A Texas Ranger

By William MacLeod Raine, 1910

FOREWORD TO YE GENTLE READER.

Within the memory of those of us still on the sunny side of forty the
more remote West has passed from rollicking boyhood to its responsible
majority. The frontier has gone to join the good Indian. In place of
the ranger who patrolled the border for "bad men" has come the forest
ranger, type of the forward lapping tide of civilization. The place
where I write this-- Tucson, Arizona-- is now essentially more
civilized than New York. Only at the moving picture shows can the old
West, melodramatically overpainted, be shown to the manicured sons and
daughters of those, still living, who brought law and order to the
mesquite.

As Arthur Chapman, the Western poet, has written:

No loopholes now are framing
Lean faces, grim and brown;
No more keen eyes are aiming
To bring the redskin down.
The plough team's trappings jingle
Across the furrowed field,
And sounds domestic mingle
Where valor hung its shield.
But every wind careering
Seems here to breathe a song--
A song of brave frontiering--