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How 10 Days in Hell with Bear Bryant Forged a Champion Team

The Junction Boys tells the story of Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant's legendary training camp in the small town of Junction, Texas. In a move that many consider the salvation of the Texas A&M football program, Coach Bryant put 115 players through the most grueling practices ever imagined. Only a handful of players survived the entire 10 days, but they braved the intense heat of the Texas sun and the burning passion of their coach, and turned a floundering team into one of the nation's best. The Junction Boys is more than just a story of tough practices without water breaks. An extraordinary fellowship was forged from the mind-numbing pain. The thirty-five survivors bonded together like no other team in America. They profited from the Junction experience; the knowledge they took back . . . Read more

Found Inside: "In the summer of 1875, after the Comanches had given up the fight, scattered bands of Apaches were still raiding in western and central Texas. Among their warriors was Herman Lehmann. By then he was sixteen and had lived with the Apaches for five years ... That August, Herman was raiding not far from his old home in Mason County with a party of twelve Apaches and their Mexican captive, Herman and the Apaches had stolen over forty horses in Kimble, Mason, and Menard Counties. Once they were satisfied with their loot they started driving the herd northwest . . . " Read more Look inside

Circuit riders and other early preachers confronted dangerous outlaws, Indians, wild animals, and Texas' unpredictable weather. Found inside: "On this trip in March of 1878, the two men met at Center Point, traveled to Junction City in Kimble County and  " ... Read more Look inside

"Two years earlier, Jim, his brother Jourd, Jim Crane, and Jim Pettigrew had rustled cattle and horses from John Gardner and Peter Patterson of Kimble County, Texas. On February 6, 1897, Kimble County Sheriff John L. Jones and his deputies located the rustlers at Rust Ranch, twenty-one miles northwest of Junction City . . ." Read more Look inside

Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson)

In Means of Ascent, Book Two of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Robert A. Caro brings alive Lyndon Johnson in his wilderness years.

Found Inside: "By the time he was twelve, he was a cowhand on a ranch; at fourteen, while his father and mother homesteaded in Kimble County the slender, dark-hared, serious-faced boy was herding steers in the fierce winds that whipped across ... When Coke was sixteen, his father opened a small general store in Junction, a little town in Kimble County wedged between high, green hills on the banks of the Llano River ... Read more Look inside

John Wesley Hardin! His name spread terror in much of Texas in the years following the Civil War as the most wanted fugitive with a $4000 reward on his head. A Texas Ranger wrote that he killed men just to see them kick ...

Found Inside: "In December 1894 he and his brother Jeff attended a dance in London, only a dozen or so miles from county seat Junction in Kimble County. There he met the spirited young lady named Carolyn Lewis but known as Callie by everyone ... " Read more Look inside

Found Inside: "To escape capture Dick and his companion fled west into Kimble County. While I was working as a cowboy with Joe Franks in the fall of 1873 I became acquainted with the two murderers, for they attached themselves to our outfit. They were always armed and constantly on the watchout for fear of arrest. Dublin was a large man, stout, dark complected, and looked more like the bully of a prize ring than the cowman he was. I often heard him say he would never surrender. While cow hunting with us he discovered that the naturally brushy and tangle county of Kimble would offer shelter for such as he, and persuaded his father to move out into that county . . . Read more Look inside

Found Inside: "Laura Hoover, a pioneer of Ozona, Texas, told a WIlA writer that, when she left Kimble County with her husband and a herd, he thought she could not manage two babies, the team, and her rifle, so he hired a boy to drive the wagon. When the boy put the put the collars on the team backward, she had him sent back home, knowing that she could could successfully manage the team, the babies, and ever . . . "  Read more Look Inside

Found Inside: "The Frontier Battalion had no further important clash with white men in organized groups until the Kimble County trouble broke out in the early part of 1877. In the mean time every commander was busy with small things. Lieutenant Pat Dolan related that between February 5 and 7 he had numerous squads combing the country for hide thieves. They captured many hides and at least eight men, while the ninth man came in and gave up. He took the prisoners to Uvalde, but the civil officers there would not receive all the prisoners " . . . Read more Look inside

"This man-made hammer of modern origin was found near London, Texas in northeast Kimble County in 1936. It is encased in Cretaceous (dinosaur-age) limestone that is supposedly many millions of years old. The hammer had to be in existence before it could ..." Read more Look inside

Found Inside: " By 1926, the Mexican tick fever scare had passed and so had the need for many of the Livestock Commission officers, including Papa John. My parents and paternal grandparents had heard they could get rich quick in Kimble County in the pecan groves, so we moved to Junction, in Kimble County, to gather pecans. it didn't take long before the adults realized that they were not going to get rich quick or get rich quick picking pecans. Papa John had to quickly find a job just to feed his family. Luckily, Terry Jetton was looking for a cowboy to work on his ranch ... Read more

Graham Barnett was killed in Rankin, Texas, on December 6, 1931. His death brought an end to a storied career, but not an end to the legends that claimed he was a gunman, a hired pistolero ....

