Few newcomes became so thoroughly Texas as did Rip Ford. His career reads like a dime novel. He was in fact the hero of several such fiction pieces. He was born in South Carolina with the ordinary name of John Salmon Ford. His father, originally a Virginian, drifted west to Lincoln County, Tennessee. The boy quickly went through the country school and at sixteen years of age taught himself for a time. At nineteen he 'read medicine' under Dr. James G. Barksdale, the basis of his later part-time career as a frontier medical man. . . . The book is indispensable for the history of Texas and for certain aspects of the Mexican War."- JOURNAL OF THE WEST