[From J. Marvin Hunter’s Frontier Times Magazine, August, 1927]

Jno. O. Allen, of Cookville, Texas, is Chaplain for the Texas Ex-Rangers Association. Mr. Allen was born in Kaufman county, Texas, June 22, 1850. He was raised on the frontier, and worked as a cowboy and Texas Ranger. He joined the Texas Rangers at Austin in the spring of 1874 and was placed in Company D, Rufus Perry captain, and served until the fall of that year, when on account of illness he asked to be discharged from the service. Mr. Allen was in several battles with the redskins while he was on the frontier, and received four wounds. He says the reason he was not killed and scalped was, when it was a case of shooting, he could outshoot them, and when it was a case of running he could out-run them. "In one fight on Salt Creek Prairie, in Young county," says Mr. Allen, "every man on my side was killed but me, and I was wounded. But listen, there were only two of us, Henry Elberson and myself. They cut me off from Henry, and for one mile I rode my horse’s neck like a fox squirrel on a limb, with arrows flying all around me, two of which hit me. I was with Charlie Rivers when he was killed in Jack county on Rock Creek. I was in another fight near Lost Valley where I shot a shield off of an Indian and captured it. This shield had a white woman's scalp on it, and it was afterwards claimed by a man whose mother and two sisters had been murdered and scalped and their house burned."