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This is the story of Texas's most famous criminals, intrepid lawmen, and others, such as James Edwin Reed or Henry Brown, a former Oldham County deputy sheriff, who dared to be both. Brown was killed by irate citizens on April 30, 1884, after taking time off from his position as city marshal to rob a bank ... Read more Look inside

by Jerry L. Rogers

Elden Duane Rogers died on March 19, 1945, one of the eight hundred who perished on the aircraft carrier USS Franklin that day. It was his nineteenth birthday. "Eldon's fate remained unknown until the dreaded telegram from the Navy Department reached his home in little Vega, Texas, in the Panhandle near Amarillo" ... Read more Look inside

The Texas Panhandle is like a whole 'nother country. The area stretching from just south of Lubbock all the way north to Oklahoma is filled with ranch land, oil fields, windy plains and some of the Lone Star State's most unique history. Read about the duck that started a gun battle in Oldham County and find out how Kate Polly's pancake flipping saved her life. Or witness Gene Autry's days as a performer in Childress and a different sort of "gold rush" in Palo Duro Canyon as historian Mike Cox shares his favorite pieces of the Panhandle's past . . . Look inside

"I was lucky, because I threw in with a forty-five-year-old cowboy named Tom Ford. He'd been born and raised on the Matadors near his birthplace in Vega, Texas. His first ten years as a cowboy had been on the Mats and he'd left there in his thirties as a top hand. Tom was as much a genius as any Einstein and right quick I saw, if I was to catch up and make a hand at the pace and volume of work on the ditch banks, I had to keep him in sight..." Read more

"After the return of Tom Emory and Jim East, Bob Roberson decided, as the the "Kid" was behind prison walls, to return home. I had concluded to stay until Spring, and gather up any LX cattle that might be in the country. As Jim East wished to return to Tascosa, and run for sheriff of Oldham County, Texas, I allowed him to go back with the Roberson crowd. I also let Lee Hall and Cal Polk go. As tom Emory wished to stay with me Roberson gave his consent . . . Read more Look inside

Drawing upon stories told to her by men and women who were with the LS during the 1880’s and later years, Dulcie Sullivan presents her narrative in a clear, straightforward, but sympathetic manner that gives the reader a vivid sense of how life was really lived there in those times. About this time, the Cage brothers decided to end their cowboy careers. Dunk returned to Louisiana, Hays followed six months . Then Tobe Robinson quit to run for sheriff of Oldham County. . . ."  Read more Look inside

In 1540 Francisco Vazquez de Coronado, the governor of Nueva Galicia in western Mexico, led an expedition of reconnaissance and expansion to a place called Cíbola, far to the north in what is now New Mexico. "This places the group at Rocky Dell on Agua de Piedras Creek, a little north of Adrian, Texas. There they arrived without comment atop the Llano at the headwaters of Tierra Blanca Creek." ... Read more Look inside  

By Gerald McCathern

In 1875, Hidetown and Tascosa, in the Texas Panhandle, were known as the Sodom and Gomorrah of the plains. With 13 saloons and 500 prostitutes in Hidetown, and a slightly lesser number in Tascosa, sin was a thriving business. The nearest law was two hundred miles to the south, so the law of the Panhandle belonged . . . Read more Look inside

As well as being the center of ranching activity in the Panhandle, Tascosa also became the last best hiding place in Texas for killers on the run, horse thieves, tinhorn gamblers, hair-trigger shootists or anyone else with a past he wanted to get away from. Billy the Kid, "Poker Tom" Emory, Bill Gatlin, Jim Kenedy, and Louis "The Animal" Bousman were just a few of the outlaws and desperadoes who vied for dominance with Cape Willingham, Cap Arrington, Jim East, and other lawmen in an ongoing war that made sudden death a routine occurrence on . . . . Read more Look inside

