"...the Texas Rangers rode with vengeance in their hearts." (p. 286)
Poul Anderson incorporates every possible historical detail. So the Texas Rangers have to be mentioned. Suddenly I realize that:
I do not know what the Texas Rangers were (or are?);
all I know about them is that the Lone Ranger had been one - and he is fiction.
Fortunately, we now have Wikipedia. See Texas Ranger Division. So now I know that the Rangers have a complicated history, still exist and are the local state equivalent of the FBI.
OK. That is something else that I have learned. Tomorrow I will decide whether to dig into other historical details in this chapter. Meanwhile, I will try to finish the fascinatingly revelatory book about Jiddu Krishnamurti. Good night again.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I suspect the Texas Rangers are a carryover from the time Texas was an independent country.
Ad astra! Sean
According to the link Paul provided:
"The Texas Rangers were unofficially created by Stephen F. Austin in a call-to-arms written in 1823. After a decade, on August 10, 1835, Daniel Parker introduced a resolution to the Permanent Council creating a body of rangers to protect the Mexican border."
Kaor, Jim!
Roughly what I had in mind for the origins of the Rangers.
Ad astra! Sean
"I do not know what the Texas Rangers were (or are?);"
Walker, Texas Ranger jokes were literally unavoidable on the internet for at least a decade (to say nothing of the TV show itself) and somehow you never noticed?
The Texas Rangers were critical in what was effectively a genocidal race war of extermination (on both sides) between white settlers and Comanches (which the Comanches were winning for about 40 years, with the line of settlement being steadily pushed BACK), and you are ignorant enough of history not to have heard anything about it?
I keep running into people like this, who know absolutely nothing and are completely blithely unconcerned about it. I still don't know how to handle it.
Thank you.
Walker?
Got it. "Walker, Texas Ranger" TV series.
Anonymous:
I expect you live in or near Texas & know more about the history of Texas than about more distant parts of the world
There is a lot more history in the world than anyone can learn.
Paul lives in Britain & probably knows more detail about British history than you do & less about the history of the US & Texas in particular than you do.
As a Canadian I expect I know as much about the origins of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (started as North West Mounted Police) as you do about the Texas Rangers. I would be surprised if you had heard of 'The Cypress Hills Massacre', an incident which helped kick start the NWMP.
BTW Poul Anderson had a *very* wide knowledge of history. In 'Losers Night', one of the Phoenix Tavern stories, the narrator overhears a brief part of a conversation between two people at a table whose names are not given. Enough is mentioned in the conversation that I was able to recognize the two as Brutus (the one famous as one of Julius Caesar's assassins) and Louis Riel. The latter being someone well known to Canadians but obscure elsewhere in the world.
Kaor, Anonymous and Jim!
Anonymous: I fear the "Walker" I'm most familiar with is the Walker seen in THE PHANTOM comic strip when I was a boy: "The Ghost Who Walks."
Jim: Absolutely, what you said about Anderson's wide ranging knowledge of history. Yes, I recall Brutus and Louis Riel, in "Losers' Night." But, besides Winston Churchill meeting Vincent van Gogh, I was esp. interested in how we see Queen Mary I of England in that story.
Ad astra! Sean
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