Remembering Joaquin Jackson

by Jim Wilson

If I showed you a room with 200 men in it and told you to pick out the Texas Ranger, you would have selected Joaquin Jackson. He looked like what a Texas Ranger ought to look like, and he acted like one, too. He, in fact, was a Texas Ranger from the crown of his good Resistol hat right down to his custom made boots. I won’t try to tell his life story—he did a good job of that himself in his two books, “One Ranger” and “One Ranger Returns,” which I encourage you to read.

Joaquin and I were friends for something like forty years. Back in the 1970s, I was a police detective in North Texas and Joaquin was the resident Texas Ranger in Uvalde. We got together while working an auto theft case in which vehicles were stolen in my area and transported to Mexico. One of the bad guys, driving one of our cars, got caught in Uvalde. Some years later, about the time I moved down to work in Crockett County, Joaquin transferred to take the resident Ranger station at Alpine. Crockett County bordered his district and we worked some cases together.

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