I was but a boy in my nineteenth year, and in for adventure when I started out from Hopkinsville, Kentucky, with all my worldly possessions, consisting of a few dollars in money, a change of clothes, and a gun, of course, to seek my fortune in this lazy man s paradise. Noah Smithwick was an old man, blind and near his ninetieth year, when his daughter recorded these words. He had stayed on in paradise - Texas - from 1827 to 1861, when his opposition to secession took him to California. The Evolution of a State is his story of these old Texas days. A blacksmith and a tobacco smuggler, Noah Smithwick made weapons for the Battle of Concepcion, and he fought in that battle. With Hensley s company, he chased the Mexican army south of the Rio Grande after the Battle of San Jacinto. Twice he served with the Texas Rangers. In quieter times, he was a postmaster and justice of the peace in little Webber s Prairie. Eyewitness to so much Texas history, Smithwick recounts his life and adventures in a simple, straightforward style, with a wry sense of humor. His keen memory for detail - what the people wore, what they ate, how they worked and played - vividly evokes the sights, sounds, and smells of the frontier. First published in part by the Dallas Morning News, Smithwick s recollections gained such popularity that they were published in book form, as The Evolution of a State, in 1900. This new edition of a Texas classic makes widely available for the first time in many years this best of all books dealing with life in early Texas.