The Twilight of the Texas Rangers
For 170 years, the legendary lawmen have faced down cattle rustlers, serial killers, and every threat imaginable. Now they must grapple with their most dangerous foe: the modern world.
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In that rough rural terrain, no officer excelled like the Texas Ranger. He knew his prey and his territory, but tenacity was his greatest asset. Indeed, a Ranger’s charge was to range the frontier: to cross city and county lines, to spend a week or a month or a year in pursuit of his quarry, to suppress lawlessness with any weapon at his disposal. It fell to other Texas officers to mingle with the public and wear starched uniforms. A Ranger was a Ranger because he was bred for the prairies and the backwoods. He personified the frontier and lived by its rough-hewn ethic. In the city he always seemed out of place. When Joaquin Jackson visited New York a few years back and toured the Harlem projects with the city vice squad, he believed he had stepped into Ranger hell. “I could never do what y’all do,” Jackson told the city cops. A Ranger belonged in the wilderness. He was the earthiest of Texas lawmen, and yet there was always a little bit of the dreamer in every Ranger, for he lived the dream of the virtuous wanderer, slaying serpents in God’s garden; every man who coveted Rangerhood sought his mythic place among the wanderers.
In their domain the Rangers were champions. Big Foot Wallace, John Coffee Hays, Rip Ford, Ben McCullough, J. B. Gillett, Lone Wolf Gonzaullas—the names themselves are expressions of frontier heroism. The Rangers made it possible to settle Texas. By protecting South Texas from cattle rustlers and East Texas from oil-field plunderers, they guarded the soft flanks of the state’s burgeoning economy. They were the Klan’s greatest foe and the most-dogged trackers of murderers, from Clyde Barrow to Animal McFadden. In the line of fire the Ranger force produced dozens of bona fide legends, a handful of scoundrels, and hundreds who simply performed as the times demanded. For the vast majority of Rangers, it might be enough to say that they were merely actors in the unholy theater of the frontier, beyond good and evil.
Yet Ranger scribes cannot resist the holy detail: that McNelly “would not enlist a man who did not come from a good family,” that feared “border boss” Captain John R. Hughes “is a devout church minister” who “will not keep a man in his Ranger company who swears or drinks,” that famed Bonnie and Clyde tracker Frank Hamer, killer of more than fifty men in his lifetime, loved to whistle for birds and “talk to his feathered friends.” Far less is said about Ranger sergeant Bass Outlaw, murderer and drunk, or about Geronimo captor Tom Horn, who was hanged for murder in 1903. For that matter, former Ranger commander and historian William Sterling wrote much about his own exploits on the frontier but nothing about his being tried in 1915 for murdering a South Texas rancher with a bullet to the back. (The jury bought Sterling’s self-defense plea, though no weapon was found on the deceased.) And while the credo “One Riot, One Ranger” originated around the turn of the century, its validity was called into question only a few decades later, following the lynching of an accused black rapist at the hands of a mob in Sherman in 1930. Writing of the incident, the Wichita Falls Times lamented, “We are afraid that story (one riot, one Ranger) is passé from now on. Not just one Ranger, but several, constituted the force at Sherman, and proved all but helpless against the mob.”
Today’s Ranger does not pretend to be able to stifle a riot single-handedly. But another turn-of-the-century Ranger motto remains in force, this one coined by Captian W. J. McDonald: “No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and keeps on a’coming.” It is the romance of this statement that has kept the Rangers alive in the hearts of Texans, and it is the sanctimony of the motto that has gotten them into so much trouble. By 1919, the notion of a lone officer’s being given the authority to determine what is “right” was called into question. That year—for the first time, but by no means the last—the Rangers were investigated by the Legislature for torturing and killing civilians who had been deemed “in the wrong.” The Ranger force endured the investigation and also survived the 1933-through-1934 reign of Governor Ma Ferguson, who filled the force with cronies as punishment for the Rangers’ diligent efforts in the 1932 campaign to keep Governor Ross Sterling in power.
When the Department of Public Safety was created, in 1935, Walter Prescott Webb glumly predicted the demise of his heroes. But Webb had underestimated the tug of the Ranger mythology he himself had promulgated. The Rangers were simply incorporated under the DPS and kept on a’coming.
Progress, however, was a’coming even faster.
