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Reprint. Originally published: London: H. Cox, 1894.

The story of veterinary medicine is a story of the human-animal bond and of a very special kind of doctor who works at that interface. It is a story of science, of professionalism, of practical experience. In Texas--with the longest international boundary of any state, with a larger and more diverse animal population than most, and with one of the highest per capita level of pet ownership--the challenges and opportunities have been especially great. Whether dosing a herd of three-hundred-pound calves with oral medication or treating a baboon in a local zoo for a ruptured disk, the veterinarian must rely on professional training. Such training has been available in Texas since 1888, when Dr. Mark Francis, eventually one of the most distinguished practitioners in the United States, became head of the fledgling program at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas. Francis quickly established research and public health activities as companions to teaching at the school. To forge a working network and maintain standards, the state's veterinarians in 1903 formed the Texas Veterinary Medical Association (TVMA). From international campaigns to eradicate foot-and-mouth disease to ultra-sound applications for military working dogs and the examination of space-flight chimpanzees, the veterinary medicine profession in Texas has faced and met many challenges. It has expanded to practice medicine for the exotics imported into the state and to provide care for the companion animals increasingly bringing comfort to the elderly and disabled. Working from the archives of the TVMA and of Texas A&M University's College of Veterinary Medicine, the authors have recorded the history of the profession and its organizational arm in Texas. They have set it in the context of the national profession and of larger events in the society. Veterinary medicine, like human medicine, has undergone enormous change in the past century; this book tells the story of that change.

The proliferation of urban special-district governments by private means has far-reaching consequences for the public domain. The utility district is the most rapidly growing form of government in the United States today. There are almost one thousand of these units in Texas; nearly four hundred are in the greater Houston area alone. Utility districts have been the mechanism through which suburban development has occurred over the past three decades. Millions of people live within their jurisdiction, and virtually no one in the United States is unaffected by them, for their influence on the migration patterns from city to suburb has been enormous. Yet little is known about them, and even less has been written about their operations. This carefully documented study, which combines participant-observer research with statistical analyses and extensive interviewing, focuses on two water districts in Harris County to provide new understanding of how little governments function. Virginia Perrenod provides a well-reasoned theoretical explanation for the performance of special districts and draws provocative conclusions about their probable unwillingness to cooperate voluntarily to promote the welfare of the larger community. In a chapter that will be especially relevant for public officials at all levels, she proposes realistic measures to secure cooperation for the common good. This ground-breaking case study of special districts in one of America's largest and fastest-growing urban areas should stimulate further thought and research into the relationship between political structures and environmental and other public policies.

These essays, based on the 1980 Agricultural History Symposium held at Texas A&M University, spotlight the long-neglected area of agricultural development in the Southwest. Focusing on Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, the book traces the history of farming from the point of view of novelists, businessmen, archaeologists, cattlemen, scientists, and politicians. The twenty-six contributing authors lucidly discuss issues ranging from the secrets of pre-Columbian agriculture to the dilemmas of the county extension agent; from the thriving rice industry to the versatility of the chili pepper; from the struggles of farmer movements to the mushrooming of agribusiness. The symposium will appeal not only to agricultural historians and scientists but also to government agents working with farmers and to students of southwestern lore. The reader gains a fresh perspective on the crises and complexities of farming, from its earliest days to the present. These thoughtful selections promote a greater understanding of the diversity of southwestern agriculture and a heightened awareness of the rich cultural heritage of southwesterners

Texas' frontiers in the 1840s were buffeted by disputes with Mexico and attacks by Indian tribes who refused to give up their life-styles to make way for new settlers. To ensure some measure of peace in the far reaches of Texas, the U.S. Army established a series of military forts in the state. These outposts varied in size and amenities, but the typical installation was staffed with officers, enlisted men, medical personnel, and civilian laundresses. Many soldiers brought their families to the frontier stations. While faced with the hardships of post life, wives and children helped create a more congenial environment for all concerned. In this, the second volume in the Clayton Wheat Williams Texas Life Series, historian Robert Wooster covers life at the forts from reveille to taps, detailing the soldiers' uniforms, weapons, and duties, along with the activities of the local civilian inhabitants. As the numerous anecdotes of post residents show, military life on the Texas frontier was not one long battle against Indians or invaders. Many of the daily battles waged were against roaches, cholera, inappropriate government-issue items, harsh weather, and personalities. The presence of women in the forts was considered a healthy and civilizing influence by some; others doubted the morals of the fort's laundresses among lonely enlisted men. Despite the popularity of gambling and drinking, family environments did flourish at many posts: school was taught, dramatic entertainments were performed, religious services were held, and dances were organized to celebrate almost any occasion. A variety of troops manned the army's Texas posts. Blacks and whites, immigrants and Easterners, West Pointers and illiterates all contributed to garrison life. Their presence in Texas until the building of the railroads and defeat of the Indians prompted the closing of the forts affected the state dramatically, often in more subtle ways than fighting. As Sgt. H. H. McConnell explained in the 1880s, "if we didn't actually kill many Indians, who shall say...[the army] was not a potent factor in 'settling up the country.'"

