The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 56, July 1952 - April, 1953 Page: 568
641 p. : ill., maps ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
buy a thousand books and study them for a lifetime to place at
his disposal a comparable amount of information on Texas.
FRANK H. WARDLAW
The University of Texas
Fort Concho and the Texas Frontier. By J. Evetts Haley. San
Angelo (San Angelo Standard-Times), 1952. Pp. 352. $6.oo.
Evetts Haley with the co-operation of three other staunch West
Texans-Houston Harte as promotor and publisher, Harold
Bugbee as illustrator, and Carl Hertzog as designer and producer
-has in Fort Concho and the Texas Frontier set a new standard
of excellence in the writing and publication of local history.
Originally projected as an early history of Tom Green County,
the work grew to cover the whole West Texas region from the
Llano Estacado to the Rio Grande and from the Austin-San
Antonio area into New Mexico. In point of time the study opens
with the Great Comanche War Trail which was "blazed in blood
long before this land was settled" and extends to June 2o, 1889,
when the flag at Fort Concho was pulled down for the last time
and the post abandoned because it had "ceased to be of any value
as a military post, except as a comfortable shelter for troops"
and was "not ... needed for that purpose."
Although the incidents making up this history of West Texas
are, as the author states in his preface, "thoroughly provincial,"
the subject matter is almost universally appealing and is in many
ways typical of the opening of any frontier area except, perhaps,
that in the Concho country it was even more so. Spurred by the
desires of men to reach the gold of California, the westward
march of the frontier in this region increased to a gallop. One
can feel the urge that led the United States government to
attempt to locate artesian wells in the "still thirsty land where
the dried-up cowboy... would be satisfied with just enough to
drink" and that caused men to seek transportation on overland
mail routes "obviously designed to accommodate the mules in-
stead of the passengers." The reader is made to see the area and
observe its development through the eyes and often in the words
of those who were themselves the makers of its history, the daunt-
less men who to achieve the goals which they had set for them-568
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 56, July 1952 - April, 1953, periodical, 1953; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101145/m1/672/?rotate=90: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.