Show Me Your Badge, Ranger

By Kathleen Rice Adams

Texas Ranger, c. 1846 (Library of Congress collection)

Texas Ranger badges are a hot commodity in the collectibles market, but the caveat “buyer beware” applies in a big way. The vast majority of items marketed as genuine Texas Ranger badges are reproductions, facsimiles, or toys. Very few legitimate badges exist outside museums and family collections, and those that do hardly ever are sold. There’s a very good reason for that: Manufacturing, possessing, or selling Texas Ranger insignia, even fakes that are “deceptively similar” to the real thing, violates Texas law except in specific circumstances.

According to Byron A. Johnson, executive director of the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum (the official historical center for the Texas Ranger law-enforcement agency), “Spurious badges and fraudulent representation or transactions connected with them date back to the 1950s and are increasing. We receive anywhere from 10 to 30 inquiries a month on badges, the majority connected with sales on eBay.”

If you had to, could you identify a legitimate Texas Ranger badge? Test your knowledge: Which of the alleged badges below are genuine? Pick one from each set. (All images are ©Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, Waco, Texas, and are used with permission. All Rights Reserved.)

Set 1

©TRHFM, Waco, TX

©TRHFM, Waco, TX

Answer: The right-hand badge, dated 1889, is the earliest authenticated Texas Ranger badge in the collection of the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum. Badges weren’t standard issue for Rangers until 1935, although from 1874 onward, individual Rangers sometimes commissioned badges from jewelers or gunsmiths, who made them from Mexican coins. Relatively few Rangers wore a badge out in the open. As for the item on the left? There’s no such thing as a “Texas Ranger Special Agent.”

Set 2

©TRHFM, Waco, TX

©TRHFM, Waco, TX

Answer: On the left is an official shield-type badge issued between 1938 and 1957. Ranger captains received gold badges; the shields issued to lower ranks were silver. The badge on the right is a fake, though similar authentic badges exist.

Set 3

©TRHFM, Waco, TX

©TRHFM, Waco, TX

Answer: The left-hand badge was the official badge of the Rangers from July 1957 to October 1962. Called the “blue bottle cap badge,” the solid, “modernized” design was universally reviled. The right-hand badge is a fake. According to the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, “No genuine Texas Ranger badges are known to exist with ‘Frontier Battalion’ engraved on them.”

Set 4

©TRHFM, Waco, TX

©TRHFM, Waco, TX

Answer: The badge on the right, called the “wagon wheel badge,” has been the official Texas Ranger badge since October 1962. Each is made from a Mexican five-peso silver coin. The badge on the left is a “fantasy badge.” According to the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, the most common designation on such badges is “Co. A.”

How did you do?

For more information about the Texas Rangers—including the history of the organization, biographical sketches of individual Rangers, and all kinds of information about badges and other insignia—visit the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum online at TexasRanger.org. The museum and its staff have my utmost gratitude for their assistance with this post. They do the Rangers proud.


And while we’re on the subject of Rangers... My short story “The Second-Best Ranger in Texas” bows tomorrow as a 99-cent e-book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords.

His partner’s grisly death destroyed Texas Ranger Quinn Barclay. Cashiered for drunkenness and refusal to follow orders, he sets out to fulfill his partner’s dying request, armed only with a saloon girl’s name.

Sister María Tomás thought she wanted to become a nun, but childhood dreams aren’t always meant to be. At last ready to relinquish the temporary vows she never should have made, she begs the only man she trusts to collect her from a mission in the middle of nowhere.

When the ex-Ranger’s quest collides with the ex-nun’s plea in a burned-out border town, unexpected love blooms among shared memories of the dead man who was a brother to them both.

Too bad he was also the only man who could have warned them about the carnage to come.

 

Descended from a long line of Texas ranchers, preachers, and teachers on one side and Kentucky horse thieves and moonshiners on the other, Kathleen Rice Adams had no choice but to become an outlaw. Maybe that’s why all of her protagonists wear black hats. Visit her at KathleenRiceAdams.com.