In the last twenty years America's higher-education system has jeopardized our society's very future by allowing a serious decline in educational quality. Responding to modern egalitarianism and the need to attract students, colleges and universities have initiated wildly innovative programs, noncampuses, and nontraditional degrees. Worse, they have lowered all standards. Nonacademic entrepreneurs, attracted by generous federal funds, now demand equal status with established schools. And they are dangerously near receiving this full recognition from irresolute regional accrediting associations. From his vantage point as Texas' former Commissioner of Higher Education, Kenneth H. Ashworth sounds the alarm to all concerned administrators and teachers in American academia. He harshly criticizes the body-count game and relaxed standards, illustrating problems with vignettes from his own considerable experience. He then proposes to educators steps that would help break the cycle of declining quality. Ashworth also provocatively sketches what he sees as the next major challenge to postsecondary education: a "postindustrial" threat to the quality of academic research. Ashworth's sober reflections are likely to provoke controversy. He makes, for example, a broad-based attack upon nontraditional and external programs, which have too often been uncritically promoted. But his well-articulated theses demand careful, even agonizing, consideration by all who care about American higher education and who, like Ashworth, believe our colleges and universities hold the key to resolving the complex and dangerous issues confronting society.

Originally published in hardcover, 1977.

"Max Krueger came to Texas from Germany in 1868, a penniless, delicate boy of sixteen. By the time he wrote his memoirs at the age of seventy-four, he had seen the state transformed from a harsh frontier to an industrialized society and had twice made his fortune in his adopted land. ... Though he was certainly too successful to be typical, Krueger's life as recorded here reflects in ... detail the era of which he was a part and represents, twice over, the fulfillment of the American dream"--

In the arena of public-administration scholarship, one of the most prominent performers is Dwight Waldo. Such an outstanding position was not given to him; he achieved it by giving his entire career--more than forty years--to the study of institutions and ideas. His prolific writing and lecturing took him to six continents but often put him in the controversial position of steadfast neutrality when volatile issues dramatically polarized his colleagues. This book, which consists of transcribed interviews with Waldo plus separate analyses and comments by the authors and by Waldo, was written by two of his former students. Brown and Stillman's informal conversations with their mentor give new perspective to the events and forces that shaped public administration in the post--World War II era. Being open to new concepts, refusing to embrace academic partisanship, and "generalizing" his studies in order to view public administration as a whole in an era of specialization make Waldo an almost unclassifiable academic. He is known for critiquing and recording events that have shaped public administration, and his favorite topics range from traditional views to emerging trends in mid-twentieth-century public administration scholars--the socalled Minnowbrook Conference--is an example of his receptiveness to change and to the probing of old ideas and new frontiers. Dwight Waldo is a preeminent interpreter of public administration as a profession, as he would like to see it, and his practice of answering questions with questions indicates that the search for public administration--how to support or deny funding, how to divide responsibilities, how to compromise between private enterprise and central authority--is not finite and that public administration is not a static exercise but a goal to be sought, however much searching it takes.

"This first comprehensive story of logging, lumbering, and forest conservation in Texas records the industry's history from the earliest days of the Republic, when a few isolated operations provided for local needs, through the first four decades of the twentieth century. Supplemented by over one hundred photographs, many never before published, the text re-creates Texas's heyday as one of the nation's leading timber producers"--

Nature never intended the Brazos River for navigation, but before the coming of the railroads Brazos steamboats were a necessary, if always erratic, form of transport. And there were men to meet the challenge. One captain, heedless of shallows, shoals, snags, and falls, boasted that he could tap a keg and run a boat four miles on the suds. Based on rich archival sources, this authoritative and entertaining book tells of the men and boats that braved the river from the earliest days to the late 1890s. Steamboat captains and plantation aristocrats, business tycoons and empire builders, mud clerks and river rats, all were obsessed with a single idea: to open the Brazos for steamboats from its headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico. The river was dredged and snags were removed, boats were designed with shallow draft, and boat owner, captain, and pilot (often one and the same) pitted their skills against the river. But the Brazos was recalcitrant. Seasonal rises silted in manmade channels and left behind new snags to catch the unwary. And as railroads inched their way across the state, the need for river transport dwindled. Railroad bridges across the Brazos finally created barriers that even a steamboat riding a "red rise" could not negotiate. By the turn of the century, the dauntless Brazos paddlewheelers were only a memory, but, even today, the dream dies hard along the river.

