George Wilkins Kendall was a promoter of Texas whose life's theme was its greatness. Born in New Hampshire, he learned printing and worked in New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. With Francis A. Lumsden, he founded the New Orleans Picayune in 1837. In 1841 he joined the Texan-Santa Fe Expedition as a reporter, was imprisoned with its other ill-fated members, and later wrote a book on the expedition. During the Mexican War from 1846 to 1848, he often rode with the Texas Rangers in what was called the world's first war coverage by a foreign correspondent, filing his news by Pony Express. In 1847 he settled on a Texas sheep range at Post Oak Springs, and his continuing news columns drew inquiries about Texas from places as distant as the Sandwich Islands, including 300 letters in a single mail. During the Civil War, he produced wool for Confederate uniforms and blankets and proposed a weaving mill on the Comal River to make cloth near the flocks, but received no government response. To keep producing wool, he had to fight Comanches, range fires, and freezing disasters, and when roaming vandals threatened to kill shepherds, he and his teenage son tended the flocks themselves. Until the end of his life, his regular dispatches to the Picayune continued to praise the good life in Texas.