The Texas Rangers | The Frontier

around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover.

“With your subscription you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries”

with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe to bring the past alive. A writer moves across the wide Texas prairie, hat drawn low, dust rising behind his horses hooves, rifle close at hand. Upon his coat pinned to the lapel, a five pointed star glints in the sun. He's tired, he's hungry, he's riding alone. But somewhere out there is the trouble

he's been dispatched to find. But whether he finds it or not, almost matters less than what he

represents to us today. That writer and the star he wears is a memory we all carry. The legend, the myth, the magic of the Texas Ranger.

“Greetings all, welcome to American history hit, Don Wildms by name, and today we are back out”

on the American Frontier in the vast unspoiled lands of Texas. Teas, that is, while still well within the borders of sovereign Mexico. In this land of opportunity and danger emerged a group of men who would rank among the most iconic figures of the Wild West, the Texas Rangers, delivering silver star

justice to a lollus frontier or so goes the myth. Who were these Texas Rangers, defenders of order,

or agents of exploitation and violence? We'll explore it all with Professor Benjamin Johnson of Loyola University, Chicago, author of several books including Texas in American history and revolution in Texas, how a forgotten rebellion and its bloody suppression turned Mexicans into Americans. Ben Johnson, great to have you with us, you have a name like a Texas Ranger. Thank you so much, I'm very pleased to be with you. Our telling of the story begins around 1820, beginnings of Texas, which was known by the Mexicans

and Spanish who founded the place as Teas. What's going on in Teas in 1820? Teas in 1820 is really kind of on the ropes. It has, you know, long been the claimed by Spain as the northern extent of its possessions in North America, but you know, you could say it belongs to the kimchi more than it belongs to the Spanish. There's been lots of civil unrest and interaction associated with efforts to create an independent Mexico that will govern itself instead of being under the rule of

Spain. It's a vast expense, but had a low settler population making it difficult to project colonial authority, especially against these Apache and Comanche tribes. I imagine settlements were a few and far between in those days, right? That's correct and there's really, you know, the largest San Antonio. So there's a cluster of Hispanic residents around San Antonio. Some farther east and Nackic Doshas, some farther south and what will end up being south Texas. And it's in

worship that it had been a few generations before. And as Mexico gains, it's independence in 1821. I hope I'm not getting ahead of our story too much. There is a lot of sentiment that they need to bring in more property owning, sedentary people and they have a lot of land and there are a lot of such people in the United States who don't have land and you know, maybe this could work out, maybe we could invite some Americans down there. Yeah. Mexico itself had been unable to

encourage its own population to settle that land. So this is what you're talking about. They're encouraging these outsiders to come in instead after 1821. Anglos Americans from the USA start to migrate to the territory. Stephen F. Austin, the famous name, let a band of colonists to this Texas region. And over time, tensions begin to grow between the Anglo-Americans, the indigenous nations and the Mexican authorities. This is really what starts to boil up, right?

That's correct, although, you know, there are also ways in which for about a decade after Stephen F. Austin brings in a hundred families. You know, it really does work. Stephen is known as a

“stave on that's how I write about him in my book. He's the godfather to Mexican children. He”

becomes fluent in Spanish. He converts to Catholicism at one point even helps put down an uprising in East Texas against Mexican rule. But I think everyone has a sense that this is a kind of

is going to work. He's really a bit of fascinating that Stephen F. Austin really known to Anglos

“anyway as the father of Texas. In 1823, the precursor of what becomes the Texas Rangers is”

about it. How so and why? Sure, that is the date that the Rangers give for their founding. And, you know, it does have a basis. There's a description that Austin hires 10 experience from tearsmen as what he calls Rangers and a punitive expedition against Tacua Indians. But there's not, you know, there's not a bureaucracy. There's not a uniform. There's not a command and control structure until really the middle of the Texas Revolution towards the end of 1835 when Texas lawmakers,

you know, the Congress of this would be independent nation, which is still fighting Mexico, for its independence, create a force, authorize the creation of a formal force called the Texas Rangers. So 1823, 1835, take your pick. Yeah, exactly. And just to remind people who are a rusty on this, the Texas Republic is founded between what years. Yeah, the Texas Republic exists between 1836 when Texas is very and probably wins its revolution and actually captures

the head of state of Mexico, Santa Ana, vastly larger polity that had had no chance of actually conquering and the Republic lasts until 1845 when it becomes a part of the United States as a state. Yeah, just important to keep that political backdrop in mind as this group is founded. That is

