File:  <34mor.htm>     <Contact>

 

THE LURE OF TEXAS

(Hardcover - 1 Mar 2011)

 

Robert D. Morritt

 

Availability

 

          “The Lure of Texas” Provides the reader with an in-depth history of Texas.  Commencing at the Paleographical era, and describes the occupation of Texas by Spain, France and Mexico together with accounts of battles and incursions leading up to the Battle of the Alamo and to the establishment of Statehood.

 

          The book commences with descriptions of  archaic  hunters and food gatherers.also of  early mound-builder influence .Flint quarries discovered in the Panhandle to as far away as West Texas.  Paleo-Indian era evident from a Clovis campsite discovered in Denton County circa 8000 BCE.

 

          The arrival of Spanish  and of  Cabeza de Vaca   a member of a Spanish expedition who became  shipwrecked on the Texas coast around 1528  and swam to shore and lived as a slave of an Indian group, who later escaped into the interior and  became  both a trader and a medicine man. Of Francisco Vazquez de Coronado in his search for the mythical "Seven Cities of Gold" and De Niza who set out on his famous expedition in 1539, giving the earliest descriptions of people in the Southwest.

 

          The Spanish Mission c.1655 built near Corpus Christi de la Isleta  and of Father Massanet who founded San Francisco de los Tejas, in the year 1690  the first Mission in East Texas,  of the French who built a Fort at Biloxi Bay in 1690. Also described are the the  Comanche raids on Missions in 1758. and of  French territory west of the Mississippi River ceded by France to Spain after the French-Indian Wars (1754-1763).

 

          The Anglo-American settlers in the 1820’s and Moses and Stephen Austin, their colonization attempts espcially with many people from the new Louisiana Territory.  The book iincludes little known facts of thel first attempt to establish a Texan Republic, which predates the Battle of the Alamo. and views  the efforts of Lt.Fannin and his troops and includes  contempoary accounts of The Goliad massacre (at the Presido La Bahia) as witnessed  by the few that escaped.

 

          Also included is an overview of a sinister  Mexican ‘lottery’ held at  Saltino where  the life or death  of captured  American troops depended solely on which color bean was picked from a bowl.  provided by their captors. Also of  Stephen Austin, Jim Bowie, The  Battle  of the Alamo and  recent  discovery of  contemporary combatant’s diary giving an accurate description of the death of Crockett at the Alamo.

 

          The book concludes during  the pre-Statehood   period an affords the reader an opportunity to  travel  back in time to  eyewitness  the birth of modern Texas, won out of adversity  and includes  accounts of those who risked their lives to create  it.