 From
Guns to Gavels: How Justice Grew Up in the Outlaw West
Tracing
the struggles of incipient criminal justice in the Southwest through
an engaging progression of outlaws and lawmen, plus a host of
colorful frontier trial lawyers and judges, Neal reveals how law and
society matured together. "Duels of the Lawmen, The
Volatile Motley War and the Outlaw Sheriff. After Joe became sheriff,
Boon quit the Matador Ranch and bought the Dew Drop Saloon in the
town of Matador. On February 17, 1892, Boone, sufficiently fortified
with his own brew, sauntered into the courthouse and taunted Beckham
... Both drew their pistols . . .Read
more Look inside
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 Mean
As Hell: The Life of a New Mexico Lawman
by Dee (Daniel R.) Harkey
Dee gives
a detailed account of his brother, Jim Harkey, and the gunfight at
Cotton Mott.
"In
February, 1878, Jim was killed up there by Jim Barbee. They were
living together in a log cabin with a stick and dirt chimney
...These boys were cowhands, and they rode drift line and ate
together, though they were working for different companies. The day
of the killing, they both got back to camp early and lay around the
camp. Barbee told Jim that day the reason he was out there was
because he had had a difficulty with his father and had tried to
stab him with a butcher knife. Jim had been chiding Barbee about
attempting to stab his father, and . . . . . .
Read more Look inside |
 Getting
Away with Murder on the Texas Frontier: Notorious Killings and
Celebrated Trials
"Fulcher's First appearance in recorded history
occurred sometime in 1886 when he and his wife, Minnie, showed up
dead broke in the West Texas Counties of Dickens and Motley.
The Fulchers took advantage of the hospitality of three pioneer
homesteaders: B. F. Brock, F.M. Wells, and J. A. Askins and their
families. At some point Fulcher got into a bitter dispute with A.
Beemer, a Civil War veteran who worked as a blacksmith on the the
sprawling Matador Ranch . . ."
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 Bones
Hooks: Pioneer Negro Cowboy
Matthew 'Bones' Hooks was a true pioneer who not only
built a town, schools, and churches, but also broke down racial
barriers as one of the first black cowboys to work alongside whites
as a ranch hand. Found inside: "He later joined cattle drives to
Fort Worth and Kansas. He followed that up as manager of the Turkey
Track Division of the Matador Ranch in King and Motley
counties. "
Read more |
 Motley
County Roundup: Over 100 Years of Gathering in Texas
Motley County Roundup is a treasure trove of
historical information about life in this history-filled county in
the Rolling Plains region of Texas. Read about the people who
explored, fought, worked, lived, and died in the area from the early
1800s to the 1990s. Woven throughout are personal perspectives from
people who lived there, including those of the author, Motley County
native Marisue Burleson Potts, whose family was part of that history
. . .
Read more Look inside |
 Trail
Dustby Douglas
Meador
Meador
started his column, "Trail Dust," in his first paper. It attracted
interest in 1934 when it won an award as the best column in Texas It
has appeared in all types of publications from the Baptist Standard,
to books of quotations. Reader's Digest has used it three times. It
has appeared often in "Quote" Magazine and is used by many
newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, as well as nearby
country weeklies. It has won numerous state and regional awards as
an outstanding column . . .
Read more |
 Kit
Carson and the First Battle of Adobe Walls: A Tale of Two Journeys
by Alvin R. Lynn
Alvin R.
Lynn grew up on a farm along the Pease River in rural Motley
County, Texas. He is a retired social studies and science
teacher and coach. With a lifelong passion for archaeology and
history, he now serves as a steward for the Texas Historical
Commission. "On a late November morning in 1864, Col. Kit Carson
and his U.S. troops, under orders from the commander of the New
Mexico Military Department, attacked Kiowa Chief Dohasan’s winter
village in the Texas Panhandle. Warriors retaliated with stiff
resistance as their women and children escaped. Fighting proceeded
down the Canadian River . . .
Read more |
 The
Texas Rangers in Transition: From Gunfighters to Criminal
Investigators, 1921–1935
Found inside: "In Motley County, Constable
Leroy Franklin "Lee" Stegall, the brother of Sheriff P. Stegal of
Floyd County, was shot to death on November 28, 1927, just two weeks
after his appointment. He was driving home when he was ambushed. He
was found slumped over the steering wheel of his car stopped
diagonally along the highway . . . "
Read more Look inside |
 Ridgely
Greathouse: Confederate, Conspirator, Convict,
and Capitalist
by Marisue Burleson Potts
Marisue Burleson Potts grew up on
a ranch near Matador, Texas, where her
father and grandfather ran herds of Hereford
cattle. She is a founding board member of the
Motley County Historical Museum, Matador; the
Comanchero Canyons Museum, Quitaque, Texas; and
the Canyonlands Archeological Society of Matador
and Quitaque. . . .
