Professor Benjamin Johnson

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 into the poor Veneer community, Harry 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 ride in to view them with immediate hostility, which is what they're afraid is going to happen.

So Horvenier from the beginning is a huge black mark on the reputation of the Texas Rangers.

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 a 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 an Anglo-Saxon conquest over inferior, so-called inferior peoples, meaning Mexicans and Indians.

And then you already have Ranger Dime 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 Lone Ranger, which runs from 1949 to 1957.

And on radio, you have Tales of the Texas Rangers in the 1950s as well.