Posted on 11/07/2004 5:26:23 AM PST by Max Combined
Scholars detail Rangers' violence in a border war against Mexicans
WACO - Back east, for social cachet there is nothing like an ancestor on the Mayflower. In Texas, it is a Texas Ranger in the family tree.
Here at the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, some of the most avid visitors come in search of connections to the men who won the West and, it was said, would charge hell with a bucket of water.
But Southern Methodist University in Dallas says new historical accounts are casting the long-revered fighters of outlaws and Indians in a decidedly darker light.
The scholarship — being gingerly acknowledged at the Hall of Fame — involves investigations into massacres committed in an obscure border war against Mexican bandits and insurrectionists in 1915, a quagmire of its time. "Not a bright period in the history of the Rangers," concedes the museum's director, Byron Johnson, in a film seen by many of its 80,000 visitors a year.
A recent book by an assistant history professor at Southern Methodist and other accounts exploiting archives on both sides of the border, including a damning but little-known Texas legislative investigation of 1919, link the Rangers to the "evaporations" of up to 5,000 Mexican insurgents and Tejanos — Texans of Mexican origin — whose lands in the Rio Grande Valley were coveted by Anglo settlers.
"People are still coming across skeletons," said the professor, Benjamin Heber Johnson, 32, whose book, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans Into Americans, published late last year by Yale University Press, offers one of the fullest accounts to date of the violence. In the end, he said, the repression led the Mexican-Americans to secure their rights with organizations like the League of United Latin American Citizens.
'Bullet in the back' The university's communications director, Meredith Dickenson, in material promoting the book as a "bullet in the back" to conventional, laudatory accounts of the Texas Rangers, wrote: "Here's an episode unlikely to ever be on Walker, Texas Ranger."
In addition, a new documentary, Border Bandits, based on the memoirs of a Texas rancher, offers a firsthand account of the killings of two unarmed Tejanos by a carload of Texas Rangers driven by a legendary Ranger, William Warren Sterling, who later led the force as adjutant general and mythologized his exploits (but not his shootings) in a popular 1959 memoir, Trails and Trials of a Texas Ranger.
"I thought the killings were an isolated incident," said the director of the documentary, Kirby F. Warnock, a Dallas writer whose grandfather, Ronald A. Warnock, had tape-recorded his recollections of coming upon the victims and burying the bodies. After recounting the tale in a 1992 memoir, Texas Cowboy, Kirby Warnock said, "I got lots of calls saying, 'The Rangers killed my granddad.' "
Another book just published, The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The Bloodiest Decade 1910-1920, by Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler, history professors emeritus at New Mexico State University, also recounts the cruelty of both sides.
Reopening old wounds
The disclosures have bruised some feelings at the museum, which has a half-million items of Ranger memorabilia. "You can't put current values on past times," said Johnson, the director, who is an anthropologist.
In recent weeks, showings of Border Bandits and forums on Benjamin Johnson's book have reopened wounds nearly a century old in the heavily Hispanic borderland, where the graves of the two Tejanos can still be found. "I think the real bandits were the Texas Rangers," said Jon Bazan, a grandson of one of the victims, who spoke at a screening in Harlingen in early October. "They were just like James Bond — a license to kill."
The museum cites Ranger "aggressions" against Mexicans but treats with reverence icons like Frank Hamer, who tracked down Bonnie and Clyde years after accumulating a fearsome reputation — not acknowledged in the exhibits — for terrorizing Mexicans.
Strange scheme
A focus of the recent scholarship is an enigmatic plot that served as the backdrop to the violence. In January 1915, with Mexico in a revolutionary uproar and world war raging in Europe, a Mexican rebel named Basilio Ramos was stopped in McAllen with a manifesto calling for an armed uprising to reclaim Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and California for Mexico, and other lands for Indians and blacks. Prisoners and Anglo men age 16 and older were to be executed.
Confusion continues to surround the origins and seriousness of the scheme, called the Plan de San Diego, for the small Texas town where it was supposedly hatched, but its exposure at a time of bandit raids from Mexico panicked the settlers. In one attack, Mexican raiders captured a U.S. soldier, cut off his head and stuck it on a pole.
Texas Rangers, first recruited in the 1820s by the early settler Stephen F. Austin to control the Indians, responded with a wave of shootings and lynchings — what one local newspaper called a "war of extermination." Johnson's book quotes witness accounts of mass hangings of prisoners and innocent Mexicans and Tejanos, some of the bodies desecrated "with empty beer bottles stuck in their mouths."
After an attack on the giant King Ranch, three of the dead raiders were lassoed and dragged by Rangers on horseback, who proudly posed for a photograph later made into postcards. Elsewhere, bodies, dead and alive, were thrown on flaming pyres or left to rot, with relatives too terrorized to bury the remains.
A Brownsville lawyer, J.C. George, said, "There have been lots who have evaporated."
Remember the Alamo
Remember Goliad
Santa Ana was no saint.
None of this was ever "covered up" that I remember. We were taught much of in Texas History classes.
Major Owens: "Also, to this day sharks still walk around the land waiting for a meal"
Not to mention what we find on the history channel. [smile] Look at what they did with the Alamo. (I enjoyed that particular documentary, though)
I think what we have going on, as reviewed by the Houston Chronicle via the New York Times Service, is academic bone sifting. The story you tell depends on which pile you drop your old bone onto. Voila, a new historical revelation!
Red Bluff, CA is about 90 miles north of Sacramento. It has its own website - and a fairly good historical society.
There was a little-known border war between the US and Mexico in this period. Naturally, the left seizes any excuse to make America look like a murdering bully.
Ping
Hey, it was the times. Don't whitewash the truth, MSM, don't rewrite history to fit your PC distorted world view.
bump!
Being a history buff, I thought you might want to look this one up:
VIGILANTE DAYS AND WAYS. Nathaniel Pitt Langford. Copyright 1890, 1912. Original publisher A.C. McClurg & Co. and by permission, A.L. Burt Co.
This is a terrific book that sticks it to the consistent lie about vigilantes being the antithesis of civilization. The account acknowleges error and brutality in some cases, but in large, the need for vigilantism is a noble and proud component of American history. In fact, it may just be the embodiment of the realization of 'self-rule' so worshipped in the Western tradition. Let us not forget that the rise of lynch mobs in the reconstruction south and the KKK were Democrat institutions wrongly attributed to the right.
The use of the vigiante commitees was to stop and punish those for whom the law (and all measures of decency) held no boundaries in a land without just authority. Most on the frontier sought the peace and freedom to pursue their lives, but beyond the organized law (correctly interpreted from the bench), the predators and violent ruled the day - until the 'everyman' stepped up to the plate. A fascinating read and one sure antidote to the Leftist Hollywood demonization of law - justice - in the hands of a righteous people.
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