RED SKY MORNING

Lively tale of a pioneering band of Texas Rangers and their adventures in a decidedly wild West.

James Brooks (1855-1944), the center of Pappalardo’s story, wandered into the Texas Rangers more or less by accident. Though in Texas for only a few years, he’d “already been a rancher, hired hand, mineral prospector, sheep farmer, aspiring groom—and nothing worked out.” At 27, he found a job that suited his “rootless disposition” and paid the satisfying sum of $45 per month as well as three meals per day. Brooks took to the job, which meant keeping order on the open range and trying to mediate conflicts among ranchers, farmers, and Native Americans, a complex tangle that eventually landed Brooks and two of his Rangers in jail, requiring a pardon from Grover Cleveland: “Backing the Texas Rangers…seems a risk-free way to send that message to intruding cattlemen and unwelcome settlers in the Indian Territories.” The author weaves an entertaining yarn about the long-lasting feud in the dense forests along the Sabine River on the Louisiana border, where an argument over hogs in a place called Holly Bottom led to numerous deaths, starting with what amounted to a double execution. Regarding that incident, a local paper wrote, “Yesterday a company of ten Rangers, in charge of Sgt Brooks, arrived here by rail and went into camp….Nothing can be learned of their mission. They are hunting somebody, and some developments will be made in a few days.” Those few days stretched out into years, and, as Pappalardo shows, lacked the neat resolution of most other Ranger operations—and, interestingly, still occasionally reverberate today. All of the author’s tales have many moving parts, and as he wryly notes at the end of the book, so many characters “require a cheat sheet” in the form of a dramatis personae that readers may want to consult it often.

Fast-paced and full of local politics and old-fashioned gunfights—a pleasure for fans of true crime and oaters alike.