Read more Look
inside |
 Life
in the Saddle
Englishman Frank Collinson went
to Texas in 1872, when he was seventeen, to work
on Will Noonan’s ranch near Castroville. He
lived the rest of his life in the southwestern
United States, and at the age of seventy-nine
began writing about the Old West he knew and
loved.
"I located and killed the
last small bunch of buffalo--about twenty-five
cows and calves and a few yearlings--east of our
camp. The skinners and White heard me shooting
and came with the wagon. I didn't take us long
to skim them. Those were the last buffalo that
we killed in Motley County . . ."
Read more Look inside |
 The
Last Comanche Chief: The Life and Times of Quanah Parker
"Next, he moved his troops to a campsite near what is
now Matador, Texas, where the soldiers received a long-needed boost
in morale in the form of mail, rations, and forage brought by a
wagon escorted by troopers. The night of October 23 the men camped
on the Freshwater Fork of the the Brazos . . . . . . "
Read more Look inside |
Thinkin'
It Over
by Jack Douglas
Jack Douglas worked for Matador Cattle Company (at Matador),
the Upper Matadors (which became Quien Sabe Ranch at
Charming, Tx), Jack Frost Bandy Ranch (north of Rotan, Tx),
the Yellowhouse Ranch (northwest of Levelland, Tx), spent a
brief time with the Scharbauer Ranch (Adrian, Tx) and
Renfrow's (at Charming). He now ranches in Hockley and
Bailey Counties . . . Read
more |
 Dear Ones at Home: Bud Smith’s Correspondence Home to
West Texas during WWI
An
antique trunk filled with family treasures is passed down
for generations. After it is opened by the newest generation
of owners, a stack of letters over a century old written to
family in Whiteflat Texas in Motley County is rediscovered.
At the risk of disintegrating, the new owners preserve them
by photographing and transcribing them. Dear
Ones at Home is a tribute to the man who wrote these letters
and to the family who lovingly kept them in the trunk they
passed down through the generations . . .
Read more |
The
Border and the Buffalo: An Untold Story of the Southwest
Plains
In presenting these Reminiscences to the
reader the author wishes to say that they were written and
compiled by an uneducated man, who was 63 years of age in
1901. The tragic deaths seen by the author in dance-hall and
saloon have been omitted, in this work. But to that band of
hardy, tireless hunters that helped, as all army officers
declared, more to settle the vexed Indian question in the
five years of the greatest destruction of wild animals in
the history of the world’s hunting, the author especially
devotes that portion of the book pertaining to the buffaloes
. . . Read more |
 Ella
Elgar Bird Dumont: An Autobiography of a West Texas Pioneer
A crack shot, expert skinner and tanner, seamstress, sculptor,
and later writer—a list that only hints at her intelligence and abilities—Ella
Elgar Bird Dumont was one of those remarkable women who helped tame the Texas
frontier. First married at sixteen to a Texas Ranger, she followed her husband
to Comanche Indian country in King County, where they lived in a tepee while
participating in the final slaughter of the buffalo. Living off the land . . .
Read more Look inside 24 references to
Motley County |
 The
Train to Estelline
The Lucinda “Lucy” Richards trilogy, spanning the
years from 1911 to the 1930s, has everything good books should have:
a variety of landscapes, characters of all ages and social classes,
an overall tenderness that never lapses into sentimentality, and a
sense of the comic amidst the tragic. “I have longed for a wider
world, a great adventure. And now it’s here. I’m so happy I can
hardly breathe.” So ends seventeen-year-old Lucinda Richards’ diary
entry for August 17, 1911, starting her job as the new school
teacher for the White Star school in the Panhandle . . .
Read more Look inside |
 Lela
and Joe
Lela Belle's Christian
beliefs supported Prohibition. Joe Callaway's ambivalence toward faith shocks
his family. But when Lela and Joe meet, their love is instantaneous.
"Although milk cows
and swine were prohibited in the city limits of Matador, many people kept
chickens for for fresh eggs. "Joseph William! Why guineas? I can't stand the
noise!" She hated leaving Matador and quickly picked up on any
disadvantage she might imagine about the new place". . .
