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With Washington on the Brazos: Cradle of the Texas Republic, noted historian Richard B. McCaslin recovers the history of an iconic Texas town. The story of the Texas Republic begins and ends at Washington, but the town's history extends much further. Texas leaders gathered in the new town on the west bank of the Brazos in March 1836 to establish a new republic. After approving a declaration of independence and constitution, they fled as Santa Anna's army approached. The government of the Republic of Texas returned there in 1842, but after the United States annexed Texas in 1846, Austin replaced Washington as the capital of the Lone Star State. The town became a thriving river port in the 1850s, when steamboat cargoes paid for many new buildings. But the community steeply declined when its leaders decided to rely on steamers rather than invest in a railroad line, although German immigrants and African American residents kept the town alive. Later, Progressive Era plans for historic tourism focused the town's central role in the Texas Republic brought renewed interest, and a state park was founded. The Texas centennial in 1936 and the hard work of citizens' organizations beginning in the 1950s transformed this park into Washington-on-the-Brazos, the state historic site that serves today as the primary focus for preserving the history of the Republic of Texas.
With Washington on the Brazos: Cradle of the Texas Republic, noted historian Richard B. McCaslin recovers the history of an iconic Texas town. The story of the Texas Republic begins and ends at Washington, but the town’s history extends much further. Texas leaders gathered in the new town on the west bank of the Brazos in March 1836 to establish a new republic. After approving a declaration of independence and constitution, they fled as Santa Anna's army approached. The government of the Republic of Texas returned there in 1842, but after the United States annexed Texas in 1846, Austin replaced Washington as the capital of the Lone Star State. The town became a thriving river port in the 1850s, when steamboat cargoes paid for many new buildings. But the community steeply declined when its leaders decided to rely on steamers rather than invest in a railroad line, although German immigrants and African American residents kept the town alive. Later, Progressive Era plans for historic tourism focused the town’s central role in the Texas Republic brought renewed interest, and a state park was founded. The Texas centennial in 1936 and the hard work of citizens’ organizations beginning in the 1950s transformed this park into Washington-on-the-Brazos, the state historic site that serves today as the primary focus for preserving the history of the Republic of Texas.
A history of Washington-on-the-Brazos, with emphasis on its importance during the days of the Texas Revolution and Republic.
Nature never intended the Brazos River for navigation, but before the coming of the railroads Brazos steamboats were a necessary, if always erratic, form of transport. And there were men to meet the challenge. One captain, heedless of shallows, shoals, snags, and falls, boasted that he could tap a keg and run a boat four miles on the suds. Based on rich archival sources, this authoritative and entertaining book tells of the men and boats that braved the river from the earliest days to the late 1890s. Steamboat captains and plantation aristocrats, business tycoons and empire builders, mud clerks and river rats, all were obsessed with a single idea: to open the Brazos for steamboats from its headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico. The river was dredged and snags were removed, boats were designed with shallow draft, and boat owner, captain, and pilot (often one and the same) pitted their skills against the river. But the Brazos was recalcitrant. Seasonal rises silted in manmade channels and left behind new snags to catch the unwary. And as railroads inched their way across the state, the need for river transport dwindled. Railroad bridges across the Brazos finally created barriers that even a steamboat riding a "red rise" could not negotiate. By the turn of the century, the dauntless Brazos paddlewheelers were only a memory, but, even today, the dream dies hard along the river.
In the 1950s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north-central Texas. For John Graves, this project meant that if the stream’s regimen was thus changed, the beautiful and sometimes brutal surrounding countryside would also change, as would the lives of the people whose rugged ancestors had eked out an existence there. Graves therefore decided to visit that stretch of the river, which he had known intimately as a youth. Goodbye to a River is his account of that farewell canoe voyage. As he braves rapids and fatigue and the fickle autumn weather, he muses upon old blood feuds of the region and violent skirmishes with native tribes, and retells wild stories of courage and cowardice and deceit that shaped both the river’s people and the land during frontier times and later. Nearly half a century after its initial publication, Goodbye to a River is a true American classic, a vivid narrative about an exciting journey and a powerful tribute to a vanishing way of life and its ever-changing natural environment.
Art Martínez de Vara’s Tejano Patriot: The Revolutionary Life of José Francisco Ruiz, 1783–1840 is the first full-length biography of this important figure in Texas history. Best known as one of two Texas-born signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence, Ruiz’s significance extends far beyond that single event. Born in San Antonio de Béxar into an upwardly mobile family, during the war for Mexican independence Ruiz underwent a dramatic transformation from a conservative royalist to one of the staunchest liberals of his era. Steeped in the Spanish American liberal tradition, his revolutionary activity included participating in three uprisings, suppressing two others, and enduring extreme personal sacrifice for the liberal republican cause. He was widely respected as an intermediary between Tejanos and American Indians, especially the Comanches. As a diplomat, he negotiated nearly a dozen peace treaties for Spain, Mexico, and the Republic of Texas, and he traveled to the Imperial Court of Mexico as an agent of the Comanches to secure peace on the northern frontier. When Anglo settlers came by the thousands to Texas after 1820, he continued to be a cultural intermediary, forging a friendship with Stephen F. Austin, but he always put the interests of Béxar and his fellow Tejanos first. Ruiz had a notable career as a military leader, diplomat, revolutionary, educator, attorney, arms dealer, author, ethnographer, politician, Indian agent, Texas ranger, city attorney, and Texas senator. He was a central figure in the saga that shaped Texas from a remote borderland on New Spain’s northern frontier to an independent republic.
With engaging text, extensive quotations, and more than 100 striking photographs, this volume captures the world of the iconic Texas Revolutionary. When Sam Houston crossed the Red River for the first time in 1832, he termed Texas the “finest portion of the Globe that has ever blessed my vision.” His diplomatic, military, political, and personal activities took him all over what is now the eastern half of the state—and he fell in love with every foot of it. With panoramic vision and broad descriptive power, he expressed his lasting affection for the country in everything he said and wrote. Having followed the trail of every trip he made in Texas, Sue Flanagan presents the Texas Houston knew—through his picturesque language and her own evocative photographs. The face of Texas east of San Antonio is pictured in all its varied features. With great discernment, Flanagan captures the landscapes, buildings, and objects in the most revealing light and in the best atmospheric conditions. These spots in nature which Houston saw, these objects which he knew, these houses where he was entertained and where he lived—all are tangible reminders of “this colorful, cagey, and controversial man,” this Texas hero whose life was a tragedy in divided loyalties.