#OTD sometime in October of 1921 Texas Ranger Frank Hamer killed Mexican revolutionary and outlaw Rafael "Red" Lopez. His death marked the end of a years long tale that law enforcement would only fully come to understand in the early 2000s. /1 Little is known of Lopez's early life, but in 1912 he was probably in his late teens and worked as a miner in Bingham Canyon, Utah. According to popular accounts he became a wanted man after allegedly killing another Mexican man. /2

#OTD in 1915, Texas Rangers murdered Jesús Bazan and his son-in-law, Antonio Longoria, in cold blood. /1 Raiders from Mexico had ridden onto their Hidalgo County ranch and stolen horses and other supplies, so the men were faced with a predicament. /2

#OTD in 1916 José Morin and Victoriano Ponce disappeared while in the custody of Ranger Capt. JJ Sanders, pictured here in a photo from @txrangermuseum. The men were suspected of attacks against US citizens but neither had been tried or formally accused. /1 Newspapers reported the men were shot while trying to escape Ranger custody. While technically possible, ‘shot while escaping’ was a common Ranger excuse for executing prisoners, especially ethnic Mexicans, in cold blood. /2

Texas’ #HB7, passed by the House and now pending before the Senate, proposes to create a “Texas Border Force” under the Texas Rangers. A thread about Ranger history and why this bill should worry us all. #txlege /1 The provision creating the Border Force is a change from the original bill, which allowed for the deputization of any “law-abiding” citizen, who would be granted criminal and civil immunity for actions against those thought to be migrants. /2 hrw.org/news/2023/04/1…

On May 12th 1858, the Texas Rangers, lead by John S. "Old Rip" Ford attacked the village of the Comanche chief Iron Jacket, a well known medicine man, killing at least 75 and taking 8 prisoners. /1 This attack was firmly understood as continuous with the “Indian Wars” more broadly and the governor, Hardin Runnels, was calling for “a major punitive expedition into Comanches Territory” for the damages they had apparently inflicted on Texans. /2

#OTD in 1881 the Texas Rangers crossed the border into Mexico to illegally apprehend Onofrio Baca on a charge of murder. They delivered Baca to authorities in New Mexico. He was lynched shortly thereafter. /1 The story began with the murder of Anthony M. Conklin, editor of the Socorro Sun, in Socorro, NM in December 1880. Conklin and his wife had attended a church festival that brothers Abran and Onofrio (sometimes Enofrio or Onofre) Baca, and a cousin, Antonio, also attended. /2

The legendary magazine @TexasObserver is in danger because of the shocking refusal of the board to do its job of supporting the Observer's reporters and editors. /1 thenation.com/article/societ… the importance of the Observer to Texas and the study of its past since its 1954 founding is hard to overstate. Its archive is an indispensable resource for those of us trying to tell an honest version of Texas history. One indication is its coverage of the Rangers. /2

#OTD in 1875 the Nuecestown Raid occurred. In the 1870s and 1880s across the Southwest, a number of raids by Mexican outlaws into the US, as well as Anglo raids into Mexico, took place. The raid on Nuecestown provoked lynching and large-scale massacres of Mexican people. /1 The raid began when approx. 15-30 outlaws swept Nueces Strip and began robbing farms and shops on the outskirts of Corpus Christi. They also took a number of hostages, all of whom were subsequently released. Having plundered the area, the raiders departed at nightfall. /2

#OTD in 2019 the film The Highwaymen premiered on Netflix. The film dramatizes #TexasRaners Frank Hamer and Maney Gault’s hunt for Bonnie and Clyde, and celebrates the Rangers’ seemingly unique ability to “take down” dangerous criminals. /1 Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow, and their gang robbed banks and stores and killed at least 9 people between 1932 and 1934. They repeatedly evaded police capture, until a posse led by Hamer and Gault ambushed and killed them in Louisiana on May 7, 1934. / 2

On or shortly after March 28, 1839, Texas Rangers captured, interrogated, and executed two unnamed men who had escaped slavery, leaving their bodies in what may be a mass grave of ranger victims under what is now @SeguinCityHall Chamber of Commerce parking lot. /1 The Rangers and militiamen were under the command of legendary Texas Republic military leader and Ranger Edward Burleson, and including the famous Ranger James Callahan. /2

#OTD on March 19, 1840, Texas Rangers and militiamen killed thirty-five and imprisoned thirty Penateka Comanche people during a Council House meeting in San Antonio, TX while negotiating captives with commissioners of the Texas government. /1 The Comanche people were not a unified nation but consisted of affiliated bands. Penatekas were the southernmost, occupying land from the Edwards Plateau to the headwaters of Central Texas rivers. They were central actors in the Texas Republic and later U.S. expansion. /2

