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INTRODUCTION I n the middle of May 1847, somewhere in the chaparral near Monterrey , Mexico, Capt. Walter P. Lane and his company of Texas Rangers spent a frustrating day searching for local partisans. One evening, while the rangers attended to their camp, two local rancheros approached them. They had darkened their faces with gunpowder to conceal their identities —as much from the rangers as from Mexican authorities, who might charge them with treason for collaborating with the enemy. They informed Lane that they knew where the partisan captain lived. José Nicolás García, they claimed, was as much a threat to their lives and livelihood as he was to U.S. supply lines, and they offered to take the rangers to him. Lane agreed and ordered his men to their horses. Closely guarding their guides, the rangers rode through the night and entered a small village near Cerralvo. The rancheros pointed to the largest dwelling, and Lane pounded on the door until an attendant finally opened it. As the captain rushed into the back room, a woman jumped from her bed, startled by the sudden intrusion . Even in this moment of danger and uncertainty, Antonia García’s beauty was such that Lane would comment on it forty years later. He demanded the location of her husband, but she professed not to know. Lane bitterly recalled, “[A]s I had been atrociously lied to by white women, I did not give much credence to the assertions of the Mexican sister.”1 Indeed, the rangers found Nicolás García concealed beneath the blankets. They hauled him out of his home, his wife imploring for mercy. The next day, the court martial that Lane organized at Cerralvo found García guilty of guerrilla warfare and sentenced him to death. On May 29, after the local priest performed the sacred rites, García defiantly stared down the Texan rifles that, under Lane’s command, took his life.2 INTRODUCTION 2 According to his memoirs, Lane found himself in these circumstances because he repeatedly succumbed to his appetite for excitement. He viewed himself as an adventurer and indeed lived much of his life “on the wing,” as he termed it, but as the episode near Cerralvo illustrated, adventurism not only placed Lane into situations of risk and violence but also into situations fraught with gendered and ethnic tensions. The ranger captain was born in 1817, in County Cork, Ireland. In 1821, at the age of four, he crossed the Atlantic with his family, sailing for the United States and settling in rural Guernsey County, Ohio. Fourteen years later, filled with romantic images of Indians and far-off places, Lane left his parents’ home and joined the embattled Anglo-Texans in their fight against what they perceived as Mexican tyranny. He fought at San Jacinto, served on a privateer, and assisted in the removal of Tejano and Indian communities in East Texas. Mexican lancers, gulf hurricanes, Kickapoo bullets, and Texas alligators did not diminish his enthusiasm for adventure, and he joined the Texas Rangers during the U.S. invasion of Mexico. In 1849, Lane crossed the Rocky Mountains and mined gold in California. He traveled to the Sonoran Desert and gambled with U.S. Army officers. With the outbreak of sectional hostilities, he joined the Confederate Army and actively served on the west side of the Mississippi River. When he retired from the adventurer’s life, Lane settled in Marshall, Texas, and found only modest success at business and politics. During Reconstruction, he assisted in the so-called redemption of Harrison County from the black majority, reestablishing traditional white rule. He served the State of Texas in several minor offices, but he seemed most content when reconnecting with old comrades at various reunions. Although Walter P. Lane neither fashioned the policies that directly influenced the course of events, nor commanded the decisive campaigns that executed them, he did participate in many important movements of the nineteenth century—adventurism, romanticism, expansion, secession , reconstruction, among others. An examination of Lane’s experiences illustrates how larger movements influenced the life of one individual and reveals how Lane expressed and derived personal meaning from the social and cultural currents of his day. To Lane, perhaps the most important movement was adventurism. It defined much of his life and informed the ways that he regarded gender and ethnicity, but few scholars have seriously examined the phenomenon and its historical manifestations.3 For many historians, “adventure” and “adventurer” were...

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