Tales and trails of twentieth-century Texas ranches

The Big Ranch Country (paper)

J. W. Williams, with introduction by Lawrence Clayton

J. W. Williams’s classic survey of the big ranches of the Southwest reaches deep into the stories of key players in American ranching history. Colorful tales of the finest cutting horse, the meanest cow theif, the most princely cowman of them all--even the hair-raising details of gunplay with a badman whose name cannot be revealed--are told in bare-knuckle fashion that leaves no cushion to soften the truth.

This is an account of many journeys by car down roads that led to roundup grounds and to chuck with the cowboys; to the ranch homes of those who built the great cattle empires; to the Burnetts, the Spurs, the Pitchforks, and the Matadors; and to many points along the way where ranching history was made. A master storyteller, Williams connects these sites to living legends of the cattle and beef industry. He spent the night beneath the stars in Colonel Goodnight’s Palo Duro Canyon, drove across the state line near the original XIT fence northwest of Amarillo, and glided along the base of the impressive Sawtooth Mountain for out in the Reynolds’ Kingdom of the Long X, half a hundred miles west of Fort Davis.

The Big Ranch Country reaches far up into the Texas Panhandle, deep into the Big Bend of Trans-Pecos Texas, and down south to the great ranch empires of the Texas coast. Williams was the first to publish maps of most of the great Texas ranches and tells many of little-known stories of the land that once was home to Boley Brown, the prince of good neighbors; Quakers who moved to the plains to escape the wicked world; and the Hank Smiths, whose famous old rock house was once the last “outpost of civilization.”

The greatest merits of The Big Ranch Country are its personal, almost conversational style, and the very fact that it is dated.... [M]odern-day realities do not impose themselves on this nostalgic work. —Ty Cashion

A valuable addition to the collector of Texana and to the mid-century reader who might have wondered just where the large range properties are and how they got that way. —Southwestern Historical Quarterly

J. W. Williams chronicled the ranches of West Texas and the Panhandle as he encountered them in the 1940s and 1950s. The Big Ranch Country was first published in 1954 and was reissued by Texas Tech University Press in 1999.

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