Tales of the Texas Rangers
Another of the 1950s TV whitewashes dismantled.
The True Story of the Texas Rangers - The New York Times
reviewed by
June 9, 2020
CULT OF GLORY
The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers
By Doug J. Swanson
Larry McMurtry’s epic “Lonesome Dove,” about a great cattle drive from Texas to Montana in the 1870s, deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1986. The novel’s protagonists were Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae, former Texas Rangers who embodied the mythic cowboy traits of being loyal and fierce fighters. Occasionally McMurtry presented Call and McCrae as having bouts of laziness and unethical behavior, but for the most part, by humanizing them, he rebranded the fabled Rangers as courageous frontiersmen for the ages.
You won’t find such admirable Rangers in Doug J. Swanson’s smashup of Texas’ law enforcement legends.***
“Cult of Glory” isn’t a book for the fainthearted. Swanson, a prodigious researcher, recounts how in their nearly 200-year “attention-grubbing” history Rangers burned peasant villages, slaughtered innocents, busted unions and committed war crimes. They were as feared on the United States-Mexico border as the Ku Klux Klan was in the Deep South. “They hunted runaway slaves for bounty,” he writes. “They violated international laws with impunity. They sometimes moved through Texas towns like a rampaging gang of thugs.”
In 1823 the Rangers were created by Stephen Austin, the “father” of Anglo Texas.
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