Lone Star Justice
The First Century of the Texas Rangers
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $41.99
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- $41.99
Publisher Description
From The Lone Ranger to Lonesome Dove, the Texas Rangers have been celebrated in fact and fiction for their daring exploits in bringing justice to the Old West. In Lone Star Justice, best-selling author Robert M. Utley captures the first hundred years of Ranger history, in a narrative packed with adventures worthy of Zane Grey or Larry McMurtry.
The Rangers began in the 1820s as loose groups of citizen soldiers, banding together to chase Indians and Mexicans on the raw Texas frontier. Utley shows how, under the leadership of men like Jack Hays and Ben McCulloch, these fiercely independent fighters were transformed into a well-trained, cohesive team. Armed with a revolutionary new weapon, Samuel Colt's repeating revolver, they became a deadly fighting force, whether battling Comanches on the plains or storming the city of Monterey in the Mexican-American War. As the Rangers evolved from part-time warriors to full-time lawmen by 1874, they learned to face new dangers, including homicidal feuds, labor strikes, and vigilantes turned mobs. They battled train robbers, cattle thieves and other outlaws--it was Rangers, for example, who captured John Wesley Hardin, the most feared gunman in the West.
Based on exhaustive research in Texas archives, this is the most authoritative history of the Texas Rangers in over half a century. It will stand alongside other classics of Western history by Robert M. Utley--a vivid portrait of the Old West and of the legendary men who kept the law on the lawless frontier.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Complicating the traditional portrait of the Texas Rangers as a unified force battling anyone who threatened the territory, republic or state of Texas, Utley's 13th book on Western history identifies two distinct Ranger populations. The first group, which thrived from 1832 to 1874, included ragtag citizen-soldiers who worked for brief stints and saw rangering as a chance to battle Indians or Mexicans "and then come back home." The second group, however, "drew from and molded a different order of men." These rangers, known after 1901 as the Ranger Force, evolved into career lawmen who practiced greater discipline, professionalism and accountability; they were more likely to encounter train robbers, labor strikes and vigilante mobs than Comanche horse thieves (Utley will cover this second era in a promised second volume). Utley (The Lance and the Shield) employs this previously unexplored difference to evaluate the competing images of the Texas Rangers. While older histories by Walter Prescott Webb and T.R. Fehrenbach maintain "the bright legend" of the Rangers as men endowed with "sterling traits" who did no wrong, more recent "revisionist" writings by folklorists and Chicano scholars offer a vision of the Texas Rangers as "brutal, lawless" men who indiscriminately slaughtered Indians and Mexicans. Utley's careful portrayal of the Texas Rangers' evolution from citizen-soldiers to Old West lawmen reveals the weaknesses and ulterior motives within the scholarly debate over the Rangers' legacy and offers a clear-eyed view of the Rangers themselves. His fine book ultimately explains why, "despite the continuing efforts of scholars to recast the image of the Texas Ranger," he still "rides the popular imagination." 32 b&w illus., 11 maps. (June)
Customer Reviews
Great sample
This makes for some great reading. Just don't pay $64.99 Amazon kindle has it for 13.36...or the Hard Copy is only 37.49. iBooks you make it too hard. Fix it.