by Mike Cox
The East Texas oil boom kept rangers busy in Kilgore. Author’s collection.
Kilgore not yet having a jail, the rangers chained their prisoners inside a recently vacated Baptist church. Absent any other evidence, rangers identified crooks, at least to their satisfaction, by inspecting their hands. Rough, greasy hands generally belong to a hardworking man. Smooth hands with neatly trimmed nails usually indicated a bootlegger, pimp, gambler or thief who didn’t know the difference between a rod iron and a rotary table.
We put men on one end [inside Kilgore’s church-jail] with chains around their necks and we put the women on the opposite end…And we never lost any prisoners.
–“Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas
Visit: East Texas Oil Museum, 1100 Broadway Boulevard, Kilgore.
KILGORE JUNIOR COLLEGE RANGERETTES
The Texas Rangers did not have any female rangers until 1993, but Kilgore Junior College has had its Rangerettes since before World War II.
Long before the state started commissioning female rangers, Texas had its Kilgore Junior College Rangerettes. Author’s collection.
Under the direction of Miss Gussie Nell Davis, the world-famous precision drill team made its first white-booted high kicks in 1940, the “brainchildren” of then college president Dr. B.E. Masters. He wanted to attract more female students and come up with something that would keep his male students from leaving the stands to drink during football game halftimes. With the Rangerettes marching and dancing beneath white cowgirl hats in red blouses and short blue skirts, he accomplished both goals. Still kicking after all these years, the Rangerettes enjoy the distinction of being the world’s first precision drill team.
Visit: Rangerette Showcase and Museum, Kilgore Junior College Campus in the Physical Education (PE) Complex, Broadway and Ross Streets, one block west of U.S. Highway 259.
GRIMES COUNTY
Navasota
JEFF MILTON (1861–1947)
When young Jeff Milton came to Texas from Florida in 1877, he stayed for a time with his sister, Fannie Milton Yarborough, in Navasota. Her husband, James Quincy Yarborough, along with two partners, operated a flourishing mercantile business there. Milton clerked at the store for a while, but when the firm’s two bookkeepers left to take up cattle ranching in West Texas, he decided to throw in with them. With a new .44-40 Winchester he rode west. Milton later joined the Rangers, living an action-filled life that writer-historian J. Evetts Haley chronicled in his book, Jeff Milton: Good Man with a Gun.
Visit: The two-story redbrick building where the future ranger worked stands at 100 West Washington Avenue in Navasota. A historical marker was placed on the former store in 1980.
FRANK HAMER STATUE
Getting a finger shot off after just a week on the job, Marshal W.B. Loftin saw it as an omen and notified the Navasota city council that he would be turning in his badge.
For a small town of three thousand, lawlessness had reached big city proportions. Democrats and Republicans exchanged invective, and while that was nothing new, the political war of words had escalated into periodic gunplay. Meanwhile, bigoted, brutal white men terrorized the local black population. To cap all that, saloons and gambling halls ran wide open.
In desperation, the mayor asked for rangers. Soon, two state lawmen arrived, Company C Sergeant John Dibbrell and a young private, Frank Hamer. The presence of the rangers had the hoped-for calming effect, but when the state officers left, conditions reverted to the way they had been.
With Marshal Loftin gone, the city needed a new marshal. The mayor wired Dibbrell to offer him the position. He said no thanks but recommended Hamer.
The twenty-three-year-old Hamer agreed to take the job, resigned from the Rangers and on December 3, 1908, set about dealing with the sociopolitical issues at hand. A few shin kicks and face slaps—Hamer trademarks—and a couple of killings later, peace reigned in Navasota. On April 20, 1911, Hamer resigned and moved on to a special investigator job in Houston before rejoining the Rangers in 1915.
A life-size bronze of Ranger Frank Hamer stands perpetual guard outside Navasota’s city hall. Photo courtesy Russell Cushman.
The impact Hamer had on conditions in Navasota became part of local folklore. In 2012, expressing its appreciation long after the fact, the city council commissioned artist Russell Cushman to do a life-size bronze statue of Hamer. Dedicated in 2013, it stands in front of City Hall.
