San Antonio College Library

The Great Depression of the 1930s set the stage for "the greatest afforestation program the world has known" when the Forest Service was given the task of planting shelterbelts from Texas to Canada in a zone a hundred miles wide. The venture, known as the Prairie States Forestry Project or the Shelterbelt Project, resulted in the planting of millions of trees between 1935 and 1942. Today, the millions of trees planted in the Depression stand as a...

True stories of people, animals, and events of long ago days in the vast American plains.

An account of the history of the High Plains of Texas and Oklahoma, based on personal accounts of old-timers in the region.

"The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people who held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod homes to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the...

This colorful account of cooking on the frontier from 1700 to 1915 describes the foods, preparation techniques, and recipes of pioneers by providing excerpts from their diaries, journals, and letters. Every kind of pioneer seems included: seafarers, trappers, military personnel, cowboys, homesteaders, clerics, mountain men, boarding-house cooks, chuck wagons on the cattle drives, various ethnic groups, etc. By profiling selected individuals in each...

The Great Plains, known for grasslands that stretch to the horizon, is a difficult region to define. Some classify it as the region beginning in the east at the ninety-eighth or one-hundredth meridian. Others identify the eastern boundary with annual precipitation lines, soil composi-tion, or length of the grass. In The Big Empty, leading historian R. Douglas Hurt defines this region using the towns and cities-Denver, Lin-coln, and Fort Worth-that...

"Stretching beyond the sweeping accounts typical of standard textbooks, Danbom challenges students to think about the many practicalities of surviving on the Great Plains in the late nineteenth century by providing a detailed account of how settlers acquired land and made homes, farms, and communities. He examines the physical and climatic obstacles of the plains - perhaps America's most inhospitable frontier - and shows how settlers sheltered themselves,...

"A profound sense of history has long compelled Indian peoples of the Great Plains to chronicle their lives pictorially. As the nineteenth century progressed, the trickle of white explorers and traders across the continent and up the great rivers turned into a veritable flood tide of soldiers and settlers. Their presence changed Plains life irrevocably. Plains Indians adopted a new medium for recording their visual histories, obtained through their...