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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…

Covered by a tarp that flutters under a hot July sun, a half-dozen men and women, most of them graduate and undergraduate students at Texas Tech University, huddle in a cavity of West Texas earth that was once an ancient watering hole. In pairs or singly, the students scrape small areas of dirt, each about…

Along the Brazos River in southeast Bosque County, Albert Redder’s patient digging uncovered the small skull of a juvenile in the earth of a rock shelter. Redder and his friend Frank Watt, avocational archeologists who lived near Waco, had been excavating the site on weekends since 1967. During the summer of 1970, they made the…

The stars at night are big and bright …” Given that opening, almost any schoolchild in the state knows what comes next: Enthusiastic, rhythmic clapping and the hearty chorus “… deep in the heart of Texas!” That lively tribute to the Lone Star State’s wailing coyotes, blooming sage and the wide prairie sky, a rowdy…