Ira Aten (1862-1953) was the epitome of a frontier lawman. When as a youth he heard of the killing by Rangers of the notorious outlaw Sam Bass at Round Rock, Aten's neighborhood, he altered his plans of being a cowboy and instead set his sights on becoming a Texas Ranger. At age twenty he enrolled in Company D during the transition of the Rangers ......
The Scandalous Love Triangle That Triggered the Boyce-Sneed Feud
Almost half a century after the Boyce-Sneed feud in West Texas erupted in bloodshed in 1912, two Texas historians attempted to write about the affair. But no one would talk to them. Lewis Nordyke abandoned the idea, and C. L. Sonnichsen, another chronicler of Texas feuds, wrote that it was 'too soon to talk about the Boyce-Sneed affair.' Not until ......
A sweet slipstream stew, a call and response to Hemingway's In Our Time, Geoff Schmidt's debut collection Out of Time is a meditation on meaning and mortality, and the ways that story and the imagined life can sustain us. In these stories, vengeful infants destroy and rebuild the world, rivalrous siblings and their mother encounter witches and ......
In the humid forests of Cape Horn, a single tree can host more than 100 species of little epiphyte plants. The floor of the forest and the rocks are also covered by numerous species of liverworts, mosses, and lichens. The decision to stop at a tree or rock and explore these "miniature forests" generates an authentic ecotourism experience. In a ......
Tracking the Texas Rangers is an anthology of sixteen previously published articles and chapter excerpts, arranged in chronological history, covering key topics of the intrepid and sometimes controversial law officers named the Texas Rangers. Determining the role of the Rangers as the state evolved and what they actually accomplished for the ......
On a chilly October afternoon in 1881, two brothers named Tom and Frank McLaury were gunned down on the streets of Tombstone, Arizona, by the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday. The deadly event became known as the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and in a quirk of fate, the brothers' names became well-known, but only as bad men and outlaws. Did they ......
The Ketchum Gang and the Wild Bunch, Second Edition
After Tom Ketchum had been sentenced to death for attempting to hold up a railway train, his attorneys argued that the penalty was "cruel and unusual" for the offence charged. The appeal failed and he became the first individual-and the last-ever to be executed for a crime of this sort. He was hanged in 1901; in a macabre ending to his life of ......
A Marine's Journey through South Vietnam, 1968-1969
In early February of 1968, at the beginning of the Tet Offensive, Private First Class Gregory V. Short arrived in Vietnam as an eighteen-year-old U.S. Marine. Amid all of the confusion and destruction, he began his tour of duty as an 81mm mortarman with the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, which was stationed at Con Thien near the DMZ. While ......
Confessions of a Horseshoer offers a close and personal look at the mind-set of a professional horseshoer (farrier) who also happens to be a college professor. The book, an ironic and playful view of the many unusual animals (and people) Ron Tatum has encountered over thirty-seven years, is nicely balanced between straightforward presentation, ......
