#OTD in 1923, the Ku Klux Klan attempted to kidnap farmer and rail worker Otto Lange from his front porch in Burleson County. The resulting case shows the complicated relationship between Rangers and the Klan. Lange was with his elderly mother and young daughter when the Klan arrived. When he resisted, Klansmen pistol-whipped his mother, […]
#OTD on July 8, 1945, Bee County Sheriff Vail Ennis, with Texas Ranger Frank Probst and another deputized man, shot and killed brothers Felix, Domingo, and Antonio Rodriguez. Ennis mowed them down with a Thompson submachine gun. A fourth brother, Geronimo, was injured. Sheriff Ennis had a long history of abuse and killing. He had
On July 23 or 24, 1915, the brothers Lorenzo and Gorgonio Manríquez were killed near Mercedes, Texas, by deputy sheriffs, in a chain of events that unleashed violence across south Texas in late summer and fall of 1915. The double murder and subsequent events reveal many of the dynamics that made 1915 so violent: wrenching
In the summer of 1888, Texas Rangers Ira Aten and Jim King went undercover to try to identify and arrest so-called “fence cutters.” They were unsuccessful. In frustration, Aten developed a plan to hide mines in the fences, blowing them up when cutters approach. To understand how military equipment, like mines, could be introduced into
#OTD in 1915, Adolfo Muñoz was tortured, riddled with bullets, and hung from a mesquite tree two miles south of San Benito after mysteriously disappearing from the custody of deputy sheriff Frank Carr and former and future Ranger Daniel Hinojosa. TSHA Handbook entry on Daniel Hinojosa. Muñoz, whose names are given as “Rudolfo” or “Muñiz”
