Professor Benjamin Johnson

So in that way, it really does look like a volunteer army.

And Texas is in a very tenuous position, right?

It is a

Its whole existence as an independent sovereign is really improbable that they catch the Mexican army in a moment of vulnerability after its leader, the president of Mexico, Santa Anna, very unwisely decides to split forces and captures them.

And they're still right next to some very powerful indigenous people, most powerful of whom are the

Comanche, and they're still right next to Mexico, a country that is literally hundreds of times its 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 in their early years are really a frontier military force and their opponents, as they very readily acknowledged, are indigenous peoples in Mexico.

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, right?

So 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 combat.

European and American soldiers had done.

It used to be you would use the horse for mobility, for speed, and when it came time to fire your musket, you would dismount and form up into some kind of ranks.