Webb's Texas Rangers

Recently I finally read Walter Prescott Webb’s history of the Texas Rangers, something I had been planning to do for a good while. It is a fine and comprehensive history covering the rangers from their beginnings in the Texas Revolution to their activities in the 1930’s, depicting   both their legendary accomplishments and successes and  their failures and misdeeds.  The rangers as variously organized served in the revolution, the Mexican War, the struggles with the Comanches from the 1830’s through the 1870’s, the later fights with Apaches in West Texas, a century of trouble along the Rio Grande, and as lawmen fighting  the murderers, feudists,  horse and cattle thieves, and other criminals both on the frontier and in the state’s settle areas.

The book does an excellent job of making plain just how wild much of Texas was in much of the time it covers.  When the rangers began their work, the western edge  of civilization in Texas ran roughly from Corpus Christi to San Antonio to the Red River north of Dallas.  With the exception of a few Spanish settlements near the Rio Grande, the rest of the state was wild, mainly unpopulated, lawless, and  very dangerous.  Bands of Comanche, Apache, and other plains and desert Indians fought  each other and raided the Mexican settlements and ranches along and south of the Rio Grande and the Texans along the frontier. In the two decades after the Civil War much of the western half of the state was settled   by ranchers and others, though  some of the areas along the Mexican border upstream of Laredo and in the Trans-Pecos region in far west Texas remained wild until at least the time of  the first world war.  The book closes in the 1930’s on an almost completely settled and civilized state where a good deal of the credit for that accomplishment belonged to the rangers. 

Though the author obviously respects and admires his subjects, the book is generally fair in its treatment of the various participants in its story. (There is one main exception. The author, who published the book in 1935, shows the  low opinion of reconstruction and the coalition of blacks, Republicans, and federal troops who controlled the state during that era typical of a southern Democrat of his time. That bias comes through at times in his treatment of the period and of federal soldiers, particularly black ones.) Refreshingly for a reader these days, it is also completely devoid of political correctness with the author pulling no punches about the cruelty and duplicity of Mexican bandits and officials or the savagery of the plains Indians. He simply relates what actually happened in a manner free of the agendas,  special pleading, and   affirmative action with regard to content which afflict so much present day writing in history.  

In addition to presenting a the story of the rangers, the book does a fine job of setting and explaining the varying contexts they operated in  the hundred years from the revolution to the 1930’s. I recommend it highly. 

Credit for Trying

A while back Debby and I watched the third movie of the trilogy based on Atlas Shrugged. When a friend asked me what I thought a couple of days later, the best thing I could say was that I gave them credit for  trying.  It and the two others before it were not awful. They just were not very good. They were done on low budgets with generally unknown actors and directors and no continuity of either actors or directors from one film to the others. However, I wonder if a good director with a Lord of the Rings size budget and the same cast and crew  throughout would have done much better. I think it would be really hard  to make a good movie  from a very long, tightly interwoven, and philosophical story such as Atlas Shrugged.

The most unfortunate thing about the movies is that they reinforced the false impression  that the book is mainly about politics.  In the book, while the political conflict and ideas are important to the story, they are also clearly only a part of larger and more fundamental issues and a much bigger set of ideas.  It would be easy for someone who had not read the book to come away from the movies thinking the political story was all there was.

Atlas Shrugged is hard enough for many people to understand anyway. A basic thing to grasp is  that it is not a book about real life or the real world despite its generally realistic setting, but rather a book about how the world might  or would be if people followed their beliefs and theories though to their logical conclusions and reflected them in their behavior pretty much without reserve.  I fear the movies miss conveying that point almost entirely.

I also doubt if someone unfamiliar with the book could have followed the plot of the movies very well.  Things seemed to get a bit sketchy from time to time. Still, I enjoyed watching the films even while wishing they had been better. I have two of them on DVD and will buy the third.