From the Marathon News Leader...
Jackson returns with new ‘Ranger’
ALPINE – Retired Texas Ranger Joaquin Jackson will present his new book, “One Ranger Returns,” with a talk and autograph reception from 6 to 8 p.m. tomorrow, Feb. 22, at Front Street Books Reading Room at 201 E. Holland Ave here. The public is invited, and refreshments will be served.
Published this month by University of Texas Press, “One Ranger Returns” continues the saga of Jackson’s exploits chasing criminals and keeping the peace across a wide swath of west and south Texas from 1966 to 1993.
It also covers his career as a private investigator since that period.
The popular “One Ranger: A Memoir,” published in 2005 also by Jackson is the fastest-selling title in UT Press history.
Now in its seventh printing with 40,000-plus sales, “One Ranger” continues to be a bestseller in Texas bookstores and has reached a sizable national audience, UT Press marketing data state.
That book was co-authored by David Marion Wilkinson, who played a vital role in its success.
Accomplished novelist and historian James L. Haley worked with Jackson on the new book, “another successful collaboration that has produced a highly readable, absorbing narrative,” Front Street owner Jean Hardy said. “It seems Jackson had many more gripping tales to tell and a lot more to say about his family and his Ranger friends.”
Some of the stories Jackson recalls include his five-year pursuit of two of America’s most notorious serial killers, Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole.
He also describes the frustration of trying to solve a cold case from 1938 – the brutal murder of a mother and daughter in the lonely desert east of Van Horn.
Jackson describes the role of the Texas Rangers during the United Farm Workers strike in the lower Rio Grande Valley in 1966 and 1967.
“In all my years of . . . Ranger service, the incident that caused the most controversy and damaged the reputation of the Rangers more than any other, was la Huelga ‘the Strike,’ the United Farm Workers strike of 1966-1967,” he wrote. “Since I am the only Ranger involved in the affair who is still alive . . . I have some issues to take up with the way this episode has been related by historians.”
Jackson sets the record straight according to his own lights, finding a more complex truth than what he calls a “shrink-wrapped” version, a “passion play of social stereotypes, of potbellied, bullying Rangers swinging nightsticks and pistol-whipping hapless, terrified Hispanic farmworkers, who were only seeking to better their destitute and exploited lives,” Jackson writes. “As reinforced by many politically-correct writers, this view was quickly extended back into Ranger history.”
Elsewhere, he presents a rogue’s gallery of cattle rustlers, drug smugglers, and a tee-totaling bootlegger named Tom Bybee, a modest, likeable man who became an ax murderer.
And in a concluding chapter, Jackson pays tribute to the Rangers who have gone before him, as well as those who keep the peace today.
For more information, contact Front Street Books at 432/837-3360, or by e-mail at
amazons@fsbooks.com“One Ranger Returns” is also featured on the store’s website at
www.fsbooks.com.
