Taming the Land: The Lost Postcard Photographs of the Texas High Plains

A postcard craze gripped the nation from 1905 to 1920, as the rise of outdoor photography coincided with a wave of settlement and prosperity in Texas. Hundreds of people took up cameras, and photographers of note chose some of their best work for duplication as photo postcards - sold for a nickel and mailed for a penny to distant friends and relatives. These postcards, which now enjoy another kind of craze in the collecting world, left what author John Miller Morris calls a ‘significant visual legacy’ of the history and social geography of Texas. For more than a decade, Morris has been finding and studying the photographers and methodically gathering their postcards. In Taming the Land , he shares those finds with readers, introducing each photographer and providing interpretive descriptions of the places, people, or events depicted in the photographs. The stories the cards tell - in the images captured and the messages carried - add an exceptional dimension to our understanding of life in rural Texas a century ago. Taming the Land presents postcards from twenty-four counties in the booming Texas Panhandle. This is the first book in a set called Plains of Light , which will collect and document turn-of-the-twentieth-century photo postcards from all over West Texas. Plains of Light: The Pioneer Postcard Photographers of West Texas is a set of books in the Clayton Wheat Williams Texas Life Series .