#OTD on March 17, 1919 the Texas Legislature significantly restructured the Texas Rangers by passing House Bill No. 5, originally authored by Rep. J. T. Canales. This was one of the most important outcomes of Canales’ activism. /1 Canales originally wrote HB 5 in Jan 1919, before the Canales Investigation. Titled "An Act reorganizing the State Ranger force, prescribing the pay, qualifications and duties of State Rangers, and declaring an emergency," it proposed "police professionalization" of the force. /2

#OTD on February 11, 1919, the tenth day of the Canales Hearings took place in the Texas state capitol. /1 The day’s hearings brought out little new information about specific incidents, but the discussion of 1915-18 border violence repeatedly showed the blurred lines between Rangers and vigilantes, state and private violence, lynching and law enforcement. /2

capitol. The day featured intense attacks on Canales and a consequential decision about the transcripts. /1 Ranger leaders supported this measure, saying that surely the transcripts would be printed once the hearings were completed. But they never were, with the few copies of the enormous transcript remaining inaccessible to the public and most scholars for generations. /2

#OTD in 1971 Mexican-origin people in the border city of Pharr endured a police riot, commonly called the Pharr Riots, that resulted in the killing of Alfonso Loredo Flores. To halt the "riot" the city government called in the Texas Rangers, among other police agencies. /1 Pharr had seen many instances of police violence, including in recent years. For example, Sergeant Mateo Sandoval beat two men, Manuel Mata, who received two broken ribs from his beating, and Guadalupe Salinas. These types of beatings proved common. @elprofe_Robles. /2

#OTD on February 5, 1919, the sixth day of the Canales Hearings took place in the Texas state capitol. Witnesses documented Ranger violence against ethnic Mexicans and Anglos emerged in testimony, and Ranger leadership sharpened racist counterattacks. /1 tshaonline.org/handbook/entri… The committee first heard from Virginia Yeager, Duval County rancher and advocate for women’s suffrage. She was the only woman to testify in the entire hearings. Her whiteness and citizenship let her be heard directly, unlike the widows and daughters of ethnic Mexican victims. /2

#OTD on February 4, 1919, the fifth day of the Joint Committee of the Senate and the House in the Investigation of the Texas State Ranger Force (hereafter, “Canales Hearings”) took place in the Texas state capitol. /1 On this day, evidence documenting some of the worse state violence, including the Porvenir Massacre, was introduced in affidavits and testimony. Canales pressed for consequences not just for Rangers in the field, but for their leaders in Austin. /2
tshaonline.org/handbook/entri…

#OTD on January 28, 1918, Texas Rangers massacred fifteen men and boys at the village of Porvenir, Texas, in what is perhaps the single most notorious and consequential event in the history of the Ranger Force. 1/ Porvenir was a small and remote, but proudly independent community. Mexican-descent families raised livestock, grew produce and cotton, irrigated their lands, and maintained a school in the harsh Chihuahua desert on the banks of the Rio Grande in northwest Presidio County. 2/

#OTD on January 15, 1919, State Representative José Tomás Canales, representing the Rio Grande Valley, along the border with Mexico, filed House Bill 5, calling a reform of the Texas Rangers. This action inaugurated the greatest crisis in the history of the Ranger Force . . . /1 . . . by producing evidence of violence by Rangers and others still used by scholars of policing, Mexican American, and border history more than a century later. The resulting hearings lasted 12 days, featured 80 witnesses, and generated 1400 pages of testimony. /2

#OTD on January 15, 1879, Rangers under the command of G.W. Arrington attacked a group of Kiowa and Comanche hunters in the panhandle, killing and scalping their leader, “Sunboy.” The presence of US soldiers kept them from extending the attack. 1/ Born as John Cromwell Orrick Jr., in Alabama in 1844, Orrington had a history of violence long before joining the Ranger Force in 1874 or 1875. After serving as a Confederate soldier, he did his part to resist the enfranchisement of Black men during Reconstruction. /2

#OTD in 1958 @UTexasPress published Américo Paredes’ landmark book With His Pistol in His Hand, an examination of the life and legend of Gregorio Cortez, whose persecution by the Texas Rangers and other law enforcement made him a folk hero in the early 1900s. /1 On June 12, 1901, sheriffs in search of a “medium-sized Mexican” alleged horse thief accosted Cortez and his brother Romaldo on their farm in Karnes County, Texas. Misunderstanding the men’s responses in Spanish, the officers thought them guilty and shot and wounded Romaldo. 2/