The Reckoning: The Triumph of Order on the Texas Outlaw Frontier (American Liberty and Justice) - Hardcover

Rose, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0896727696 ISBN 13: 9780896727694

Publisher: Texas Tech University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Isolated by geology and passed over by development, the vast, waterless tablelands of the Edwards Plateau of Texas became the stage for one of the great nineteenth-century dramas of western justice. In 1873, opportunistic Anglo-Celtic cattlemen and homesteaders, protected by little other than personal firearms and their own bravado, began settling the stream-laced rangelands east of the plateau. An insidious criminal element soon followed: a family-based tribal confederation of frontier outlaws took root in the canyonlands around the forks of the Llano River, in unorganized and lawless Kimble County. Sometimes disguised as Indians, they preyed on neighbors, northbound trail herds, and stockmen in adjacent counties. They robbed stagecoaches repeatedly. They traded in border markets alongside Mexican Indian raiders, and may have participated in the brutal Dowdy massacre of 1878.Outnumbering and intimidating law-abiding settlers, the confederation took over the nascent Kimble County government in 1876. Only dogged persistence by Texas Rangers, with increasing support from citizens and local law officers, would stem the tide. Meticulously researched and documented, The Reckoning examines all the players. Rose shows frontier West Texas as it really was: a raw, lawless, unforgiving place and time that yielded only stubbornly to Order and its handmaiden, the Rule of Law.

About this title

About the Author

Peter R. Rose is a fifth-generation Texan and a geologist with more than fifty years of professional experience. The author of the definitive monograph on the Edwards Plateau of West Texas, he is descended from nineteenth-century settlers in Kimble County, where his family maintains ranching operations to the present day. He and his wife, Alice, divide their time between Austin and Telegraph, Texas.T. R. Fehrenbach, author of the classic Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans and former head of the Texas Historical Commission, is an authority on Texas, Mexico, and the Comanche people. He currently writes a weekly column for the San Antonio Express-News.

Edition details

• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0896727696
• ISBN 13: 9780896727694
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288