Found Inside: "Van "Ripp" Martin was sheriff of Kimble County and had an unusual way of dealing with bad guys and people who wanted to be bad but didn't know how to do it. Since he knew most of the people in the county he could talk to them on a personal basis. . . " Read more Look inside

The second in the series of "Little Town" essays by Rana K. Williamson, this collection of 26 hometown stories are of a more personal nature. They chronicle, in large part, the author's relationship with her late father, set against the backdrop of the small West Texas ranching community of Junction, Texas . . . Look Inside

Join historian Cliff Caldwell for volume two of A Day's Ride from Here as he takes you through the hidden history of Texas Hill Country. Follow the San Saba trail the old Spanish route from San Antonio to Menard to the famous Pegleg Crossing, where Rangers brought down Dick Dublin in 1878. Visit frontier posts like Camp Verde and Camp Ives near Bandera Pass and see the sites of the earliest Texas Paleo-Indians along the Pecos River. Explore early pioneer settlements and once bustling towns . . . Read more

“I was trying to remember the other day exactly what my first memories are of Kimble County, of Junction, of Segovia, Texas. There is some spectacular stuff there, if I can bring it all to the surface—without making anything up. That’s not real hard to do, but it takes time. You have to go slow.”—Bob Winship . . . Look Inside

New Mexico rancher and lawman Dee (Daniel R.) Harkey describes himself as having “been shot at more times than any man in the world not engaged in war.” Mean as Hell, originally published in 1948 when Harkey was 83, is his detailed, witty autobiography about his youth. " Then in 1874, Joe married and moved to Kimble County, Texas. He took me and Mose, my younger brother, with him. He settled on a little creek, called Little Saline and engaged in ... When I got up there, eight Comanches had almost all of the horses in the country rounded up. They saw me about time I saw them. Two of them started after me  ” . . . Read more Look inside

Historian Mike Cox has been writing about Texas history for four decades, sharing tales that have been overlooked or forgotten through the years.

"West Texas has two Lover's Leaps. One is the precipice two miles from Junction in Kimble County, first written about by Grinstead. The other is Texas's least -known Lover's Leap, a cliff on the Devils River.. " Read more Look inside

by Peter R. Rose

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 . . . Read more

Found Inside: "Hill's first Ranger captain, Gully Cowsert, was a third-generation Ranger. He previously ranched in Kimble County and worked as an investigator for the Texas Sheep and Goat Raisers Association prior to entering the Ranger Service. Cowsert began his tenure as a Ranger captain in 1933 ... " Read more Look inside

"On reaching Kimble County we laid over in a new village called Junction City, now the prosperous seat of government of Kimble County, to load up our mess-wagon with grub, etc. Farther up the river we came to the end of our journey, at the Joe and Creed Taylor ranches . . . Read more Look inside

"On reaching Kimble County we laid over in a new village called Junction City, now a prosperous seat of government of Kimble county, to load up our mess-wagon with grub. Further up the river we came to the end of our journey at the Joe, and Creed Taylor ranches . . . Read more Look inside

"Richard Dublin a.k.a. Dick Dublin was born, and grew up with his brothers Dell and Role, on a small farm along the South Llano in Kimble County, Texas. All the youngsters became outlaws. Dick, the oldest, was described as "a large man, stout and of dark complexion, who looked more like the bully of a prize ring than the cowman he was." Although the motive remains murky, Dick and a partner in crime, Ace Lankford, killed two men at a country store  . . . Read more

A narrative history of 5 brothers born in Kimble County, Texas in the late 1800's in and around Junction, Texas. Details regarding family migrations from England (Wilson), Virginia (Woodward and Cox) and Missouri (Edmundson and Graham) to Texas . . . Look inside

John Wesley Hardin is the most famous gunfighter of the American Wild West. The subject of conversations from the Mexican border to the rowdy saloons of Kansas, he was the greatest celebrity of the age. He wrote an autobiography, but he only told what he wanted known, and few have researched beyond that. Today, Hardin is an enigma. Part of the mystery is his disastrous relationship with Helen Beulah Mrose, yet she has not been researched at all. Until now. The author lists Kimble County courthouse records as a primary source for this book . . .   . . . Read more Look inside

"The four groups were then to rendezvous with the major and the main body on the nineteenth at Junction in Kimble County. Gillett accompanied one scout to Fort McKavett and arrested several hard cases there. His horse was injured and, once Coldwell's men rode north, Gillett was forced to remain . . . Read more Look inside

Deadly Dozen tells the story of twelve infamous gunfighters, feared in their own times but almost forgotten today.

