From Amazon.com
The Texas Rangers have alternately been described as "fearless men of sterling character" and "ruthless, brutal, and more lawless than the criminals they pursued." The truth, says Robert M. Utley in
Lone Star Justice, "lies somewhere in between the extremes." The Rangers got their start in 1823, and for half a century they were "citizen soldiers periodically mobilized to fight Indians or Mexicans." They were professionalized in 1874, when they became lawmen employed by the state of Texas. Utley summarizes their colorful history under the leadership of figures like Jack Hays and Ben McCulloch. They came to national attention during the Mexican War, when they fought with distinction under Zachary Taylor at Monterey and also served as scouts throughout northern Mexico. As lawmen, they were noted for apprehending fugitives (the murdering outlaw John Wesley Hardin fell to one of their bullets) and controlling mobs, but they were less successful at putting bad guys behind bars (a problem that the author blames on "a defective criminal justice system"). At bottom,
Lone Star Justice is a sober-minded but generally admiring assessment of a unique group of men.
--John Miller
From 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.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
