T. R. Fehrenbach tells the Texas story as one who knows and loves his native soil. While many stories abound describing Texas's beginnings, Fehrenbach reveals the minds and souls of the first settlers to make their way to a distant and hostile land and carve out a different kind of world from the "civilized" America of their past. The first settlers were a hardy breed of frontiersmen, well-suited to the rigors of the wilderness that comprised Texas. From Stephen A. Austin's "300" to the Indian fighters and Texas Rangers that came later, Texas drew the bold and brave; independent men who sought land and freedom to live as they wished, unfettered by laws that made no sense to them.
Texas is different. Fehrenbach' s history of this great state explains how and why. From the East Texas cotton plantations that thrived before the War, to the arid Panhandle into which farmers trickled after the Comanches were conquered, to the vast stretches of mesquite and catclaw where longhorn cattle roamed to the Rio Bravo that formed the Texas/Mexico border, Texas has a history like no other state; the only Republic, whose flag can be flown alongside the U. S. flag.
Fehrenbach takes the reader from the earliest days of struggle and chaos into the relative peace and prosperity of modern Texas, leaving some of us to wish the old ways hadn't flown.
I recommend this history to all who share a love of Texas.
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