A Texas Ranger

“A Texas Ranger is a book to make healthy pulses throb and well ordered veins tingle with wild delight.”
— The Sunny South, 17 June 1899

There was a time when the authority of Texas traveled on horseback.

Across the Nueces Strip and along the Rio Grande, law might exist plainly enough upon paper while the man charged with enforcing it remained a hundred miles from the place where it had been broken. Stolen cattle could vanish across an international boundary before a sheriff had gathered a posse; a fugitive might have friends, horses and open country between himself and the nearest court.

Into that borderland rode Captain Leander H. McNelly and his Special Force of Texas Rangers.

Napoleon Augustus Jennings knew their world at close quarters. First published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1899, A Texas Ranger recalls McNelly’s hard company, the Sutton–Taylor feud, the cattle raids of the Rio Grande country, King Fisher, John Wesley Hardin and a frontier where outlaw and officer might know one another by name before one was ordered to arrest the other.

Jennings wrote before the Ranger had hardened completely into legend. His men are still mounted officers under long skies, carrying warrants, following trails and placing the authority of the State upon their own courage, judgment and endurance.

What survives is not the polished West of later memory, but something rougher and nearer: the border while it was still being lived.

The law might speak in Austin; on the frontier, someone still had to make it heard.

GREEN SERIES · Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1899 · 226 pages · Paperback and hardcover forthcoming

Discover the book and its artwork on our English Instagram profile.