Andrew R. Graybill is professor of history and Director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. His first book, Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier, 1875-1910 (2007), is a comparative study of the two most famous constabularies in the world and pays particular attention to the consequences of frontier absorption for rural people. He is a coeditor, with Benjamin H. Johnson, of Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories (2010), which marks the first attempt to bring scholars of both the continent's border regions into sustained conversation. Most recently, he is the author of The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (2013), which tells the story of a Montana family of mixed native-white ancestry and the changing notions of racial identity in the West between 1850-1950, and a coeditor, with Adam Arenson, of Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States (2015).
Using the Canadian Mounties and the Texas Rangers as a frame, this lecture explores the differences as well as the surprising similarities that characterized the nineteenth-century frontiers at either end of the Great Plains, with particular attention to ecology, Native peoples, and the persistence of myth.