“really, is it fair to call it a militia? Not really, right? I think a militia, you know,”

paramilitary is the word that's often used. Sometimes they're doing things that look like law enforcement, sometimes, particularly in the early years, they're mostly doing things that look like military peppers, right? They are making more on hostile powers in attempting to prevent outside powers from making more on Anglo-Texes. Yeah, and they're first organized by Austin,

but then led by a guy named Moses Morrison, who their essential job is to patrol the roads and

the lands in general, and essentially protect these Anglo-Settlers, right? That's right. Yeah, and especially in the early years, they end up doing a lot of things, right? Because government capacity generally is just developing and is very limited. So they also do things like in the middle of the Texas Revolution, they are retrieving cattle, they are trying to help refugees cross muddy trails and swollen streams and the like. So the Rangers are just, they're always been a,

it's an organization that changes and has always had a somewhat mixed mission. Yeah, they're the staple least. It sounds like before there's a state. By 1830s, their pay was set to $1.25 a day, but they had to provide their own horses and their supplies. I got a quote here from a guy named John Caperton. He wrote something called The Sketch of Colonel John C. Hayes, Texas Ranger. I'll read it. Each Ranger was armed with a rifle, a pistol, and a knife,

with a Mexican blanket tied behind his saddle and a small wallet in which he carried salt and ammunition, and perhaps a little panola or parched corn, spiced and sweetened, a great layer of thirst, and of course tobacco. He was equipped for a month. This little body of men unencumbered by baggage wagons or pack trains moved as lightly over the prairie as the Indians. I mean, this is really the picture of this lonely ride around on the plains isn't it? Yeah, sure it is.

And they've become, you know, by the 1840s, they have a reputation well outside the state of Texas, for exactly the kind of thing you're talking about. Let's talk about how they get that reputation as we go. These are not polished lawmen. They are organized, but they're writing out from sort of separate headquarters, I suppose. Kind of half farmers, half fighters, patrolling a wilderness where the government barely existed. With the outbreak of the Texas Revolution, 1836, the

provisional government officially sanctioned the first Ranger Force to patrol the frontier.

How large was the spores? 56, 60 people, six companies of melted volunteers, and there meant to be a bit geographically dispersed. Yeah. And within a few years, it grows. There's about 300 and a couple of years from then. And as you explained, they're not only, you know, writing for law, they're writing for to help people and scout for people, their careers, their guides, they also perform sort of rear guard actions during several battles that are going

“over the Mexican Army after the battle of the Alamo. Why is this such a unique thing to Texas?”

Some curious, you know, why are we talking about the Arkansas Rangers? You know, why Texas? Yeah. I think there's a couple of reasons. I mean, one, they're power and influence and their scope

they're not a particularly militarily significant force. You know, and they're actually somewhat to their frustration, being used sparingly as scouts and careers during the Revolution. Actually, after the battle of the Alamo, rather than, you know, leading shock troops in battle against Mexican forces, but they become more and more significant, particularly on the Texas frontier as really the kind of the point of the spear to use that phrase for Anglo-Texas. And then

you know, this is a theme throughout Ranger history, really, you know, after just a generation. So by the 1840s, they are as significant as cultural icons and legends as they actually are

“as a bureaucracy. So I think that's what distinguishes them from, you know, Arizona has Rangers,”

California has Rangers. It was a general term for sort of back country, woodsmen that was used across much of the English-speaking world, but it's only in Texas that you get the confluence of an actual paramilitary bureaucracy and organization and a body of legend and war that lasts all the way up, both of them until today. Let's take a short break. And when we come back, we'll talk about the notable engagements the Rangers fought in and the darker aspects of their history right after this.

Okay, we're back with Professor Benjamin Johnson talking about the Texas Rangers. No, not the baseball team, the real ones. We've called them sort of a bit of a militia, kind of a state police. How were they organized and how did one become a Ranger? So yeah, they're organizing, you know, they are officially chartered by the government of the Republic of Texas and officers are hired and then calls go out for men to enlist. So in that

“way, it really does look like a volunteer army. In Texas, it's in a very tenuous position, right?”

It is a, it's whole existence as an independent sovereign. It's really improbable that they catch the Mexican army in a moment of vulnerability. After it's leader, the president of Mexico thought to Anna, very unwisely decides to split forces and captures them. And they're still

right next to some very powerful indigenous people, most note of most powerful of whom are

Comanchey and they're still right next to Mexico, a country that is literally hundreds of times at size and that views them as illegitimate bandits and upstart revolutionaries and would like to recapture them. But precisely because of that vulnerability, then the people leading the Republic of Texas see the need to have a kind of frontier military force that is out in the field more or less full time, right? That's not just mobilized like a volunteer fire department when

there's an emergency. And so the Rangers and their early years are really a frontier military force and their opponents as they very readily acknowledged our indigenous peoples in Mexico.

