With more than 150 images, many never before published, historian Jerry Thompson tells the story of what Pulitzer Prize-winning historian William H. Goetzmann has called a "wild and vivid land”. From the Coahuiltecan Indians and the Spanish colonizers who clustered along the banks of the Rio Grande, to the cattlemen and oil wildcatters who conquered the brush country, Thompson details six centuries of exciting and entertaining history in a thoroughly researched and comprehensive text.