Elma Dill Russell Spencer Series in the West and Southwest – serie

Drawn from personal recollections, historical records, and biographical research, Capitan Chiquito: A Personal History of an Apache Chief, 1821–1919 relates the little-known life and career of a leader of the Aravaipa band of Apaches during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During his nearly 100 years of life, Chief Capitan Chiquito spent time in prison with Geronimo; defended his home territory in Aravaipa Canyon from the depredations of Anglo-Americans, Mexicans, and rival Native American tribes; suffered the brutal massacre and abduction of many of his people; and ultimately won from the federal government the right to live on and cultivate his canyon homestead. He died in 1919 at the age of 98 from complications of influenza while caring for ill members of his clan.In the opening pages, author John Paul Hartman reminisces about some of the people he has loved—and lost—during his time on the San Carlos Reservation in southeastern Arizona. His wife, Velma Bullis, great-granddaughter of Chief Capitan Chiquito; her father, Lonnie, the chief’s grandson; and many others have preceded him through “the Western portal,” departing this life. “There is nothing for me here in San Carlos now,” he writes. “It is time for me to leave . . . But before they will let me go, I have a story to tell.” As Hartman ends this work, he explains that he undertook the research and writing about his wife’s ancestor as a means of closure for his two decades of life on the San Carlos Reservation. With the care of a historian and the dedication of an enthusiast, he has followed the trail of this notable leader, affording readers a unique view of a previously little-known yet intensely revealing historical narrative.

Here, the author looks at the history and culture of Hispanics in Utah and examines the impact of their widespread conversion from Catholicism to Mormonism. His study examines Hispanic assimilation and acculturation in a setting vastly different from other states.

Here, Ray A. Billington outlines the three century-long process of westering that forged the American characteristics of resourcefulness, individualism and democracy, and upward social mobility.

In the spring of 1883 Apache raiders massacred Judge McComas and his wife and kidnapped their six-year-old son, Charley, as the family traveled on a desolate road in southwestern New Mexico Territory, all victims of revenge sought by the Apaches for Gen. George Crook's campaign. At the time, the entire circumstances concerning this tragic incident had not been fully understood - or perhaps cared about. In Massacre on the Lordsburg Road, historian Marc Simmons brings to light one of the last massacres of the Indian wars, presenting exactly why and how the McComases met their end on that desolate road, the events that led up to it, and the public reactions that followed. The puzzlement of why a reputably wise and able man would lead his family into such a fatal predicament, the pursuit of the Apaches into Mexico by General Crook, and the ironic circumstance of Charley McComas's death at the hands of Crook's troops in a raid on the Apache camp, illustrates that past events were as complex and as human as those today.

Once called the Lords of the Plains, the Comanches were long portrayed as loose bands of marauding raiders who capitalized on the Spanish introduction of horses to raise their people out of primitive poverty through bison hunting and fierce warfare. In ""Comanche Society"", Gerald Betty develops an exciting and sophisticated perspective on what he regards as the driving force of Comanche life: kinship. Betty details the kinship patterns that underlay all social organization and social behavior among the Comanches and uses the insights gained to explain the way Comanches lived and the manner in which they interacted with Europeans. Rather than a narrative history of the Comanches, this account presents analyses of the formation of clans and how they functioned across wide areas to produce cooperation and alliances; of hierarchy based in family and generational relationships; and of ancestor worship and related religious ceremonies as the basis for social solidarity. Betty then considers a number of aspects of Comanche life - pastoralism, migration and nomadism, economics and trade, warfare and violence - and how these developed along kinship lines. Berry describes in detail the Comanche horse culture as it was observed by the Spaniards and the Indian adaptation of Iberian practices. This cutting-edge history draws on original research in extensive primary documents providing an interpretive gaze into the culture of eighteenth and nineteenth century Comanche life.

Historian David La Vere has gathered a wealth of vivid detail about life among the former Texas Indian peoples, including the Kiowas, Comanches, Wichitas, Caddos, Tonkawas, and Lipan Apaches. Culled from 112 volumes of the Indian-Pioneer Histories in the Indian Archives at the Oklahoma Historical Society, these oral histories also include interviews with non-Indian neighbors. Together, their recollections provide an exceptional picture of the details of daily life-war and raiding, hunting and planting, foodways, dress, parties and spiritual practices, education, health, and housing. La Vere sets the stage for this ethnographic detail with a lively, readable history of the succession of peoples who lived in Texas from the Paleo-Indians until the present. It is a clear overview of the basic social structures of the tribes, the relations among tribes and, later, of the Indians with the Europeans who came to the region.

