THREE YEARS AMONG THE COMANCHES: The Narrative...

THREE YEARS AMONG THE COMANCHES: The Narrative of Nelson Lee, the Texas Ranger, with an introduction by Walter Prescott Webb; foreword by Gary Clayton Anderson (University of Oklahoma Press: $7.95). Since its original publication in 1859, this memoir has been used frequently as a reference for novels about the Texas Rangers. However, as Gary Anderson demonstrates in his concise introduction, Lee made up almost everything in the book--which accounts for the inaccurate dates, improbable events and material cribbed from other sources, including the descriptions of the Comanche War Dance and Green Corn Dance. “Three Years” is actually an example of 19th-Century popular writing, in the well-worn tradition of dime novels and Indian escape narratives. With its derogatory comments about Hispanics and Amerindians, Lee’s narrative reveals not what happened in Texas in the 1850s but what what people wanted to believe happened.