The Texas Rangers: A Murderous Group
The Texas Rangers (not the baseball team though they should change their name), created in 1823, had a brutal bloody past. According to Michael L. Collins in Texas Devils: Rangers & Regulars on the Lower Rio Grande, 1846-1861, Walter Prescott Webb, a questionable historian, made crucial mistakes in ballooning and saluting the Texas Rangers with tall tales (mostly exaggerations) that would become cannon fire for those clicking their boots in praise of racial myth. Collins is clear that Walter Prescott Webb was carrying water for the white supremacist version of Texas history.
Ranging Companies in Texas would eventually become the enforcers of white supremacy. In fact, the Knights of the Golden Circle (a KKK type group) had a unit called the Alamo Guards which were nothing more that marauding killer vigilantes. The Texas Rangers (not the baseball team) of the past have a horrible ugly history. Infamous Texas Rangers included Jack Hays, John “Rip” Ford, Ben McCulloch, Mat Nolan, Captain Richard King (of King Ranch fame), Captain William G. Tobin, John Littleton, Samuel Lockridge, Edward Burleson, Andrew Walker, and many others were associated with brutal and racist activity in Texas.
Captain Jack Hays was called “Devil Jack” by the Comanche, and according to Collins, Hays was described in newspaper accounts as “the man whose name has been the terror of their nation.” Collins reported that John “RIP” Ford “was known to favor the annexation of Mexico.” This would logically mean that Texas Rangers were part of the overall plot to create a slave empire in Mexico by force. Ford would reportedly learn how to implement serial-type killings of Mexicans from Jack Hays. He was also in charge of hunting down confederate deserters that refused to fight for the slave owners (for a number of reasons) during the Civil War. Additionally, he was in charge of hunting down whites and Germans who refused to swear an allegiance to the Confederacy and poor whites that deserted or refused to fight for the Confederacy and Robert E. Lee by the thousands.
From the very beginnings the range companies were used to enforce white racist rule in Texas. They developed against the background of Anglo settlers wanting to control Mexican lands, hunt down runaway slaves, and serve as merchants of death against Native People. According to the Bullock Museum: “In 1823, empresario Stephen F. Austin announced he would supplement the Mexican government’s militia patrols with his own force of ten men, whom he paid out of his own pocket. Thus, the Texas Rangers were born.” These rangers were established to protect white settlers from Native American attacks which were taking place as a result of Anglo encroachments on Native lands. The genocidal campaigns against Indigenous People grew in steam after Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. Murderous ranging companies engaged in hangings, murder, brutality, and scalping. After killing or torturing Mexicans and Native Americans their bodies were sometimes dragged with ropes behind their horses. Some victims were dragged through cactus patches for fun.
The Rangers were used to murder and pillage “Indian” villages and later for revenge against Mexicans that stood up to their white supremacist hatreds. In every extremist group one can find people of color, collaborators, that racists used. Native Americans had collaborators that cooperated with Andrew Jackson’s genocide, and there were African American collaborators that helped their slave masters. The fake history tellers like to throw this up by claiming people of color helped them. They did this at the Alamo as well by honoring Tejano slave owners and other sellouts.
