2.

The Texas Rangers

AS THE FIRST RAYS OF SUNLIGHT PEEKED OVER THE HORIZON on Christmas morning 1917, Sam Neill was sipping a cup of coffee when he heard the rumble of forty-five horses galloping into the Brite Ranch.¹ The Mexican Revolution had been spilling into Texas for several months as refugees fled north in search of safety and groups of armed men from Mexico raided border communities for supplies. The riders from Mexico forded the Rio Grande before sunrise and made their way fifteen miles over rocky hills and dry, grassy plains toward Marfa, Texas, intending to raid the Brite Ranch.

The ranch, normally teeming with farmhands readying for the morning’s work, was deserted because everyone had gone home for Christmas. Sleeping inside the home was Sam’s son, ranch supervisor T.T., and T.T.’s wife. There were only a handful of farmhands still in their quarters. Two were quickly detained by the bandits but a few others slipped away. Inside the house, Sam and T.T. were able to gather their rifles and kill one of the bandits. Sam, a former Texas Ranger, was also hit twice, on the nose and the leg.

A standoff ensued. The bandits sent one of the farmhands, José Sánchez, into the house to negotiate a surrender. Instead, the Neills gave the bandits the keys to the general store and told them to take what they needed and leave. They were in the process of looting the store and stealing all the horses from the corrals when an unsuspecting mail carrier, Mickey Welch, pulled his cart into the ranch with two other men. The Mexican bandits, mistaking the mail carrier for reinforcements for the besieged family, shot and killed the two passengers and lynched Welch, leaving his body hanging in the store.

About twenty-five miles away in Valentine, Texas, Bob Keil and the rest of his company of Troop G of the United States Cavalry were just tucking into their Christmas Day meal when they got word of the raid.² The company was often dispatched to the border to guard against such raids, so they abandoned their uneaten food and set off for the ranch. They had their horses in the corral at Valentine, but it would have taken over two hours of hard riding to reach the ranch. Instead, they turned to local residents who had new automobiles. Within a few minutes, they had twelve Oldsmobiles and Hupmobiles ready to make the trip. The poor condition of the roads slowed the drive, and one car had to be abandoned after it got a second flat tire.

By the time they reached the ranch, the bandits were gone, but the soldiers were horrified to see Welch’s body hanging in the store. Sam Neill told them that the bandits had left only an hour before and he pointed the way. The soldiers pulled out their field glasses and spotted dust kicked up by the horses on the horizon. The cavalry chased the bandits toward the border using both the automobiles and horses from the ranch. They killed several en route before the bandits crossed the Rio Grande at a spot called Los Fresnos, near the new refugee town of Porvenir that had sprung up on the U.S. side of the border.

The brazen cross-border raid and the killing of three people enraged the white community of the sparsely populated region. Bob Keil of the cavalry remembered, “A deathly quiet settled over the Big Bend. It was certainly noticeable on the river. No one had a name for it, but it was like the stillness that precedes a cyclone.”³

The Texas Rangers also had a company of fifteen men at Marfa, mostly green new recruits, who were tasked with patrolling the 38,000-square-mile Big Bend region for border incursions. The Rangers set out to find a scapegoat for the deadly raid and they settled on the village of Porvenir, on the flimsy logic that since the bandits chose to cross the Rio Grande nearby, the Mexican refugee population must have been involved.⁴ On January 26, 1918, the Texas Rangers rode into the village of 140 people and searched all the homes for weapons or other evidence that would demonstrate loyalty to the rebels across the border. They found only a pistol in the home of a white man and a rifle in the home of an American citizen of Mexican descent. The Rangers left the village but would return the next day to exact their revenge.

“There Will Be No Way of Subduing Them, but Extermination”

The image of the Texas Rangers as a fabled frontier force that brought justice to the wilds of the Southwest is primarily the creation of popular culture in the twentieth century. From The Lone Ranger of 1950s television to Walker, Texas Ranger of the 1990s, the Rangers evoke the idea of honorable men serving as the last line of defense against lawless frontier violence. As with many historical fables, the rosy picture of the Texas Rangers does not match the gritty reality of their early years.

When Stephen F. Austin led the first band of American settlers into Texas in 1825, the region was claimed on the map by Mexico but inhabited by Native Americans who had lived there for centuries. Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821 and the fledgling country was struggling to organize its government and stabilize its economy. It had little presence in the remote northern reaches of the state of Coahuila y Tejas.

The Mexican government did not pay too much attention to the request from Austin to settle the wild coast of the Gulf of Mexico near the Colorado and Brazos Rivers, what is today the region between Corpus Christi and Galveston. Austin recruited settlers, and by 1825, there were three hundred families working to establish homesteads in the region. Many of the settlers were from New Orleans and brought slaves with them to farm cotton.

