Hundreds of miles from its supply center in Chihuahua and just freed from the grip of Spain's mercantilist colonial policies, New Mexico was ripe for foreign commerce when the first of the Missouri traders arrived in Santa Fe in 1821. For the next forty years trade flourished between Americans hawking anything that would sell, often at incredible profit, and New Mexican buyers hungry for all types of manufactured goods. But the frontier moved inevitably westward, goods became more readily available and consequently less expensive, and the railroad at last replaced the mulewhackers who had long plied the Santa Fe Trail.
"Broadcloth and Britches" is the first account to synthesize an abundance of primary source material--the reminiscences of traders, the impressions of journalists and soldiers, the unpublished manuscripts of both literate and semiliterate observers--and serious scholarly journal articles and monographs of the Santa Fe Trail and trade. In this detailed and lively narrative, the authors trace the origins, development, and decline of the trade: the early expeditions; the route and its hazards; transport, financing, and profits; the effects of complex political shifts in Spain, Mexico, Texas, and the United States; and the economic consequences of increasingly efficient supply to a relatively fixed market.

Newspaperman Don Hampton Biggers witnessed the last years of the West Texas frontier and grew intrigued with the buffalo hunters, the early cattlemen, and the stories they told. As the twentieth century began, he was collecting and publishing the recollections of old-timers who had participated in making Texas history. This book combines two of Biggers's works, History That Will Never Be Repeated> (1901) and Pictures of the Past (1902)--both rare and coveted by collectors of Texana. The two, republished in 1991 as a Book Club of Texas special edition and trade clothbound edition, are now available in paperback for the first time. For Pictures of the Past the author wove old buffalo hunters' stories into descriptions of the herds, the slaughter, Indian incidents, Fort Griffin, the battle at Adobe Walls, and much more. History That Will Never Be Repeated records lore of the cattle industry in West Texas from 1876. In these vivid accounts by cowboys and ranchers are some of the most emblematic events of the American West--riding line, working roundup, turning a drift herd--recalled not for their romance but for their hardship and for the sheer endurance required of the men who lived them. The remarkable period photography of George Robertson and Erwin E. Smith illustrates the book in duotone throughout.