LIVING PIONEERS

Informal history and folkways in first-person tales of old Texas, Arizona, the Chisholm Trail and the Cherokee Strip -- but mostly Texas. Fifteen men and women still alive recall the last dramatic days of pioneering, -- homesteading, stampedes and Indian fights, free range vs. barbed wire, and Harold Preece has smoothed out the prose for publication. How the Texas Rangers discouraged fence-cutters with dynamite and quelled border-rustlers on the Rio Grande; how one man's claim was staked and then jumped in the overcrowded run for homesteading land on the Cherokee Strip; the birth of the first baby on the Chisholm Trail; the posse which was tricked by the Indian wife of an outlaw; a fifteen year old boy's exploits as bronco-buster for the Comanches; a snowball fight that staved off a gun fight; etc. etc. these form an uneven epic of earlier days which has its drama and regional appeal and realism.