CULT OF GLORY

A comprehensive account of the Texas Rangers, perhaps the most storied police force in American history.

There’s Walker, Texas Ranger, and then there’s The Lone Ranger, the latter recounting “a crime-fighting career that spanned almost ninety years.” There are Lonesome Dove and many an oater. Celebrated in popular culture very nearly from the beginnings of the organization almost 200 years ago, the Texas Rangers have always been a small outfit with an oversized image. Even today, writes former Dallas Morning News reporter Swanson, now a journalist professor at the University of Pittsburgh, there are only some 160 Rangers on active duty in a state of 29 million people. In the force’s early days, most of their work involved fighting the Natives, and the legacy of conflict between the group and non-Anglos is strong. The author points out that it was only in 1969 that an officer of Hispanic descent was admitted, and more than two decades would pass before an African American was allowed into the service. That legacy includes, in recent history, the use of the Rangers to break up a strike of Hispanic farmworkers, a cloud on a reputation already marked by episodes of violence. Still, as Swanson writes—after recounting tales ranging from Ranger incursions into Mexico to the successful hunt for outlaws Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker—the force is slightly more representative of Texas’ population today, with about a quarter of its number representing ethnic minorities, and all now recruited from the state’s highway patrol. “The perils have dwindled in the modern era—no one is pulling Comanche arrows from their foreheads anymore—but the job still carries risks,” Swanson concludes. His narrative is a touch too long and sometimes repetitive but understandably so, given the big story he has to tell, expanding on, updating, and sometimes correcting works by writers such as Walter Prescott Webb and John Boessenecker.

Revisionist history done well, if not likely to please Chuck Norris die-hards.