Currently reading Doug J. Swanson’s detailed history of the Texas Rangers, Cult of Glory (a real “myth buster”). Swanson expands on the pronouncement of Maxwell Scott and prints both the legend and the fact.
Two things caused me to stop early in the book and think. The first was in a section devoted to John Salmon Ford, Old Rip (a sobriquet indicting Ford’s prominence as a Texas Ranger who dealt savagely with any person he deemed a bad-guy). Ford attempted to create a slave empire in northern Mexico as a by-product of the Mexican-American War. He failed.
After the death of William Wirt Winchester, his wife Sarah inherited vast amounts of money including a sizable interest in her deceased husband’s firearms company. She also received a spiritualist warning that as long as the construction on the family palace in San Jose continued, she would escape death, possibly from the ghosts of those killed by Winchester repeating riles.
