Lone Star Justice The First Century of the Texas Rangers by Robert M. Utley Oxford University Press, 370 pp., $30 THERE’S A MOMENT in Larry McMurtry’s novel “Lonesome Dove” when the retired Texas Rangers Woodrow Call and Augustus McRae–now in the cattle business–pass a new farm settlement with a church and a few stores. “Now look at that,” Augustus says. “The dern people are making towns everywhere. It’s our fault, you know. . . . Me and you done our work too well. We killed off most of the people that made this country interesting to begin with.” Robert Utley’s history “Lone Star Justice: The First Century of the Texas Rangers” shows McRae’s observation is not far from the truth. Utley is the author of a number of prominent books about the West, including “The Lance and the Shield,” and in “Lone Star Justice” he highlights the hold the Texas Rangers have maintained on the general American imagination. They’ve done even more for Texans’ self-image. What is really left these days to distinguish Texas from anywhere else–Houston from Phoenix, Dallas-Ft. Worth from Minneapolis-St. Paul, the Red River from the Platte, the Big Piney Woods from the Black Hills? Mostly, what Texas has to keep itself distinct is a memory of those days when a handful of Rangers policed an area the size of Western Europe, battling Indians, Federales, bandits, gamblers, and John Wesley Hardin. By the time they were done, Texas was a safer and less interesting place. The Rangers were founded in 1823 as a citizen militia while Texas was still a province of Mexico. Their genesis reflected the demographics of an increasing American presence, and they were charged with the task of protecting the nascent colonial towns of coastal Texas from the depredations of Mexican bandits and the ongoing scourge of the Comanches, hordes of whom periodically swept off the interior prairies. The bloody struggle between the Rangers and the Comanche “Lords of the Plains” would last for fifty years. After participating in the 1836 war for independence from Mexico, the Rangers were officially sanctioned by the Republic of Texas and its first president, Sam Houston, as the new nation’s main defense force. For nine years they were the Republic’s standing army while Houston (one of three presidents, later to serve as governor and a U.S. senator) worked to have Texas admitted to the Union, a complicated process because of the national slavery question. In the Mexican-American War that began in 1846, the Rangers were known for a battlefield valor driven by a deep-seated animosity toward Mexicans (“Remember the Alamo!”) and for scouting ability gleaned from years of Indian fighting. General Zachary Taylor used them extensively in field operations culminating in the Battle of Monterrey. The legendary Ranger Ben McCulloch was the general’s eyes and ears at Buena Vista, the victory that would shortly catapult Taylor to the White House as the twelfth president. But Taylor also found–as did General Winfield Scott–that the Texans needed a hard curb to keep them from executing reprisals against both military and civilian Mexicans. These atrocities reflected the racism endemic in nineteenth-century Anglo Texas and were a blot on a mostly exemplary century-long Ranger record. Taylor and Scott harbored no illusions about the Ranger companies they commanded–declaring them “unsurpassed both as fighters and troublemakers.” To the Mexicans, the Rangers were forever after known as “Los Diablos Tejanos.” THE HISTORY of the Texas Rangers is dominated by dynamic personalities, and each particular period has its sterling hagiographies, mostly about the storied “captains” who commanded the rough and ready Ranger units. There was John Coffee Hays, a surveyor when he joined the Rangers but a man whose swashbuckling exploits and bravery “bordered closely on rashness.” After equipping fourteen men with the new Colt five-shot revolvers, Hays defeated seventy Comanches at the Battle of Walker Creek north of San Antonio in 1844, killing twenty-three, wounding thirty, and revolutionizing mounted combat at close quarters. In fifteen minutes of confused carnage, Hays’s troop suffered two lance wounds but no fatalities. Once Texas joined the United States in 1845 and settlers began to crowd in, the war with the Comanches and their Kiowa allies escalated. The federal government established a string of forts along a four-hundred-mile front in central Texas, stretching from the Red River south to the Rio Grande. The Army, however, proved ineffective in deterring Indian depredations. In Washington, Senator Sam Houston pleaded for federal aid for the Rangers (now a sort of police-force militia) to deal with the threat, but the endless political maneuvering and bureaucratic red tape got Texas nothing. Finally, Governor Hardin Runnels ordered another legendary Ranger, “Rip” Ford, to attack the Comanches in their homeland. The plan required Ford to cross the Red River and take the conflict beyond the borders of Texas. Traveling surreptitiously, much of the time at night, Ford led two hundred Rangers and Indian auxiliaries across the river. On May 12, 1858, at the Battle of Antelope Hills in present Oklahoma, he surprised the large village of Chief Iron Jacket, destroying it and killing seventy-six while suffering only two killed and three wounded on his own side. The Rangers took eighteen women and children prisoner for future trade for white captives and stampeded three hundred Comanche