San Antonio College Library

Established on Grand River in 1824, Fort Gibson was the first and perhaps the most important military outpost in the Indian Territory. The army's principal mission was to maintain order and expedite the policy of Indian Removal. Executing a policy many Indians bitterly opposed, the troops at Fort Gibson became the natural adversaries of tribes already residing in the territory. Conflict was anticipated, and war hysteria swept the region. Yet, during...

Historian David La Vere has gathered a wealth of vivid detail about life among the former Texas Indian peoples, including the Kiowas, Comanches, Wichitas, Caddos, Tonkawas, and Lipan Apaches. Culled from 112 volumes of the Indian-Pioneer Histories in the Indian Archives at the Oklahoma Historical Society, these oral histories also include interviews with non-Indian neighbors.

This biography profiles the life of Bass Reeves, a former slave who was recruited as a deputy United States Marshal in the area that was to become Oklahoma. "Sitting tall in the saddle, with a wide-brimmed black hat and twin Colt pistols on his belt, Bass Reeves seemed bigger than life. Outlaws feared him. Law-abiding citizens respected him. As a peace officer, he was cunning and fearless. When a lawbreaker heard Bass Reeves had his warrant, he knew...

Before the drought of the early twenty-first century, the dry benchmark in the American plains was the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. But in this eye-opening work, Kevin Z. Sweeney reveals that the Dust Bowl was only one cycle in a series of droughts on the U.S. southern plains. Reinterpreting our nation's nineteenth-century history through paleoclimatological data and firsthand accounts of four dry periods in the 1800s, Prelude to the Dust Bowl demonstrates...