Kirjahaku

Reconsidering the myth of ""good guys in white hats"" The Texas Rangers have been the source of tall tales and the stuff of legend as well as a growing darker reputation. But the story of the Rangers along the Mexican border between Texas statehood and the onset of the Civil War has been largely overlooked - until now.This engaging history pulls readers back to a chaotic time along the lower Rio Grande in the mid-nineteenth century. Texas Devils challenges the time-honored image of ""good guys in white hats"" to reveal the more complicated and sobering reality behind the Ranger Myth.Michael L. Collins demonstrates that, rather than bringing peace to the region, the Texas Rangers contributed to the violence and were often brutal in their injustices against Spanish-speaking inhabitants, who dubbed them los diablos Tejanos - the Texas devils. Collins goes beyond other, more laudatory Ranger histories to focus on the origins of the legend, casting Ranger immortals such as John Coffee ""Jack"" Hays, Ben McCulloch, and John S. ""Rip"" Ford in a new and not always flattering light.In revealing a barbaric code of conduct on the Rio Grande frontier, Collins shows that much of the Ranger Myth doesn't hold up to close historical scrutiny. Texas Devils offers exciting true stories of the Rangers for anyone captivated by their legend, even as it provides a corrective to that legend.

During the turbulent years of the Civil War and Reconstruction, a squall of violence and lawlessness swept through the Nueces Strip and the Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas. Cattle rustlers, regular troops, and Texas Rangers, as well as Civil War deserters and other characters of questionable reputation, clashed with Mexicans, Germans, and Indians over unionism, race, livestock, land, and national sovereignty, among other issues. In A Crooked River, Michael L. Collins presents a rousing narrative of these events that reflects perspectives of people on both sides of the Rio Grande. Retracing a path first opened by historian Walter Prescott Webb, A Crooked River reveals parts of the tale that Webb never told. Collins brings a cross-cultural perspective to the role of the Texas Rangers in the continuing strife along the border during the late nineteenth century. He draws on many rare and obscure sources to chronicle the incidents of the period, bringing unprecedented depth and detail to such episodes as the ""skinning wars,"" the raids on El Remolino and Las Cuevas, and the attack on Nuecestown. Along the way, he dispels many entrenched legends of Texas history - in particular, the long-held belief that almost all of the era's cattle thieves were Mexican. A balanced and thorough reevaluation, A Crooked River adds a new dimension to the history of the racial and cultural conflict that defined the border region and that still echoes today.

A teenage girl enters into a war against drugs and drug dealers with a father figure that might not be all he seems.