The men i worked with used to chase criminals on horseback,” says Lewis Rigler, who joined the Rangers in 1947. “The captains all got cars around 1921, and the number one private was the one who got to drive and wash the captain’s car. There were only fifty-one of us by the time I came along, and they put a tremendous responsibility on all of us. No bothering the captains with picky-picky things—just go where you need to go and work as long as it takes to get the job done. And anytime you needed something, you picked up the phone and called the Colonel direct.”
The Colonel was Homer Garrison, Jr., the head of the DPS and the Rangers from 1938 until 1968. Garrison had come up through law enforcement ranks; he knew his men, and their trust in him was unwavering. When the Colonel’s door was closed, he was most likely telling the governor what his men needed. When it was open, anyone was free to tell the Colonel what was on his mind. In 1965 Sid Merchant was a 32-year-old DPS patrolman when he took advantage of Garrison’s policy, walked in, and said, “Colonel Garrison, I’d like to be a Texas Ranger.” The DPS chief said, “I could tell that the moment you walked in,” and eventually hired him. Garrison relied on his hunches but was not an intractable man. Twenty days after Lewis Rigler was promoted to a command post at the Austin headquarters in 1957, he told Garrison, “Colonel, I appreciate your confidence in men. But I’m used to dealing with robbers, rapists, and cattle thieves. Here I’m just staring at the walls. Please just make me a private again.” Garrison nodded and said, “You head on back to Gainesville, Lewis.” Rigler did, and happily remained a Ranger private for the next twenty years.
Garrison kept the politicians at bay and let his Rangers police themselves. Each of the six Ranger companies was led by a captain stationed at each of the six offices (in Houston, Dallas, Lubbock, Corpus Christi, Midland, and Waco), with Ranger privates scattered throughout the hinterlands. Each Ranger assembled his own work load from the cases originating in his jurisdiction. If a Ranger needed to leave his region, or even the state, no advance permission was required. When Garrison needed to hire a new Ranger, he usually took the advice of his subordinates. “A lot of Rangers put in a good word for me,” says Glenn Elliott, who joined the force in 1961 and left in 1987. “But I had been in the trenches with them. During the Lone Star Steel strike in 1957, I was a patrolman working side by side with Lewis Rigler, Bob Crowder, Jim Ray, and Red Arnold. The first night of the strike, we fought a mob of twenty-five hundred mad people blocking the gates. That night, those Rangers learned how I would react in the dark against a mob. If anyone should know whether I’d be a good Ranger, it was them.”
“The Colonel stressed individuality,” says Rigler, though only up to a point: Garrison’s Rangers were white males. Equal opportunity was not yet an issue, but Garrison had his hands full with other matters. Criminals were smarter in post-war Texas, their methods far more sophisticated than in the days of bank robbers and bootleggers. So that his frontier battalion would not be consigned to obsolescence, Garrison’s Rangers were made to learn state-of-the-art investigative and foresic techniques. His last Ranger hiree, Joaqin Jackson, says, “The Rangers would never have survived the modern era if not for him.” But no amount of laboratory schooling could prepare the veteran Rangers for the avalanche of laws and court rulings that descended upon them in the sixties. The Civil Rights Act. Miranda. Laws of arraignment. Habeas corpus writs. No longer could Rangers hide suspects from their attorneys by means of the “East Texas merry-go-round,” ferrying them from one town to the next in the dead of night. No longer could a suspect be tossed in jail without being charged with a crime and given access to a telephone. And the age-old Ranger specialty—coaxing confessions out of suspects by any means necessary—was suddenly in serious jeopardy.
“All the way up to the early sixties, a Ranger was apt to kill you as look at you,” says one Ranger who served among the old-timers. “He was the law, and on occasion he was above the law.” The methods employed by tough cusses like Walter Russell, Jerome Preiss, Clint Peoples, Jim Nance, and Levi Duncan weren’t pretty, but they produced results. When a man got his face held down in a river, it tended to refresh his memory. Putting a milk bucket over a fellow’s head and beating on it with a nightstick often yielded some useful information. “After Miranda,” says Sid Merchant, “we needed to use more finesse in getting confessions. Some of those old boys said to hell with it and left.”
Those who stayed found that the new rules, however aggravating, were going to be enforced. “They issued us each a little card that had the suspect’s rights printed on it, and we were supposed to read it aloud,” recalls a retired Ranger. “Some of us didn’t bother doing it at first—and we had some cases overturned as a result.”
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