Captain Bill McDonald, Texas Ranger: A Story of Frontier Reform

Captain Bill McDonald is a name that in Texas and the districts lying adjacent thereto makes the pulse of a good citizen, and the feet of an outlaw, move quicker. Its owner is a man of fifty-six, drawn out long and lean like a buckskin thong, with the endurance and constitution of the same.

In repose, Captain Bill is mild of manner; his speech is a gentle vernacular, his eyes are like the summer sky. I have never seen him in action, but I am told that then his voice becomes sharp and imperative, that his eyes turn into points of gray which pierce the offender through.

Two other features bespeak this man's character and career: his ears and his nose—the former, alert and extended—the ears of the wild creature, the hunter; the latter of that stately Roman architecture which goes with conquest, because it signifies courage, resolution and the peerless gift of command.

His nerves are of that quiet and steady sort which belong to a tombstone and he does not disturb them with tobacco or stimulants of any kind—not even with tea and coffee. In explanation, he once said:

"Well, you see, sometimes I have to be about two-fifths of a second quicker than the other fellow, and a little quiver, then, might be fatal."

Incidentally, it may be added that Captain Bill—they love to call him that in Texas—is ranked as the best all-round rapid-fire marksman in the State, and for the "other fellow" to begin shooting is believed to be equivalent to suicide. Add to these various attributes a heart in which tenderness, strict honesty and an overwhelming regard for duty prevail, and you have in full, Captain William Jesse McDonald, formerly Deputy Sheriff, Deputy U.S. Marshal and Ranger Captain, now State Revenue Agent of Texas.

It is the story of this man that we shall undertake to tell. During his twenty-five years or more of service in the field, he reduced those once lawless districts known as the Pan-handle, No-man's Land, and, incidentally, Texas at large to a condition of such proper behavior that nowhere in this country is life and property safer than in the very localities where only a few years ago the cow-thief and the train-robber reigned supreme. Their species have become scarce and "hard to catch" there now, and the skittish officials who used to shield them have been trained to "stand hitched." The story of a reform like that is worth the telling, for it is the unwritten history of a territory so vast that if moved to the Atlantic seaboard it would extend from New York to Chicago, from Lake Erie to the Gulf of Mexico—its area equal to that of France and England combined, with Wales, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland thrown in, for good measure. Furthermore, it is the story of a man who, in making that history, faced death almost daily, often under those supreme conditions when the slightest hesitancy—the twitch of a muscle or the bat of an eyelid—a "little quiver," as he put it—would have been fatal; it is the story of a man who time and again charged into the last retreat of armed and desperate murderers and brought them out hand-cuffed, the living ones, of course; it is the story of a man who, according to Major Blocksom, in his report of the Brownsville troubles in 1906, would "Charge hell with a bucket of water." In a word, it is the story of a man who has done things, who is still doing them, and whose kind is passing away forever.