Life is never easy but specially so when your born in a boxcar in the center of a railroad siding in the Great Depression. Add in the fact the Dust Bowl is flooding the air your can hardly breathe to survive each day. "Dad is a foreman of a steel gang that is in the process of being moved to Magenta, Texas, north of Amarillo. The gang is made up of Anglo and Mexican laborers living in boxcars furnished by the railroad. The car has stacks of bunk beds . . . Read more Look inside

Garrett was more than just a famous western sheriff, more than the slayer of the legendary Billy the Kid. He had long known that big-name gunmen were not unusual in the panhandle region. Billy the Kid had been merely one of many to frequent the cattle, adobe, and scrap-lumber community of Tascosa in Oldham County, Texas. The town experienced a a peaceful birth in June, 1877, but lost no time growing up to a reputation for rustlin, vice, and violent death ... Read more Look inside

Found inside: "An Englishman by the name of A.B. Ledgard had a big sheep ranch on the Alamocitos as late as 1882, and the prominent Baca and Armijo families operated heavily in sheep, as did Mariano Montoya, the first clerk of Oldham County. Their flocks grazed the the Panhandle and were driven to Dodge City to be shipped by rail" . . . Read more Look inside

by Mehgan Graves

Meghan is a special education teacher in Vega, Texas and her husband, Karlton, is a teacher and coach. Karlton and Mehgan have one child, a daughter named Annabeth. In Walking in Love, author Mehgan shares her and her husbands own personal story of faith amid turmoil, as she and her husband, Karlton, confront his cancer diagnosis and prepare for the ensuing battle. First, opening a window into their lives before marriage, Mehgan shows ... Read more Look inside

Found inside: "Don Agapito Sandoval and Don Casimiro Romero from Mora were the founders of Atascosa in Oldham County, Texas. Don Agapito left the Llano country in 1888 about the same time Don Casimiro moved to El Medano, about fifteen miles from the town of Endee and close to San Jon. At El Medano, Don Casimiro opened a store . . . " Read more

"I moved to Adrian, Texas the latter part of the summer of 1963. Adrian is located forty-five miles west of Amarillo on Interstate forty. It had one blinking stop light, one cafe, one post office and one grocery store. Adrian was a farming community and the population was one-hundred-fifty. I was totally amazed at the Adrian boys that summer. It seemed like almost all of them worked all day long, then ... " Read more Look inside

Englishman Frank Collinson went to Texas in 1872, when he was seventeen, to work on Will Noonan’s ranch near Castroville. At the age of seventy-nine he began writing about the Old West he knew and loved. He had a flair for writing, a phenomenal memory, and a passion for truth that is evident in what he wrote and said. "After the cook left Monroe put one of the Mexicans to cooking. The he went to Tascosa, a settlement on the Canadian River in what is now Oldham County, Texas. When he returned to Spring Lake he was in a bad mood and told the English Cowboy that " . . . Read more Look inside

Every time a cowhand dug his boot into the stirrup, he knew that this ride could carry him to trail's end. In real stories told by genuine cowboys, this book captures the everyday perils of the "flinty hoofs and devil horns of an outlaw steer, the crush of a half-ton of fury in the guise of a saddle horse, the snap of a rope pulled taut enough to sever digits. . . . Found inside: "Photo of of Monclavio Lucero busting a bronc on the LS Ranch in Oldham County Texas in 1907 " Read more Look inside

"Stories about family, legacy, marriage, divorce, religion, all of them played out in relentless weather and under an all-encompassing sky. . . . "here on the family farm three miles northwest of Vega, Texas, in the Panhandle, I lean into a north wind. It is winter, a brown-scape tinged in ochre, dried buffalo and grama grasses, the touch of green wintered-over yucca and bear grass. It's early morning, the sky a pale blue, except for" ... Read more Look inside

by Shelley Armitage

Armitage begins her narrative with the intention to walk the llano from her family farm thirty meandering miles along the Middle Alamosa Creek to the Canadian River. Along the way, she seeks the connection between her father and one of the area’s first settlers, Ysabel Gurule, who built his dugout on the banks of the Canadian. Armitage, who grew up nearby in the small town of Vega finds this act of walking inseparable from the act of listening and writing . . . Read more Look inside

by Anna Greenlee

"She was telling her that neighbors were exotic guests from who-knows-where coming and going. I guess it did sound better than saying, “There is a lady and her two kids at the pool from Vega, Texas.” It just doesn't have the same ring to it ... Read more Look inside

