The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 67, July 1963 - April, 1964 Page: 611

Book Reviews

seems to have been a genius at developing ideas that he himself
was never able to apply, had a large share in promoting early-day
irrigation. C. W. Post stated that Biggers put water on his brain
about 9g o. With the zooming prices of the 194o's and 1950's,
irrigation and tractor farming combined to make the Lubbock
country one of the prime agricultural regions of the world. More
than two and a half million acres of land were being irrigated in
the Lubbock trade area in 1954, and the annual buying power of
nine counties of the region exceeded half a billion dollars. Oil, as
well as agriculture, has helped to make that sum.
In the latter part of the book the authors look at their city
and its development, mainly since World War I, more critically
and minutely. They relate the story of its Negro and Latin-Amer-
ican people, who are still confined to certain quarters of the city
and are poorly housed. They conclude that after World War I the
churches, fearing that they were losing contact with their young
people, changed many practices. They review the clashes between
groups over interpretations in science and religion, an issue made
more acute by the conservatism of Lubbock generally and the
presence of Texas Tech. They relate much of the history of Texas
Technological College and suggest that its impact on the Plains
country merits further study.
This book should stimulate the writing of other histories of
cities. RUPERT N. RICHARDSON
Hardin-Simmons University
Rip Ford's Texas. Edited by Stephen B. Oates. Austin (Univer-
sity of Texas Press), 1963. Pp. xlviii+519. $7.50.
Any student of past Texas affairs whose labors have led him into
the voluminous file of John S. Ford papers can well appreciate the
task to which Stephen Oates set himself; any who sit down with
Rip Ford's Texas can have little but approbation for the editorial
accomplishment.
The editing of autobiographical material-and Ford's memoirs
are autobiographical, both as concerns a man and a state-offers
its peculiar problems of juxtaposition, particularly in such a case
as this, where so much was put on paper so long after the events.
How Ford might have revised his work no one can say, but Oates

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