Skip to main content

Texas rangers

Its peculiarly local exuberance is nourished by rare traditions and an untamed individualism.

This Is Texas. Improbable event, incredible success, unprofitable loyalty, colossal hardship, heart-breaking failure went into its making.

There have never been many of them, and they haven’t always behaved well. But for more than a century now, they’ve been one of the most famous law-enforcement out fits in the world.

The Lone Star state as it once was—proud, isolated, independent, the undiluted essence of America forever inventing itself out of the hardscrabble reality of the frontier

The Texans on these pages are a vanishing species, born of the vast and varied geography of the toughest frontier.

Both grimness and beauty touch this haunting fragment of America’s past

This is an old tale, and not a pretty one; it is a true tale, a real “Western,” although it wouldn’t go on TV. It sounds to me like a ballad—the ballad of Cynthia Ann.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate