Land of the High Sky Griffin, John Howard

Description

Once the home of the buffalo, the mustang and the lordly Comanche, the Midland Country of West Texas has been the site of human drama on a large and often violent scale. When the Anglo-Texans, after years of bloody conflict, finally wrested the land from the Indians, the high flat prairies became the home of cowboys and ranchers with their carefully-bred cattle. Midland was the school center for the area. Great ranches developed and the town became a cattle-shipping center. Later, with the discovery of oil the little cowtown grew into a cosmopolitan city – center of the immense Permian Basin oil empire. Mr. Griffin presents not only a chronological history, but detailed accounts of the daily life, foods and customs of the various periods and of the civilizations that have inhabited the area. The reader crosses the Plains with Marcy in 1849 and experiences the murder and scalping of Lieutenant Harrison by the Indians. He participates in setting up a Comanche Camp at Mustang Springs. He goes on the first cattle drives across the hostile Plains, witnesses the Indian attack against Oliver Loving and later he winters alone with a cowboy at an isolated little camp, or comes into the growing cowtown to help the men take in some tenderfeet with the badger game. He hears the sounds of the cowtown in its festive and tragic moods. He watches the town fight to grow, to remain high class and to prosper. And finally, he witnesses the dramatic revolution brought on by the discovery of oil, the transformation that occurs with sudden great growth and the manner in which the cattlemen and oil solved the problems of rapid expansion. This is an epic of the land and of its effects, good and bad, on the people, and of their effects, good and bad, on it.