LONE STAR JUSTICE: The First Century of the Texas Rangers

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. (June)

Forecast:This book has a first serial in American Heritage magazine and a nod from the History Book Club (main selection). After all the lovers of Texas history and lore pick up this title, it should show impressive numbers for a university press book.