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Bedichek’s most significant book has outlived most of those written by his contemporaries J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb

Texas’ “Poet President” deserves better from history than he gets.

China’s first emperor built a clay army to protect him in the afterlife.

Bring ‘em back alive.” That was the golden rule of wildlife adventurer Frank Buck. The native Texan practiced what he preached in Borneo, Malaya, Sumatra and other exotic locales, capturing hundreds of thousands of animals for zoos, circuses and private collectors. Buck, whose exploits were recounted in books, movies and radio programs, became as renowned…

In 1848, shortly after Mexico surrendered its claim to Texas, an American trader and freighter traveled the brutal road through the Chihuahuan Desert to the Presidio del Norte, the most remote outpost of the Mexican empire. He was Benjamin Leaton, and he found himself in a tiny, struggling frontier pueblo, “a miserable, Indian-blighted place.” Leaton…