horses back to Texas. The U.S. Army in Fort Belknap was so impressed with Ford’s expedition as a lesson in tactics, they copied it and conducted similar raids on Rush Springs and Crooked Creek. Ford was also a central figure in the “Cortina War” of 1859, a bloody affair in which a proto-Pancho Villa and Mexican bandit-patriot named Juan Cortina and four hundred followers attempted to reoccupy territory on the Texas side of the Rio Grande. They flew the Mexican flag as they plundered the countryside. Ford and eighty Rangers engaged them at Rio Grande City on December 27, 1859, and the buckskin-clad commander delivered a blow as ruthless and devastating as the one he had administered to the Comanches the previous year, although Cortina and a few followers escaped into Mexico. The U.S. Army was supposed to rendezvous with Ford, but it arrived late and was useful mostly in preventing Ford from pursuing Cortina below the border. During the Civil War, Texas saw the reemergence of the Indian menace as the federal forts were evacuated with the state’s secession from the Union. Some Ranger companies served with Confederate forces, while others were charged with dealing with the Indians and as Texas’s defense against Union incursions (which were almost non-existent, as Texas was not strategically important and, unlike the Deep South, was rife with Union sympathizers). A bigger problem were the small groups of starving Rebel deserters from other parts of the South who roamed the countryside and committed atrocities. Then in December 1863, an army of three hundred Comanches laid waste to a broad swath of north Texas, leaving towns such as Fort Worth islands of armed defense in a burning sea of savagery. Ford and Henry McCulloch (brother of Ben), sharing command of roughly a thousand Rangers statewide, had their hands full. RECONSTRUCTION TEXAS was occupied by federal troops commanded by General Philip Sheridan’s Department of the Gulf from his headquarters in New Orleans. Texas had escaped the destruction suffered by other Confederate states, but had still seen four years of anarchic lawlessness and Indian trouble. Sheridan’s army of 2,200, once again garrisoning fifteen frontier posts, helped to quiet things down. With the Civil War now over, the military presence was increased on the entire Great Plains as both the Johnson and Grant administrations strove to resolve “the Indian problem.” In Texas, the Rangers came to be increasingly seen as a law-enforcement agency and concentrated their efforts as a border patrol in the Rio Grande Valley battling cross-bor
der smuggling and cattle rustling. By 1874 there were five thousand U.S. troops in Texas to deal with the endlessly restive Comanches and Kiowas. In that same year, the Rangers were officially “institutionalized” by the state legislature as the “Frontier Battalion,” an administrative euphemism to go along with their new role as cops with Stetsons and six shooters. The citizenry and the newspapers would have none of it, still calling them “the Texas Rangers.” The Frontier Battalion under a new leader, John B. Jones, participated in one last fight with the Indians, the 1874 Red River War, which ended in the decisive Comanche defeat at Palo Duro Canyon in the Panhandle. The hard winter of 1875 saw the last destitute stragglers come in to the Oklahoma reservation and–except for some minor Apache trouble on the New Mexico border in 1880–a half century of Indian war in Texas ceased. Major Jones was the first modern Ranger. In the succeeding decades of the nineteenth century, the Texas Rangers would tame unruly railroad and cowtowns, arrest or kill such notable outlaws as John Wesley Hardin and Sam Bass, and jump in the middle of the violent range wars that visited Texas with the advent of barbed wire and closing of the open range. In the twentieth century, the Rangers would police “oil patch” boomtowns that were as murderous as any 1870s cowtown, all the while setting the example for a system of state police that would quickly spread across the nation. This may not have been entirely a good thing. The size and bloody history of Texas demanded a quasi-military police force, and the Rangers were never numerous: “One riot, one Ranger” was their motto, as a single officer was expected to put down any number of troubles. But was it the right model for, say, Massachusetts? Huey Long’s personal bodyguard of heavily armed highway patrolmen in Louisiana has its origins in the Texas Rangers, and the power of local communities across the nation to control their state’s police declined over the years. The Rangers were at their best during the years Robert Utley chronicles in Lone Star Justice. They were hard but fair men at a time when the hardness was necessary and the fairness a bonus. They may have killed off most of the people that made Texas interesting to begin with, but most of those people were trying to kill them at the time. Texas isn’t what it used to be, and one wonders whether men like Ben McCulloch, John Coffee Hays, and Rip Ford would think that it was worth it, if they could see the modern Houston or Dallas their fights made possible. Maybe. They were charged with making that vast Texas country safe for settlers and townships, and they did their job. But then again, maybe not. For where in the new world they helped make is there room for men like them? A frequent contributor on western topics to The Weekly Standard, Bill Croke is a writer in Cody, Wyoming.
