Texas. They took the most contrary bunch of frontiersmen, ranchers, farmers, cowpokes, shiftless no-accounts, shootists, rascals, and politicians, jumbled them together, and somehow formed a state. They called it Texas, but for defenseless women and children, it was hell.
Texas Rangers. Although they were outnumbered a thousand to one, the Texas Rangers fought a holding action against the complete breakdown of law and order, often paying for peace with their lives. But one county held out against attack after attack, a place so mean that a saint would have turned bad.
Into this valley of death rode Ranger Vaughn Steel, hungering for revenge, thirsting for justice, and determined to wipe out the rustlers of Pecos County.
Zane Grey (1872–1939), born in Ohio, was practicing dentistry in New York when he and his wife published his first novel themselves. Grey presented the West as a moral battleground, in which his characters are destroyed because of their inability to change or be redeemed through a final confrontation with their past. The man whose name is synonymous with Westerns made his first trip west in 1907, at age thirty-five. Motion picture rights brought in a fortune, with 109 films based on his work.
