Chronicles of the Big Bend: A Photographic Memoir of Life on the Border

As a young teamster on a pack-mule train, Wilfred Dudley Smithers saw the Rio Grande's Big Bend for the first time in 1916, and it captured his imagination forever. For decades thereafter he returned to Texas' last great frontier—the great bend of the Rio Grande on the Texas-Mexico border—chronicling the region and its people in words and photographs.

After half a century of photography, Smithers' superlative collection of nine thousand images ended up at the University of Texas at Austin, a...