Western Americana

The Briscoe Center has acquired significant collections that document the historical development of the western United States, with a special focus on the Rocky Mountain West. The majority of the center’s Western Americana Collection consists of some fifteen thousand volumes of rare books that were acquired from private collectors; they are supplemented by collections of archives and manuscripts, photographs, maps, newspapers, and ephemera. The center’s Western Americana Collection provides unique insights into the many themes of the region’s history, from Indigenous Americans, exploration, settlement, and conflict to more recent themes of politics and popular culture.

Rare Books and Manuscripts

Over several decades, the Briscoe Center acquired major collections from Frank Kell, Earl Vandale, Earl A. Brininstool, and Edward Eberstadt, four private collectors of rare books and manuscripts.

Frank Kell Collection

The Frank Kell Collection, which was obtained during the 1940s, was the personal library of a highly successful railroad entrepreneur from Wichita Falls. With more than five thousand books, the collection is rich in Texas and Western frontier history, including information about adventurers, Indigenous Americans, trails, railroads, border warfare, cowboys, cattlemen, industry and commerce, and other themes. The collection also features a number of books on Mormon history, including Samuel Bowes’s Across the Continent: A Stage Ride over the Plains to the Rocky Mountains, the Mormons, and the Pacific States (1869) and Maria Ward’s Female Life among the Mormons: A Narrative of Many Years’ Personal Experience, by the Wife of a Mormon Elder (1855). The Kell Library Fund supports the purchase of additions to the collection.

Earl Vandale Collection

During the 1940s, the university began acquiring the rich and varied collection of Amarillo attorney and bibliophile Earl Vandale. Focusing on Western themes like fur trading, exploration, frontier defense and Indian wars, the cattle kingdom, and outlaws and peace officers, the Vandale Collection also contains two thousand items of Texana. Of particular interest are Peter Gallagher’s journal of the Texan Santa Fe Expedition of 1841 and his confinement in Perote Prison, and a 1917 letter from John W. Poe to cattleman Charles Goodnight describing the killing of Billy the Kid.

Earl Alonzo Brininstool Collection

Earl Alonzo Brininstool was a writer and collector of nineteenth-century Western American history. His extensive collection, which the university acquired in the 1960s, includes significant documentation of the U.S. Army’s Indian War campaigns. The materials contain first-hand accounts of General George Armstrong Custer’s disastrous campaign at Little Big Horn in 1876; the pursuit and surrender of Apache leader Geronimo; the deaths of Crazy Horse and Santana; and the surrender of Sitting Bull, the last Sioux to surrender to the U.S. government. The Brininstool Collection also features materials on other legendary figures of the American West. A memoir by Martha Cannary, better known as Calamity Jane, traces her life from childhood through marriage, including her work as a scout for Custer, her exploits as a Pony Express rider on one of the roughest routes in the Black Hills, her career as a sharp-shooter with Wild West shows, and her friendship with gunfighter Wild Bill Hickock. There are narratives and letters regarding Hickock’s exploits as well as his certificate of marriage in 1876 to Agnes Thatcher, complete with individual portraits of the couple. There is even a strand of Hickock’s hair, which allegedly was cut from his head after he was shot to death in 1876.

Edward Eberstadt Collection

The Eberstadt Collection is composed of a wide array of books, broadsides, and maps that New York bookseller Edward Eberstadt and his sons assembled over a seventy-five-year period. In 1975 the renowned Austin bookseller and publisher John H. Jenkins purchased the collection, which by that time was considered the best private library of Western Americana in existence. Jenkins then sold the materials on Texas and the American Southwest to the university, where they greatly enhanced the Briscoe Center’s collections in the field. Included are more than two thousand leaves of manuscripts and some three thousand volumes of books, pamphlets, and imprints dealing specifically with the exploration and development of the West and Southwest. Items in the collection include a manuscript report on the Franciscan missions of Texas that Father Antonio Margil de Jesús wrote in 1725 and a 1914 New Mexico court case concerning the use of the Rio Grande for irrigation.