Visit: 202 East Washington Avenue.
THE BURIED BADGE
Not long after taking on the marshal’s job, Hamer hired another ranger as his deputy, Marvin E. Bailey.
Hamer had joined the Rangers in April 1906, eight months after Bailey and only a month before R.M. “Duke” Hudson enlisted in Company C. All reported to Captain John H. Rogers in Alpine.
A few years after Hamer left Navasota, his friend Bailey (who in the spring of 1910 had been appointed captain of Company B) hired on as marshal. He later worked as a Grimes County sheriff’s deputy under former ranger Hudson, sheriff from 1924 to 1928. Bailey remained in Navasota through at least 1940, when he was chief deputy under Sheriff Earl Harris. Known in Navasota as “Cap” Bailey, he died in Houston on August 8, 1953, and is buried in San Antonio’s San Fernando Cemetery Number 3.
In the spring of 1999, nearly ninety years after Bailey’s Ranger service ended, a man digging in his garden in one of Navasota’s older neighborhoods hit something metallic about ten inches deep. Wiping the dirt off the object, he saw it was an old Texas Ranger badge. Not only that, stamped on it was “Captain M.E. Bailey/Company B/Texas Rangers.” Turns out, the person who found the badge owned the house where Bailey had lived. Knowledgeable folks who examined the copper badge pronounced it authentic.
Visit: The former ranger’s house is at 415 Church Street. The old Grimes County Jail where former Ranger Hudson lived with his family stood at the county seat in Anderson until razed in 1956.
HARRIS COUNTY
Houston
RANGERS IN THE BATTLE OF SAN JACINTO
Even some serious history buffs don’t know that nearly 10 percent of the Texans who participated in the pivotal Battle of San Jacinto—the brief but bloody engagement that bought Texas’s independence from Mexico—were either former or current Texas Rangers.
The battle began about 4:00 p.m. on April 21, 1836, six weeks after General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna’s troops stormed the Alamo in San Antonio de Bexar and killed all its defenders. At a point in present Harris County where Buffalo Bayou flows into the San Jacinto River, some 930 Texans under General Sam Houston defeated more than 1,300 Mexican soldiers, killing 630 and capturing 730. Only 9 Texans died outright or suffered mortal wounds.
In one eighteen-minute battle, the course of the Texas Revolution (international historians refer to the period as the Federalist War of 1835–1836) had changed. Now considered one of the more significant military encounters in world history, had Mexico prevailed that spring afternoon, the United States likely would have been a much smaller nation—one without Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California and some additional territory to boot.
While every Texas public school student learns this story in state-required Texas history classes in the fifth and seventh grades, the role of the rangers in the battle is poorly understood. More than eighty men in the Texas ranks had served as rangers either engaged in combat that day or detailed to protect the Texas army’s supplies behind their lines at Harrisburg. Contemporary accounts are clear that those left at the rear considered it less than a plum assignment and did so only because they had orders to stay. Of the thirty-six rangers who did fight, four are well known: Robert “Three-Legged Willie” Williamson, John J. Tumlinson Jr., Isaac Watts Burton and Ben McCulloch.
Any armed confrontation is rich in irony. One of the Mexicans who survived the vicious fighting, which degraded into mass slaughter before Houston reined in his men, was First Sergeant Francisco Becerra. Wounded before his capture by the Texans, after the battle he stayed in Texas. N
ot only that, by March 1839, he rode as a Texas Ranger.
Visit: The San Jacinto Battleground State Historical Park is off State Highway 225 East, twenty-two miles from downtown Houston at One Monument Circle, La Porte. San Jacinto Museum of History is in the San Jacinto Monument at the San Jacinto Battleground State Historical Park.
JAMES WILSON HENDERSON (1817–1880)
When former Texas Ranger Peter H. Bell resigned as governor on November 23, 1853, Lieutenant Governor Henderson was sworn in as his replacement the same day. A native of Tennessee, Henderson had ridden as a ranger under Captain Jack Hays, earning the nickname “Smokey.” Henderson served as the state’s chief executive for only twenty-eight days before a duly elected governor took office. He served again in the legislature in 1857 and as a captain in the Confederate army during the Civil War. He died in Houston on August 30, 1880.