“Yeah. Tell me about a guy named John Hayes. John Jack coffee Hayes 1840s, right?”

Sure. Yeah. So Hayes is a fascinating figure. And he's really the first

real legendary Texas Ranger. He comes to Texas in the middle of the revolution in 1836. And is one of the people who Sam Houston asked to join a company of Rangers. That's engaged in service between San Antonio and the Rio Grande rights. How right on the what they hope will become the border with Mexico. And he fights during the Texas Revolution. And then goes on to do kind of a combination of surveying frontier lands, right?

Which the Rangers are involved in and are the kind of the security force for that. And then actively fighting indigenous people. And I think the reason he comes to fame is that he is both

a technical innovator, right? So he is one of the first people to realize that advances in

gun technology mean that you can actually fight from horseback in a very different way than armed European or an American soldiers had done it used to be. He would use the horse for mobility for speed. And when it came time to fire your musket, you would dismal and form up into some kind of ranks. Well, he realizes that there's now weaponry. That means that you can actually fire from horseback. And so he changes the tactics of frontier warfare. He adopts many native

tactics as well. But the other reasons he's kind of counter-type, right? You know, these pictures of Rangers, especially that are taken in the 20th century are these big larger than life figures, hazes of very diminutive, short, soft spoken man. But, you know, he really deals very effectively

development of frontier warfare that gives rise to him as a legend. There's a county named after him still in Texas. So that tells you something about what an oppression he made. He had to have been a very aware of weapon development and and how things were changing back east, I suppose, in what was available. That's right. And you know, the Rangers have a kind of throwback vibe to them, right as people who live in the past who live in rougher, more frontier conditions. And that's true.

But in a way they've always been on the cutting edge. And they were certainly early adopters of

firearms technology coming out of particularly New England, particularly the called firearms company. Yeah, right there in Hartford, you can drive right past the building.

“Once Texas is annexed into the ice states 1845 is, how does the Rangers change with that?”

And then what happens when the Mexican-American war breaks out? Sure. So the annexation of Texas in 1845 is really the the cause for the US Mexican war, right? Because Mexico does not accept this breakaway province joining the United States and the American president uses us as a pretext to start a war that will end up locking off the, you know, North 40% or so of Mexico in giving the United States the contemporary states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and parts of Wyoming.

And so the US Mexican war is, you know, a war of conquest that got it last from 1846 to 1848. And in a way, it's from the point of view of the Texas Rangers, it's just an extension of the fighting against Mexico that they've been involved in virtually since their inception.

So he serves as commander of the first regimen of Texas mounted riflemen, which joins the larger

constellation of American forces in the US Mexican war. They develop quite a reputation, especially in within the war for ruthlessness. I mean, Battle of 1846 in Battle of Monterey, Texas Rangers are massacring civilians burning it nearby settlements. Had they been utilized by the military

“strategically that way? They are at least for a while useful to the overall US cause, right?”

So that kind of scouting or anti-garella warfare or kind of informal warfare, right? It's useful for the American military to have this not fully controlled militia body that can do things that benefit them without the American officers necessarily having to take blame or take credit

for the actions of the Rangers. And they come to be known as the Los Diablo's Teanos,

right? So the Texas Devils literally, and at some point, American military officers actually start condemning the Rangers, right? Because their view is at their out of control and that their violence against civilian populations actually incites the Mexican populist to be more likely to resist American rule. So it's a double-edged sword for the US military, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. General Zachary Taylor, later president, is quoted to have said there is scarcely

“a form of crime that has not been reported to me as committed by them. And this is where things”

start to get controversial, historically. The Rangers are accused of atrocities. How does this come out? I mean, where do we hear about Texas Rangers? So you hear about, I mean, if you read the press in either Mexico or the United States, you would hear reports and accounts of these. If you have, you know, a brother or a son or a husband who's in the American military and he's riding home, he may be mentioning the Texas Rangers and these stories. And then particularly in the