Times were tough in the thirties, and tough guys chronicled the era in newspapers, short stories, and novels in prose that was terse, hard-boiled, bleak. One such writer was a Texan named Edward Anderson. Rough and Rowdy Ways is the story of Edward Anderson, primarily in what were, ironically, his golden years--the Great Depression. The laconic loner hopped freights, wrote two proletarian novels of the social underclass, looked for inspiration in a shot glass, and mixed with Hollywood celebrities while employed as a screenwriter for Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers. When the thirties ended, the hard-times storytelling that was Anderson's genius went out of style, and his family suffered the effects of his rejection slips, unemployment, and alcoholism. Attracted to theoretical aspects of fascism, anti-Semitism, and Swedenborgianism, Anderson became an eccentric unpopular among intellectuals as well as the poor folk whose plight he had sketched too well in prose. He died in Brownsville, Texas, in 1969, leaving a legacy of shattered relationships and two whole, well-crafted novels of a distinctive literary genre and historical era

Originally published: Dallas, Tex.: Southwest Press, 1932.

"In 1970, the small nation of Cambodia was sucked into the vortex of Cold War geopolitics, a war whose denouement led to one of the worst bloodbaths in history. Road to the Killing Fields is the first book to deal exclusively with the military aspects of how that tragedy developed. Because U.S. involvement in that part of Southeast Asia was largely clandestine, Americans have had little exposure to the events that led to the horrific citizen massacres known as the "killing fields.""--

Patriotic Texans have long sung the praises of their revolutionary heroes, such as Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston. Some historians have even contributed their own encomiums, while others have cast a less romantic gaze upon Texas' past. But a complete, scholarly analysis of the persons, politics, and events that created the Republic of Texas was not among the material on Texas' so-called revolution that has been published in the last century. Andreas V. Reichstein offers this volume to fill that gap in the literature. From the perspective of a non-native, he has analyzed modern and contemporary writings on Texas' war of independence and explored the role that Freemasonry, land speculation, and the idea of Manifest Destiny played in the transformation of Texas from Mexican province to independent republic and to state of the Union in quick succession. From the 1821 declaration of Mexico's independence and that of Texas in 1836, Reichstein describes the historical contexts of the deals made between governments and private citizens, to parcel out the land of Texas. Rather than following the lead of previous historians, he refutes some of their theories about the reasons for the war and the motives of its supporters. Although Reichstein's research might be considered iconoclastic by some, the old image of, for example, Stephen F. Austin as a modest, isolated, and altruistic founding father is less in keeping with the image of the modern Texas hero. Reichstein removes the heavy mantle of myth to reveal Austin as a shrewd, networking entrepreneur. Extensive research into collections of manuscripts and papers brought to light the privately expressed motives of those Protestant Americans who settled in the Catholic, Mexican province of Texas and then made it their own. Assiduously documented, this volume brings the creation of the nation and the state of Texas onto the stage of world history.

San Antonio, Texas, lies geographically and culturally at the crossroads of Mexico, Texas, and the larger United States. During the Great Depression it lay also at the crossroads of these cultures' myths, memories, and identities. Between 1929 and 1941, in this city's West Side barrio, a generation of Mexican immigrants developed into a new middle class and forged an identity that has shaped Southwestern experience since then: the identity of the Mexican American. Richard Garcia presents an innovative study of the tension between change and continuity in thought, culture, and community that characterized this transformation. His analysis focuses on both the conservative Mexican-exile ricos, who promoted a perspective of Lo Mexicano and a return to la patria, and the rising Mexican American middle class, who sought a life of Americanism that stressed social integration, education, political rights and power, and economic betterment for both individuals and the ethnic community. Members of this middle class wanted to be Americans politically while remaining Mexicans culturally. Garcia's argument is the first to link the ethnic identity of the Mexican American generation to the rise of the middle class within the immigrant community. He also takes into account the Mexican community's structural relationship to the city, the process of class differentiation within the barrio, and the role of family, church, education, and politics. Through the microcosm of San Antonio, this pioneering study explores the process of changing consciousness that was occurring throughout the United States during this important period.

