‘Cult of Glory’ digs deep into history of Rangers
The Texas Rangers, fabled guardians of the Texas frontier, were almost absurdly brave, extraordinarily tough and, as Doug Swanson notes in his new book about the legendary lawmen, “practically immune to danger.” Battling fierce Comanches, chasing outlaws, serving as swashbuckling soldiers during the Mexican War and patrolling the perilous border with Mexico, they risked their lives as a matter of course. Some lost their lives.
But the oldest — and certainly the best known — state law enforcement agency in the country, also have been, in Swanson’s words, “violent instruments of repression.” They terrorized Mexicans and Mexican Americans, hunted runaway slaves for bounty, busted unions, enforced school segregation and, Swan
son writes, “served the interests of the moneyed and powerful while oppressing the poor and disenfranchised. They have been the army of Texas’s ruling class.”
The author of Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers makes the compelling case that both characterizations are correct.
Swanson, formerly an awardwinning reporter with the Dallas Morning News and now a journalism professor at the University of Pittsburgh, didn’t set out to puncture the substantial myth of the vaunted Rangers. He didn’t really know what the story would be when he began his research more than five years ago.
“Generally, the idea was to get behind the myth a little bit,” he told me by phone a couple of days ago from his home in Pittsburgh. “I didn’t know that much about the Rangers. I had worked with them several times as a reporter. They were good guys, did good work.”
One story in particular, he says, “set off a light bulb.” In the decades before the Civil War, Texas had its own Underground Railroad, with desperate runaway slaves making their treacherous way to South Texas and across the Rio Grande. Mexico had outlawed slavery in 1829. Although professional slave hunters roamed the border region, they weren’t rounding up enough fugitives to satisfy angry Texas planters.
Ranger Captain James H. Callahan, a Georgia native who had served as a soldier in the Texas Revolution, decided he could remedy that problem — and pocket a parcel of cash, as well. Texas slaveholders had raised a bounty pool of some $20,000 to pay for the return of runaways.
Rangers had been tracking down fugitive slaves on the Texas side of the border for years, but Callahan concocted a more ambitious plan. In September 1855, he led a force of approximately 130 men in an audacious invasion of Mexico, crossing the Rio Grande near
Eagle Pass. Ten miles in, a force of about 500 men, Mexicans and Indians, met the renegade Rangers. After a brief engagement that killed four members of Callahan’s company, the Texans high-tailed it back to the river — for lack of ammunition, they said. On their way back, they looted the desperately poor Mexican village of Piedras Negras before burning it to the ground.
Callahan came home a hero, having vanquished Indians “whose demonic hands,” in his words, “are still wet with the blood of Texan women and children.” The myth-makers didn’t mention Piedras Negras.
After Callahan was shot to death by a disgruntled Blanco County neighbor in 1856, a Texas lawmaker and former Ranger captain named John Henry Brown rose from his desk on the House floor to sing the fallen Ranger’s praises. Brown, who as a lawmaker had pushed for the resumption of the African slave trade and who warned that a “free negro population is a curse to any people,” reminded the House that a new county in West Texas needed a name. Thus, we have Callahan County east of Abilene, named in honor of a Ranger “hero.”
The more Swanson researched, the more he came across Ranger misdeeds, a number of them horrendous. They rarely came to light because the Rangers operated what Swanson calls “a fable factory through which many of their greatest defeats, worst embarrassments, and darkest moments were recast as grand triumphs.” He adds: “They didn’t merely whitewash the truth. They destroyed it.”
Despite uncovering what seemed to be a pattern of atrocities, brutality and corruption, Swanson would be the first to admit that bravery bordering on foolhardiness is an integral part of the Ranger DNA. Consider, for example, the story of Cicero Rufus “Rufe” Perry, who became a Ranger in 1836 at age 14.
On a hot August afternoon in 1844, Perry and three other Rangers were looking for horse thieves along the Nueces River when they were ambushed by about 25 Comanches. An arrow burrowed into the young man’s left shoulder, a second into his stomach, a third stuck in his temple. His fellow Rangers, perhaps thinking he was dead, took his gun and fled across the river on their horses. Perry passed out.
When he came to, he hid in a thicket, where he pushed his head against dirt and small sticks to stanch the bleeding. He could hear the Comanches talking nearby. After dark, unable to stand but desperately thirsty, he crawled back to the river, about 200 yards away. It took him all night, he recalled, “to get to the wattor.” The next day, he began an agonizing walk eastward toward the main Ranger camp a hundred miles away. Seven days later, dehydrated and near death, he stumbled into San Antonio.
“I was like one risen from the dead,” Perry recalled. At one point during his three-month recuperation, a surgeon cut out the arrow point that had burrowed into his head.
Rufe Perry, Jack Hays, Samuel Walker, Rip Ford, Ben McCulloch, Bigfoot Wallace and all the other legendary Rangers lived and died a long time ago. Their proud counterparts today are members of a small elite force that specializes in suspected cases of public corruption, among other contemporary law-enforcement operations. A 1957 state law guarantees that the Rangers can never be abolished, but the agency has certainly had to adapt.
The publication of Swanson’s book coincides, of course, with a remarkable moment of iconoclastic reassessment, in Texas and across the nation. Confederate flags are being furled; Confederate statues are being toppled. Military bases named for Confederate generals are likely to be renamed. In Dallas, the larger-than-life Texas Ranger statue that towered over the lobby at Love Field since 1961 has been trundled away (apparently because of Swanson’s book).
Why does it matter, I asked Swanson, that the myth doesn’t tell the whole story? Today’s Rangers aren’t rampaging through poor South Texas villages. They’re not harassing farm workers in Starr County or launching probes of the NAACP and other civil rights organizations in East Texas as they were several decades ago. Can’t we just live with the myth?
Swanson’s answer via email noted that the Rangers are approaching their bicentennial in 2023, “a great opportunity for them, in the spirit of these times, to address and embrace their full history.” Acknowledging that history “would be a sign of their institutional strength.”
Telling the entire story, he suggested, “gives voice to those who have been overlooked or ignored. It’s a fairer picture, and it’s far more interesting. It also brings a measure of justice to a historical narrative that has, for many, been unjust . . . . ”
Swanson’s email got me to thinking that Rangers facing up to their full history would be, in a way, yet another act of bravery. In Swanson’s words, “The Rangers have done many honorable things in their great history. This would be a chance for one more.”