The motto: “No man in the wrong can stand up to a man in the right who keeps a-comin’.” The badge: a simple circle-star. The reputation: as big as the state they are sworn to protect.
Next to the Alamo, the Texas Rangers might be the most famed element of Lone Star legend. Older than Texas itself, which achieved statehood in 1845, the elite law-enforcement agency figures prominently in the state’s history and outsize identity.
Their mythology fills pop culture. Novels, from Zane Grey’s The Lone Star Ranger (1914) to Reavis Z. Wortham’s contemporary thrillers. Movies, from 1910’s The Ranger’s Bride to 2016’s neo-western thriller Hell or High Water. And then there was the masked man who rode a cool white horse and had a Native American sidekick. First heard on radio in 1933, The Lone Ranger morphed into comic books, a TV series (1949–1957), and movies that forever linked the overture to an opera (William Tell) to a fictional Ranger.
Texas novelist Larry McMurtry added to the Ranger mystique when his 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove, became a runaway bestseller, led to an iconic 1989 miniseries, and inspired a series of sequels and prequels in print and on TV. Readers and viewers loved retired Texas Ranger heroes Augustus “Gus” McCrae and Woodrow Call. Of the real-life cattlemen those characters were based on — Charles Goodnight/Nelson Story (Call) and Oliver Loving (Gus) — only Goodnight had service, mostly as a scout before the Civil War, with the Rangers. But the fiction memorialized both characters in the American imagination.
Less rarefied than McMurtry’s work but a powerful force in pop culture, Chuck Norris’ long-running series — inspired by one of Norris’ best films, the 1983 western — saw him portraying a martial-arts master dispensing morality and justice with a good roundhouse kick. The recent reboot, , featuring Jared Padalecki in the title role, returned for its third season this October, alongside the debut of the prequel , which walks the TV story of the Texas Rangers back to Wild West days.
