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:: xv :: Foreword This book is a microcosm of what was a macrocosmic crime war in Texas. It creates a feel for country, time, people—the dramatis personae in a narrative that no “big picture” can achieve. Many Texans descended from frontier times will find something familiar to their own past. Newcomers may marvel at what Texas was before the state became “civilized.” Overlooked by historians (but not by makers of song and story) is the great cleanup of crime and general disorder in Texas’s inner border regions between 1874 and 1881. For two generations Texas’s history was dominated by a threepronged war (Mexicans, Indians, and Yankees), and this violence left anarchy and detritus along what had been the old Indian border and farm-ranch line. Whatever the law was west of the Pecos, little of it existed in the Hill Country and beyond. Rustlers and road agents not only abounded; in some counties they organized and ruled. Sheriffs were hamstrung by both fear and local politics. Security fell to the scattered settlers, and in every central Texas county some sort of militia or minuteman organization was formed. But nothing was really effective until the Rangers came. The Frontier Battalion, reconstituted in 1874, mustered only a few hundred men—without badges or uniforms, and poorly paid. (However, ammunition expended was replaced.) They were, by modern standards, a brutal bunch. However, they accomplished one of the greatest law-and-order feats in human history by cleaning up the border—arresting hundreds, killing hundreds more, and driving an estimated three thousand bad actors from the state. This effort did not erase crime but reduced it to the kind tolerated by civilization. The context of the times is often hard to grasp by moderns. As one lawman wrote, the country was populated by men “mean as hell,” and shooting was too good for some of them. More important, I think, beyond whatever historical interest this book may arouse and satisfy, it contains a lesson that, unspoken, should always be as bright as morning: Order must come before law, and civilization cannot exist without the will and power to defend it. This, after all, was what the Old West was all about. T. R. Fehrenbach San Antonio, Texas ...

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