Shooters and Shifting Sands: The Wild West Life of Texas Ranger Captain Frank Jones by Bob Alexander (review)

We are told that there were four great Texas Ranger Captains in the glorious days of “one riot, one Ranger”: William McDonald, John Rogers, James Brooks, and John Hughes. To that legendary pantheon we need to add a fifth name, Frank Jones, argues award-winning western author Bob Alexander. The retired lawman turned author is a stalwart of the University of North Texas Press stable (having published five titles now), and he is obviously a big fan of the Texas Rangers, and that is not a reference to the baseball team.

Whether Jones (1856–1893) actually belongs in the exalted company of the Big Four is the main question. He was obviously an extraordinary lawman, a man of action and also a good administrator with a sharp mind and a willingness to mentor young up-and-coming Rangers. Those are rare qualities individually, but to find them all in the same man is truly remarkable. Alexander’s book has much to recommend it, including an up-close view of law enforcement along the Texas–Mexico border when that border was wide open, the sometimes strained relations between the Rangers and local law enforcement, and details about late nineteenth-century law enforcement in wild-and-wooly Texas. The best part of the book may be Captain Jones’s dramatic death on June 30, 1893, in a shootout on the “shifting sands” of Pirate Island, complete with last words worthy of the popular Western novelist Louis L’Amour: “Boys, I am killed” (357).

The book’s weakness is that the author is a charter member of “the Riders of the Purple Prose.” A few examples: The Rangers have “backbones of steel” (xvi); people do not fire a shot, they “pop a cap” (216); men are not hanged, they “die draped with the black hood while suspended beneath . . . a jail yard scaffold.” (247); and nobody just dies, they “pass to the other side” or something similarly colorful. This goes on for page after page. The reader has to work hard to dig Jones out from under the layers of purple prose. Other stylistic problems are a love of rhetorical questions, exclamation points, anticipation, and too many editorial asides.

Much of the first half of the book is “life-and-times” stuff because Jones did not leave any writings except a few letters and official reports. This may be why the author devotes so much space to Comanche raids, especially Comanche barbarism, going back in time even before Jones was born. This material seems only distantly related to Jones’s life. Personally, I have one small bone to pick with the author: His otherwise extensive bibliography is arbitrarily selective, consigning all primary sources to the endnotes alone.

If you enjoy blood-and-thunder lawman’s biography, this one will sweep you along at a full gallop. It may or may not convince you that Frank Jones was a great captain, but you will have no doubt that the man possessed “true grit.” And you will certainly have no doubt where Bob Alexander stands on the question.