Visit: Glenwood Cemetery, 2525 Washington Avenue.
JEFFERSON COUNTY
Beaumont
When the Spindletop well blew in on January 10, 1901, Texas and the rest of the nation entered the modern age. Nearby Beaumont boomed, with tens of thousands rushing to Jefferson County from across the nation to capitalize on the new oil play.
By 1903, the Spindletop field had already begun to wane. But a new play developed north of the small Hardin County town of Batson, and it, too, soon mushroomed. By January 1904, crime there had grown out of hand, and Governor Samuel W.T. Lanham dispatched ranger captain J.A. Brooks. When Brooks returned to Austin to report that conditions were indeed bad, the governor sent him back on February 7 with three rangers. This marked the first time Texas Rangers were used to tame a lawless oil boomtown, but it would not be the last.
Before his [Brooks’s] arrival the town was in a constant turmoil, while now everything is peace and quiet. The bad man full of whiskey with his six-shooter has taken to the woods.
–“Card of Thanks” from the citizens of Batson, Houston Post
Visit: Off State Highway 105, thirty-seven miles northwest of Beaumont. Spindletop–Gladys City Boomtown Museum, 5550 Jimmy Simmons Boulevard, Beaumont. Museum of Hardin County History, 830 South Maple Street, Kountze.
LIMESTONE COUNTY
Groesbeck
FORT PARKER
The sturdy split cedar-log stockade and twin blockhouses built in 1833–34 by the family and followers of Elder John Parker would figure in one of the classic dramas of American frontier history: the capture and subsequent rescue of Cynthia Ann Parker. Much less known is that before that happened the fort served as the rendezvous point for the first ever government-authorized Texas Ranger force.
On July 31, 1835, four volunteer ranger companies arrived at the fort on the Navasota River to join with a fifth company commanded by Captain Robert M. Coleman, who had strongly advocated creation of a tax-funded ranger force to protect settlers from hostile Indians. This body constituted the first ranger battalion organized as an arm of Texas government, even though Mexico saw that government as illegal.
The rangers bought beef, corn and bacon from the Parkers and, after reorganizing into four companies and electing John M. Moore as their commander, left the fort in August on an Indian expedition. Moore’s rangers had a few skirmishes, killing a handful of Indians while losing one of their own, but the battalion was mustered out of service at Bastrop in mid-September, its results far from spectacular.
Had it been possible to maintain a ranger presence at or near Fort Parker, what happened in the late spring of 1836 might have been averted. But by then, even though Texas forces had finally prevailed in freeing the former province from Mexico, frontier protection amounted to only one of many issues awaiting the attention of the nascent Texas republic.
The Parker family built this log fort near present Groesbeck and played a major role in the development of the Rangers. Author’s collection.
On the morning of May 19 that year, several hundred Comanche and Kiowa warriors approached the fort. Most who lived in and around the stockade were working their fields at the time. The Indians killed five men, including family patriarch John Parker and two of his sons, Benjamin and Silas, and kidnapped five women and children, including Rachel Plummer and little Cynthia Ann Parker. The others managed to escape.
The saga of Cynthia Ann did not end here, but this historic spot is where it had its beginning—along with the Texas Rangers as an arm of government.
I was vain enough to try to save myself, [but] they soon headed me [off], and one large sulky looking Indian picked up a hoe and knocked me down. I well recollect their tearing my little James Pratt out of my arms, but whether they hit me any…more I know not, for I swooned away.
–Rachel Plummer’s narrative
Visit: Reconstructed in 1936 by the Civilian Conservation Corps, old Fort Parker was part of Fort Parker State Park when it opened in 1941. By 1965, the fort badly needed renovation, which the state funded and oversaw. In 1992, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department deeded the reconstructed fort to the city of Groesbeck, which continues to operate it. The state park remains as a separate attraction.
