Texas Ranger (law men not baseball) mythology was always a part of my childhood. One of my uncles was named for Aubrey Redfearn, an east-Texas Ranger. When I was ten-years-old I met a Ranger working a stock-theft case, (cattle rustling) in Post, Texas, (near the New Mexico line). The man, (until 1993, all Rangers were men) looked something out of a western movie and treated everyone else like a lower life form.
Awestruck, I read everything I could find about the Rangers: Grey, L’Amour, even Michener. When the NBC movie-of-the-week featured a pilot for a Texas Ranger TV series I was enraptured. When the television series failed to materialize I was heartbroken. It became increasingly obvious that the Rangers were persona non grata in contemporary fiction.
It wasn’t until I got to college and studied Texas history that I began to see why.
Originally a volunteer militia, during the war for independence from Mexico, Texas Rangers remained on the frontier as a paramilitary force on call. Legend attributes everything from scouting for Polk’s 1846 invasion of Mexico, to fighting Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche tribes, to taming the lawless west.
The Rangers did scout for the U.S. Army in northern Mexico—when they weren’t fighting each other or Polk’s troopers but did more looting than fighting. Rangers engaged in running battles with Mescalero and Comancheria raiding parties before and after the Mexican-American war. But it was the U.S. Army and genocidal policies that pacified the native tribes.
As for taming the west, the Rangers produced and sheltered as many scofflaws as they apprehended. Baz Outlaw, (you can’t make that name up) was born and raised in Georgia. Educated with a professional life ahead of him, until he murdered a man, Baz fled to Texas, becoming a Ranger based on his equestrian skills and skill at arms. There was no background check in those days. A vicious alcoholic, Outlaw would become a train robber, ultimately killing half-a-dozen men, including a Ranger and a constable.
Ranger Jack Duncan captured legendary Texas bad man John Wesley “shot a man for snoring” Hardin on a train, pistol-whipping him when Hardin tangled his own pistol in his suspenders. The truth is far-less heroic. Hardin claimed he was asleep on the train when Duncan molly-whopped him with a pistol barrel which seems more likely than a veteran gunfighter getting twisted up in his own pants. Oh, there was also a killing of another man on the train who supposedly carried, (but never drew) a pistol. None of the myths or facts address Duncan’s illegal interception of mail from Hardin to his father or that he “apprehended” Hardin in Florida, where Duncan NO jurisdiction.
Extrajudicial means is a recurring theme in Ranger operations.
After Texas entered the union the Rangers mostly tracked down runaway slaves, stock rustlers, and renegade bands. In the early days of reconstruction, the Rangers were replaced by a predominately African American State Police force in an effort to end state-sponsored terror. The state police were disbanded before Reconstruction ended. In years following reconstruction, the Rangers’ heritage became one of apartheid enforcement, union busting, and unregulated killings. There would not be another African American Ranger until 1988 and then only after multiple brutality lawsuits were filed by the NAACP.
Women were finally added to the ranks in 1993. Texas Monthly Magazine published a special edition mash-note to the Rangers. As with previous treatment, Texas Monthly completely ignored the history of killings, abductions, and torture attributed to the Rangers. The magazine conspicuously abstained from reporting subsequent allegations of sexual harassment brought by the inaugural female Rangers.
But the relationship with the press was not always as rosy—or obsequious. When Jovita Idar wrote news articles critical of Ranger brutality toward Mexicans and Tejanos, the Rangers destroyed her press in the dead of night. Mostly because Idar had shamed them away from a daylight attempt. Other Rangers used brutal intimidation to drive black-owned newspapers out of Texas.
A white-supremecist militia well into the 20th century, Rangers worked to put down Mexican farm workers attempting to organize in 1933. Rangers engaged in mass arrests, false charges, and beatings to break the fledgling union. They sided with anglo farm owners again during the Starr County Melon strike in 1965 and against the United Farm Workers in 1967.
The Rangers’ reputation for law enforcement continues to be marred by violence, Civil Rights violations, and questionable killings. One of the most famous incidents is Frank Hamer’s hunt for Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. After a mass firing of the entire Ranger Division for politicking, Hamer went after Parker and Barrow for a purported $20,000 reward—continuing a Ranger tradition.
That tradition, “Ranger for hire,” is illustrated by one of the better writers on the subject. Elmer Kelton was born on a cattle ranch and raised in the Ranger lore as well as Ranger fact. His historic fiction novel, The Day The Cowboys Quit features a some-times-gun-for-hire, some-times Ranger who's sets a brushfire, (like a forest fire on the prairie). Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is more horrific in detailing little-known, bloody Ranger excursions into Chiuaua and Coahuila, massacring Apache and Mexicans alike. An unbroken line of murder runs from the days of Texas Independence through to Frank Hamer.
Sure, Hollywood gave us The Lone Ranger but it also gave us True Grit, where La Boeuf (Glenn Campbell 1967, Matt Damon 2010) is a Ranger in pursuit of the bounty on an Arkansas outlaw. John Sayles’ masterpiece, Lone Star, while not specifically about a Texas Ranger, is rooted in a writing-class debate about a border-town Ranger. One student was interested in telling the story of a revered Texas Ranger but a Latina student, countered that the Ranger might be revered by the anglos but (because of his brutality) not by the local Tejanos.
The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez is equally unflinching in its depiction of Rangers in turn of the century Texas especially in relation to the Tejanos who endured them. More recently, David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water, is brutally honest in Jeff Bridges’ take on the Ranger in situ: racist, sexist, and desperately unable to cope with a world that has passed him by.
Of course this truncated history doesn’t even scratch the surface of creative fuel and story potential in taking the Rangers from white-hat mythos to Me-Too reality. The truth is just under the surface of legends. The dare is in making it palatable to audiences who LOVE myths.
That’s the highest calling for any fiction writer: to make the truth accessible.
The photo above, Texas Rangers, 1949 is from Hill Country Magazine and is covered by the Fair Use Doctrine.
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