OTD calendar January

#OTD on January 1st, 1958, the University of Texas Press published Américo Paredes’ landmark book With His Pistol in His Hand, an examination of the life and legend of Gregorio Cortez, whose persecution by the Texas Rangers and other law enforcement made him a folk hero in the early 1900s.  On June 12, 1901, sheriffs […]

#OTD on January 8, 1865, Texas Confederate militiamen, including Texas Ranger captain N. M. Gillentine, attacked a large group of Kickapoo Indians camped on a tributary of the Conchos river about 25 miles southwest of where San Angelo, Texas is currently located.   The Kickapoo being attacked were a large group of families, possibly as many

  #OTD on January 10, 1915, Governor James “Pa” Ferguson began expanding the number of Texas Rangers as a response to “bandit incursions” at the Texas-Mexico border. At the start of the year there were around one dozen Rangers. By 1917 when Ferguson left office there were over 1,000.         While Ferguson responded

#OTD on January 15, 1879, Rangers under the command of G.W. Arrington attacked a group of Kiowa and Comanche hunters in the panhandle, killing and scalping their leader, “Sunboy.” The presence of US soldiers kept them from extending the attack. Born as John Cromwell Orrick Jr., in Alabama in 1844, Arrington had a history of

  #OTD on January 15, 1919, State Representative José Tomás Canales, representing the Rio Grande Valley, along the border with Mexico, filed House Bill 5, calling a reform of the Texas Rangers. This action inaugurated the greatest crisis in the history of the Ranger Force by producing evidence of violence by Rangers and others still

#OTD on January 20, 1919, a white mob in Hillsboro, Texas, removed Bragg Williams from the county jail and burned him at the stake at the intersection of Elm and Covington streets on the southwest corner of the courthouse square.    Williams, an intellectually disabled Black laborer, had been found guilty and sentenced to death

#0TD, on January 21st, 2021, a reboot of Walker Texas Ranger premiered on the CW, available to be streamed all over the United States, now just titled Walker.  The series revived the character of Walker from the 1990s show starring Chuck Norris as a Ranger. The original show was inspired by Norris’ role in the

#OTD on January 23, 2016, the Bullock Museum opened the bilingual exhibit “Life and Death on the Border.”  It offered an unflinching look at the role of the TexasRangers in the 1910s border violence.    This was an important moment in Texas Ranger history because it was the first time a state public history institution recounted

#OTD on January 28, 1918, Texas Rangers massacred fifteen men and boys at the village of Porvenir, Texas, in what is perhaps the single most notorious and consequential event in the history of the Ranger Force.   Porvenir was a small and remote, but proudly independent community. Mexican-descent families raised livestock, grew produce and cotton, irrigated

#OTD in 1881, 21 Texas Rangers raided an Apache gathering in the early morning, where men, women and children were having breakfast near the Sierra Diablo mountain range.   Lead by George W. Baylor, the Rangers killed 6 people that day and Baylor wrote in an official report: “[I] don’t think [the Indians] will sit