FORT PARKER MEMORIAL PARK
A year to the day after the attack, James Parker (who had been a ranger for a time) led an armed group to the abandoned fort and collected the animal-gnawed bones of the victims. They buried five sets of remains in a common grave, the beginning of a cemetery first called Union Burial Ground, then Lewisville Cemetery, then Glenwood Cemetery and, finally, Fort Parker Memorial Park. A concrete slab marks the grave. A large monument was dedicated at the site in 1932.
Visit: Off Farm to Market Road 1245, on State Park Road 35, at Fort Parker Historical Park, north of Groesbeck. The Fort Parker site has exhibits and signage on the massacre and its aftermath.
Mexia
RANGER CRACKDOWN
As had happened elsewhere, and would unfold again in other places, the discovery of a large oil field in Limestone County in 1920 led to the rapid growth of a once small town. Seemingly overnight, Mexia’s population exploded from four thousand to fifty thousand. Unfortunately for the rule of law, some of those people made their living illegally.
On January 7, 1922, Adjutant General Thomas Barton led two ranger companies on raids of the two worst gambling and boozing hot spots in the county. Four miles east of Mexia on the Teague road (present U.S. 84), one company converged on a joint called the Winter Garden, quick-freezing illegal activity with numerous arrests. At the same time, north of town near the community of Wortham, the second ranger company hit a dive called the Chicken Farm.
Armed with shotguns and some just-introduced Thompson Model 1921 .45-caliber submachine guns, rangers confiscated gambling paraphernalia and ample quantities of bootleg booze.
Four days later, still concerned about crime and vice in the community only forty-one miles from his hometown of Waco, Governor (and future Baylor University president) Pat Neff declared martial law in portions of both Limestone and adjacent Freestone Counties and sent in state troops. An estimated three thousand residents suddenly found it expedient to leave.
The cleanup saw two firsts in Ranger history: prisoners got photographed and fingerprinted, the forensic expertise courtesy of the Houston Police Department. Also for the first time, the state used an airplane for law enforcement purposes. The flights revealed illegal moonshine stills hidden in the sticks along the Trinity River bottom in adjacent Freestone County. Thanks to aerial photographs of the stills, prosecution proved easier.
Courageous and impersonal in the performance of duty, they exemplified on every occasion the highest ideals and the best traditions of the Ranger Force that constitutes so great a part of the glorious history of Texas.
–Adjutant General’s Department Annual Report, 1921–1922
Visit: A historical marker placed in 1967 just south of Mexia on State Highway 14 tells the story of the Mexia boom.
NAVARRO COUNTY
Corsicana
THOMAS INGLES SMITH (1800–1848)
Born in
Virginia, Smith got his first taste of combat during the War of 1812 when only a boy. He came to Texas in 1836, enlisting in the Republic of Texas army. After the revolution, he served again in the Battle of Salado on September 18, 1842. Three months later, with Eli Chandler, he cocommanded a small detachment of rangers with a sensitive assignment: remove the young republic’s government records from the congressionally selected capital of Austin to Washington-on-the-Brazos as ordered by President Sam Houston.
When Smith and his men showed up with three wagons and began loading them with documents, the people of Austin took serious umbrage. If another town became capital, which possession of the government records would certainly foster, Austin—no metropolis even as it was—would become a ghost town. Following a show of force that included the firing of a howitzer in the general direction of the rangers, Smith’s men hastily left with what they had been able to load so far.
A vigilante group led by a former ranger chased the wagons to Brushy Creek in present Williamson County, fired a few shots and recovered the papers.
Smith continued to serve periodically as a ranger and Indian scout throughout the life of the republic. Appointed as a commissioner to negotiate with Indians, he was a signatory to the last treaty between the republic and Indians.
Owning land with two partners in what would become Navarro County, he donated the town site for Corsicana and served on the commission that selected it as the county seat in 1848. A historical marker commemorating Smith was erected in Corsicana in 1986.
Visit: Navarro County Courthouse, 601 North Thirteenth Street, Corsicana.
JONES RANCHO