Customer Reviews

Fort Worth: A Frontier Triumph

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This is an excellent book for anyone interested in the history of North Texas. The author was a trained historian and high school teacher who compiled her notes from a lifetime of research at the urging of a local publisher. She writes in a fast-paced style for the public, and captured the tales told by the major characters to their progeny while preserving the facts. I was fascinated to read of the division of the vote in Tarrant County on the issue of secession, and Sam Houston's effort to convince Texans not to join the Confederacy if they did indeed secede, but to return instead to their previous Republic. (Tarrant County did vote to secede by 28 votes out of approximately 800 cast.) Garrett tends to describe her subjects in a positive, hero-worshipping style, and she reveals her own unconscious racial bias in her chapter on Reconstruction, in which she describes the choices and behaviors of the recently freed ex-slaves with no empathy if they departed at all from the wishes of their former masters. It was also interesting to learn how early the very first cattle drives began through what would become "Cowtown." As a hometown reader, I was amused that she describes former locations in terms of locations from the '60s and '70s that now no longer exist! Amusing! In summary, I agree with a reviewer writing at the time of publishing: this author captured "the spirit" of the times. Highly recommended reading!