Mexican descent population in both Mexico and Texas, now there are oral histories, there are stories being told it's about this time that the term Green Chay, which is a derogatory term for Ranger in Spanish, comes into white circulation, they're corrillos or the kind of traditional folk music or ballads of northern Mexico and they come to feature Texas Rangers or more centrally what the song's cast. It's heroic Mexican men who stand up to them and who resist them. So,

you know, within a generation of their founding, they are simultaneously bureaucracy and legends and contested in the press and in popular culture and ways that really, you know, they change over time but the pattern that last up until the 2020s is already set by the end of the U.S. Mexico war. Yeah, their main targets, so I mean, certainly within the borders of Texas were the Apache and Comanche tribes. What was their goal in that was were they claiming land for people

or were they just killing people? I mean, what was their general objective? Sure. I mean, you know, Texas is not unique, certainly, and engaging in vicious war on both sides, of course,

California and the 1850s is an absolute horror show, but Texas is remarkably successful in what many

“scholars call ethnic cleansing, right? So, if you look at the indigenous population by the end of”

the 19th century in Texas and compare it with Indian territory, what becomes Oklahoma or New Mexico or even Louisiana or Arkansas to its east, Texas has very, very few indigenous people and that's because Texans, including the Rangers, were very motivated and very successful in

expelling once large and powerful indigenous populations. Battle of Little Rogue Creep, 1858,

were moving across the decades here, civil wars coming up, but a Ranger named John Salmon RIP Ford, I guess his name was RIP Ford, led a group of 100 Rangers on a months-long campaign in from Texas into Indian territory, as you mentioned, modern day Oklahoma, against the native Hommachi tribe, as was done in those days, aided by another tribe, from Kawa tribe, traditional enemies of the Hommachi, they basically tracked them to their permanent camp, tell me what went down

then. Yeah, so they penetrate to the heart of the Komanchi domain and attack Komanchi villages and are able to successfully return. They sometimes kill women and children and take them hostage

and they go after food supplies and including they go after the buys and populations, which

are really the basis of Komanchi, Kawa and other policies, economic orders and they're not particular, they don't really have the authorization to do this, right? They are crossing a border that the federal government doesn't want them to cross, but there aren't federal forces to stop them, so they just kind of go ahead and do that and it's really in this battle also known as sometimes referred to as the Battle of Antelope Hill, that the tactics that the U.S. Army will later

use in the 1870s in both the northern and southern planes come into fruition. So once again, the Rangers for better for worse are kind of setting the template for Frontier warfare. The expulsion of natives brought more settlers into Texas, the Rangers found themselves dealing more and more with internal issues of the Anglo population. They become more akin to local police force. They are in the nickname Prairie Patrolman. So it's a fascinating thing to see

over a 30 year period, 30, 40 year period, really, how this group changes its role in this

“ever changing society. And I think one thing you have to take into account is that modern policing”

itself is just in its infancy, right? So your people are not used to seeing uniform police officers all over the place. We think of the United States as a country with a large standing military. The United States is not a country with a large standing military. It's political cultures is vehemently opposed against that. So time and time again, state authorities turn to the Rangers as one of the few forces that's actually able to project violence and charges them

with various tasks that the people running the state find to be worthwhile. They're infamously known for their star. When did they start wearing those shiny little stars? It's there by the end of the 19th century. But when that starts, I don't know. I think it's got to be a knockoff of the lone star of Texas. So my guess is that it goes way back to the beginning. By the turn of the 20th century leaping ahead here, the need for Rangers was called into

question as those frontier settlements and townships began establishing their own enforcement. 1918 the poor veneer massacre happens. Very ugly incident. Tell me about that. Sure. So the massacre itself is at the end of January in 1918. And essentially the Rangers with a bit of a escort from the US cavalry and far west Texas. The nearest landmark today,

“if you want to call it that would be Big Ben National Park. But it's, you know, hours of driving”

to get even there. They come into the small village of Corbeneer right on the Rio Grande. And they separate the men and boys from the rest of the villagers. And they line up 15 teenage boys at men against a bluff and they shoot them. And this ends up resulting in a big outcry and eventually the next year in 1919, a very long and well-publicized set of legislative

hearings when estate representatives basically charges them with primed against humanity right

with violating their oath with killing innocent people. And there's a long and quest not only into poor veneer, but into a set of larger killings in the 19 teams that probably involved hundreds of victims at the hands of the Texas Rangers and others almost all of them along the

banditry, many of them simply being Mexican and being stuck in a wrong time or the wrong place

or having land that a neighbor of theirs coveted and fingered and turned their name to over to the Texas Rangers. This is associated with the Mexican Revolution right so after a long period of relative calm and actual cooperation for economic development and for the suppression of indigenous peoples between the governments of the United States and Mexico, there is a full-fledged revolution, breaks out in Mexico in 1911. It kind of destabilizes the US Mexican border. It sends

