The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821-1900 [Hardcover]

Mike Cox (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 18, 2008 | ISBN-10: 0312873867 | ISBN-13: 978-0312873868 | Edition: 1st

Texas writer/historian Mike Cox explores the inception and rise of the famed Texas Rangers. Starting in 1821 with just a handful of men, the Rangers' first purpose was to keep settlers safe from the feared and gruesome Karankawa Indians, a cannibalistic tribe that wandered the Texas territory. As the influx of settlers grew, the attacks increased and it became clear that a much larger, better trained force was necessary.

 

From their tumultuous beginning to their decades of fighting outlaws, Comanche, Mexican soldados and banditos, as well as Union soldiers, the Texas Rangers became one of the fiercest law enforcement groups in America.  In a land as spread-out and sparsely populated as the west itself, the Rangers had unique law-enforcement responsibilities and challenges.

 

The story of the Texas Rangers is as controversial as it is heroic. Often accused of vigilante-style racism and murder, they enforced the law with a heavy hand. But above all they were perhaps the defining force for the stabilization and the creation of Texas. From Stephen Austin in the early days through the Civil War, the first eighty years of the Texas Rangers is nothing less then phenomenal, and the efforts put forth in those days set the foundation for the Texas Rangers that keep Texas safe today.     

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Formerly the stuff of dime-novel legend, Texas Rangers have since fallen into disrepute as vigilantes who were primarily occupied with murdering Native Americans and hunting escaped slaves. Texas journalist Cox retains much of the old admiration however, and has produced a thick compendium of gunfights, pursuits and general skullduggery that contains everything anyone would want to know about the Rangers, the "mounted irregulars operating with government authority to meet an exigency." That exigency was the Native American presence in the rich Mexican territory of Texas. Early local governments quickly recruited young men to secure the land for American colonists. The early Rangers had to provide their own horses and arms, but there was no shortage of pugnacious adventurers. There was always a shortage of money, however, and governments rarely financed more than a year of service. Only in 1874 did the state government set up a permanent force. Cox mines contemporary newspapers, letters and diaries to cobble together a journalistic account that-except for the occasional detour into politics (invariably about raising money for the Rangers)-consists overwhelmingly of sketches and human interest stories. Old West buffs will enjoy the steady stream of anecdotes, but readers looking for a thoughtful or critical history of law enforcement along the Texas frontier will be left unsatisfied.
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From Booklist

Cox breathes new life into the legendary Texas Rangers in this lively, enlightening history of one of the oldest, most esteemed law-enforcement agencies in America. Founded in 1821 in order to protect settlers from the fearsome Karankawa Indians, the force’s members and the scope of their mission grew in proportion to the sprawling territory they helped patrol. Though the threat of Indian attacks eventually abated, the Rangers fought an array of new enemies, including Mexican bandits and Union soldiers. Revered and reviled for their vigilante brand of justice, the Rangers constituted a law unto themselves on the raw Texas frontier. Cox, former spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, does an admirable job of documenting the first 80 years of this often controversial but always intriguing organization. --Margaret Flanagan

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Forge Books; 1st edition (March 18, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312873867
• ISBN-13: 978-0312873868
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #732,313 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars San Antonio Express-News: "meticulously researched substantial contribution [with] straight-ahead writing", March 28, 2008

By 

Stephanie Barko, Literary Publicist "steffercat" (Austin TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821-1900 (Hardcover)

Book review: Straight-talking look at first Rangers

Web Posted: 03/07/2008 12:18 PM CST

Sterlin Holmesly
Special to the San Antonio Express-News

The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821-1900
By Mike Cox

Forge, $25.95


Texas Ranger lore continues to fascinate, and Mike Cox makes a substantial contribution to it with this work on the force's first 80 years.

Stephen F. Austin's settlers were threatened by the cannibalistic Karankawa Indian tribe. A small group of armed riders was formed for protection. That was the beginning of the Rangers.

Over the next eight decades, the Rangers battled Comanches, Apaches, Mexican soldiers, bandits, rustlers, fence-cutters, bank robbers and outlaw mobs. They furnished their own horses and weapons and were poorly and erratically paid. Their numbers expanded and contracted according to the size of the threats to the frontier and the shaky state budget. Many served hoping to be paid by the next session of the Legislature.

The Rangers quickly developed a reputation for ferocity. They were often accused of being racist vigilantes, accurately in some cases. Still, they deserve credit for protecting the state's expanding frontier and eventually making Texas a safe place to live and work.

For Mike Cox, this book is obviously a work of love and fascination. For 15 years, the former journalist served as the spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, which includes the modern Rangers.

It is a meticulously researched book, drawing on newspapers of the day (including the San Antonio Express), letters, orders and official reports cited in copious source notes. The writing is straight-ahead.

We meet such leaders as Capts. "Rip" Ford and Leander McNelly as well as privates who put their lives on the line and rode the country from San Saba to El Paso.

Cox details the capture of outlaw John Wesley Hardin and the shooting of Sam Bass and his gang, two highlights in Ranger history.

As the book ends, some Texans began to believe that the Rangers were a relic of the past and were no longer needed. As we know, that wasn't true.
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Sterlin Holmesly is a San Antonio author.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The vulnerable Texas Ranger, July 19, 2008

By 

Dick Stanley (Austin, TX, United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821-1900 (Hardcover)

I came away from independent historian Mike Cox's new classic Ranger history with a new view of the fabled outfit, the samurai of early Texas. There's less of their invincibility here than vulnerability. Despite committing occasional injustices, they seem often to have been short of manpower, money and even modern weapons yet would charge into a fight they couldn't reasonably win and only after taking as well as inflicting casualties, withdraw. They usually were effective, but they usually paid a price.

One review I saw complained that Cox's tale is too bloody. It is graphic in describing the appalling things the Commanche and other maurauding Indians liked to do to settler families, but no more so I don't think, than some recent historical fiction. More so, however, than professional historian Walter Prescott Webb's 1935 classic that Cox has updated with skill and thorough documentation. Webb, for instance, says on page 313 only that Ranger D.W.H. Bailey was slain in July, 1874, trying to get water for a thirsting company under Indian siege. Cox tells us that Bailey's name was Dave and quotes a comrade that the Indians killed him in sight of the others by cutting off his nose, ears, hands, arms, etc. and eating his flesh until their leader dispatched him with a tomahawk. It helps you understand why the early Rangers tended to shoot Indians on sight. When the savages finally were subdued, there were still Anglo and Mexican murderers and border bandits to fight and the Rangers kept charging, and sometimes losing, but were always ready to charge again.

Cox is finishing a second volume to bring the Rangers up to the 21st century, something Webb didn't live to do, and it should make a dandy story, or rather series of stories, which is the way this first volume is put together. Rangers are mainly detectives, nowadays, but their mystique lives on in their holstered but cocked .45s. I'll look forward to No. 2 while recommending this one to anyone interested in Texas. As my Corsicana grandfather used to say, "It's a peach."

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Early Day Texas Rangers--The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, April 16, 2008

By 

Don Butler - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821-1900 (Hardcover)

In this wonderfully written, well documented history of the early Texas Rangers, Mike Cox tells it the way it was, without attempting to romanticize, justify or condemn. Set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Texas frontier history, where lawlessness was the rule and racial hatred prevailed on all sides, the author puts into perspective the violence of the era and the attrocities committed by all the competing cultures during such turbulent times. With a second volume on the way, this is destined to be the definitive work on Texas Ranger history.