In 1835, Texas offered young men like John C. Duval a chance for action and glory. That year he and his brother, Burr, the sons of a former governor of Florida, organized a volunteer company called the "Mustangs." Like Davy Crockett, they were fired up "to give the Texans a helping hand on the road to freedom" from Mexican rule. The first chapters of "Early Times in Texas" lead up to the Goliad Massacre on Palm Sunday 1836, in which Burr (referred to as Captain D--) was killed. John was luckier. After a hair-raising escape from Goliad, he wandered across the countryside, dodging the Mexicans and living by his wits. The diary that Duval kept during these exciting months was the basis for "Early Times in Texas," which was published more than fifty years later, in 1892. In the intervening years he was a Ranger known as "Texas John" and later was recognized as one of Texas's first men of letters, the author of "The Adventures of Big-Foot Wallace"

William A. Wallace (1816-1899) went from his native Virginia to Texas in 1836, shortly after the battle of San Jacinto, "for the purpose . . . of taking pay out of the Mexicans for the murder of his brother and cousin." His experiences as a hunter, Indian fighter, member of the Mier Expedition (1842-1844), defender of the "old Republic" in the Mexican War, and Texas Ranger were chronicled by his comrade John C. Duval in this free-hand biography, first published in 1870. Because Duval, as the editors note, felt free to adapt his materials in order to make the book more interesting and used many novelistic devices, "in his own way he achieves something of the effect of the twentieth-century school of biographers. He makes his characters live." Although Part I, dealing with Big-Foot's adventures as a hunter and Indian fighter, is a mixture of fact and fiction, Part II, the account of his role in the Mier Expedition, is unretouched, told from the point of view of an actual participant, and "stands as the most realistic straight narrative of this dramatic chapter in Texas history. [It] is the heart of the biography. The Indian adventures are a prologue for it; and Part III, the final comedy of Big-Foot in the settlements, makes an epilogue." In this classic of early Texas, the reader will recognize three literary traditions of the nineteenth century: the journals and memoirs of the pioneers; the romantic adventure story; and the broadly humorous yarn of the American frontier.