lots of migrants from Mexico into the United States. So there's a lot of social turmoil. There's a lot of fear and for the first time anglers are coming into regions along the US Mexican border, which even though we're now what 90 years after 80 years after the Texas Revolution, still had majority Mexican populations who voted who held land, who held local political

office in a way that non-white people in the United States virtually never did. Right so these

border regions are very distinctive. There had been a raid on a prominent West Texas ranch the bright ranch the month before in December of 1917 and state authorities really wanted to show that they were responsive to the brights and to families like theirs and there's no evidence leaking the residents of northern here to this, but there they were. It was an opportunity. They were an opportunity to target and the Ranger Commander James Fox on the scene had been sent there. It was

well known that he executed completely in a Mexican and Mexican Americans in South Texas in the previous

years and it's just so clear that you know he was sent there basically. Take off the leash,

“do whatever you need to do, terrorize these people. We want to show the brights and others that we are”

serious about this, that we're serious about this violence. But the Mexican government protests, there's a local white school teacher who had married and to the poor of an era community who uh, Gary Warren who keeps a list of people who were killed. The American military is very angry about this again kind of a reprise of the U.S. Mexican war. They don't want to be associated with this and they don't want the communities that they write into view them with immediate hostility

which is what they're afraid is going to happen. So, Orvanier from the beginning is a huge black mark on the the reputation of the Texas Rangers. After the break, Ben and I will discuss how the Rangers rise above full of these controversies and attain a legendary shining star status. Ben, we've covered a few of the darker chapters in the history of Texas Rangers.

“Somehow, though, they attain a legendary status in American culture. How does this reinvention happen?”

Who's responsible and what made the turn? Yeah, there's a couple of things that happen. I mean, this is where I think we need to leave the actual like lived experience of the frontier and the bureaucracy of the Rangers and go into Hollywood and the realm of popular culture. So as we've talked about, they already had a reputation right by the 20th century as a kind of larger than life force historians who are deeply invested in the frontier past start writing about them

and particularly a guy named Walter Prescott Webb published the book simply entitled The Texas Rangers in 1935 that kind of cast them as a frontier defense force as the point of the spear and what Webb celebrates is that Anglo-Saxon conquest over inferior so-called inferior peoples, meaning Mexicans and Indians. And then you've already have Ranger Din novels. The Rangers are already invested in their own reputation. And by the time you get to the 1940s, you have the television show, The Long Ranger,

which runs from 1949 to 1957. And on radio, you have tales of the Texas Rangers in the 1950s as well. And so that then, and a world where most people at that point are living in cities or living in suburbs, you know, it's a very different society than frontier taxes in the 19th century, the legend of the Rangers only grows. And it's part of the embrace of the Western past. There's also an increased professionalism about the Rangers in terms of reorganization.

“At some point, they're integrated into the Department of Public Safety, 1935, right?”

That's correct. So yeah, 1935 is in some ways a turning point, certainly in terms of its bureaucratic

Department of Public Safety. And they really then become for all intents and purposes,

another professional law enforcement agency, right? They've lost that character. They're not going to war with anybody anymore. They are charged with enforcing the laws that kind of lead investigative unit, which in some ways you could call it like the FBI of the state of Texas. But again, other states have them, right? Minnesota has the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprentices. For example, it's just nobody's ever made a television show about the Minnesota Bureau

of Criminal Apprentices. And I should say that, you know, this is often framed as a story of they become just like other police forces. Therefore, they're not as controversial and they don't

“do bad things. But I think the better way to put it is, they become like other police forces”

and they do the things that are very controversial and divisive about policing and the larger history of the United States. So just for example, two years. So they end up in the Supreme Court,

twice in the 20th century. And the first time comes out of a case. It's just two years after they're

folded into the DPS in East Texas, a black farm labor named Bob White is accused of raping and murdering a white woman who's married to a farmer who was white some employee. There's no real physical evidence. The local authorities don't have enough evidence to charge him. So they call in the Texas Rangers and the way the Rangers handle this case is that they take Bob White out of the county jail every night for a week, chained him to a tree and beat him senseless and after five or six

days of this treatment. Sure enough, white unsurprisingly confesses discosed a court. He's convicted and sentenced to death. But he appeals and the National Association for the Advancement of

Colored People, some of the nation's foremost civil rights organization takes up his cause and says

you can't use this evidence in court because it was tortured from him. It was coerced and the Supreme Court ends up throwing out the evidence. You know, White is assassinated and open court by his former employer. So it doesn't do him any good. But it just shows you that even though they've become a conventional police force, not unlike other state police forces, their actions are still deeply controversial. But there was a Texas state police and it goes back to the

“1800s who were later disbanded. Was it because Texans related to the Rangers more than the cops?”