STORYTELLING IN A FLASH by Tom Rizzo

“Do I have a story for you…” 

Chances are this is a phrase you’ll hear more than once during any given week. 

In fact, it’s a good bet that whenever two or more people are gathered in the same general vicinity someone is bound to reel out a story of a recent experience or retell someone else’s story from their own perspective.

Storytelling is the world’s greatest indoor and outdoor sport. Oral storytelling has been around, of course, since humans began grunting. Way back then, people used words, drawings, gestures, and facial expressions to entertain, educate, inform, and even inspire.

The best stories were told and retold--epic stories of ghosts and gods, legends and heroes, war and love. Travelers tucked these stories into their memory banks and carried them to other lands and cultures where they exchanged them for even more stories, which they brought home to share.

Good storytelling requires an attentive audience. 

 

Today, attention spans aren’t what they used to be, which is why the best oral stories tend to be brief and vivid so listeners can engage as many senses as possible. On the other hand, we’ve all been in situations when you'd like to implore the storyteller to “puh-leeeeze get to the point!”

Economy in storytelling is a special skill. Especially in writing. Choosing the right words to tell a story is a challenge most of us face, whether writing a short story or novel—although economy of words isn’t usually a priority consideration for someone trying to churn out a 40,000- to 80,000-word novel.

When I worked in broadcast news, I learned to write “fast and tight”—to tell a breaking story in as few words as possible, written in a way that provided listeners with the sense of a complete story. 

Today, thanks to social media channels, even the non-professional writers of society are learning to express themselves with brevity. 

 

Text messaging, Twitter, blog comments, chats, and other electronic communication formats demand a minimum number of words to get a point across.

Magazines get into the act, as well, in different ways. For example, the other day, while skimming a local city magazine, I saw a column labeled, “One-Sentence Stories.” The column featured six stories, these two among them: 

• “A woman allegedly smacked his sister-in-law across the face with a dead catfish in a domestic disturbance in Lufkin.”

• “Aggie legend Johnny Manziel was photographed in an Austin swimming pool, sprawled across an inflatable swan and guzzling from a champagne bottle.”

These and the other four sentences weren't really stories. I’d classify them as statements or, at the very least, story-starters. Valid stories usually contain action, conflict, and perhaps resolution. 

Telling a story in the fewest number of words possible is generally referred to as flash fiction. 

 

The most intriguing Flash Fiction challenge is the Six-Word Story. Books - yes, books - have been written about writing Six-Word Stories. Entire websites are devoted to the concept. The idea has inspired a literary movement proving that lots can be said in few words. 

The idea started, according to literary legend, when Ernest Hemingway was challenged to write a short story in only six words. No doubt you’ve read the six-word story somewhere along the way:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Hemingway supposedly bet a table of other writers ten-dollars each that he could develop an entire story in six words. After the money was produced, he wrote the six words on a napkin, passed it around the table, and collected the money for winning the bet. Whether the story is true or not remains unanswered. Its accuracy has come under fire a number of times. 

Regardless of the reality, the idea of writing a six-word story represents the ultimate challenge in storytelling. 

 

Check out the website, Six-Word Memoirs  where contributors from all walks of life use six words to tell the story of their lives. The results are mixed, but many are quite creative.

And everyone, regardless of the quality, should be applauded for their effort to Say It In Six. 

Confining our creative efforts to six words forces us to be more selective in word choices. Sometimes, it’s as frustrating as it is challenging. But it’s a good way to focus and refine your thinking. Here are a few I attempted: 

• Financial markets collapse. Penthouse to poverty.
• She aimed. She shot. He bled. 
• Santa Claus arrived, left no gifts.
• Fugitive family rescued from sinking yacht.
• No use crying over dreams unfulfilled.
• The genie appeared. Granted no wishes.

Give it a go yourself. 

Consider this a participatory blog. In the Comments section below, leave your own six-word story. 