Found Inside: "Shortly after Barney's birth his parents moved to Texas, where began a history of violence that would plague the Riggs family ... His older brother, Brannick, got into a shooting scrape in Kimble County in October 1885, stood trial for murder and . . . " Read more Look inside

These are the chronicles of the trail drivers of Texas those rugged men and, sometimes, women who drove cattle and horses up the trails from Texas to northern markets in the late 1800s.

"When we reached the Colorado river that stream was very low. Here I saw my first buffalo, but it was a tame animal and was branded by a long S on each side. Ed Hagerman of Kimble County was ahead of us with a herd of the Half Circle L C cattle. After a great deal of hard luck and trouble we reached yellow Horse Draw about ten miles from Lubbock where we encountered a heavy hailstorm. We had lost a great many of our cattle on the trip, and the sudden change chilled a number of others to death as well as five horses." . . . Read more Look inside

Paul Carlson engagingly chronicles the development of the range sheep and goat industry from Spanish times to about 1930. Read more Look inside

The Society had its beginnings at the A&M-Texas football game in 1909. The announced purpose of the society was to collect and make known to the public songs and ballads, superstitions, signs and omens, cures and peculiar customs, legends, dialects, games, plays, and dances, and riddles and proverbs. Found Inside: Lover's Leap in Kimble County --- Flora Eckert

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A crack shot, expert skinner and tanner, seamstress, sculptor, and later writer—a list that only hints at her intelligence and abilities—Ella Elgar Bird Dumont was one of those remarkable women who helped tame the Texas frontier. First married at sixteen to a Texas Ranger, she followed her husband . . "Gillett tells of scouting for Indians with Tom Bird in Kimble County when the men encountered a female black bear and two cubs. After killing the mother the Rangers tied up the fighting cubs and took them as pets. Gillett tells . . . .  Read more Look inside

Found Inside: "They had fled from the direction of Kimble County, where Major Jones had been operating successfully. These men invariably were going under assumed names, so it was difficult to know where they did in fact belong. Hall had some ... " Read more Look inside

Found Inside: "The lawlessness in Kimble County was coming more and more to the attention of the Frontier Battalion. Repeated requests to the state for help emphasized how overrun the county was with thieves and outlaws. As one citizen put it, "our horses, cattle and hogs are being stolen almost daily, cattle from other counties by tens, thirtys and fiftys are stolen and drove to this county . . . " Read more Look closer

Frank Hamer and Oscar Latta became close friends. Latta was a capable lawman and a dangerous man in a gunfight. In 1897, while a deputy sheriff in Kimble County, he and other officers engaged in a pitched gun battle with bank robbers, killing two of them. The next year he enlisted in the Rangers . . .Read more Look inside

Found Inside: "Noxville is now a dispersed ranching community in eastern Kimble County, but in the late nine-tenth and early twentieth centuries it was a supply center that served the surrounding livestock raising area. By the 1860s the first white settlers had begun establishing ranches in what later became Kimble County. The best-known of these individuals was Creed Taylor, a veteran of the Texas Revolution and the Mexican War, who established a ranch headquarters on the James River in 1869. He and his family had recently been involved in the bloody Sutton-Taylor feud ... Read more Look inside

The Resting Places of Famous, Infamous, and Just Plain Interesting Texans

Found Inside: "Meandering beneath high limestone bluffs, the clear water of the Little Devil's River served as a focal point for settlement in Kimble County in the early 1870s. Among those who farmed and prospered along the stream was Illinois native Noah Nox. Nox set up business along the banks of the river, and his store served as the first Noxviille post office. Nearby, townspeople quarried the local limestone, cut it into neat blocks and built the first rock schoolhouse in Kimble County ... " Read more Look inside

The Buckhollow Encampment Site, Kimble County, Texas

by O. C. Fisher

NIce reference book with lots of old photos and information about Kimble County Texas

West Texas History & Memories

Texas History in the 19th Century (Amazon)

Vintage Texas Photos (eBay Ads)

Amazing People from Texas County by County

Early Life in Texas County by County

Books about Texas People and Places

Kimble County Unclaimed Estates

These Deceased Residents of Kimble County Left a total $31,298 in Unclaimed Money for their heirs. Know the Heirs? Share this with your list of Family and Friends from Junction, Roosevelt and London Texas . . . see the list