Crime and Fiction: Texas Rangers

 

All fabrication: "the," "fourth," "season," and (probably) most of Chuck's face

Texas Ranger (law men not baseball) mythology was always a part of my childhood. One of my uncles was named for 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 like 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.

If they look more like hick-gangsters than lawmen, well...

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 to the Rangers.  

The Rangers did scout for the U.S. Army in northern Mexico—when they weren’t fighting U.S. troopers (or each other). The fact is the rangers 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 law inforcement, the Rangers produced and sheltered as many scofflaws as they apprehended. Baz Outlaw, (you can’t make that name up, I tried) was born and raised in Georgia. Educated with a professional life ahead of him, Baz murdered a man and fled to Texas. Outlaw became 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 had NO jurisdiction. 

Extrajudicial means was a recurring theme in Ranger operations

After Texas entered the union the Rangers mostly tracked down runaway slaves, stock rustlers, and renegade bands. Yes, you read that right. Rangers upheld the rights of slave-owners, cattle barons, and "indian agents," (means concentration camp commanders). They were the bad guys.

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 "extrajudicial" killings. There would not be an African American Ranger until 1988 and then only after multiple brutality lawsuits were filed by the NAACP.

When women were finally added to the ranks in 1993, Texas Monthly Magazine published a special mash-note commemorative edition to mark the occasion. As with previous treatment, Texas Monthly completely ignored the history of killings, abductions, and torture attributed to the Rangers. In the months that followed, the magazine conspicuously abstained from reporting subsequent allegations of sexual harassment brought by the inaugural female Rangers.

Jovita Idar, a BIG goddamned hero

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 mid-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 as a law enforcement agency 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.

According to legend, Hamer resigned to track down Parker and Barrow allegedly killed multiple lawmen. The truth, as so often is the case, someone more mundane. 

Hamer was fired—along with the entire Ranger company—for politicking in violation of state and federal law. With a "special Texas Highway Patrol commission" and the promise of a $20,000 bounty, Hamer tracked Parker and Barrow. That his hunt took him out of Texas and into Louisiana, well out of his questionable jurisdiction was just continuing a Ranger tradition. 

As was the double homicide Hamer committed on Parker and Barrow.

More than The Lone Ranger

But over time, creatives got to the truth through fiction.

A good primer

Elmer Kelton was born on a cattle ranch and raised in the Ranger lore as well as Ranger fact—including the tradition of “Ranger for hire." 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 but on the prairie) to get even with a court that dared to try (and acquit) him for murdering an innocent cowboy. 

Read this

In his 1968 novel, True Grit, Charles Portis gave us La Boeuf is a Ranger in pursuit of the bounty on an Arkansas outlaw. Portis, (an Arkansas native) gives the Ranger proper dressing down. Petty, vain, and arrogant, La Boeuf wants to be a hero, wants to commit to something, the way that human ruin, Ruben "Rooster" Cogburn does. But La Boeuf wants money, more. He's a gun for hire at best and a joke among serious people more often.

Don't read this

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (imphasis on the blood) is more horrific in detailing little-known 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. BTW, do NOT read Blood Meridian. It is a visceral, emotionally scaring, and haunting. Just don't.

Watch this

John Sayles’ film, Lone Star, while not specifically about a Texas Ranger, is rooted in a writing-class debate about a border-town Ranger. One passionate student sought to tell the story of a revered Texas Ranger. But a Latina student, just as passionate, countered that the Ranger might be revered by the anglos but (because of his brutality) not by the local Tejanos.

Yes, do watch this

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.

Could be worse...could be Abbott

Especially, when these days, the Rangers are more a PR arm for whichever governornisimo has bought the office.

Give this a read, too, but not Blood Meridian...ever

That’s the highest calling for any fiction writer: to make the truth accessible.

I own none of the images above. All are used for instructive/educational purposes as covered by the Fair Use Doctrine.