THE hundred-year history of the Renderbrook Spade Ranch mirrors the history of ranching in West Texas, tracing ranching's evolution from an open-range, Longhorn-dominated industry to today's forward-looking specialized operations which survive by using state-of-the-art technology in genetics, nutrition, marketing and range science. The story is one of slow but steady progress from the horse-and-wagon era to the age of computers, crossbreeding and embryo transplants. But the Spade is also unique. Its history is strongly tied to the development of barbed wire, that Yankee invention that forever changed the face of ranching in Texas. Established as an investment for earnings that barbed wire had brought to Illinois farmer-entrepreneur Isaac Ellwood, the ranch still belongs to Ellwood descendents. It is one of the few begun during the period between the Civil War and the turn of the century that remains in family hands by the 1980s. In his foreword to this lively and fascinating history of a ranch and the people who made it, Elmer Kelton writes "That [the Spade] continues into a second century under the same family's ownership is a tribute to that family and to the many loyal employees whose labor, intelligence and devotion have kept it afloat during drouths and depressions that brought ruin to many similar ranches."

Renderbrook: A Century Under the Spade Brand

History

Kelton, Steve

Americas

Texas Christian Univ Pr

TCU Press

<p>About the Author\nSTEVE KELTON is retired from the San Angelo-based Livestock Weekly, where he spent 42 years, the last 25 as editor. A West Texas native, he is a son of the late Western novelist and livestock journalist Elmer Kelton. During his youth, Steve spent as much time as possible on the McElroy Ranch in West Texas’s Crane and Upton counties. Managed by his grandfather, Buck Kelton, the McElroy was where Elmer and his brothers grew up. Aside from journalism, Steve is the author of the nonfiction books Renderbrook, A Century Under The Spade Brand, a history of the Renderbrook Spade ranch in West Texas; and Grassroots Legacy, a commissioned history of the Texas Farm Bureau’s first 50 years. He lives in San Angelo with his wife.\nElmer Kelton (1926-2009) was the award-winning author of more than forty novels, including The Time It Never Rained, Other Men’s Horses, Texas Standoff and Hard Trail to Follow. He grew up on a ranch near Crane, Texas, and earned a journalism degree from the University of Texas. His first novel, Hot Iron, was published in 1956. Among his awards were seven Spurs from Western Writers of America and four Western Heritage awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. His novel The Good Old Boys was made into a television film starring Tommy Lee Jones. In addition to his novels, Kelton worked as an agricultural journalist for 42 years. He served in the infantry in World War II. He died in 2009.\nElmer Kelton’s Hewey Calloway, one of the best-loved cowboys in all of Western fiction, returns in this novel of his middling years, as he looks for work―but not too much work―in 1904 West Texas.\nHewey Calloway is heading north to Colorado, on a horse drive for an old friend, Alvin Lawdermilk, when he gets word that one of his hired hands is planning to rob him. After the plot is foiled, the fugitive horsehand is on the run and leaving bodies in his wake.\nDeputized to help bring the criminal to justice, Hewey is bestowed with a weight of responsibility that he's long avoided. Never known for his skill―or lack thereof―with a pistol, he can only pray that he and retired Texas Ranger Hanley Baker will be enough to put an end to this trail of dastardly deeds.\nSteve Kelton's The Unlikely Lawman will transport you to an Old West full of duplicity, gunfights, and the often-unforgiving hardships of frontier life.</p>

Elmer Kelton's The Unlikely Lawman: A Hewey Calloway Adventure (Hewey Calloway, 4)

Literature & Fiction

United States

Forge Books

A Grassroots Heritage: Texas Farm Bureau's Six Decades of Service

Texas Farm Bureau

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