Lone Star State Reads
By: Richard H. Dillon 08/25/2009
Much history and legend of the Lone Star State involves the Texas Rangers. Mike Cox’s Time of the Rangers (Forge, $27.95) powerfully carries forward their story from 1900, when the outfit shifted from frontier soldiering against Comanches to policing a more urban state. During the Roaring 1920s and Depression 1930s, gangsters tested the Rangers’ resolve.
Harold J. Weiss Jr. tells the story of Ranger Capt. Bill McDonald in Yours to Command (University of North Texas Press, $27.95). A compulsive lawman, Ranger McDonald was also a deputy sheriff, U.S. marshal, state revenue agent and presidential bodyguard. Although a crack shot, he was no gunfighter. He never killed anyone; his bravado being sufficient to intimidate the most dangerous outlaw.
In Ten Deadly Texans (Pelican Publishing, $16.95), Lawrence Yadon, Don Anderson and Robert Barr Smith discuss the meanest hombres to encounter Rangers. Among them are Cullen Baker, John Wesley Hardin, Wild Bill Longley, Deacon Jim Miller and Sam Bass. Their colorful stories are aided by a chronology of crime and a gazetteer of outlaw hideouts.
Texas is part of the South as well as the Rangers’ West. Sacred Memories (Texas State Historical Association, $9.95) is Kelly McMichael’s guide to Confederate statues on Lone Star courthouse lawns. They were not instigated by veterans, but by the United Daughters of the Confederacy not only to honor the Civil War dead, but also to remind us of the South’s “Lost Cause,” states’ rights. (The statuary remains silent on slavery.)
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