On his first expedition, Austin encountered a band of Karankawa, Native Americans who lived in the area in the winter to eat mussels and fish from the Gulf of Mexico. The band were friendly and they parted on good terms. Nevertheless, Austin had a more sinister view of their presence, writing at the time, “There will be no way of subduing them, but extermination.”⁵ Austin spread false rumors that the Karankawa were dangerous and possibly cannibals, and he set up a group of rangers to battle the Native Americans. These settlers were ruthless, killing entire villages and stealing their supplies. The remaining Karankawa fled to Padre Island in the 1840s, but another extermination effort by the Texas settlers in the following decade eliminated the remaining members of the tribe.

By the 1830s, the Mexican government became wary of the growing American colony inside its territory and was particularly uncomfortable with its reliance on slavery, which was banned in Mexico in 1829. During an uprising in Mexico in 1832, the Texian settlers, as they called themselves, forced Mexican troops out of their colony and demanded revisions to their agreement with Mexico. Stephen F. Austin was detained in January 1834 and taken to Mexico City. He was never charged with anything and was released in August 1835.

That fall, Mexico dispatched troops to pacify the restive territory. Skirmishes continued through the new year when the Mexican president, Antonio López de Santa Anna, led a regiment into Texas to put down the rebellion. In March 1836, Santa Anna laid seige to a small band of Texians at Béxar, in what is now San Antonio. The Texians, including the famed frontiersmen Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, holed up in the Catholic mission called the Alamo. After a thirteen-day siege, the Mexican troops attacked, killing all of the approximately two hundred men inside. The Mexican army lost at least double that number in the attack. The Alamo was not militarily significant, but the bravery of the men inside and the killing of all of them by the Mexican forces became a rallying cry for the Texian rebels.

The conflict concluded a month later at San Jacinto, north of the present-day city of Houston. The rebels routed Santa Anna’s troops on April 21 and even captured the Mexican president as he hid in some brush, attempting to flee. Rather than execute Santa Anna, the Texian general, Sam Houston, forced him to order the removal of all Mexican troops from Texas. Texas declared its independence but also sent a request to Washington, D.C., that the United States annex the territory.

Although Mexico withdrew its troops, it did not recognize the independence of Texas. Skirmishes continued in contested territory between the Rio Grande and the Nueces River, known as the Nueces Strip. In 1836, the Texas government formally established the Texas Rangers as “Mounted Gunmen to act as Rangers on the Western and Southwestern frontier.”⁶ They patrolled the loosely defined borders of the new republic, fending off attacks from Mexico from the south as well as Native Americans to the west and north in what is today Oklahoma. The Rangers had little training but carried out this mission with ruthless violence, destroying Native American settlements, killing men, women, and children indiscriminately, and often scalping their victims. They also served as slave patrols to stop the southern Underground Railroad that ferried people to Mexico.

John Coffee “Jack” Hays epitomized the early Texas Rangers. Hays was born in Little Cedar Lick, Tennessee, in 1817 and was only nineteen when he arrived in the Texas Republic and joined the Rangers. With boyish good looks and stylish hair, Hays did not look the part of frontier law enforcement, but he quickly rose through the ranks to become captain of a Rangers unit in 1840. After a series of Mexican raids, Sam Houston, the president of the Republic of Texas at the time, declared martial law in the Nueces Strip in 1843, giving Hays and his Rangers broad authority to prevent Mexican incursions in the area. A local newspaper reported that Hays used that authority to summarily execute three men he thought to be Mexican spies.⁷

Hays’s unit of Rangers was later redeployed to track and fight the Comanche, a fierce band of Native Americans that controlled an area known as Comancheria that ranged from what is today southern Colorado through western Kansas, Oklahoma, and eastern New Mexico, as well as most of western Texas. The Comanche were a formidable foe for the Texians because they had honed the use of horses to attack quickly and then escape the more plodding advances of the Texian forces. For many years, the Comanche proved stronger and seemed impossible to defeat.

Hays and his unit of Rangers led the battle that changed the course of the conflict with the Comanche and sped the ethnic cleansing of West Texas. The problem the Rangers faced was that although they had rifles, in the 1840s they still only afforded a single shot and took almost a minute to reload. The Comanche learned to send a few warriors out to draw the first volley of shots, and then as the Texians were reloading, they would quickly charge their lines on horseback.

