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John C. Dawson, Sr : High Plains Yesterdays: From XIT Days Through Drought and Depression

Eakin Press, Austin, Texas, 1985

ISBN 089015516X

8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. CG2 - A first edition (stated) hardcover book SIGNED and inscribed by John C. Dawson, Sr. to previous owner on the front free endpaper in very good condition that has some bumped corners, some light stains on the page edges, light discoloration and shelf wear with no dust jacket. 8.75"x5.75", 274 pages. Satisfaction Guaranteed. The northernmost portion of the Texas Panhandle, the Dalhart High Plains area, is perhaps best known for its legendary cold weather. With "only a barbed wire fence between it and the North Pole," as the saying goes. To many it is famed for the 3,000,000,000-acre XIT Ranch that was carved out of the Texas Public Domain as payment for construction of the State Capitol building at Austin, pursuant to a contract let in 1832. Buffalo Springs, thirty miles northwest of Dalhart, was the original headquarters of the ranch and many of the early residents of the Dalhart area spent their youthful years as cowboys on the ranch. This are lies north of the Canadian River and extends into Oklahoma and Kansas on the north and into New Mexico and Colorado on the west. It remained largely unsettled and unused public domain until the coming of the big ranches of the late 1800s. From about 1901 to about 1939, those living in this High Plains area witnessed and took part in its transition from a purely cattle-raising empire to a cattle and farming empire. Only venturesome, independent, and self-reliant people were sufficiently attracted by it to cast their fate with it. In High Plains Yesterdays, John C. Dawson, a retired Houston lawyer who grew up in the High Plains town of Dalhart, and observed these people during his formative childhood years, undertakes to capture the personalities and characters of some of these people and to make the reader intimately acquainted with them. Also, he undertakes to cause the uninitiated to know and feel some of the blizzards, sandstorms, droughts, and hot winds, and the contrasting clear, invigorating atmosphere, enormous skies and broad vistas, which the settlers enjoyed or proudly endured.. Book Condition: Very Good. Binding: Hardcover. Jacket: No Jacket

First Edition
Signed by Author

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