The myth of the cowboy is powerful in American folklore, but the real life of the cowboy was hard, lonely, and rewarding, if one was seeking the less tangible rewards of being close to nature. The modern cowboy or ranch hand uses different methods but works the land with the same love as the icons of the Old West did. John Lincoln went from bookkeeper to president of the Matador Cattle Company, and his view along the way to the top plus his digging into the company founder's files provide the basis for this look at one modern ranching enterprise and its workers. The founder of the Matador Cattle Company was Fred Koch, who built up a large, successful engineering firm, and with its financial rewards began to fulfill his dreams of ranching by purchasing prime ranch properties in Kansas, Montana, Texas, and Wyoming. Upon Fred Koch's death, his sons Charles and David took over the family business--Koch Industries, Inc.--and it became one of the wealthiest family-owned companies in the nation. Lincoln provides an entertaining and humorous view of modern ranch life in his stories of individuals who have lived this life in the employ of the Koch family and of the day-to-day activities on several of the largest ranches in the Matador Cattle Company. His love for the land and its caretakers comes through in his words and urges that anyone with dedication and willingness to work hard can live close to beauty and nature by working on a ranch.

As a study of rebels and authority, of revolution and the suppression of revolution, Revoltosos examines the activities of Mexican rebels in the United States between the Immigration Act of 1903--and attempt to exclude "anarchists"--and the end of the Red Scare in the early 1920s. The revoltosos were insurgents and political refugees, of the right wing as well as the left, who used the United States as a base for their opposition to the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and the succeeding governments of Madero, Huerta, and Carranza. As exiles and rebels, the revolotosos were the objects of suppression by both American and Mexican authorities, who devised a binational police and espionage system that included American private detectives in the pay of Mexico and U.S. immigration, consular, and secret service personnel. Since most revoltoso activity was within the law, the U.S. government's actions were extreme, even for a time of nativism, antiradicalism, and war hysteria, and the use of illegal means to suppress legal actions was a serious threat to civil liberties. W. Dirk Raat has made extensive use of archival materials on both sides of the border, including documents only recently made available through the Freedom of Information Act. Thus, he is able to cast new light on a significant era in the history of both countries.

In 1956, the era of tail-finned cars and nineteen-cents-a-gallon gasoline, the Missouri Pacific Railroad emerged on the corporate scene as a private company after twenty-three years in a receivership. In its past lay a collapsed rail empire, a sensational bankruptcy struggle that shattered dreams and betrayed trusts, an emotional battle over stockholders' interests, and the flamboyant maneuvers of the railroad's overseers. In its future lay two computerized, merger-dominated decades in which the railroad business would serve as a classic example of a tradition-bound industry forced to adapt to "future shock." The transition from crippled line to prime property would become, as one politician later put it, "a lawyers' paradise, and a security-holders' nightmare." H. Craig Miner, using a wealth of oral and written primary sources, with the cooperation of the company and complete access to records and personnel, describes and critically analyzes, the physical and financial revolution of the Missouri Pacific.

Bob Denhardt first "penned up" The Quarter Horse and had it printed in Houston in 1941. It was the first book ever published about this then-new breed of horse; the American Quarter Horse Association had been formed just the year before. Today Quarter Horses are one of the most popular and famous breeds, and the association is the world's largest livestock breeders' organization. Collected here are all the early articles that appeared concerning early Quarter Horses, or "Steel Dusts," as they were called after one of their progenitors. Denhardt was first introduced to the legendary animals in 1937 by Texas author J. Frank Dobie, and in his search for them he found not just a single horse, but a common type, a breed. The stories and articles in this book tell about such sires as Traveler, Peter McCue, Weatherford Joe Bailey, Dan Tucker, and Old Fred--an accumulation of knowledge about the early Quarter Horses of the Southwest that is invaluable to today's breeders, owners, and lovers of the breed who want to know more about the origins of their horses.