Back east in New Jersey, inventor Samuel Colt had designed a new pistol with a revolving chamber, hypothetically allowing multiple shots before reloading. At first, the new gun did not sell well. The early designs were fragile and liable to explode as it was fired. It was also expensive. As his new company struggled to sell the weapon, they did deliver an order of 180 functioning revolvers to the navy of the Republic of Texas. Texas disbanded the navy in 1843 and the revolvers were transferred to other units, including Hays’s band of Rangers.

They put the new guns to use in an encounter with Comanche at Walker’s Creek. The Rangers were outnumbered but killed twenty Comanche while suffering only one casualty before the Comanche fled. After the battle, Hays wrote, “I cannot recommend these arms too highly. Had it not been for them, I doubt what the consequences would have been.”⁸ As word of the new weapon spread, Colt continued to refine the design, and the Colt Revolver came to be known as the “the gun that won the west.”

After Texas was annexed by the United States in 1845, disputes with Mexico over the Nueces Strip increased. At the same time, politicians in Washington, D.C., had imperial designs on further westward expansion, leading to the Mexican–American War. During the war, the Rangers were assigned to U.S. Army units and fought on campaigns deep into Mexico. They gained a rough reputation for violence and thuggery. As the U.S. Army occupied Mexico City toward the end of the war, the Rangers under Hays’s command killed ten Mexican citizens on the march into town, then eighty more in a slum after a Ranger was killed there while exploring the city. The U.S. general Winfield Scott scolded Hays but did little more.⁹ A Catholic priest from France named Emmanuel Domenech was more direct: “The Rangers . . . are the very dregs of society and the most degraded of human creatures. They slew all, neither woman nor child was spared. These blood-thirsty men . . . have neither faith nor moral feeling.”¹⁰

After the war, the Rangers, which were not a permanent force but rather mustered in times of need, were disbanded and the U.S. Army fought Native Americans on the frontier. Jack Hays joined thousands of other prospectors as he traveled to California in the Gold Rush of 1849.¹¹ Instead of prospecting, he became the sheriff of San Francisco in 1850. Later he was named the surveyor general of California, and he was instrumental in the early foundations of the city of Oakland.

The Creation of the Border

For most of its first century of existence, the United States was not focused on marking or protecting its borders, but on expanding them.¹² This happened through killing and displacing native populations and through purchasing land from other colonial powers. When the United States was founded, it consisted of thirteen colonies on the Atlantic coast of the continent. Even the western parts of those original states were not yet occupied by settlers. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 added, on paper, the western plains ranging from Louisiana on the Gulf of Mexico all the way to Montana. In 1821, the United States purchased Florida from Spain. In 1846, the United States and Britain signed the Treaty of Oregon, establishing the 49th parallel as their territorial boundary in the Pacific Northwest.

At the end of the Mexican–American war, the United States took half of Mexico’s territory including all of California, Nevada, and Utah along with parts of Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Wyoming. The border was finalized with the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, which added the southern parts of New Mexico and Arizona to allow for a more direct southern railway route to California and to give the United States control of the new mines being discovered in the region, including those that would give rise to Tombstone a few decades later. By 1853, the territorial outline of the lower forty-eight states was complete.

Like many documents at the time, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which established the border between the United States and Mexico at the end of the war, was an agreement on paper, not a reflection of the reality on the ground. The document makes clear that neither the Mexican nor the American governments knew much about the land they were awarding to each other: “And, in order to preclude all difficulty in tracing upon the ground the limit separating Upper from Lower California, it is agreed that the said limit shall consist of a straight line drawn from the middle of the Rio Gila, where it unites with the Colorado, to a point on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, distant one marine league due south of the southernmost point of the port of San Diego.”¹³ The area was vast and largely unknown to white settlers, so they simply agreed to draw a line on the map and figure it out on the ground later.

The treaty called for the two countries to nominate surveyors to work together to mark the border on the ground within one year. A few markers were placed in the 1850s at key locations, but it ended up taking almost fifty years for the two countries to get around to the daunting task of locating the line through the entire 1,954 miles of sparsely populated and remote landscapes.¹⁴ In the nineteenth century, marking the border on the ground was a low priority for both countries because the physical line did not really matter. Since there were no immigration regulations between the countries, it was not necessary to locate, much less patrol, the vast stretches of the remote border.

