Posted on 11/07/2004 5:26:23 AM PST by Max Combined
Scholars detail Rangers' violence in a border war against Mexicans
WACO - Back east, for social cachet there is nothing like an ancestor on the Mayflower. In Texas, it is a Texas Ranger in the family tree.
Here at the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, some of the most avid visitors come in search of connections to the men who won the West and, it was said, would charge hell with a bucket of water.
But Southern Methodist University in Dallas says new historical accounts are casting the long-revered fighters of outlaws and Indians in a decidedly darker light.
The scholarship — being gingerly acknowledged at the Hall of Fame — involves investigations into massacres committed in an obscure border war against Mexican bandits and insurrectionists in 1915, a quagmire of its time. "Not a bright period in the history of the Rangers," concedes the museum's director, Byron Johnson, in a film seen by many of its 80,000 visitors a year.
A recent book by an assistant history professor at Southern Methodist and other accounts exploiting archives on both sides of the border, including a damning but little-known Texas legislative investigation of 1919, link the Rangers to the "evaporations" of up to 5,000 Mexican insurgents and Tejanos — Texans of Mexican origin — whose lands in the Rio Grande Valley were coveted by Anglo settlers.
"People are still coming across skeletons," said the professor, Benjamin Heber Johnson, 32, whose book, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans Into Americans, published late last year by Yale University Press, offers one of the fullest accounts to date of the violence. In the end, he said, the repression led the Mexican-Americans to secure their rights with organizations like the League of United Latin American Citizens.
'Bullet in the back' The university's communications director, Meredith Dickenson, in material promoting the book as a "bullet in the back" to conventional, laudatory accounts of the Texas Rangers, wrote: "Here's an episode unlikely to ever be on Walker, Texas Ranger."
In addition, a new documentary, Border Bandits, based on the memoirs of a Texas rancher, offers a firsthand account of the killings of two unarmed Tejanos by a carload of Texas Rangers driven by a legendary Ranger, William Warren Sterling, who later led the force as adjutant general and mythologized his exploits (but not his shootings) in a popular 1959 memoir, Trails and Trials of a Texas Ranger.
"I thought the killings were an isolated incident," said the director of the documentary, Kirby F. Warnock, a Dallas writer whose grandfather, Ronald A. Warnock, had tape-recorded his recollections of coming upon the victims and burying the bodies. After recounting the tale in a 1992 memoir, Texas Cowboy, Kirby Warnock said, "I got lots of calls saying, 'The Rangers killed my granddad.' "
Another book just published, The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The Bloodiest Decade 1910-1920, by Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler, history professors emeritus at New Mexico State University, also recounts the cruelty of both sides.
Reopening old wounds
The disclosures have bruised some feelings at the museum, which has a half-million items of Ranger memorabilia. "You can't put current values on past times," said Johnson, the director, who is an anthropologist.
In recent weeks, showings of Border Bandits and forums on Benjamin Johnson's book have reopened wounds nearly a century old in the heavily Hispanic borderland, where the graves of the two Tejanos can still be found. "I think the real bandits were the Texas Rangers," said Jon Bazan, a grandson of one of the victims, who spoke at a screening in Harlingen in early October. "They were just like James Bond — a license to kill."
The museum cites Ranger "aggressions" against Mexicans but treats with reverence icons like Frank Hamer, who tracked down Bonnie and Clyde years after accumulating a fearsome reputation — not acknowledged in the exhibits — for terrorizing Mexicans.
Strange scheme
A focus of the recent scholarship is an enigmatic plot that served as the backdrop to the violence. In January 1915, with Mexico in a revolutionary uproar and world war raging in Europe, a Mexican rebel named Basilio Ramos was stopped in McAllen with a manifesto calling for an armed uprising to reclaim Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and California for Mexico, and other lands for Indians and blacks. Prisoners and Anglo men age 16 and older were to be executed.
Confusion continues to surround the origins and seriousness of the scheme, called the Plan de San Diego, for the small Texas town where it was supposedly hatched, but its exposure at a time of bandit raids from Mexico panicked the settlers. In one attack, Mexican raiders captured a U.S. soldier, cut off his head and stuck it on a pole.
Texas Rangers, first recruited in the 1820s by the early settler Stephen F. Austin to control the Indians, responded with a wave of shootings and lynchings — what one local newspaper called a "war of extermination." Johnson's book quotes witness accounts of mass hangings of prisoners and innocent Mexicans and Tejanos, some of the bodies desecrated "with empty beer bottles stuck in their mouths."
After an attack on the giant King Ranch, three of the dead raiders were lassoed and dragged by Rangers on horseback, who proudly posed for a photograph later made into postcards. Elsewhere, bodies, dead and alive, were thrown on flaming pyres or left to rot, with relatives too terrorized to bury the remains.
A Brownsville lawyer, J.C. George, said, "There have been lots who have evaporated."
They are where they need to be. Look at Rumsfeld and the anectodal stories about our soldiers bravery and yes even compassion that manage to slip through the MSM. Many of these brave men's exploits have been posted by Freepers.
Why doesn't the Left try debunking some of ITS heros?
Great pics.
A few more terrorist attacks and so-called peaceful Muslims could face the same fate. It's not right or wrong - just the way things work when crime and brigandage are considered acceptable by an identifiable population and is therefore not amenable to a law enforcement solution because everyone is a suspect.
This author is fit to clean the boots of any Ranger that ever wore the badge.
