"John McCarty, newsman and publisher of Amarillo, has sought sources far and wide, and he has used them with great skill. . . . It is good that the story of Old Tascosa has been saved."-Walter Prescott Webb, Dallas Morning News "Tascosa may not have been the toughest of the old-time cow towns, but it was tough enough. . . . A solid contribution to Southwestern history."-New York Herald Tribune "Every lover of the Old West, every reader of Western history has at times wished in vain for a full and readable account of Tascosa, one time cow town capital of the Texas Panhandle. . . . Perhaps our best account of a typical tragedy of the plains."-Stanley Vestal, Chicago Sunday Tribune Once the rival of Dodge City and Cheyenne, for years Tascosa, Texas, lay a ghost town of crumbling adobes. Today almost all traces of frontier Tascosa are gone, replaced by the ultramodern stone buildings which make up a self-contained city of boys and administrative staff-Cal Farley's famed Boys Ranch. Maverick Town tells the story of the rise and decline of Old Tascosa, which epitomized the romance and danger of the early West. Tascosa's heyday was brief, yet it compressed into a few years the history of an era- that of the open range-which will never return. John L. McCarty was a Texas newspaperman and publisher who wrote many articles and two books about the Old West. Harold D. Bugbee, who drew chapter-head decorations for this book, was an illustrator of many articles and books about the West. C. L. Sonnichsen was Benedict Professor of English Emeritus, at the University of Texas, El Paso. Among his many books are The Mescalero Apaches and Tucson: The Life and Times an American City.