Lone Star Justice
The First Century of the Texas Rangers
by Robert M. Utley
Oxford University Press, 370 pp., $30
THERE'S A MOMENT in Larry McMurtry's novel "Lonesome Dove" when the retired Texas Rangers Woodrow Call and Augustus McRae--now in the cattle business--pass a new farm settlement with a church and a few stores. "Now look at that," Augustus says. "The dern people are making towns everywhere. It's our fault, you know. . . . Me and you done our work too well. We killed off most of the people that made this country interesting to begin with."
Robert Utley's history "Lone Star Justice: The First Century of the Texas Rangers" shows McRae's observation is not far from the truth. Utley is the author of a number of prominent books about the West, including "The Lance and the Shield," and in "Lone Star Justice" he highlights the hold the Texas Rangers have maintained on the general American imagination.
They've done even more for Texans' self-image. What is really left these days to distinguish Texas from anywhere else--Houston from Phoenix, Dallas-Ft. Worth from Minneapolis-St. Paul, the Red River from the Platte, the Big Piney Woods from the Black Hills? Mostly, what Texas has to keep itself distinct is a memory of those days when a handful of Rangers policed an area the size of Western Europe, battling Indians, Federales, bandits, gamblers, and John Wesley Hardin. By the time they were done, Texas was a safer and less interesting place.
The Rangers were founded in 1823 as a
citizen militia while Texas was still a province of Mexico. Their genesis reflected the demographics of an increasing American presence, and they were charged with the task of protecting the nascent colonial towns of coastal Texas from the depredations of Mexican bandits and the ongoing scourge of the Comanches, hordes of whom periodically swept off the interior prairies. The bloody struggle between the Rangers and the Comanche "Lords of the Plains" would last for fifty years.
After participating in the 1836 war for independence from Mexico, the Rangers were officially sanctioned by the Republic of Texas and its first president, Sam Houston, as the new nation's main defense force. For nine years they were the Republic's standing army while Houston (one of three presidents, later to serve as governor and a U.S. senator) worked to have Texas admitted to the Union, a complicated process because of the national slavery question.
In the Mexican-American War that began in 1846, the Rangers were known for a battlefield valor driven by a deep-seated animosity toward Mexicans ("Remember the Alamo!") and for scouting ability gleaned from years of Indian fighting. General Zachary Taylor used them extensively in field operations culminating in the Battle of Monterrey. The legendary Ranger Ben McCulloch was the general's eyes and ears at Buena Vista, the victory that would shortly catapult Taylor to the White House as the twelfth president.
But Taylor also found--as did General Winfield Scott--that the Texans needed a hard curb to keep them from executing reprisals against both military and civilian Mexicans. These atrocities reflected the racism endemic in nineteenth-century Anglo Texas and were a blot on a mostly exemplary century-long Ranger record. Taylor and Scott harbored no illusions about the Ranger companies they commanded--declaring them "unsurpassed both as fighters and troublemakers." To the Mexicans, the Rangers were forever after known as "Los Diablos Tejanos."
Val:Y
|