The Iron Horse forever changed the American West, from a wild frontier to a network of scattered settlements tied together by steel rails. Behind the romantic image of the galloping Iron Horse, however, lies a rich history of American business activity. Railway giants have dominated this history, but small companies such as the Quanah, Acme & Pacific Railway Company (QA&P), a short line that operated in four counties of northwestern Texas from near the turn of the century into the 1980s, had just as great an impact in their areas of operation as the giants did on the national scene. The QA&P developed in an era when railroads were tightly regulated by the Railroad Commission of Texas and the federal Interstate Commerce Commission. The in-depth historical analysis of an American short line railroad presented here is in essence the study of all such carriers in the era before deregulation. Fully illustrated with photographs and memorabilia, this volume covers the Quanah Route's birth, valiant struggle for life, and eventual demise in a changing regulatory and competitive environment. This then is a history not only of a railroad but also of its service area, particularly during one of the last great railroad construction booms, which took place in West Texas during the 1920s. Through the years of the QA&P's life, energetic men such as Sam Lazarus and Charles Sommer juggled political and financial concerns against the changing times, Lazarus making the deal by which the QA&P became a subsidiary of the St. Louis-San Francisco (Frisco) road. In the end, the "good roads movement," trucking industry, and growing American passion for the private automobile spelled the end of the railroads' golden age as the prime carrier of passengers and products. As traced by Don L. Hofsommer in the full archives of the QA&P, the history of this short line railroad embodies the pulse and pathos of a place through the changing times of the twentieth century.

Red meat--it's as American as apple pie. In a world where most hunger is alleviated with an occasional handful of grain, red meat's daily appearance on most American tables is a vivid symbol of national prosperity. The red-meat industry is also a powerful symbol. Undulating with the waves made by entrepreneurs and monopolies, shortages and gluts, scandal and government regulations, the industry mirrors the nation's turbulent economic history. Author Jimmy M. Skaggs traces the development of the red-meat industry from forest-foraging razorbacks in colonial days to genetic engineering of tender, disease-resistant beef cattle. Scholars and persons interested in livestock raising, agriculture, and America's marketplace will find Prime Cut to be an unflinching account of one of our nation's most volatile, most quintessentially American industries. With the extensive bibliography accompanying this work, the only modern comprehensive study of American livestock raising and meatpacking, readers will have access to countless details of the meat industry.

Gathering eggs, planting crops, feeding hogs: firsthand experience of these grows more distant with each new generation. From 1914 to 1964, however, a West Texas farmer named William G. DeLoach quietly recorded this life-style. He described weather, plantings, harvests, births, and deaths in his diary. In doing so, he not only chronicled the life changes that everyone experiences but also kept a record of the developments taking place across the country and around the world. The diary's editor, Janet Neugebauer, supplies interweaves explanations to round out the picture that DeLoach offers in his personal descriptions. Her history is a book unto itself that gives the context of the farming experience on the Great Plains. She explains the frustration farmers felt from overproduction, the price-cost squeeze, the exodus of young people into the cities, and the increasingly strong role the government played in what was shifting from a family's way of life to a corporate industry. Graceful and accurately detailed sketches by Charles Shaw provide the visual backdrop for DeLoach's story. This work provides an overview of fifty years of national and international history as well as an intimate account of the life of an ordinary man in a changing world. Few farmers had time or inclination to keep a record of their day-to-day lives, but William DeLoach's perseverance has left us with a rich history of one family's triumphs and failures during half a century. For anyone who ever lived on a farm or visited relatives' farms, as well as for those interested in this aspect of our national history, this book will prove a real treasure.

Before the discovery of oil and the advent of Progressivism to Texas, the state dealt with prison overcrowding by leasing convicts and their labor to private industry and funneling the profits into the state's coffers. In this book, Donald R. Walker examines economic, social, and political aspects of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Texas that resulted in the leasing system and its eventual demise. Convict leasing resulted in high mortality rates among prisoners, and stories of abusive guards and intolerable conditions were common. Blacks, who lacked social standing, legal counsel, and the rights to vote, testify, and sit on juries, made up a disproportionate amount of the prison population and were usually sent to work in the fields. In the twentieth century, revenues from the oil industry eased the financial woes of the state, and a movement for social reform gained momentum. Investigative journalism revealed to the public the abuses of prisoners, and in 1912 the state retook control of the prison system. Relying mainly on primary sources, including eyewitness accounts from prisoners, prison records, private correspondence, and newspaper accounts, Walker gives details and statistics of prison management in Texas during that era that will interest scholars of corrections management, Texas, black history, and the South.

