Matt Andersen was dead. Shot down in a hold up that shocked the small community of Bozeman, Montana. At least the townsfolk thought he was dead. A case of mistaken identity may have saved Matt's life but it would have to be a life lived in exile. His adventures took him south where he served in the confederate army. After the Civil War, he followed his commanding general to Texas to work as a hired gun. Range wars and cattle drives kept him busy, and home life on the ranch was good.Then, one summer day, three cowboys rode in from Montana to bring him home. Matt's life would change forever as he found himself having to decide between the life and love he found in Texas and his family's ranch in Montana.A sweeping saga of greed, lust, gunfights, cattle drives, and family loyalty, Across the Brazos is a story of one man's struggle to find himself and his home.

More than a century after his death in 1878, the mere mention of John Larn’s name can trigger strong reactions along the Clear Fork of the Brazos River in northern Texas. In Bravo of the Brazos, Robert K. DeArment tells for the first time the complete story of this enigmatic and controversial figure. Larn was good-looking, well-mannered, and gentle around women and children. He was a successful rancher and renowned frontier sheriff. Yet he was also the charismatic leader of a vigilante committee that enjoyed widespread support. Before his death at age 29, Larn had killed or participated in killing at least a dozen men.

Nature never intended the Brazos River for navigation, but before the coming of the railroads Brazos steamboats were a necessary, if always erratic, form of transport. And there were men to meet the challenge. One captain, heedless of shallows, shoals, snags, and falls, boasted that he could tap a keg and run a boat four miles on the suds. Based on rich archival sources, this authoritative and entertaining book tells of the men and boats that braved the river from the earliest days to the late 1890s. Steamboat captains and plantation aristocrats, business tycoons and empire builders, mud clerks and river rats, all were obsessed with a single idea: to open the Brazos for steamboats from its headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico. The river was dredged and snags were removed, boats were designed with shallow draft, and boat owner, captain, and pilot (often one and the same) pitted their skills against the river. But the Brazos was recalcitrant. Seasonal rises silted in manmade channels and left behind new snags to catch the unwary. And as railroads inched their way across the state, the need for river transport dwindled. Railroad bridges across the Brazos finally created barriers that even a steamboat riding a "red rise" could not negotiate. By the turn of the century, the dauntless Brazos paddlewheelers were only a memory, but, even today, the dream dies hard along the river.

When Matt Jorgensen learns that the man who helped him hone his deadly skills with a pistol is gunned down, he vows to bring the killer to justice. On the train to Abilene, Matt relives his early days in the Kansas territory when he found himself embroiled in the rising turmoil of a nation at odds over slavery. Free soilers and slavers fought against each other at the expense of the innocent farmers of the territory. Matt would have to learn to be fast, accurate, and lethal with a gun to survive. Together, Matt and his gunslinging mentor, Rod Best, were able to bring law and order to the Kansas territory. However, all of Matt's skill and daring wouldn't help him with the biggest challenge of his life: learning to live without the woman he loved. In this second book in Williamson's Brazos series, Matt Jorgensen arrives in Abilene as the man from the Brazos, whose destiny is a showdown with the ghosts of his past and the murderous outlaws of the present.

In the 1950s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north-central Texas. For John Graves, this project meant that if the stream’s regimen was thus changed, the beautiful and sometimes brutal surrounding countryside would also change, as would the lives of the people whose rugged ancestors had eked out an existence there. Graves therefore decided to visit that stretch of the river, which he had known intimately as a youth. Goodbye to a River is his account of that farewell canoe voyage. As he braves rapids and fatigue and the fickle autumn weather, he muses upon old blood feuds of the region and violent skirmishes with native tribes, and retells wild stories of courage and cowardice and deceit that shaped both the river’s people and the land during frontier times and later. Nearly half a century after its initial publication, Goodbye to a River is a true American classic, a vivid narrative about an exciting journey and a powerful tribute to a vanishing way of life and its ever-changing natural environment.

Historians have long believed that the "frontier" shaped Texas plantation society, but in this detailed examination of Texas's most important plantation region, Sean M. Kelley asserts that the dominant influence was not the frontier but the Mexican Republic. The Lower Brazos River Valley -- the only slave society to take root under Mexican sovereignty -- made replication of eastern plantation culture extremely difficult and complicated. By tracing the synthesis of cultures, races, and politics in the region, Kelley reveals a distinct variant of southern slavery -- a borderland plantation society. Kelley opens by examining the four migration streams that defined the antebellum Brazos community: Anglo-Americans and their African American slaves who constituted the first two groups to immigrate; Germans who came after the Mexican government barred immigrants from the U.S. while encouraging those from Europe; and African-born slaves brought in through Cuba who ultimately made up the largest concentration of enslaved Africans in the antebellum South. Within this multicultural milieu, Kelley shows, the disparity between Mexican law and German practices complicated southern familial relationships and master-slave interaction. Though the Mexican policy on slavery was ambiguous, alternating between toleration and condemnation, Brazos slaves perceived the Rio Grande River as the boundary between white supremacy and racial egalitarianism. As a result, thousands fled across the border, further destabilizing the Brazos plantation society. In the1850s, nonslaveholding Germans also contributed to the upheaval by expressing a sense of ethnic solidarity in politics. In an attempt to undermine Anglo efforts to draw a sharp boundary between black and white, some Germans hid runaway slaves. Ultimately, Kelley demonstrates how the Civil War brought these issues to the fore, eroding the very foundations of Brazos plantation society. With Los Brazos de Dios, Kelley offers the first examination of Texas slavery as a borderland institution and reveals the difficulty with which southern plantation society was transplanted in the West.

Sydney Taylor Honor Book In the new country, Shirley and her family all have big dreams. Take the family store: Shirley has great ideas about how to make it more modern! Prettier! More profitable! She even thinks she can sell the one specialty no one seems to want to try: Mama’s homemade gefilte fish. But her parents think she’s too young to help. And anyway they didn’t come to America for their little girl to work. “Go play with the cat!” they urge. This doesn’t stop Shirley’s ideas, of course. And one day, when the rest of the family has to rush out leaving her in the store with sleepy Mrs. Gottlieb…Shirley seizes her chance! P R A I S E “Charming. Paula Cohen tells an all-American tale of the Yiddish diaspora.” —The Wall Street Journal “Timeless: an indomitable protagonist and the loving family who dotes on her.” —Publishers Weekly “Beau­ti­ful­ly illus­trat­ed….Shirley is one smart child, a real asset to her striv­ing fam­i­ly. She is full of inno­v­a­tive ideas, which are depict­ed by Cohen with both humor and respect.” —Jewish Book Network "An affectionate ode to family, fish, and creative problem solving." —BookPage