Well, the Texas state police has its origins in the reconstruction era government. So this is a government of black voters in Texas, white unionists, and you know, white unionists from the north who had been sent down. So that police force is really is hated by many white Texans. And when when reconstruction is overthrown and the white South as a whole is left to run its own affairs right with disastrous results for for the black population, right for the the freed people and

their and their descendants, the Texas police, that Texas police force goes away. And I forget when the the DPS was refounded. But yeah, they're in a branch of state government and of the state police. They're like cousins to the highway patrol and the people of Stap you if you speak today. To this day, the Rangers are part of the Texas Department of Public Safety. They are a division

“of all of that. The famous incident we should point out, which gets a lot of notoriety. Former”

Texas Ranger Frank Hamer leads a party of a combination of Texas and Louisiana law officers that hunt down the infamous Bonnie and Clyde in 1934 gets a lot of press out of that. What's often forgotten about Hamer, if I can interject and downplayed by the Texas Ranger Museum in all of fame, is that in the 19 teens, he was involved in these killings along the US Mexican border and the one state representative representative J. T. Canales from South Texas.

Mexican American guy, the only non-white guy in the Texas legislature at that point, he's the one who files the charges against the Rangers after the poor of the near massacre and Frank Hamer stalks him through the streets of Austin, setting state representative. Shows up flashes his gun at him, confronts him down in South Texas. Tells him if he keeps running his mouth off, he's going to run into real trouble. So, Hamer has a reputation long

before he is responsible for killing Monty and Clyde. This legend of the Texas Rangers is being, you know, obviously, even within this conversation, we can hear it, a reevaluation of where they're at. And the controversies of their reputation continue to this day. I mean, of course, you have all the din novels, the Rollin Ranger TV series, Walker Texas Ranger, of course. But these days, things are being looked at in different light. Can you explain that process

these critical accounts of the Rangers have been around, you know, as long as the Rangers have

“been around, and it's just that now they circulated public more or to put it more of the Texas”

Rangers and their Hegeographers and defenders have really lost the public monopoly on how their story is told. You can see this as early actually as 1972 when a professional baseball team moves to Dallas and re-names itself the Texas Rangers, they get picketed by Mexican-American civil rights activists who think of the Rangers as the ones who spy down them and brutalize them

and try to stop them. There's a historical marker that I was involved in that this organization

I'm with refusing to forget was involved in putting up to the memory of the poor veneer massacre. So there's this more public recognition of these things. And there was a statu called one riot

“one Ranger that Texas Ranger who modeled for that statute played a key role in preventing the”

integration of man's field high school by four black students in 1956. That was put up and love field. Dallas's old small airport, the Southwest, the one that Southwest Airlines flies in and out of and it stood there from 1961 to 2020. I would see it every time I would fly up there to go visit my grandmother's as a child and that was taken down in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd and a lot of scrutiny was directed at historical monuments and the authorities decided after this

journalist Doug Swanson published a book called Cult of Glory that recounted the story of what the model for the statute had been involved with. They just decided they didn't want. They didn't

“want any part of this and then low and behold last month I think it was the Texas Ranger ball”

team put the statue back up in its stadium right and they've been criticized for that and people are writing op ads and letters to the editors and you know the predictable social media controversy. So you know we're at a point where the lovers and the haters of the Texas Rangers, you know they both get an audience for their points of view. They used to be just the cheerleaders for the Rangers did but that's now changed. Ben Johnson is a professor of history at the

Loyal University in Chicago author of several books I've already mentioned. Texas and American history and revolution in Texas how I forgot and rebellion and its bloody suppression turned Mexicans into Americans very complex story. Those are good books to check what you can't. How can people know what you're doing these days Ben? They can go to the website of Texas and AmericanHestory.com or they can go to refusing to forget.org. Nice. Thank you very much for your time. Appreciate it.

Thanks, Tom. Thanks for listening to American History it. You know every week we release new episodes. Two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays on kinds of content from mysterious missing

colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries.

Don't miss an episode by hitting like and follow. You help us out which is great. But you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History hit with me, Don Wellman. So grateful for your support.