Texas rangers

<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Both grimness and beauty touch this haunting fragment of America’s past</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck">The Lone Star state as it once was, proud, isolated, independent, the undiluted essence of America forever inventing itself out of the hardscrabble reality of the frontier</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">There have never been many of them, and they haven’t always behaved well. But, for more than a century now, they’ve been one of the most famous law-enforcement outfits in the world.</span></p>

<p>Its peculiarly local exuberance is nourished by rare traditions and an untamed individualism.</p>