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11/2003. xix, 241 pages.
0896725111
978-0-89672-511-9

Buffalo Guns and Barbed Wire: Two Frontier Accounts by Don Hampton Biggers

By Don Hampton Biggers
Introduction by A. C. Greene
Biography of Don Hampton Biggers by Seymour V. Connor

Newspaperman Don Hampton Biggers witnessed the last years of the West Texas frontier and grew intrigued with the buffalo hunters, the early cattlemen, and the stories they told. As the twentieth century began, he was collecting and publishing the recollections of old-timers who had participated in making Texas history.

This book combines two of Biggers’s works, History That Will Never Be Repeated> (1901) and Pictures of the Past (1902)--both rare and coveted by collectors of Texana. The two, republished in 1991 as a Book Club of Texas special edition and trade clothbound edition, are now available in paperback for the first time.

For Pictures of the Past the author wove old buffalo hunters’ stories into descriptions of the herds, the slaughter, Indian incidents, Fort Griffin, the battle at Adobe Walls, and much more. History That Will Never Be Repeated records lore of the cattle industry in West Texas from 1876. In these vivid accounts by cowboys and ranchers are some of the most emblematic events of the American West--riding line, working roundup, turning a drift herd--recalled not for their romance but for their hardship and for the sheer endurance required of the men who lived them. The remarkable period photography of George Robertson and Erwin E. Smith illustrates the book in duotone throughout.