The 1929 master's thesis of folklorist, Jovita Gonzalez has served as source material on the Texas-Mexican borderlands for more than seventy-five years but has never before been published. When Gonzalez decided to pursue a master's degree in history from the University of Texas, she was already the vice-president and president-elect of the Texas Folklore Society. Despite this, she wrote a defiant master's thesis that offered a competing vision of Texas history and culture to that promoted by the ""founding fathers"" of Texas folklore. Her complex analysis de-emphasizes the role of the Texas Revolution in Texas history and explores the ways in which Anglos and Mexicans developed tense ties following the U.S.-Mexico War. Her approach to Texas history elegantly counters the ""rhetoric of dominance"" of the established historians of the American West of her time. Gonzalez's thesis is now available for the first time to a wider reading public, especially those who value a Tejana legacy that presents the borderlands as a crucible in which a new kind of identity is being formed.

The past has long fingers into the present, but they are not just the fingers of fact. How we remember the past is at least as important as the objective facts of that past. The memories used by a people to define itself have to be understood not just as (sometimes) bad history but also as historical artifacts themselves. Texas' pasts are examined in this groundbreaking volume, featuring chapters by a wide range of scholars. Current historians' views of Texas in the nineteenth century and especially the significance of the Alamo as a site of memory in architecture, art, and film across the years comprise a major element of this volume. Other nineteenth-century historical events are also examined through their memorializations in the twentieth century: the construction of Civil War monuments by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, public and private Juneteenth celebrations, and the Tejano memorial on the Capitol grounds commemorating the history of Mexicans in Texas. Twentieth-century chapters include collective memories and meaning attached to the Ku Klux Klan, the significance of the civil rights movement in the eyes of different generations of Texans, and the lasting (or fading) Texan memories of Lyndon Baines Johnson. The volume editors offer these studies as a model of how Texas historians can begin to incorporate memory into their work, as historians of other regions have done. In the process, they offer a more nuanced and even a more applied version of Texas history than many of us learned in school.

This provocative revisionist look at a Mexican official long vilified in Texas gives a new perspective on specific events involving Juan Davis Bradburn. It also helps to explain early stages of the Texas war for independence in terms of the refusal of Anglo settlers to accept the ""un-American"" laws and customs of Mexican Texans.

The mid-nineteenth century was a tumultuous yet formative time for the Mesilla Valley, home to present-day Las Cruces, New Mexico. With the coming of the U.S. Army to Mexican territory in 1846, the region became the site of a continent-shaping power struggle between two rival nations.Then Mexican governor Manuel Armijo unexpectedly fled Santa Fe, he left the New Mexico territory undefended, and it fell to forces under Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearny in a bloodless occupation. In the ensuing two decades, the southern portion of New Mexico's Rio Grande Valley played a prominent role in the conflict that overtook the infant American territory.In Turmoil on the Rio Grande, William S. Kiser has mined primary archives and secondary materials alike to tell the story of those rough-and-tumble years and to highlight the effect the region had in the developing U.S. empire of the West. Kiser carefully limns in the culture into which the U.S. soldiers inserted themselves before going on to describe the armed forces that arrived and the actions in which they were involved. From the thirty-minute Battle of Brazito—in which the greenhorn recruits of the 1st Regiment of Missouri Volunteers, led by Col. Alexander Doniphan, vanquished Mexican troops through superior technology—to the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the international boundary disputes, and the Confederate victory at Fort Fillmore, Kiser deftly describes the actions that made the Mesilla Valley important in American history.