OH yea the Natives were treated with respect and held in high honor in New England. Any Mohicians around that want to talk about that?
And this means what to a Texas Ranger between, say, 1836 and 1920?
When you lose an election, it's time to go back to the ol' tried and true - culture wars and revisionism. Deconstructing the society you hate. Why no trendy research on the 150-200 million dead by the hand of Marxism?
When the first ranging companies were formed in 1823, the Anglos they were protecting from the Indians, mainly Comanche, were part of Stephen F. Austin's colonies.
These were not the common farmers who hung on at the edge of civilization. These men were all very young, with a love of adventure, and a total lack of fear. They rode their own horses and provided their own guns. They had no uniforms or badges.
They were always outnumbered, and poorly, if ever, paid for their services. They lived on what they could scavage from the countryside, including some of the farm animals they were supposed to be protecting.
When Texas won it's independence, the Rangers main duty shifted from protecting against the Comanches to protecting against marauding Mexicans who came across the Rio Grande to steal horses and cattle.
In order for the tiny bands of Rangers to fight the much larger raiding parties of Mexicans, they had to learn how to think like a Mexican. History records that more Texans were killed by Mexicans at "parleys" than during all the battles. The Rangers parleyed with their guns.
The Rangers were never cruel. They didn't torture or brutalize their captives, but they learned quickly that it was a favorite method of both the Mexicans and the Comanches if they surrendered.
The Rangers viewed the Indians in a completely different light than the Mexicans. Indians were wild wolves who had to be exterminated without prejudice. Mexicans were hated with a passion because of their duplicity.
The single most important factor which made the Rangers successful, other than the men themselves, was the invention of the revolving pistol by Samuel Colt in 1838. It was called a "six-shooter" in the West, never a revolver, and, even though it had to be broken apart in three pieces to reload while on a galloping horse, it gave each man the firepower of six.
Rangers did not respect the Rio Grande as the border between Texas and Mexico, and the Los Diablos Tejanos, Texas Devils, were feared in every border town.
These were hard men for hard times.
Their actions cannot be judged fairly one hundred sixty years later.
Here is a historical curiosity. Probably the best known Comanche war chief, and certainly the last to come in, was the maternal Grandson of early Texas Ranger Silas Parker. Quannah had nothing good to say about the Rangers, I don't think.
No, I don't imagine he did.
His mother was Cynthia Ann Parker of Parker's Fort who was abducted by the Comanches as a baby, and lived her life with the Comanches until her "liberation" by a Texas Ranger captain named Sul Ross.
Cynthia Ann never accepted the white man's life, and had to be put under guard to keep her from escaping.
She died four years later, and her daughter, who was only eighteen months old when Sul Ross found them, starved herself to death.
Quanah's tribe of Comanches, the Quahadis, the Kiowas, the Araphahoes, and Quanah's father's tribe, the Nacona's, were caught between a rock and a hard place.
The reservations didn't have enough food to feed them, and the buffalo hunters had stripped the plains of their only food source.
In retaliation the combined Indian tribes of about 700 men, with Quanah as their leader, attacked the buffalo hunter's camp at Adobe Walls.
With less than thirty people in the camp, the buffalo hunters defeated them with their long range Sharp's .50 caliber guns.
Articles like this will turn those red states blue.
Your confusing Norteno music with Tejano. It's not the same thing. The narco-corridos are fairly recent and they are the Mexican equivalent to rap music.
I've been to the Ranger museum in Waco. I'm telling you it's crap. I'm just telling you what I know to be true. I was born and raised in Texas. I am a direct descendent of the Comanche (some call us the Paduca) we say the Nuahmunuah.
The Rangers killed folks for no good reason at times, just like the damn Federales did in Mexico. Both of them were at war with my family. As late as 1908 my Great Great Grandfather was murdered in Mexico by the Federales. He was burned in a city square alive. He was killed for no good reason...oh well just another dead Indio...no matter.
Rangers hung and shot people without trial. I'm not sure why the Times has chosen to bring this up...more race baiting from the left I imagine.
There is a saying in that Indians in Texas used about the Rangers and about white people in general. "They kill like children."
It means that they kill not for food or defense, but because the have an undisciplined minds and hearts.
I love Texas history, and I've studied it to some length from many different sources. The Texas Rangers are always a big part of it.
What you say is true: The Rangers were not nice men. They killed when the mood struck them.
Part of this can be attributed to the age of these men. All of the famous Rangers achieved their fame before the age of thirty.
But most of it was due to the conditions under which they lived, and they didn't expect to live to a ripe old age.
They truly shot first and asked questions later.
I'm not trying to excuse or justify - just understand.
I happen to be doing my Master's thesis on the 1915 insurection and spoke with Ben Johnson before his PHD thesis was published in book form.
No one ever mentions that the Plan of San Diego had two main ideas:
1. Rebellion and Secession from the United States in all the Southwestern states.
2. Kill all the male 'anglos' over the age of sixteen and take their property/possesions.
Does this sound like it might cause a backlash?
The 1919 investigation of the Rangers had ONE guy who said there might have been from 500-5000 insurrectos killed. It's sorta like 10,000,000 homeless. No one knows where the factoid comes from but it gets repeated endlessly until it becomes received truth.
Which doesn't say that the Rangers weren't above shooting any Mexicans who came over the Rio Grande with mayhem and rebellion on their minds.
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