With its economy based heavily on slavery, Texas joined the Confederacy during the Civil War. In the aftermath, during the Reconstruction period, the white population chafed under federal occupation. Texas was readmitted to the union in 1870, and in 1874, the Texas legislature reconstituted the Texas Rangers as a state police force to lessen the reliance on the hated federal officials. Seventeen-year-old Jeff Milton joined the Rangers only three years after it was reconstituted. The new Rangers had two units. One was placed on the frontier and focused on pushing Native Americans out of Texas, and the other worked along the border with Mexico to prevent Mexican incursions and to get cattle rustlers and bandits under control. As an early history of the Rangers explains, “they were irregular as hell, in everything except getting the job done.”¹⁵

In the 1890s, Mexican and American surveyors worked together to place markers along the length of the border and inscribe it into the landscape. The white obelisks they installed are still visible at some locations along the border today. The United States set up customs checkpoints in the towns along the border—including Brownsville-Matamoros, Laredo–Nuevo Laredo, El Paso–Ciudad Juárez, Nogales-Nogales, and Tijuana–San Diego—but it did not have a federal force to patrol in between the checkpoints except for the small contingent of mounted Chinese Inspectors.¹⁶ Consequently, the Texas Rangers were the primary force patrolling the U.S.–Mexico border in the first decades of the twentieth century.

The Porvenir Massacre

There were many instances of extreme and wanton violence by the Texas Rangers, but the Porvenir Massacre is perhaps the most egregious. After three people were killed in the Mexican raid on the Brite Ranch on Christmas Day 1917, the Texas Rangers were dead set on revenge and identified the settlement of Porvenir as their target. The village was full of refugees who had fled the violence of the Mexican Civil War, but it was adjacent to the spot where the Brite Ranch raiders crossed back into Mexico, so the Rangers assumed the villagers were involved. Even though their initial search of Porvenir turned up very little, the Rangers returned to the village with an army cavalry unit late on the night of January 27, 1918, and ordered everyone out of their homes.

Bob Keil and the other cavalrymen had been surprised when the Rangers had showed up earlier that evening requesting support for the raid. Keil had been in Porvenir that very afternoon to buy some eggs for the camp mess and was amused that the Rangers thought there might be bandits there. He remembered thinking, “If we find a butcher knife down there, it will be a surprise to me.”¹⁷

It was a cold night, and they lit a large fire for warmth after rounding up all the villagers and taking them out of their homes. The Rangers stood back while the cavalry did their work. When they were finished, they reported to the Rangers that they did not see any bandits. Moreover, the soldiers knew most of the residents of Porvenir personally and knew they were just farmers.

The Rangers thanked the cavalry and then told them to stand back, as the Rangers wanted to talk directly to the villagers. As the flames flickered in their faces, the Rangers systematically selected thirteen Mexican men and three teenaged boys, including thirteen-year-old Juan Flores and his father, Longino. At the last minute, one of the Rangers decided that Juan was too young and shoved him over to the huddled group of villagers. They marched the remaining fifteen out of the town.

As the villagers shivered and cowered near the fire, the late-night silence was pierced by a volley of gunshots. The Rangers then galloped out of town, leaving Keil and the cavalry unit confused. They stayed in the town for a while, then rode away.¹⁸ Thirteen-year-old Juan slipped out of Porvenir and made his way toward Marfa, to the home of his schoolteacher, Henry Warren, the only white man he knew and trusted. The other residents remained in their homes until dawn, peeking through windows, praying that the Rangers would not return, and hoping against hope that the fifteen were alive. The wife of one of the missing men went into labor and delivered a baby in the anxious hours before dawn.

As the sun rose, Juan Flores returned to Porvenir with Henry Warren. They searched the nearby countryside and came upon the grisly scene on a hillside. The bodies of the fifteen men and boys, ranging in age from fifteen to seventy-two, were dead with gunshot wounds. Many had been shot multiple times in the face, making them difficult to identify, but Juan immediately saw that his father was among the dead. The remaining residents of Porvenir gathered their possessions and crossed the river back into Mexico in search of safety. A few days later, the cavalry unit returned to the abandoned site and destroyed the entire village.

The Rangers involved in the murders did not write up an incident report for a few days. When they did, the report said that the villagers were suspected of being involved in the Brite Ranch raid and had fired first. All the deaths were in the crossfire. However, that story unraveled.

Henry Warren sent a letter to the governor of Texas informing him of what happened, “to call to your attention this unprovoked and wholesale murder by Texas Rangers.” Warren wrote, “these men were all farmers . . . there was not a single bandit in the 15 slain men.”¹⁹ Mexican authorities took testimony from the survivors, and the Mexican ambassador in D.C. filed a complaint. After a review, five of the Rangers were fired and the unit was disbanded. The unit’s captain was forced to resign. A broader investigation of the entire Rangers organization in 1919 found that the Rangers had been responsible for up to 5,000 extrajudicial killings in the previous five years.²⁰

Despite, or perhaps because of, this violent history, many of the first Border Patrol agents were hired directly from the Texas Rangers.