The Red River Bridge War

Winner, 2017 Oklahoma Book Award, sponsored by the Oklahoma Center for the Book Winner, 2016 Outstanding Book on Oklahoma History, sponsored by the Oklahoma Historical Society At the beginning of America’s Great Depression, Texas and Oklahoma armed up and went to war over a 75-cent toll bridge that connected their states across the Red River. It was a two-week affair marked by the presence of National Guardsmen with field artillery, Texas Rangers with itchy trigger fingers, angry mobs, Model T blockade runners, and even a costumed Native American peace delegation. Traffic backed up for miles, cutting off travel between the states. This conflict entertained newspaper readers nationwide during the summer of 1931, but the Red River Bridge War was a deadly serious affair for many rural Americans at a time when free bridges and passable roads could mean the difference between survival and starvation. The confrontation had national consequences, too: it marked an end to public acceptance of the privately owned ferries, toll bridges, and turnpikes that threatened to strangle American transportation in the automobile age. The Red River Bridge War: A Texas-Oklahoma Border Battle documents the day-to-day skirmishes of this unlikely conflict between two sovereign states, each struggling to help citizens get goods to market at a time of reduced tax revenue and little federal assistance. It also serves as a cautionary tale, providing historical context to the current trend of re-privatizing our nation’s highway infrastructure.

Winner, 2017 Oklahoma Book Award, sponsored by the Oklahoma Center for the Book Winner, 2016 Outstanding Book on Oklahoma History, sponsored by the Oklahoma Historical Society At the beginning of America’s Great Depression, Texas and Oklahoma armed up and went to war over a 75-cent toll bridge that connected their states across the Red River. It was a two-week affair marked by the presence of National Guardsmen with field artillery, Texas Rangers with itchy trigger fingers, angry mobs, Model T blockade runners, and even a costumed Native American peace delegation. Traffic backed up for miles, cutting off travel between the states. This conflict entertained newspaper readers nationwide during the summer of 1931, but the Red River Bridge War was a deadly serious affair for many rural Americans at a time when free bridges and passable roads could mean the difference between survival and starvation. The confrontation had national consequences, too: it marked an end to public acceptance of the privately owned ferries, toll bridges, and turnpikes that threatened to strangle American transportation in the automobile age. The Red River Bridge War: A Texas-Oklahoma Border Battle documents the day-to-day skirmishes of this unlikely conflict between two sovereign states, each struggling to help citizens get goods to market at a time of reduced tax revenue and little federal assistance. It also serves as a cautionary tale, providing historical context to the current trend of re-privatizing our nation’s highway infrastructure.

Appointed by President Lincoln to command the Gulf Department in November 1862, Nathaniel Prentice Banks was given three assignments, one of which was to occupy some point in Texas. He was told that when he united his army with Grant’s, he would assume command of both. Banks, then, had the opportunity to become the leading general in the West—perhaps the most important general in the war. But he squandered what successes he had, never rendezvoused with Grant’s army, and ultimately orchestrated some of the greatest military blunders of the war. “Banks’s faults as a general,” writes author Stephen A. Dupree, “were legion.” The originality of Planting the Union Flag in Texas lies not just in the author’s description of the battles and campaigns Banks led, nor in his recognition of the character traits that underlay Banks’s decisions. Rather, it lies in how Dupree synthesizes his studies of Banks’s various actions during his tour of duty in and near Texas to help the reader understand them as a unified campaign. He skillfully weaves together Banks’s various attempts to gain Union control of Texas with his other activities and shines the light of Banks’s character on the resulting events to help explain both their potential and their shortcomings. In the end, readers will have a holistic understanding of Banks’s “appalling” failure to win Texas and may even be led to ask how the post–Civil War era might have been different had he been successful. This fine study will appeal to Civil War buffs and fans of military and Texas history.

Spring of 1904. An inexperienced automobile driver jumps the curb and drives into the lobby of the St. George Hotel. The mayor orders a roundup of unlicensed dogs due to a citywide outbreak of rabies. An elevator crushes the head of a young man as he retrieves a half dollar he had dropped down the shaft. Embers from a wood-burning stove transform a sleeping house into a funeral pyre. A ten-year-old boy in City Park has a spike driven into his temple by a playmate with a fence picket. All this in just a few days. Rusty Williams catalogues the heartbreaking and bizarre forms in which death stalked Dallas at the turn of the twentieth century.

Originally published: Atlanta, Ga.: Peachtree Publishers, 1981.

The Battle at Hurricane Bridge is an often overlooked Civil War action occurring at the small and otherwise quiet western Virginia village. For five hours behind the limited protection of an unfinished earthen fort, the green Union troops of the 13th West Virginia Volunteer Infantry under the command of Captain James Johnson, fought to hold off the hardened Confederate veterans of the 8th and 16th Virginia Cavalry commanded by Brigadier General Albert Gallatin Jenkins.Ultimately, the March 28, 1863, battle at Hurricane Bridge directly contributed to the Union army maintaining control of the James River & Kanawha Turnpike, a key supply line, and enabled Federal control of the Kanawha Valley for the remainder of the war.

William H. (Alfalfa Bill) Murray is the most important figure in the political history of Oklahoma. No other individual contributed so greatly to the formation of its political institutions—and there was never a more colorful or controversial character on the state’s political scene. Flamboyant, unpredictable, and stubborn, Alfalfa Bill became a legend. President of the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention, speaker of the first House of Representatives, two-term congressman, and governor of Oklahoma, the Texas-born Murray made an indelible mark on his adopted state. But he also made enemies. During the struggle for statehood he waged a hard battle over the constitution, taking on President Theodore Roosevelt and Secretary of War William Howard Taft. As Oklahoma governor, Murray challenged the oil industry, newspaper interests, and the state of Texas. To enforce his programs, he relied on the National Guard. While governor, Murray called out the guard forty-seven times for duties ranging from policing ticket sales at University of Oklahoma football games, to patrolling oil fields, to guarding the Red River Bridge during the infamous Bridge War with Texas. In 1932 he ran for the Democratic nomination for president, and his fame spread across the nation. When candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt offered a program for national recovery, Murray countered with “Bread, Butter, Bacon, and Beans.” In describing Murray’s frustrated efforts to preserve the agricultural American of the nineteenth century, Bryant has written a perceptive biography presenting the first clearly defined portrait of this determined but inflexible man.

In 1830s Canada, a thirteen-year-old Cree girl journeys westward from York Factory to the Red River valley, lured by a Norfolk trotter horse and determined to find her Scottish fur trader father.