderful, incident-free vacation. For a tiny number, however, a simple mistake, unpreparedness, or pure bad luck has lead to catastrophe. Massive rescue efforts and fatalities, while rare, do happen at the park. Heat stroke, dehydration, hypothermia, drowning, falls, lightning, and even murder have claimed victims at Big Bend. This book chronicles selected rescues and tragedies that have happened there since the early 1980s. The lessons you learn reading this book may save your life.

A warm, witty memoir of a young family’s rugged adventure living in the newly established Big Bend National Park in the 1940s. A woman who went West with her husband in the 1840s must have expected hardships and privation, but during the 1940s, when Etta Koch stopped off in Big Bend with her young family and a twenty-three-foot travel trailer in tow—which they named Porky, the Road Hog—she anticipated a brief, civilized camping trip between her old home in Ohio and a new one in Arizona. It was only when she found herself moving into an old rock house without plumbing or electricity in the new Big Bend National Park that Etta realized she’d left her sheltered life behind for an experience in frontier living. In this book based on her journals and letters, Etta Koch and her daughter June Cooper Price chronicle their family’s first years—1944–1946—in the Big Bend. Etta describes how her photographer husband Peter Koch became captivated by the region as a place for natural history filmmaking—and how she and their three young daughters slowly adapted to a pioneer lifestyle during his months-long absences on the photo-lecture circuit. In vivid, often humorous anecdotes, she describes making the rock house into a home, getting to know the Park Service personnel and other neighbors, coping with the local wildlife, and, most of all, learning to love the rugged landscape and the hardy individuals who call it home.

No matter how long or how hard they strive, no matter how extensive their education as a species, no matter what they experience of the small heavens and larger hells they create for themselves, it seems that humans are destined to see their technological accomplishments always exceed their ability to understand themselves.

Even before Pancho Villa’s 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, and the following punitive expedition under General John J. Pershing, the U.S. Army was strengthening its presence on the southwestern border in response to the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Manning forty-one small outposts along a three-hundred mile stretch of the Rio Grande region, the army remained for a decade, rotating eighteen different regiments, primarily cavalry, until the return of relative calm. The remote, rugged, and desolate terrain of the Big Bend defied even the technological advances of World War I, and it remained very much a cavalry and pack mule operation until the outposts were finally withdrawn in 1921. With The Old Army in the Big Bend of Texas: The Last Cavalry Frontier, 1911–1921, Thomas T. “Ty” Smith, one of Texas’s leading military historians, has delved deep into the records of the U.S. Army to provide an authoritative portrait, richly complemented by many photos published here for the first time, of the final era of soldiers on horseback in the American West.