_____ 

Tom, author of the post-Civil War action-adventure Last Stand At Bitter Creek, is working on his second novel. Soon to be released are several works of nonfiction:

• The StoryTellers, Interviews with Writers about the Art of Fiction

• Tall Tales from the High Plains & Beyond (three volumes)

                  --Book One: The Unexplained and Other Stories

                  --Book Two: The Law Keepers

                  --Book Three: the Lawbreakers

_____

One Against a Gun Horde

For a long time I wanted to write about one particular Saturday afternoon in the 1970s. Last year that idea became a story, "One Against a Gun Horde."

In those years I lived with my parents on a Nebraska acreage that sat on a hill, overlooking a creek valley grassland. About a mile to the southwest sat a small group of buildings we rented for livestock. Cattle grazed in the pasture. Hogs lived in the barns. A gravel road ran parallel with our homestead. Half a mile away, a right turn would take you half a mile to the other place.

So on this one sunny, summer Saturday, my dad and I were walking across our open yard, heading to the house for coffee, when we heard a gunshot. Then another. 

It was the middle of summer. Not hunting season. And the thunder echoing up through the cedars and cottonwoods from the other place didn't come from a BB gun or even a .22 rifle.

This was high powered stuff. 

We held up our hands to shield our eyes from the sun and searched the horizon.

The shooters weren’t hard to find. Their bright red pickup was a give away, parked in the ditch at the other place.

Taking off in a run, Dad said over his shoulder, "Get in the pickup.” I followed, feet dragging a little, while my heart picked up the pace. "Call the dog," he said

"Where are we going?" Like I didn't know. I got our German Shepherd into the box, and we jumped into our ancient blue Ford. 

Dad turned the key, but before throwing the pickup into gear, he said, "Sons a bitches are too close to the hogs and cattle to be shootin'." His face was red, he was breathing hard, holding his voice down to a low growl.

"We're going down there?!?!"

I thought he'd lost his mind.

He thought I'd lost mine for the question.

We were both partly right.

"Dad. They've got guns," I said. "They've got guns." Trying to be extra dramatic.

"Oh yeah," he said, flinging open his door. Seconds later he was back with a single barrel shotgun that was older than the truck. "Hold onto that," he said.

Spinning gravel, we set out to confront the weekend gunnies, whoever they were, with an ancient shotgun, one shell, and a barking German Shepherd.

Less than a minute later, braking sideways on the gravel road, Dad deliberately spraying rocks at the parked red pickup, I decided it could've been worse.

I only saw two guys.

Then I decided it could've been better.

Each of the bearded men were bigger than dad and me combined. Each held a rifle.

"Do you know 'em?" said Dad. "Because I sure as hell don't." As if I hung around with bearded rednecks who were at least twice my age.

I shook my head, but he was already out of the pickup, stomping toward them. I decided to leave the shotgun in the cab.

When I joined them, I got a surprise.

Dad sure as hell did know 'em. 

In fact, he'd gone to school with one of the men, and rode to Army basic training with the other.

Just like that, the anger was gone, all was forgiven, and it was old home week.

And like every kid left standing alone while a parent yuks it up with old friends, I immediately wanted to be someplace else.

So while I waited around and toed the dirt, I started to imagine how things might've been different. 

What it these guys hadn't been old pals? What if they'd tried something? How would my dad act? How would I act?

That's the premise of “One Against a Gun Horde,” that interplay between real life and fiction, and it served as an origin story of sorts. For a while now I've written about a character named John Coburn who some folks know as "The Peregrine" thanks to a series of dime adventure stories written about him "back east."

But who wrote those stories about Coburn? And why? Here's the answer, and the afternoon incident above is where it all started.

Download the story in PDF format here.

The story is part of a Kindle collection available at Amazon here.

After growing up on a Nebraska farm, Richard Prosch worked as a professional writer, artist, and teacher in Wyoming, South Carolina, and Missouri. His western crime fiction captures the fleeting history and lonely frontier stories of his youth where characters aren’t always what they seem, and the windburned landscapes are filled with swift, deadly danger. Read more at www.RichardProsch.com

Sex and the Single Soldier

To quote Kevin Adams, “Sex may well have surpassed drinking as the most popular leisure pursuit for enlisted men on the frontier.”