Strategically located at the western edge of the Atlantic World, the French post of Natchitoches thrived during the eighteenth century as a trade hub between the well-supplied settlers and the isolated Spaniards and Indians of Texas. Its critical economic and diplomatic role made it the most important community on the Louisiana-Texas frontier during the colonial era.Despite the community’s critical role under French and then Spanish rule, Colonial Natchitoches is the first thorough study of its society and economy. Founded in 1714, four years before New Orleans, Natchitoches developed a creole (American-born of French descent) society that dominated the Louisiana-Texas frontier.H. Sophie Burton and F. Todd Smith carefully demonstrate not only the persistence of this creole dominance but also how it was maintained. They examine, as well, the other ethnic cultures present in the town and relations with Indians in the surrounding area.Through statistical analyses of birth and baptismal records, census figures, and appropriate French and Spanish archives, Burton and Smith reach surprising conclusions about the nature of society and commerce in colonial Natchitoches.

For the Karankawas and the Tonkawas, the period from 1821 to 1859 was particularly devastating. Once thriving communities, the Karankawas survived only as scattered individuals after a small remnant on the banks of the Rio Grande was massacred, and the few remaining Tonkawas had been pushed across the Red River into Indian Territory.Kelly F. Himmel has written an account of this conquest that gives new understanding of the processes. He explores geopolitical and economic factors, as well as the role of individual and collective human actors and the effects of cultural orientations of the conquered and conquering groups toward each other.Historians, sociologists, and anthropologists will find new insight and information in this valuable addition to the literature on Texas Indians and Texas history.

In the late seventeenth century, General Alonso de León led five military expeditions from northern New Spain into what is now Texas in search of French intruders who had settled on lands claimed by the Spanish crown. Lola Orellano Norris has identified sixteen manuscript copies of de León’s meticulously kept expedition diaries. These documents hold major importance for early Texas scholarship. Some of these early manuscripts have been known to historians, but never before have all sixteen manuscripts been studied.In this interdisciplinary study, Norris transcribes, translates, and analyzes the diaries from two different perspectives. The historical analysis revealing that frequent misinterpretations of the Spanish source documents have led to substantial factual errors that have persisted in historical interpretation for more than a century. General Alonso de León’s Expeditions into Texas is the first presentation of these important early documents and provides new vistas on Spanish Texas.

In early 1914, Clemente Vergara discovered several of his horses missing and reported the theft to local authorities. The Webb County sheriff arranged for the South Texas rancher to meet with Mexican soldiers near Hidalgo to discuss compensation for his loss. Vergara crossed the Rio Grande, soon succumbed to a vicious physical assault, and was jailed. Shortly after incarceration in Hidalgo, Vergara’s captors moved him to Piedras Negras. Days later his body was found hanging from a tree.The murder of Clemente Vergara contributed to events that put the United States and Mexico on the brink of war and opened the door for expanded American involvement in Mexico. Texas governor Oscar B. Colquitt seized upon the incident to challenge President Woodrow Wilson—a fellow Democrat—to intervene and even threatened retaliation by the Texas Rangers. Meanwhile, the White House played a larger strategic game with competing factions in the midst of the Mexican Revolution. Wilson’s apparent inaction heightened Colquitt’s demands to guarantee the safety of Americans and their property in the Texas borderlands, and the Vergara affair’s extensive media coverage convinced many Americans that intervention in Mexico was necessary.Author John A. Adams Jr. shows how an otherwise commonplace horse theft and murder revealed a tangled web of international relations, powerful business interests, and intrigue on both sides of the border. Readers will be captivated by Murder and Intrigue on the Mexican Border and the continuing legacy that border events leave on Texas history.

Born in Millheim, Texas, to a family of German immigrants who moved to Texas in the wake of the 1848 revolution, William Andreas Trenckmann was a teacher, journalist, and publisher who successfully combined his German heritage with a new, distinctly Texan identity. His education was cultivated at the brand new Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, where he distinguished himself as the valedictorian of the first graduating class; he later served on the college's board of directors and was even offered the presidency. From 1907 to 1909, he represented Austin County in the Texas legislature. Trenckmann's lasting contribution to Texas history, however, was the creation of Das Wochenblatt, a German-language weekly newspaper that he edited and published for over forty years.Das Wochenblatt became a popular and respected source of information for German-speaking immigrants, their descendants, and the Texas communities where they lived and worked. Through the paper, Trenckmann advocated for civil liberties and free elections. He also vigorously opposed prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan, and later the rise of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism. When the United States entered World War I, many German-language publications were suspended or otherwise heavily censored, but Trenckmann's newspaper was granted a rare exemption from the wartime government.From 1931 to 1933, Trenckmann serialized his memoirs, Erlebtes und Beobachtetes, or “experiences and observations.” In Preserving German Texan Identity, historians Walter L. Buenger and Walter D. Kamphoefner present a revised and annotated translation of those memoirs as a revealing window into the lives of German Texans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

