“like firecrackers well started in a barrel” — Texas Centennial Commemorative Silver Half Dollar Coin

Today, the Texas Centennial Commemorative Silver Half Dollar Coin recognizes the expertise of the Texas Rangers as viewed in an article 125 years ago.

From the Dubuque Daily Herald of May 18, 1892, an excerpt from The West from a Car Window by Richard Harding Davis:

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How the Texas Ranger Handles a Rifle or a Revolver.

The rangers were the largest men I saw in Texas, the state of big men. And some of them were remarkably handsome, in a sunburned, broad shouldered, easy, manly way. They were also somewhat shy with the strangers, listening very intently but speaking little, and then in a slow gentle voice; and as they spoke so seldom, they seemed to think what they had to say was too valuable to spoil by profanity.

When General Mabry found they would not tell of their adventures he asked them to show how they could shoot; and as this was something they could do, and not something already done, they went about it as gleefully as school-boys at recess doing “stunts.”

They placed a board, a foot wide and two feet high, some sixty feet off in the prairie, and Sheriff Sheeley opened hostilities by whipping out his revolver, turning it in the air and shooting, with the sights upside down, into the bull’s-eye of the impromptu target. He did this without discontinuing was he was saying to me, but rather as though he were punctuating his remarks with audible commas.

Then he said, “I didn’t think you rangers would let a little one-penny sheriff get in the first shot on you.” He could afford to say this because he had been a ranger himself, and his brother Joe was one of the best captains the rangers have had; and he and all of his six brothers are over six feet high.

But the taunt produced an instantaneous volley from every man in the company. They did not take the trouble to rise, but shot from wherever they happened to be sitting or lying and talking together, and the air rang with the reports, and a hundred quick, vibrating little gasps like the singing of a wire string when it is tightened on a banjo.

They exhibited some most wonderful shooting, declares Harper’s Weekly. They shot with both hands at the same time with the hammer underneath, holding the rifle in one hand and never when it was a revolver they were using, with a glance at the sights.

They would sometimes fire four shots from a Winchester between the time they had picked it up from the ground and before it had nestled comfortably against their shoulder.

They also sent one man on a pony racing around a tree about as thick as a man’s leg and were dissatisfied because he only put four out of six shots into it.

Then General Mabry, who seemed to think I did not fully appreciate what they were doing, gave a Winchester rifle to Captain Brooks and myself and told us to show which of us could first put eight shots into the target.

It seems that to shoot a Winchester you have to pull a trigger one way and work a lever backwards and forward, this would naturally suggest that there are three movements—one to throw out the empty shells, one to replace it with another cartridge and the third to explode this cartridge.

Captain Brooks, as far as I could make out from the sound, used only one movement for his entire eight shots.

As I guessed, the trial was more to show Captain Brooks’ quickness rather than his marksmanship, and I paid no attention to the target, but devoted myself assiduously to manipulating the lever and the trigger, aiming blankly at the prairie.

When I had fired two shots into space, the captain had put his eight into the board.

They sounded, as they went off, like firecrackers well started in a barrel, and mine, in comparison, like minute-guns at sea.

The rangers I found after I saw more of them could as rapidly with a revolver as with a rifle and had become so expert with the smaller weapon that instead of pressing the trigger for each shot, they would pull steadily on it and snap the hammer until the six shots were exhausted.

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The Texas Centennial Commemorative Silver Half Dollar Coin shows with an artist’s portrayal of Rangers in Camp.

Texas Centennial Commemorative Silver Half Dollar Coin