The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821-1900 (Tom Doherty Associates Book)
by Mike Cox
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Book Summary Information
Author: Mike CoxEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-03-18
ISBN: 0312873867
Number of pages: 496
Publisher: Forge Books
Book Reviews of The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821-1900 (Tom Doherty Associates Book)
Book Review: The vulnerable Texas Ranger
Summary: 5 Stars
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."
Summary of The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821-1900 (Tom Doherty Associates Book)
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. ????
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