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A child of the Great Plains, Walter Prescott Webb was one of the preeminent historians of the region and of the American western frontier. He was born on April 3, 1888, in Panola County, East Texas, on the southern fringe of the Great Plains and grew to manhood in the farmland of the Stephens-Eastland Counties area of West Texas. After graduating from high school and before going on to the University of Texas at Austin for his higher education in 1909, Webb taught in several of the local country schools. At the University of Texas he completed his bachelor's degree in history in 1915 and became a member of the history faculty in 1918. He became a particularly close friend of the western writer J. Frank Dobie and the Texas naturalist Roy Bedichek while at the University of Texas.
Webb earned his master's degree from the University of Texas in 1920, writing his thesis on the Texas Rangers. In 1922, at the age of thirty-four, Webb took a leave of absence from his faculty duties to pursue a doctorate in history at the University of Chicago, but he failed to complete the degree and returned to Austin a year later. Webb finally received his doctorate from Texas in 1932, having submitted the previously published
Webb married Jane Oliphant on September 16, 1916; they had one daughter, Mildred Alice, born on July 30, 1918. Almost two years after Jane's death, Webb married Terrell Maverick, the widow of San Antonio mayor and New Deal congressman Maury Maverick, on December 14, 1961. Webb died in an automobile accident near Austin on March 8, 1963.
Webb drew much of his love and understanding of the Great Plains from his own life and the writings of historians of the American frontier, especially Frederick Jackson Turner. In
See also FOLKWAYS: Dobie, J. Frank.