Under the Texas Sun: Adventures of a Texas Cowpuncher (Wardlaw Books)

If Mark Twain had written about Texas, this might have been his book. A young boy, thrown into his mother's family when his father dies of Civil War wounds, early grows to be a young man herding cows on Texas' frontier ranges. But it is not Mark Twain's story; it is Malcolm Graham Vernon's, delightfully and poignantly retold by his granddaughter. When "Mac" Vernon's widowed mother returned with her brood to "the Family" in East Texas, her father assumed stern control. Ku Klux Klan meetings, a flight from the Reconstruction army, and building a life on a series of frontier farms provided ample occasion for a young boy's antics to prepare him far manhood. At fifteen, Mac thought he had graven up, thought of himself as an experienced cowhand. Bidding his gentle but proud mother good-bye, he struck out to the west, to be a "real" cowboy. Hired on at the Half Circle Six near San Angelo, Vernon worked for the next eight years as a ranch hand, branding cows, riding night guard around milling -sometimes stampeding-cattle, and working on the stillopen ranges. He brashly recovered stolen stock from a thieving army contractor, saw one man killed over a four-bit monte game and another over a bucket of buttermilk, and got to know the people and the ways of the West Texas range "as well as any man, I guess." "My grandfather," Anna Manns Dana writes in her preface "was a storyteller, and he must have been a spellbinder, for whenever any two members of his family or friends got together, at some point one would say, `Remember Papa's story about ... ?"' From his leather-bound diaries, letters, records, and family memories, Dana has culled his best stories, enabling him once more to weave his spell -of humor and sorrow, childhood and range work, the stories of a young boy growing into manhood under the Texas sun. " . . . the stories are good enough to make you wish you'd heard them told aloud."—True West

" . . . offers insights into the lives of characters in a society far different from our own—mail-order brides, prostitutes, the Ku Klux Klan, and, for spice, a hermit who became a bank president—all riding the wave of the rough and tumble frontier. . . . "—Bloomsbury Review

Malcolm Vernon's stories—delightfully and poignantly retold by his granddaughter—are of a fifteen-year-old boy heading west alone, working the range, recovering stolen stock, seeing men killed over card games and buckets of buttermilk, and, most of all, growing to manhood on the Texas frontier.