What makes a Texan tick? The answer can be found not in military and political histories, but in the social history of the people of Texas - the story of their long, heroic battle to conquer challenging conditions as America's frontier pushed westward. Pioneer settlers grappled with summer droughts and winter blizzards, often fighting for their lives against Comanche Indians or wild animals. Unknown diseases killed the livestock. Prairie fires destroyed fields and pastures, and clouds of grasshoppers devoured crops. To beat these odds, early settlers had to be as tough as the rawhide they braided into quirts or lariats - for only the strong survived. All Texans shared in the hard life of the frontier. Picture, if you will, a circuit-riding preacher swimming his horse across swollen streams to conduct a camp meeting. A doctor as he rides fifty miles or more through rough country to set a broken bone or deliver a baby, or a schoolteacher risking her life to protect her pupils during an Indian raid. Or a newspaper editor, shot in the back for telling the painful truth. These - any many more - were the people who built Texas. Wayne Gard portrays them in informal sketches of pioneer life on the Texas frontier, illuminating the still-emerging Texas character. What makes a Texan tick? You'll find part of the answer in Rawhide Texas.

Midnight raids, blazing six-shooters, and dangling ropes played frequent and vital roles in the taming of the West. And in this true account of justice-and sometimes vengeance-on the frontier, Wayne Gard ably relates how determined frontiersmen and heroic women achieved order before they had formal law. Colorful Roy Bean, most famous of the frontier oracles, who dispensed liquor with one hand and justice with the other, stalks through the pages, along with Sam Houston, Watt Moorman, Judge Almond 9who would not tolerate long speeches by lawyers because they cut down on his fine), the feuding Grahams and Tewksburys, and Jacksons and Goodbreads, with their violent outbreaks of killing. Frontier Justice was among the books chosen by a committee of distinguished scholars for inclusion in the permanent White House Liberty of important American books on the nation's history. "In addition to having complete command of his subject, Mr. Gard presents it with the skill one would expect from a journalist of long experience. His book is a welcome, balancing addition to the literature of the wild and woolly 'West."-Choice "The research is thorough and well done....Such a volume as this will find a hearty welcome from the general reader...and the public would be better informed on the nation's history if more books like this were written."-The Journal of Southern History "Frontier Justice makes clear the sometimes almost indefinable line between the so-called 'badmen' and the minions of order when operating beyond the frontiers of statutory law...The book is a distinct contribution to Western Americana."-Nebraska History

For more than a dozen tempestuous years, beginning in 1867, the Chisholm Trail was the Texas cowhand's road to high adventure. It offered the excitement of sudden stampedes, hazardous river crossings, and brushes with Indian marauders. It promised, at the end of the drive, hilarious celebrations in the saloons, gambling parlors, and dance halls of frontier Kansas towns.

The account that appears on these pages reveals the courage, daring, and enterprise of the cattle owners and their cowboys, establishing them firmly as heroes in the westward expansion.

"The world is bobbing around," said Sam Bass the day he died. The day was Sunday, July 21, 1878--Sam's twenty-seventh birthday. Sam had done considerable bobbing around himself. He had been a cowboy, a gambler, a highwayman, and a train robber before he met his fate at Round Rock. His coups were many; his fame legendary. And the strangest thing of all is that he never killed a man until that last gunfight. "Wayne Gard has done a biography that bears the stamp of authenticity in every sentence. The writing of such a book about such a man is a rare achievement. The author has stuck to ascertainable facts and told a better story than the romancers."--Walter Prescott Webb "As good a biography of a desperado as one may hope to find."--Stanley Walker "Mr. Gard has taken an interesting subject and told his story simply and well. This kind of thing, based on careful research, is worth ten Western thrillers."--Joseph Henry Jackson