Mick Lang

Dawn of the Ranger's Rise Mick Lang

Ranger Caleb McPherson: As a teenager, Caleb caught poisonous snakes with his bare hands, rode untamed horses, and chewed tobacco that would make a grown man ill. And no one his age in Southwest Louisiana wanted to fight him. In the late 1830s, traveler tales of Texas captivated his imagination. At twelve, Caleb decided that he was going to Texas. He wanted to live Texas! One day, he heard about the Texas lawmen, the ones who rode the range armed with repeater pistols, fighting whoever threatened settlers and their settlements. He knew that day he would become a ranger, one of those Texas rangers. His father warned him that Texas was not Louisiana. "If you go to Texas, you will have to kill a man one day, and killing a man wasn't anything like killing a turkey." In Texas, his father's words returned to haunt him ... but on a scale that he never had expected. In the early 1840s, Caleb left home at sixteen and headed west on a mule; he was armed with two flintlock pistols and a double barrel shotgun. Determined as he was, Caleb sought out the rangers in San Antonio. There he traded in his flintlocks for two Patterson Colts and his mule for a mustang, becoming one of the youngest men to ride with the rangers. Little did he know that just as he reached seventeen, he would face the greatest firefight of his life ... and the worst was yet to come.