Though Bandera was originally settled by Polish immigrants who made cypress shingles for a living, the town became a staging area for cattle drives shortly after the Civil War, and has been known as a cattle town ever since. As cattle drives became a thing of the past, Bandera turned to dude ranches for income. Today, tourism is a major industry, and Bandera bills itself as the "Cowboy Capital of the World."

Burnet County (then called Hamilton Valley) was among the wildest places in the west when Adam Rankin Johnson moved here in 1854, but the twenty-year-old Kentuckian proved equal to every adversity, and then some. To this day he remains Burnet County’s most influential citizen; a truly great man whose ingenuity, courage, fortitude, and vision should be an inspiration to us all.

Since the 1700's, stories of abandoned or lost Spanish mines and buried treasure in San Saba and adjacent counties have fired the imaginations of thousands of treasure seekers. The following items, from the San Saba News, convey well the excitement these stories generated around the turn of the century.

The Canyon of the Eagles, a joint venture of the Lower Colorado River Authority and Presidian, is a new generation of nature park that allows people to enjoy nature in total comfort, a hands-on learning center where education is fun, and a preserve where endangered species and natural habitat are preserved in a people-friendly way.

When Ed and Susan Auler discovered that their ranch on the northern shore of Lake Buchanan had much in common with the best wine country in France, they made a decision that helped change the course of Texas history. It was during a cattle-buying trip to France in 1973 that the Aulers first noticed remarkable similarities to their Central Texas home.

Most towns have their good times and bad times, but those times aren’t always as good or as bad as the times experienced by the town of Llano, Texas. From a dusty frontier town to the "Pittsburgh of the West", just to "crash and burn" (almost literally) in a few chaotic years, Llano has lived through more than its share of twists and turns.

"The way I see it," says owner John Kemper of the Blue Bonnet Cafe in Marble Falls, "all our customers are celebrities." That attitude must be one of the reasons for the tremendous success of the 75-year-old establishment run by John and his wife, Belinda since 1981. The truth is that some of the Blue Bonnet's customers are a little more famous than others.

If you're going to search of gold in Texas, first you need to know where to look. Next you need to know how to get at the stuff. Reports of gold and silver in central Texas have been carried in books and memories for 250 years.