Indigenous American History

In addition to numerous rare books on western tribes, several collections reveal important facets of Indigenous American history. The William S. Soule Indians Photograph Album features portraits of important Comanche, Kiowa, and Kiowa Apache chiefs and families as well as camp scenes that were taken in and around Fort Sill between 1869 and 1876. The Elizabeth Ross Clarke Narrative gives a pioneer woman’s perspective on the Texas frontier from 1838 to 1898, with much discussion of Indian raids and other dangers and hardships. A set of letters written in 1909 by Quanah Parker—who was the son of captive Cynthia Ann Parker as well as the last Quahada Comanche chief—appeals to a Texas rancher and the legislature for permission to allow his people to return and hunt in Texas.

The “West of the imagination”

The Briscoe Center’s Western Americana holdings include the papers of the prominent university historians Walter Prescott  Webb and William H. Goetzmann, both of whom addressed broad themes of Western history in their many publications. Both collections contain published and unpublished manuscripts, background research, correspondence, and other materials relating especially to their seminal works: Webb’s The Great Plains (1931) and The Great Frontier (1952) and Goetzmann’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Exploration and Empire (1966) and The West of the Imagination (1986).

One of the great themes of Western history is the cattle industry, which spread mostly from Texas through the Plains states and the Rocky Mountain West. The Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association Records (1877–1968) cover nearly a century of that association’s history. Reports, legislation, photographs, printed material, and maps spell out the workings of the organization, which was the largest of its kind in the United States. The John Reagan Papers contain important material on both the cattle and mining industries of New Mexico, and the Margaret Borland Papers feature the legal and financial records of the first woman to lead a cattle drive to Kansas.

Frontier Fiction, Cowboy Ballads, Boots, and Maps

The “West of the imagination” has long spurred creative writing for popular readership. The Briscoe Center’s resources in the field include a collection of “dime novels”—a genre that encompasses a wide array of popular fiction about the frontier—that date from the latter half of the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The archive includes the Beadle & Adams 20 Cent Novels, De Witt’s Ten Cent Romances, the Buffalo Bill Stories, the White-headed Hunter, and other titles, as well as works that examine that type of literature. In 1982 Joe Small, an Austin writer and the publisher of True West magazine, donated his archive to the center. True West is a Western nonfiction publication that Small launched in 1953, the same year in which he acquired Frontier Times. Other titles in the collection include Wanderlust, Gold!, Badman, Best of True West, Horse Tales, Old West, Western Sportsman, and Frontier Times. Both True West and Frontier Times feature writing by J. Frank Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb, and Fred Gipson of Old Yeller fame. Finally, the papers of Kerrville, Texas, newspaper editor Jesse Edward Grinstead document his creative writing, notably his novels and the stories he published in Argosy and All Western Magazine.

In 1910 folklorist and university alumnus John A. Lomax published the results of his early cowboy ballad collecting in Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, which features an enthusiastic preface by Theodore Roosevelt. The John A. Lomax Family Papers, which came to the university in 1948, contain extensive files, research notes, and correspondence on all of Lomax’s work in collecting and preserving the ballads of the West and other regions. The popular singing cowboy Bill Boyd is one Texas musician who was inspired by Lomax’s cowboy ballads. Boyd was one of the most popular artists for the RCA Victor label throughout the 1930s and ’40s, and he starred in six Hollywood Western films. The Bill Boyd Papers, which were acquired in the 1970s, feature contracts, correspondence, songbooks, sheet music, movie stills, and posters. The materials shed much light on the relationship between musical artists and the music industry as well as the development of musical styles and imagery, as in the case of the singing movie cowboy.

The Briscoe Center’s collections of Western Americana feature many other special facets of Western history and culture. For example, the Lucchese Boot Company Records document the history of that famous San Antonio firm, which was known for the outstanding quality and design of its Western footwear.

Finally, the center houses more than thirty-five thousand maps dating from 1513 to the present that depict Texas and the American Southwest. Two of the most significant are Alexander von Humboldt’s Map of New Spain (1811) and Stephen F. Austin’s manuscript Mapa Geográfico de la Provincia de Tejas (1822).

The resources in the Western Americana Collection span a period of five centuries and embrace a wide diversity of themes and formats. With their unique information and insights into the region’s history, they offer a rich resource for scholars and the general public alike.