THE MEN WHO WEAR THE STAR

A comprehensive, partisan, occasionally starry-eyed history of the famed (or perhaps infamous) Texas Rangers. Robinson (A Good Year to Die, 1995, etc.) tracks the Rangers back to their roots in 1823, when they were the equivalent of Western minutemen: mobile, irregular units who banded together in response to specific needs—mostly conflicts with Native Americans and the Spanish—and quickly disbanded thereafter. They were local men, tough as nails from working a mean landscape, and much appreciated for the protection they offered the settlers. Yet, as Robinson tries for the rousing angle in telling their tales, he too often paints the opposition as wholly barbarian—as gang rapists and as cannibals—in exculpation of ignoble Ranger behavior, even going so far as to conflate the Rangers— subduing of the Karankawas with their extinction. The Ranger who emerges from Robinson’s record served with distinction in the Mexican War, then chose the Confederacy in the Civil War. He quelled horrendous local conflicts, like the Jaybird-Woodpecker Feud, though his loyalties were sometimes for sale. He manhandled cattle rustlers, horse thieves, and highwaymen John Wesley Harding and Sam Bass, and killed numerous innocents in the border skirmishes of 1915—18. He was the Lone Ranger; he was a blackmailer and a revenge killer. By the 1920s and 1930s he was a fish out of water, and Robinson ends his history there, neatly skipping over unsavory Ranger conduct in the labor struggles of the 1970s. Robinson allows for all these identities, though no reader will mistake the relish with which he recounts an episode—in which an Indian has been surprised in his sleep—when one Ranger whispers to another: “Plug him.” In essence, an in-house history, gilding the good, displaying roguish behavior proudly on the sleeve. For many readers, an unconvincing attempt to restore the gleam to a Ranger star dulled by too many instances of bullying and mayhem. (B&w photos throughout)