Under the Texas sun

From the book jacket: If Mark Twain had written about Texas, this might have been his book. A young boy, thrown into his mother’s family when his father dies of Civil War wounds, early grows to be a young man herding cows on Texas’ frontier ranges. But it is not Mark Twain's story; it is Malcolm Graham Vernon's, delightfully and poignantly retold by his granddaughter. When “Mac" Vernon's widowed mother returned with her brood to “the Family" in East Texas. her father assumed stern control. Ku Klux Klan meetings, a flight from the Reconstruction army. and building a life on a series of frontier farms provided ample occasion for a young boy's antics to prepare him for manhood. At fifteen. Mac thought he had grown up, thought of himself as an experienced cowhand. Bidding his gentle but proud mother good-bye, he struck out to the west, to be a “real" cowboy. Hired on at the Half Circle Six near San Angelo. Vernon worked for the next eight years as a ranch hand. branding cows, riding night guard around milling--sometimes stampeding--cattle, and working on the still-open ranges. He brashly recovered stolen stock from a thieving army contractor, saw one man killed over a four-bit monte game and another over a bucket of buttermilk, and got to know the people and the ways of the West Texas range "as well as any man, I guess." "My grandfather,” Anna Manns Dana writes in her preface “was a Storyteller. and he must have been a spellbinder, for whenever any two members of his family or friends got together, at some point one would say, “Remember Papa's story about . . . ?'" From his leather-bound diaries, letters, records, and family memories. Dana has culled his best stories, enabling him once more to weave his spell-- of humor and sorrow, childhood and range work, the stories of a young boy growing into manhood under the Texas sun. Anna Manns Dana was born in Strawn, Texas. in her grandfather's home. She grew up listening to his stories as he told them and, after his death, as his relatives and friends retold them. She holds a B.S. degree from Texas Woman's University and has pursued graduate studies there and at Texas Christian University. In addition to her life as wife and mother, she has worked as a seismologist for an oil company, an architectural draftsman, a mathematics teacher, and a portrait painter.