Read more |
 Last
of the Old-Time Outlaws: The George West Musgrave Story
"Following his adventures with the Christian gang, Holbrook, Joe
Beckham (the former sheriff of Motley County, Texas, who had killed his
successor, Sheriff Cook) and the deadly Hill Loftus joined with Red Buck
Weightman to form a gang in western Oklahoma. Following a December holdup of the
post office at Waggoner's, northeast of Wichita Falls . . . "
Read more Look inside |
 Saddling
Up Anyway: The Dangerous Lives of Old-Time Cowboys
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:
"Tom Ford and Claud Jefferies working with a bronc on the Mattador
Ranch in Texas in 1905 as an unidentified cowhand looks on. "
Read more Look inside |
 News
from Down to the Cafe: New Poems
By David
Lee
David Lee was born in Matador,
Texas. He played semiprofessional baseball as the only white player
to ever play for the Negro League Post Texas Blue Stars and was a
knuckleball pitcher for the South Plains Texas League Hubbers. These
poems are rooted in stories overheard at the Wayburne Pig Cafe. They
capture a rural community's true voice, peppered with gossip and
arguments right off Main Street. It was nominated for the
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry . . .
Read more Look inside |
 Quanah
Route: A History of the Quanah, Acme, & Pacific Railway
The Iron Horse forever changed the American West, from a wild
frontier to a network of scattered settlements tied together by steel rails.
Behind the romantic image of the galloping Iron Horse, however, lies a rich
history of American business activity. Railway giants have dominated this
history, but small companies such as the Quanah, Acme & Pacific Railway Company
(QA&P), a short line that operated in Hardeman, Motley, Floyd and Cottle
Counties in northwestern Texas from near the turn of the century into the 1980s,
had just as great an impact in their areas of operation as the giants did on the
national scene . . . Read more |
 A
Walk Across Texas
Part travelogue, part natural
history, and part documentary, A Walk across
Texas is the record of three friends’ journey
from the Panhandle to Granbury—a 450-mile walk
across West Texas.
"... walk to Matador, some
twenty-eight miles away. We had walked fourteen
of those miles yesterday and figured that we
would not have any trouble reaching the town
today . . . "
Read more Look inside |
 Cowboy
Spurs and Their Makers
"By the time they reached the
Caprock and Motley County, they were footsore
and hungry, so they put down their stakes at the
settlement of Quitaque. An indispensable
part of any frontier town was the blacksmith
shop, and young Bass opened his first shop at
Quitaque in 1897 ... Wallie blacksmithed at the
village of Whiteflat in Motley County in the
1930s before he opened his Spur factory" .
. . Read more |
 The
Great Plains during World War II
Emphasizing the region’s social and economic history,
The Great Plains during World War II is the first book to examine
the effects of the war on the region and the responses of its
residents.
"By late
1943 Great Plains ranchers experienced a shortage of cowhands as a
result of the draft, enlistments, and flight to higher pay wartime
jobs. In December the Matador Land and Cattle Company had five
thousand calves unbranded owing to the labor shortage . . ."
Read
more Look inside |
The
early history of Motley County
January 1, 1958
by Harry H Campbell |
Rich
Grass and Sweet Water
Ranch Life With the Koch Matador Cattle Company |
The
Matador Land and Cattle Company
by William Martin Pearce (1964) |
 Solon Love Owens, Texas Cowboy
by Augusta Owens Smith
An
interesting story of life on a Texas ranch told by the
daughter of Solon Love Owens born in 1894 including
remembrances of his father, James W. Owens, born in 1855 . .
.
Read more |
 Dark
Journey Deep Grace: Jeffrey Dahmer's Story of Faith
by Roy Ratcliff
Roy Ratcliff was born
in Matador, Texas in 1948. This is his story of how he became Jeffrey
Dahmer's death row minister and what he learned about America's most notorious
serial killer. Told by a man who at first tried to avoid meeting Jeffrey Dahmer,
but later became his friend and showed him the light of Gods love . . .
Read more |
The
Last Stage To Matador-- Touching Lives Along The Way
The Stagecoach. It was ruggedly built--for
the land it crossed demanded it be so--and filled with
passengers of diverse origins, all following the same dream,
and loaded with bags of letters bringing glad tidings to
some recipients, and heartbreak to others. This book vividly
documents the Journey Stagecoach hitched to a team of four
magnificent bays as it once again sets out to deliver pen
pal letters across the old west Texas Panhandle, crossing
the historic Matador Ranch, the legendary JA Ranch . . .
Read more |
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