What makes a Texan tick? The answer can be found, not in military and political histories, but in the social history of the people of Texas-the story of their long, heroic battle to conquer challenging conditions as America's frontier pushed westward.

Pioneer settlers grappled with summer droughts and winter blizzards, often fighting for their lives against Comanche Indians or wild animals. Unknown diseases killed the livestock. Prairie fires destroyed fields and pastures, and clouds of grasshoppers devoured crops. To beat these odds, early settlers had to be as tough as the rawhide they braided into quirts or lariats-for only the strong survived.

All Texans shared in the hard life of the frontier. Picture, if you will, a circuit-riding preacher swimming his horse across swollen streams to conduct a camp meeting. A doctor as he rides fifty miles or more through rough country to set a broken bone or deliver a baby, or a schoolteacher risking her life to protect her pupils during an Indian raid. Or a newspaper editor, shot in the back for telling the painful truth.

These-any many more-were the people who built Texas. Wayne Gard portrays them in informal sketches of pioneer life on the Texas frontier, illuminating the still-emerging Texas character. What makes a Texan tick? You'll find part of the answer in Rawhide Texas.

Wayne Gard was a longtime editorial writer for the Dallas Morning News. He was the author of seven volumes of Texana and Southwestern history, including Frontier Justice and The Chisholm Trail, both published by the University of Oklahoma Press.