ighting
men of the bitterest Baresark type, look at the immortal defenders of
the Alamo. Some of them were, in the light of calm analysis, little
better than guerrillas; but every man was a hero. They all had a chance
to escape, to go out and join Sam Houston farther to the east; but they
refused to a man, and, plying the border weapons as none but such as
themselves might, they died, full of the glory of battle; not in ranks
and shoulder to shoulder, with banners and music to cheer them, but each
for himself and hand to hand with his enemy, a desperate fighting man.

The early men of Texas for generations fought Mexicans and Indians in
turn. The country was too vast for any system of law. Each man had
learned to depend upon himself. Each cabin kept a rifle and pistol for
each male old enough to bear them, and each boy, as he grew up, was
skilled in weapons and used to the thought that the only arbitrament
among men was that of weapons. Part of the population, appreciating the
exemptions here to be found, was, without doubt, criminal; made up of
men who had fled, for reasons of their own, from older regions. These in
time required the attention of the law; and the armed bodies of
hard-riding Texas rangers, a remedy born of necessity, appeared as the
executives of the law.

The cattle days saw the wild times of the border prolonged. The buffalo
range caught its quota of hard riders and hard shooters. And always the
apparently exhaustless empires of new and unsettled lands--an enormous,
untracked empire of the wild--beckoned on and on; so that men in the
most densely settled sections were very far apart, and so that the law
as a guardian could not be depended upon. It was not to be wondered at
that the name of Texas became the synonym for savagery. That was for a
long time the wildest region within our national confines. Many men who
attained fame as fighters along the Pecos and Rio Grande and Gila and
Colorado came across the borders from Texas. Others slipped north into
the Indian Nations, and left their mark there. Some went to the mines of
the Rockies, or the cattle ranges from Montana to Arizona. Many stayed
at home, and finished their eventful lives there in the usual
fashion--killing now and again, then oftener, until at length they
killed once too often and got hanged; or not often enough once, and so
got shot.

To undertake to give even the most superficial study to a field so vast
as this would require a doze