To the Vast and Beautiful Land gathers eleven essays written by Light Townsend Cummins, a foremost authority on Texas and Louisiana during the Spanish colonial era, and traces the arc of the author's career over a quarter of a century. Each essay includes a new introduction linking the original article to current scholarship and forms the connective tissue for the volume. A new bibliography updates and supplements the sources cited in the essays.From the ""enduring community"" of Anglo-American settlers in colonial Natchez to the Gálvez family along the Gulf Coast and their participation in the American Revolution, Cummins shows that mercantile commerce and land acquisition went hand-in-hand as dual motivations for the migration of English-speakers into Louisiana and Texas. Mercantile trade dominated by Anglo-Americans increasingly tied the Mississippi valley and western Gulf Coast to the English-speaking ports of the Atlantic world bridging two centuries, shifting it away from earlier French and Spanish commercial patterns. As a result, Anglo-Americans moved to the region as residents and secured land from Spanish authorities, who often welcomed them with favorable settlement policies. This steady flow of settlement set the stage for families such as the Austins—first Moses and later his son Stephen—to take root and further ""Anglocize"" a colonial region.Taken together, To the Vast and Beautiful Land makes a new contribution to the growing literature on the history of the Spanish borderlands in North America.

This is the fascinating biography of a bright young working man, Tom Hickey, who came to the United States from Ireland in 1892, became a machinist, and soon joined the Knights of Labor and the Socialist Labor Party. His party boss recognized the potential in this Irishman and even made him an "enforcer" against those who questioned the boss's authority. The enforcer, though, eventually found himself forced out and moved west to start a new life. Ultimately, Hickey landed in Texas and saw an opportunity to use syndicalism as an organizing tool to build a state socialist party.He did just that. Within a few years, Hickey transformed the faction-ridden Socialist Party of America in Texas into a force strong enough to threaten the Republican Party at the ballot box. He gained a large following thanks to a unique mixture of  evangelical rhetoric and militant industrial unionism.As biographer Peter H. Buckingham points out, Hickey failed to deliver his people into the Promised Land. Violence, poll taxes, voter suppression, and other forces made voting for socialist candidates problematic, and the Democratic Party soon co-opted the more appealing elements of socialism into watered-down,  reformist planks for the Texan voter. By the time Hickey died of throat cancer in the mid-1920s, his moment had passed."Red Tom" Hickey is an important contribution to Texas and American history, capturing a moment in time that Buckingham argues was the second sustained crisis in American history: a democratic society wrestling with the effects of industrial capitalism.

The Texas shooting at Santa Fe High School on May 18, 2018, which killed ten and injured thirteen, prompted public debate over the causes and potential solutions to this type of violent episode. On May 21, 2018, National Rifle Association president Oliver North declared that a culture of violence is largely responsible for these killings. “The problem that we’ve got is we’re trying like the dickens to treat the symptom without treating the disease. . . . The disease is youngsters who are steeped in a culture of violence.” This debate has captivated the American media and general public for decades.Texas history is steeped in brutality and bloodshed, creating a narrative that these conditions are still a vial part of the state’s culture in the twenty-first century. But perceptions of violence are often at odds with realities on the ground. Over several centuries, violence has decreased with the development of modern society, but popular perception seems to be that a culture of violence has emerged, and perhaps persisted despite demographic, economic, cultural, and political shifts in Texas.Starting from the notion that a culture of violence existed historically in the state and asking if such a culture still persists in modern Texas, this collection of essays examines trends associated with various types of violence within the state as well as social and political responses from 1965 to 2020. This important and timely work provides valuable context for discussions on violence in the past and for the future.

