Stories of mythic proportion: The Texas Rangers have lots of 'em. Many have been collected in books, told and retold and retooled over the years until they've been distilled down to their essence. One Ranger, One Riot is undoubtedly the best-known of all. The legendary incident is based on an illegal prize fight, not a riot, but that's beside the point. There are plenty more where that one came from, and the bulk of these tales make up a virtual Texan epic.

Mike Cox knows a lot of these stories by heart. He's been steeped in Ranger lore since the age of five, when his grandfather, a newspaper reporter, recounted the many illustrious Rangers he knew personally. Like the story of Frank Hamer for example, the famed Ranger who tracked down Bonnie and Clyde.

Mike is the chief of media relations for the Rangers and their parent agency, the Department of Public Safety (DPS). Most of us saw him hard at work in this capacity during the Fort Davis standoff last April, feeding sound bites about the unfolding crisis to the hungry media. But Mike is also a printed-word historian who has written extensively about the Rangers over the course of 20 years in several books and scores of newspaper articles. His new book,Texas Ranger Tales is outstanding. Most of the stories in Ranger Tales occur between ten and 110 years before he was born, but Mike has also been involved in some pretty big stories during his own lifetime, most recently, during the aforementioned Fort Davis standoff. Even before I interviewed Mike for this story, I decided to call his interview Fort Davis Flashbacks but his West Texas roots run far deeper than I had suspected.