After getting the lay of the land, so to speak, frontier man Bigfoot Wallace moved from Austin to San Antonio, which was considered the extreme edge of the frontier, to sign up as a Texas Ranger under Jack Hayes. In them days, Texas was as wild as the west could get. There was danger from the south from the Mexicans, danger to the wet and north from the wild frontier filled with Indians and desperados, and to the east the settlements still had problems with the Cherokee Nation…
Bigfoot Wallace was as crazy an individual as they come. He could spin a yarn better than anyone, and while he was a dangerous foe to his enemies, he was also a jovial giant, who was always on the lookout for a good laugh. What with hunting and fishing and fighting Comanches and avoiding rattlesnakes, Wallace had the time of his life in Texas. Said he wouldn’t swap Texas for the whole shooting match that was the rest of the United States.
Turns out, the rough and tumble life of a Texas Ranger wasn’t enough to satisfy Bigfoot Wallace. No sir! He hungered for adventure, and he found it. First he fought against Mexican General Adrian Woll’s invasion of Texas in 1842, then he volunteered for the retaliatory raid across the Rio Grande…
Bigfoot Wallace – that wild and wacky Texas Ranger — returned to the wilds of frontier life once the United States won the war with Mexico, and it suited him as nothing else could do. Soon he was freighting mail six hundred miles from San Antonio to El Paso, and it was the wildest stretch in the Wild West! Wallace was the only man who could do it. Anyone else who tried was scared off by attacking Comanche and Apache warriors or killed outright…
Well now, Bigfoot Wallace was jest about the roughest, toughest Texas Ranger that ever rode west of the Pecos. Came to Texas bent on avenging the death of a brother and cousin who’d been massacred at Goliad by Santa Ana’s army, but by the time he got here the Revolution was won and Texas was a Republic. He might’ve gone home then, but Wallace discovered Texas was a hunter’s paradise, so he made his way to the extreme edge of the frontier, where he hunted the abundant game that he sold to the settlements.
