THE TEXAS RANGERS

Cox (Texas Disasters, 2006, etc.) follows the 19th-century evolution of “a mostly volunteer Indian-fighting force,” founded in a remote province that was still part of Mexico, into “a paramilitary arm of the government” and then “a frontier law enforcement agency.”

During his 15 years as public-affairs spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, the author enjoyed unlimited access to the documented records of the Texas Rangers. Now an Austin Statesman columnist, he combines that material with memoirs, anecdotes from descendants and irresistible apocrypha to chronicle the Rangers’s first 79 years. (A planned second volume will take them from 1900 to the present day). It reads like an amalgam of every Western movie ever filmed: Indians hold the high ground, but the vastly outnumbered Rangers charge and win; bandits hold up stagecoaches and are pursued by implacable Rangers; etc. Yet for much of the 19th century, the Rangers had less to do with law enforcement than with frontier security. The fierce, proud Kiowas and Comanches had been nomadic hunters for millennia; buffalo didn’t recognize a boundary between the Republic of Texas (1836–45) and U.S. Indian territory. For struggling frontier settlers, any Indian hunting party was a “depredation” waiting to happen. Escalation could be instantaneous; a warning shot begot a burned cabin, men killed, women and children taken captive. For a half-century or more, the Rangers were first responders in these situations, sporting badges handcrafted from Mexican five-peso pieces. Each side took scalps and inflicted physical terror on the other. Rangers could be drawn into ambushes, and at times they mistakenly attacked peaceful tribes. But particularly after the Civil War, real men who could drop an enemy from several hundred yards with a rifle were almost all the law there was in Texas. Cox fleshes out their true-life adventures with mundane realities like chronic underfunding due to public ingratitude.

A whopper of a history giving equal credit to the Rangers’s legendary gallantry and the accompanying brutality.