It is a story about a young girl whose parents went through a divorce. She had an abusive stepfather who ran out on her and her mother for twenty years. As she got older, she bought a motorcycle with her friends, and they decided to start a female motorcycle club called the Black Widows. "They have been riding for a few hours and arrive at Boise, Texas. They refuel, grab water, juices and chips. Virginia receives a call from LuAnn ... Read more Look inside

When legendary Charlie Siringo wrote this classic work, he was only thirty years old and had already spent half that life as a cowboy. With enduring wit, he tells the tale of long cattle drives, small-town beauties, meetings with Billy the Kid, and growing up on the Texas frontier. "After being out three days we landed in Tascosa, a little Mexican town on the Canadian. There were only two Americans there, Howard and Reinheart, who kept the only store in town. Their stock of goods consisted of three barrels of whisky and half a dozen boxes of soda crackers . . . Read more Look inside

Riding straight out of the pages of Western history, W. J. L. Sullivan arrives, hat firmly planted on his head, to tell in his own plain way about his time as a sergeant of the Texas Rangers. "He held up this train in a cut about four hundred yards from the Canadian River , near Tascosa , Texas . Rip Pearce was about thirty years of age at that time , and was six feet two inches and a half tall , and weighed about 200 pounds . When I ..."  Read more

Maverick Town tells the story of the rise and decline of Old Tascosa, which epitomized all the romance and danger of the early West. Tascosa's heyday was brief, yet it compressed into a few years the history of an era-that of the open range-which will never return. Across the trackless miles of buffalo grass in the Panhandle of Texas to the easy crossing of the Canadian came Indians, Spanish explorers, Comancheros, buffalo hunters, Mexican settlers and sheepherders, and finally the cattlemen and the homesteaders. The Mexicans, the cattlemen, and the homesteaders entered an unequal struggle ... Read more

In the badlands of Oklahoma and Texas in the late nineteenth century, Jim Gober―cowboy, lawman, gambler, saloon keeper, homesteader, horse-race promoter, private detective, both hunter and hunted―was a real-life hero. The Wild West tales featuring Jim Gober spanned the gamut from the Indian raids of his childhood in Denton County, Texas, and the shootouts of his teenage years in the Panhandle town of Tascosa, to the shot, in self-defense, from his Colt 45 in 1887 when the then young lawman served as the first sheriff of Potter, County Texas ... Read more Look Inside

"During the 1870's,Jim Kenedy headquartered in Tascosa, Texas. Hoping to make aman of him,his father had established him in the Texas Panhandle with two thousand head of cattle and a complete crew of herders. A young doctor named ... " Read more Look inside

The Grand Duke from Boys Ranch

As a boy in Houston, Bill Sarpalius, his brothers, and their mother lived an itinerant life. Bill dug food out of trashcans, and he and his brothers moved from one school to the next. They squatted in a vacant home while their mother, affectionately called “Honey,” battled alcoholism and suicidal tendencies. In an act of desperation, she handed her three sons over to Cal Farley’s Boys Ranch in Oldham County, north of Amarillo . . . Read more Look inside

“Exchange Hotel, Tascosa, Texas” Oldham County. Once the Queen City of the Panhandle, the original town of Tascosa was almost a ghost town when this nostalgic 191 I photo was taken. its decline was fated when the Fort ... Read more Look inside

The historical pieces collected into Light 'n Hitch cover the period from the Seventies to the Twenties in this century. Every important aspect of the development of the High Plains . is represented in the accounts of movement into the area; of efforts to establish law and order; of town building with tents and dugouts; of great women bringing dignity and beauty into primitive surroundings; of ceaseless struggles to bring transportation and communications into the vastness of the plains. "Wildorado folks stood out in the storm to watch that train buck drift after drift . . . Read more