The army veteran of the time, Reginald Bradley said, “You take a young fellow of 22 or 23, and he’ll always be thinking about where he can get a drink of beer, or a girl. The first item on the menu was filled by saloons, post traders, or the nearest town. Prostitutes filled the second, and no fort in the frontier was without prostitutes nearby. Mostly at hog ranches, which usually consisted of ramshackle buildings that housed dance halls, saloons, gambling joints, and soon. Adams says “lights out” at the typical frontier fort came at 9 p.m., which gave the rank and file soldier plenty of time to get off to the hog ranch, get his fill or whatever, and be back before reveille. I quote: “Not surprisingly, venereal disease was one of the top two reasons for medical discharge in the United States Army every year between 1877 and 1889.”

Calamity Jane
was on the line for a while,
they say.

 The book Class and Race in the Frontier Army kind of blames the rash of venereal disease among enlisted men on the all-male environment, and the increasingly stratified society of the late 19^th century. Specifically: “While bourgeois Americans enjoyed a gender system that celebrated companionate (if not egalitarian) marriage and domestic life, working-class Americans struggled to fashion viable households in an era of economic turmoil. Men who lived on the margins of the working class fared even worse, shunted into transient jobs and homosocial environments such as logging, mining, and cowboy camps. Like those men, soldiers lived within a class structure that promoted a masculine form of gendered oppression.”

OK. So the ranks had a hard time making families that endured, it was doubly hard for those of color, male and female. Thus, white soldiers found that their status as white men provided them access to women who were particularly vulnerable.

Poverty kept men too poor to have families. Women didn’t have job skills other than domestic ones. There were far more men than women around a military camp. Thus, in addition to prostitutes, soldiers often consorted with working class white women, and of course those of color.

Troop K, 1st Cav.

Here is a case in point, taken from Adams’s book.

Private Patrick Moriarty of the 9^th Infantry was charged at Fort McPherson, Nebraska, with attempted rape for assault upon Mrs. Thomas Bock, laundress of Company A, 9^th Infantry. Testimony of witnesses conflicted, but both sides agreed that Mrs. Boch was known to have consorted with drunken enlisted men. The prosecution argued that her miserable drunken husband was to blame, because he often had other miserable drunkards like the “prisoner” over to his house for the purpose of drinking.

Private Moriarty claimed he was far from the only soldier to have become intimate with Mrs. Boch, and it was only after her sister caught the two in the act that the cry of rape was raised. Defense witnesses said they had seen the prisoner frequently put his arms around her, and also several men in the company do the same when over there drinking. They also said they had seen Mrs. Boch in company with prostitutes in North Platte, and that they heard her husband, a private in the same regiment as Moriarty, call his wife a “whore.”

Moriarty was convicted of assault and unlawful entry, but acquitted of intent to commit rape. No one on either side ever observed that Mrs. Boch’s status in the army left her vulnerable to such assaults. And Adams notes: “Indian, Mexican, and black women were even more liable to experience sexual exploitation than working-class white women.”

Crib girls were not known
for fancy quarters

Witness the case of an Indian girl named Julia, employed as a servant by an officer of the 11^th Infantry. A certain Thomas Vanstan entered her tent without invitation and assaulted her without cause or provocation and with the intent of committing rape. Vanstan’s defense was that “such liasons were common among enlisted men, and that he intended to ask Julia to a dance, not to assault her. He said also that his advances were “not unwelcome.”

Adams writes: “Vanstan’s defense worked: he was acquitted of attempted rape. He pled guilty to assault and entry into Julia’s tent ‘without authority.’ Vanstan’s main offense was not the act itself, but that he failed to ask permission first. That his approach was more troubling than his actions is a compelling indication that even though white enlisted men lived on the margins of American society, they retained significant power over nonwhite women on the frontier.”

Enlisted men had it hard in the frontier army, but any women within his grasp had it worse.

Just released from Western Fictioneers. 

The Sheriff. 

About Commodore Perry Owens.

