Professor Benjamin Johnson

It's about this time that the term Rinche, which is a derogatory term for ranger in Spanish, comes into wide circulation.

There are corridos, or the kind of traditional folk music or ballads of northern Mexico that

And they come to feature Texas Rangers, or more centrally, what the songs cast as heroic Mexican men who stand up to them and who resist them.

So, you know, within a generation of their founding, they are simultaneously a bureaucracy and legends and contested in the press and in popular culture in ways that really, you know, they change over time.

But the pattern that lasts up until the 2020s is already set by the end of the U.S.-Mexico War.

Sure.

I mean, you know, Texas is not...

Unique, certainly, and engaging in vicious war on both sides, of course, at times with indigenous peoples.

You see similar things across the West and nice liberal California in the 1850s is an absolute horror show.

But Texas is remarkably successful in what many scholars call ethnic cleansing, right?

So if you look at the indigenous population by the end of the 19th century in Texas and compare it with Indian territory, what becomes Oklahoma?

or New Mexico, or even Louisiana, or Arkansas to its east, Texas has very, very few indigenous people.

And that's because Texans, including the Rangers, were very motivated and very successful in expelling once large and powerful indigenous populations.

Yeah, so they penetrate to the heart of the Comanche domain and attack Comanche villages and are able to successfully return.

They sometimes kill women and children and take them hostage.

And they go after food supplies, and including they go after the bison populations, which are really the basis of Comanche, Kiowa, and other polities' economic orders.

And they're not particular.

They don't really have the authorization to do this, right?

They are crossing a border that the federal government doesn't want them to cross, but there aren't federal forces to stop them.

So they just...