Winner, 2018 Presidio La Bahia Award, sponsored by the Sons of the Republic of TexasIn 1851, an article appeared in a German journal, Geographisches Jahrbuch (Geographic Yearbook), that sought to establish definitive connections, using language observations, among the Comanches, Shoshones, and Apaches. Heinrich Berghaus’s study was based on lexical data gathered by a young German settler in Texas, Emil Kriewitz, and included a groundbreaking list of Comanche words and their German translations. Berghaus also offered Kriewitz’s cultural notes on the Comanches, a discussion of the existing literature on the three tribes, and an original map of Comanche hunting grounds.Perhaps because it was published only in German, the existence of Berghaus’s study has been all but unknown to North American scholars, even though it offers valuable insights into Native American languages, toponyms, ethnonyms, hydronyms, and cultural anthropology. It was also a significant document revealing the history of German-Comanche relations in Texas.Daniel J. Gelo and Christopher J. Wickham now make available for the first time a reliable English translation of this important nineteenth-century document. In addition to making the article accessible to English speakers, they also place Berghaus’s work into historical context and provide detailed commentary on its value for anthropologists and historians who study German settlement in Texas.Comanches and Germans on the Texas Frontier will make significant contributions to multiple disciplines, opening a new lens onto Native American ethnography and ethnology.

Historian Roland RodrÍguez explores the military career of Captain Francisco Amangual (1739–1810) whose presence in the presidial hierarchy included active participation in convoys, skirmishes, and routine, day-to-day administration. The main thrust of the narrative examines Amangual’s tenure as the presidio paymaster (habilitado) for BÉxar, Texas, from 1788 to 1793. Amangual and his cohorts generated voluminous documentation including stockpiles, litigious actions, correspondence, military service records, criminal investigations, and monthly company reports. Their interactions with Native polities, civilians, and fellow soldiers illuminate the overarching administrative functions fulfilled by the paymaster in New Spain’s Comandancia General. Drawn from a wide cross-section of archival sources, RodrÍguez’s approach foregrounds the significance of the borderland’s operatives, documenting the seemingly mundane activities of life in the garrison and the more harrowing episodes of soldiering. What we are left with today from their writings is a unique body of literature about army life in the periphery. This case study aims to project onto the stage of presidio history one lesser-known actor’s role as an unapologetic navigator of complex bureaucratic obligations even as he soldiered on during the empire’s twilight.A secondary but no less important focus of the book examines the evolution of the so-called flying squadrons (compaÑÍas volantes), a kind of make-ready cavalry unit in the Provincias Internas.The volantes evolved as a specialized contingent charged with surveilling New Spain’s frontiers. Late in life, Amangual headed the San Carlos de Parras company. In much the same way as it brings Amangual’s multi-faceted career to light, the book assigns a cogent place to the complicated history of the flying squadrons. In doing so, the narrative presents a critical reevaluation of the colonial presidio experience.

The “Runaway Scrape” is, among Texas historians, at once recognizable but often less understood. While shelves of books examine the fall of the Alamo and the revolutionary victory at San Jacinto, surprisingly little sustained attention has been given to the chaotic period from the early to late spring of 1836 when many settlers fled their homes in the face of Santa Anna’s advancing forces. In the final months of the rebellion-turned-revolution, fear of defeat prompted larger questions of what it meant to be a man or woman in an environment of wartime retreat. In Run for Your Lives! historian Linda English opens a new window into the Runaway Scrape, exploring the events and rhetoric through the lens of gender. English identifies the central question looming over men and women alike: Were you doing enough to support the rebellion? Texas men faced the pressure to be “manly”—not to turn away or retreat, but to meet the enemy on the battlefield. As demoralizing losses stacked up, the rhetorical appeals of Anglo Texan authorities employed even more fervent language, casting the enemy as depraved and a threat to the innocent women and children of the state. Appeals to masculinity also intensified with fear-mongering references to potential Indian attacks. At the same time, while many women ceded leadership decisions to their male counterparts, an increasing number competed for power and more decisive leadership within refugee groups. Accusations of “authoritative” or “brazen” women acting like men and “weak” or “unmanly” men acting like women abounded in an apparent scrambling of gender expectations. But as English argues, “a closer examination of the heated gendered rhetoric . . . indicates that it was delivered with a goal in mind”—recruiting converts and enlistments to the cause. Nevertheless, shifting of attitudes or expectations also proved short-lived. Postwar peace realigned the gender landscape, underscoring the temporary nature of revolutionary gender roles.