Customer Reviews

The Texas Rangers: Men of Valor and Action

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Mike Cox was in an excellent position to research the history of the Texas Rangers, and his anecdiotal account is a joy to read. He tells his stories vividly but without embellishing, and one is sorry to reach the end. Texas in the period this volume covers seems like another world, but he notes how the success of the informaly organized rangers impeded the development of the state and county police, so that the law men had a lot in common with the law breakers they rode after.

The author makes the point of view of the book clear from the intro. This book contains Ranger stories, Ranger myth. And clearly it is intended to be enjoyed, and shared, by readers of all ages as myth. Though its stories are based on actual events, the book is not, nor does it pretend to be a serious, scholarly work. I admit that the book has innocence and idealization that the Rangers themselves certainly don't possess. But who cares? This is a romp, and the author is honest about his intensions from the beginning.

This history is written with the verve of a masters theses. A former publicist for the Texas DPS? That is a clue I overlooked, darn it. Cox should get marks for mentioning some of the slimy underbelly of the Rangers, slave-catching and genocide are two sins of their past, but the main problem with this book is that it reads like a collection of 3X5 cards.

The first book of Texana that I remember calling my own was Lon Tinkle's 13 Days to Glory. That's not to say that I had not before been engulfed in others, for the bookshelves that lined the hallway of my boyhood home were filled with such. The bug bit when I first came upon J. Frank Dobie's Coronado's Children. After reading and re-reading its stories of lost gold, gold mines and Yaqui silver, and dreaming about, sometimes poking around all the places I knew where such might be hidden, I went on to such titles as Bruce Grant's The Cowboy Encyclopedia, Dobie's The Longhorns and The Mustangs, and graduated to J. Evetts Haley's The XIT and Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman. I did not get to Walter Prescott Webb's The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense until I got to the campus of The University of Texas (the "at Austin" was tacked on somewhat later when The University became a "system" and not just a mere institution). There, I discovered the wonders of the Barker Library. Along the way I had started acquiring a meager Texana collection of my own. It didn't start as a "collection". What it really was is the lingering evidence of a personal character flaw. I cannot stand the thought of giving away or selling a book once acquired. I always think that I might someday like to travel that way again, so I want to have the piece at hand on a bookshelf, in the unlikely event that in Austin the great blizzard sets in, that closes roads and schools and businesses for a week, and that knocks out all telephone communications for two. It just so happened that what I liked reading, and therefore was buying, and therefore was "collecting" happened to be about Texas.

Having said all that I'll get to the purpose of this exercise. In 40 years my 8-year old son will be able to pick up whatever civilization is then using to commit words to permanency and write a paragraph similar to the one above, except his first object of ownership will be that of Mi! ke Cox' The Texas Rangers: Men of Action & Valor, Eakin Press, Austin, Texas, 1991. I trust that it will launch him on as pleasurable journey as I have had. Judging from his response as we have read together the stories of legendary Rangers, I believe it will. Written for youngsters by a former newspaperman from "the old school", now Public Information Officer of the Texas Department of Public Safety, the book, by linking ten entertaining stories of Texas Rangers, from Stephen F. Austin's employing in 1823 ten men in addition to those provided by the Mexican Government to range for the common defense, to the modern day use of crime labs and helicopters to arrest dinosaur track thieves in Hays County, gives the young reader a brief history of the legendary Texas Rangers. In doing so, it sheds light on how the force came to be, how it has changed and why, and, yet allows one to appreciate that, although the institution and its mission may have changed as society's needs and therefore its guardians have changed, the personification of a Ranger endures, and will as long as there are men and women of valor and action that pin on the lone star circled in a ring of silver. There are stories of Captain John J. Tumlinson; Captain John Coffee (Jack) Hays, later to be founder of the City of Oakland, California and university philanthropist; Captain John Salmon (Rest in Peace "Rip") Ford, former Tennessean and Hill Southerner, doctor, lawyer, and newspaper editor; leader of the Frontier Battalion, Major John B. Jones, whose men tamed Texas, putting an end to its last major Indian threat and outlaws like Sam Bass; Rangers John B. Armstrong and Jack Duncan, captors of outlaw killer, preacher's son John Wesley Hardin; Captain Leander H. McNelly, Confederate cavalry officer and gentleman cotton farmer whose band of Special Force of Rangers pacified the Rio Grande Valley and the Nueces Strip; Ranger Sergeant John R. Hughes, inspiration for Zane Grey's fictional character and television icon,! The Lone (Star) Ranger; Captain Will Wright, whose men kept a lid on the rough days of the oil boom and Prohibition; and Captain Frank Hamer, who, with former Ranger B.M. Gault, put an end to the murdering and bank robbing reign of the infamous duo, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. While "driving friendly" over the roads and highways of Texas, remembering not to "mess with" it, look at your Texas highway map and you will see the names of some of these legends engrossed on its counties and communities.

After reading The Texas Rangers with your child, if you thirst for more readings of Ranger stories worth remembering and recounting, written for a slightly older level, the author has just published a new book on the subject, Texas Ranger Tales: Stories That Need Telling; has one (Texas Standoff; Media Relations in a Crisis) forthcoming that includes insights on the so-called "Republic of Texas" standoff at Ft. Davis and the Siege at Waco's Mount Carmel Branch Davidians Complex; and another collection of Texas Ranger stories in the works.

It was not until my son and I finished the book and I started this review that I noted there was a difference in title on book cover (The Texas Rangers: Men of Action & Valor) and title page (The Texas Rangers: Men of Valor and Action). I don't know if there is a significance or simply one of those things that when corrected in the next edition will be noted in a book dealers's catalog 20 years hence that makes one edition worth more in the collecting than another.