Captain John R. Hughes: Lone Star Ranger (review)

Popular western history author Chuck Parsons’s latest work is a traditional narrative chronicle of the life and career of John Reynolds Hughes, one of the legendary “Four Great Captains” of Texas Ranger lore. Hughes’s Ranger career spanned twenty-eight years, and he was a captain for twenty-one of those years. Among his significant accomplishments was his role in guiding the Rangers through the early stages of their evolution from frontier lawmen into modern criminal investigators.

Hughes was born in the Midwest into an antislavery home and came of age in the Indian Territory, where he lived among and befriended Indians of many tribes, including the legendary Comanche chief Quanah Parker. As a result, he brought relevant experience, skills, and an uncommon cultural perspective to Texas law enforcement. Serving as a Ranger from 1887 to 1915, Hughes tracked down horse thieves and fugitives, interdicted smugglers and horse and cattle thieves from both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, and investigated murders and all other manner of crimes. In the early years of the Mexican Revolution (near the end of his career), Hughes monitored the situation to prevent the related violence from spilling across the border and to thwart partisan efforts to use Texas as a staging ground for intrigues and offensives (perhaps to no avail).

While Parsons’s latest chronicle will delight general audiences with exciting tales of Hughes’s Ranger escapades, scholars may take issue with the lack of interpretive analysis and omission of certain events and periods, particularly Hughes’s relationship with Tejanos and activities during the turbulent Mexican Revolution era. (Only cursory coverage of that period, which comprised the final five years of Hughes’s Ranger career, is provided.) Some Ranger history critics may attribute the omission to purposeful complicity in concealing evidence of malfeasance and racial bias on Hughes’s part. This is unfortunate, as a broad survey of modern Tejano and Ranger literature by this reader found it to be notably devoid of allegations of heavy-handedness, injustices against Tejanos, or bigotry on the part of Hughes (except for a single undocumented anecdote in a literary publication). Even sources typically considered to be critical of various Rangers from that period have portrayed Hughes as hardworking, long-suffering, and relatively evenhanded. The timing of Hughes’s career makes him a particularly suitable subject for this topic, because the most egregious examples of alleged Ranger bias and malfeasance occurred immediately in the wake of Hughes’s unceremonious dismissal by Texas Governor Jim Ferguson. Those abuses further alienated a substantial segment of the Texas population and forever tainted the Ranger mystique.

Considering Hughes’s prominence in Ranger history, a modern biography has long been overdue. Captain John R. Hughes: Lone Star Ranger is an extensively researched and well-written account that will provide enthusiasts with an entertaining and informative read and spark discussion among scholars.