Shooting Irons, Part 2: G

What would the Old West be without the gun? From the Hawken of the Mountain man to the Peacemaker of the gunslinger, we just can’t imagine our protagonists any other way. A gun was not just a means of war between men, but a way to put food on the table and protect against wild animals. Of course, there was that ever-present incentive to politeness we’ve already discussed…

Here’s the second round of our gun glossary.

Greener: a shotgun, from the maker of superlative shotguns in London.

Gun-hung: armed with holstered gun(s)

Gun-caps: percussion caps used to ignite the powder charge of a cap-and-ball pistol.

Hardware: a belt gun

Heeled: armed with a gun – however, “armed heels” meant wearing spurs

Hawken: Jacob and Samuel Hawken made these rifles in St. Louis from 1822-49, when Jacob died. Samuel carried on alone until 1861, then sold out. Hawken began as a mountain rifle, specially made for the fur trade. Carl Russell (1967) described it as “a heavy 34-inch octagonal barrel, about .53 caliber (1 ½ -ounce round ball, 214 grains), low sights, set trigger, percussion lock with a peculiar basket of steel (the ‘snail’) enclosing the nipple, half-stock, ramrod carried under a metal rib, sturdy butt stock, crescent-shaped butt plate, and the total weight of the piece 10 ½ to 12 pounds.” By that time, it had developed into the Plains rifle, the frontier man’s ideal weapon.

Henry: starting manufacture in 1860, this repeating rifle was the forerunner of the Winchester, and gave way to that gun in 1866. It was conspicuous in being all metal from muzzle to stock, with a tubular magazine under the barrel which held 15 rimfire shells and loaded from the front. The lever-trigger guard ejected empty shells, inserted a fresh round into the chamber, and cocked the trigger.

Iron: a gun, especially a revolver

Jewelry: firearms, especially a belt-gun

Lead: bullets; this resulted in got leaded (got shot) or swap/swing leather (to shoot it out). My personal favorite is leaned against a bullet going past.

Lead-chucker, lead pusher: a pistol

Leather: a revolver holster (to slap leather was to grab for your gun)

Le Mat: a strange and formidable belt-gun that found its way West after popularity during the Civil War; a nine-chamber, single-action cap-and-ball revolver which fired conventional shots through a rifled, .40-caliber upper barrel and a load of buckshot through a smoothbore, .66-caliber lower barrel. This gun was originally made in France, but copied by a number of makers in the Confederacy.

Long Tom: a long-barreled, large-caliber rifle sometimes used in buffalo hunting

Meat in the pot: the rifle or revolver with which the hunter shot for the pot

Navy Model: a revolver by makers like Colt and Remington, supplied to Navy specification, with a slightly shorter barrel and smaller caliber than the Army model. Navy models were popular with civilians for their comparative lightness and slightly smaller size.

No beans in the wheel: an unloaded revolver

Old Reliable: a Sharps rifle

Packing, pack iron: to carry a revolver

Peacemaker: the Colt Revolver Model 1873. The innovation that helped make this the finest and most famous weapon of its kind was that the .44 ammunition fit the Winchester repeating carbine made in the same year.

Pepperbox, coffee mill:  an early development of revolving pistol, in which the cylinder consisted of a number of barrels consolidated into one moving part. This gave the appearance of a pepperbox. These were cap-and-ball guns.

Persuader: a six-gun, bullwhip, or spur

Plains Rifle: the original requirement was for a “plain rifle,” a utilitarian weapon for use on the plains and for trade with Indians. This developed into the Plains Rifle, a name which took the place of the Mountain Rifle. The Mountain was a long-barreled, long-stocked weapon, while the Plains was short-barreled and short-stocked. Shortening the barrel was probably due to the scarcity of steel on the plains, but also, when the muzzle was damaged, it was just sawn off. Many manufacturers made several types of rifles in this category.

Powder-burning contest: a gunfight

Pup: a Mountain Man term; a single-shot percussion pistol

Quick-draw artist: a gunman proficient with the fast-draw

Sources:

A Dictionary of the Old West, Peter Watts, 1977

Dictionary of the American West, Win Blevins, 1993

J.E.S Hays

www.jeshays.com

hays.jes@gmail.com