T.Lindsay Baker – författare

For more than half a century, Austin artist Don Collins crisscrossed Texas looking for traces of the past. Most often he has found them in a variety of old buildings. Drawings of these places, thirteen a year, appeared for three decades in popular calendars issued in Austin by the Miller Blueprint Company. The publications themselves have become collectors' items.In order to prepare his annual calendars, Don frequented less-traveled byways and often forgotten places. When he discovered that he had begun retracing his routes, he bought a stack of Texas county road maps. The artist marked the courses that he had taken so that he would be sure to see new country on each subsequent foray: ""I would seek out roads that followed the path of least resistance, often up a creek. I would follow them and usually find an old structure."" In time he expanded his geographical range to more distant areas of the state: ""I wanted to go there and see what it's like.""In this book, Collins has chosen seventy from more than three hundred works of art that he created for the Miller Blueprint calendars. The carefully detailed renderings record buildings from farmhouses to industrial plants, from shanties to mansions. Through these pages viewers tour the state both visually and through the artist's own recollections about the remarkable range of places he has recorded with pencil and paper.

In the spring of 1874 a handful of men and one woman set out for the Texas Panhandle to seek their fortunes in the great buffalo hunt. They intended to establish a trading post to serve the hunters, or ""hide men,"" and at a place called Adobe Walls they dug blocks from the sod and built their center of operations. After only a few months, angry members of several Plains Indian tribes, whose survival depended on the rapidly shrinking bison herd, attacked the post. Initially defeated, the attacking Indians retreated. But the defenders also retreated, and intent on erasing all traces of the white man's presence, the Indians burned the deserted post. Nonetheless, tracings did remain, and in the ashes were buried minute details of the hide men's lives. Adobe Walls tells us much about the dying of the Plains Indian culture and the march of white commerce across the frontier.