General William R. Shafter was no gallant hero. He drank, gambled, swore, got into fights with his men. They nicknamed him for the river that was one of his targets: "Pecos Bill." He was accused of trying to start a war with Mexico and became involved in an embezzlement case. Associated with military blunders during the Spanish-American War, he has often been pictured as a fat, incompetent buffoon. But Shafter, if coarse and abrasive, was a man who got results. A winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, he served in the Army for forty years, from the Civil War to the Spanish-American War, in which he commanded all Army operations. In Texas, he commanded one of the army's first all-black regiments. He helped restore peace at Pine Ridge after the Wounded Knee massacre, and he carried out in Cuba one of the swiftest and most successful campaigns in the history of American warfare. In this carefully researched and very readable study, Paul Carlson gives insight into the career and life of one of history's enduring enigmas.

Imprint date from Texas A & M University Press website.

During the Second World War few countries provided a more difficult challenge for Gen. "Wild Bill" Donovan's Office of Strategic Services than did Yugoslavia. Working with its British counterpart, OSS sought to sustain the Yugoslav resistance in its struggle against the Axis occupiers. Unfortunately, OSS personnel, who first began entering the country in the late summer of 1943, found themselves caught up in a ruthless civil war between Draza Mihailovich's Nationalists or Chetniks and Josip-Broz Tito's Partisans. OSS enjoyed some notable successes, ferrying badly needed supplies to Tito in the fall of 1943, assisiting in the evacuation of hundreds of Allied airmen, and collecting valuable military and political intelligence. On the other hand, President Roosevelt's decision to allow Prime Minister Churchill to play the Allied hand in the Balkans meant that the agency would have almost no influence on Allied policy. Kirk Ford, Jr., has mined the recently declassified operational records of the OSS and conducted interviews or correspondence with more than sixty of the surviving participants of the events in Yugoslavia. His findings challenge the view of Mihailovich as collaborator and Tito as liberator while shedding new light on both the motives behind Allied policy decisions and the extent to which these decisions affected the internal balance of power in Yugoslavia. By telling the story of the dangers OSS operatives faced behind enemy lines and by tracing the relationship between the OSS and British intelligence, Ford reveals that intrigue, deception, and secrecy were not activities reserved exclusively for the enemy.

The first book to explore in depth recent issues facing the oil and natural gas industry, The Oil Makers goes straight to the industry's leaders. Jeffrey Share presents a collection of prominent voices, including presidents and CEOs of several of the nation's largest oil and gas companies. The book also contains interviews with two former secretaries of the Department of Energy, as well as major lobbyists and executives in the various service industries. The Oil Makers brings to light important and controversial issues such as the image of the industry, the environmental movement and regulations, the trauma and effect of the 1980s depression, finance and taxation issues, the increasing shift to overseas production, the idea of a national energy policy, and the future of the industry. Share provides an inside look at all aspects of the oil and natural gas industry: the majors, independents, drilling contractors, service companies, natural gas, consultants, investment bankers and analysts, politicians, and the new breed. The Oil Makers contains interviews with Roy Huffington, Orville Gaither, Matt Simmons, James Day, Denise Bode, Al Baker, Robert Rose, John Olson, Ed Rothschild, Carol Freedenthal, George Mitchell, Donald Hodel, Admiral James Watkins, and many more.

The Plains Cooperative Oil Mill in Lubbock was organized in 1937 to process and market cottonseed oil on a cooperative basis. With annual sales in 1999 averaging 150 million dollars, the Plains mill is now a trendsetter in the cottonseed industry, processing on average 600,000 tons of cottonseed a year-approximately 15 percent of the cottonseed processed in the United States. Since its inception the Plains mill has returned millions of dollars to its patrons, removed the "Dallas differential," which in the early days penalized Plains producers at the marketplace, and actively encouraged the development of other cooperative activities in the area. Its influence, direct and indirect, on Plains agriculture has been incalculable. Despite the farsighted assistance of the Houston Bank for Cooperatives, the Plains mill, faced with inadequate capital, losses in membership, and obsolete facilities, got off to an uncertain start. But in 1943 new manager Roy Davis saw that extensive irrigation would soon revolutionize cotton production, and under his imaginative and innovative guidance the Plains mill became the largest and one of the most successful cottonseed oil mills in the world. A recent venture into milling sunflower seed brought near disaster when the market dropped far below the mill's guaranteed payment, but courageous support by the gins and the Houston Bank for Cooperatives brought the Plains mill back to successful operation. This lively insider's look at the Plains mill, written by a former president of the Houston bank, dramatically demonstrates the importance of adequate capital, sound management principles, membership support, and a sympathetic lending institution in the development of a cooperative enterprise.