Professor Benjamin Johnson

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, sure is.

And they 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.

56, 60 people, six companies of mounted volunteers, and they're meant to be a bit geographically dispersed.

Yeah, I think there's a couple of reasons.

I mean, one, their power and influence and their scope grows over time, right?

So when they start off in the Texas Revolution in late 1835, 1836, they're not a particularly militarily significant force.

And they're actually somewhat to their frustration being used sparingly as scouts and couriers during the revolution and actually after the Battle of the Alamo rather than 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 force.

to use that phrase, for Anglo-Texans.

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 backcountry 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.

So yeah, they're organized, 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.