Online
The records are not entirely complete, but do have copies of the original documents for members of different organizations, including the Texas Rangers, who served under the authority of the State Adjutant General.
Books
Mike Cox
The Texas Rangers Volume I: Wearing the Cinco Peso 1821-1900
Texas Rangers Volume II: Time of the Rangers from 1900 to the Present
A two-volume history of the Texas Rangers and is written in a popular history, anecdotal style.
Charles H. Harris III, Frances E. Harris and Louis R. Sadler
Texas Ranger Biographies: Those Who Served 1910-1921
A book of thumbnail biographies of the known Texas Rangers during the period of 1910-1921. These are drawn from and expanding on the personnel lists in its appendix.
Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler
The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The Bloodiest Decade, 1910-1920
This book is an in-depth history of one of the most controversial and difficult periods in Texas Ranger history. It includes an appendix with extensive personnel lists of names as well as types and dates of service for known Texas Rangers of the era.
Darren L. Ivey
The Texas Rangers: A Registry and History
A collection of Texas Ranger history, including organization, commanding officers, and known posts and camps.
Stephen L. Moore
Savage Frontier: Rangers, Riflemen, and Indian Wars in Texas
Volume I: 1835-1837
Volume II: 1838-1839
Volume III: 1840-1841
Volume IV: 1842-1845
This series is on the Rangers and other Republic of Texas forces on the frontier during the 10 years of the Revolution and the Republic. It includes extensive rosters for units as well as detailed descriptions of actions.
Julian Samora, Joe Bernal, and Albert Peña
Gunpowder Justice: A Reassessment of the Texas Rangers Through Their History
An account of the changing character and functions of the Texas Rangers throughout their history, as well as their reorganizations in the early decades of the 20th Century. It focuses on incidents in Ranger history where the civil liberties and rights of Mexican-Americans were violated. Gunpowder Justice was written as an argument in favor of the movement to disband the Texas Rangers in the 1960s and 1970s.
Robert M. Utley
Lone Star Justice: The First Century of the Texas Rangers
Lone Star Lawmen: The Second Century of the Texas Rangers
Two-volume history of the Texas Rangers that does not avoid the darker periods of Ranger history. A good starting point for learning the basic history of the Rangers.
Walter Prescott Webb
Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense
First published in 1936, this book is a slightly dated narrative history of the Rangers through the 1930s.
Frederick Wilkins
The Legend Begins: The Texas Rangers, 1823-1845
Defending the Borders: The Texas Rangers, 1848-1861
The Law Comes to Texas: The Texas Rangers 1870-1901
A three-volume history of the Texas Rangers during the 19th Century.
Official Publications of the Texas Ranger Bicentennial
The following books have been distinguished for their analytical, interpretive and balanced perspective, a narrative reading style, and reference compliations.
Bob Alexander
Old Riot, New Ranger: Captain Jack Dean, Texas Ranger and U.S. Marshal
Jack Dean, holds the distinction of being one of only five men to serve in both the Officer’s Corps of the Rangers and also as a President‐appointed United States Marshal. His service in Texas Ranger history occurred at a time when society and law enforcement were undergoing change hastened by America’s Civil Rights Movement, landmark Supreme Court decisions, advances in forensic technology, and efforts to diversify and professionalize the Texas Rangers. His biography is packed with tales of the modern Ranger service: murders, suicides, jailbreaks, manhunts, armed robberies, home invasions, kidnappings, public corruption, sexual assaults, illicit gambling, car‐theft rings, dope smuggling, and arms trafficking.
Bob Alexander and Richard K. Alford
Tall Walls and High Fences: Officers and Offenders, the Texas Prison Story
Tall Walls and High Fences is the first comprehensive history of Texas prisons, written by a former law enforcement officer and an officer of the Texas prisons. Bob Alexander and Richard K. Alford chronicle the significant events and transformation of the Texas prison system from its earliest times to the present day, paying special attention to the human side of the story.
Famous people and episodes in Texas prison history receive their due, from Texas Rangers apprehending and placing outlaws in prison to the 1974 prison siege at Huntsville. Alexander and Alford pay special tribute to the more than 75 correctional officers, lawmen, and civilians who lost their lives in the line of duty.
Bob Alexander and Donaly Brice
Texas Rangers: Life, Legend, and Legacy
A new one-volume history of the Texas Rangers from inception to early this year, by two noted Western historians who have written extensively on the Texas Rangers’ history, personnel and operations.
John Boessenecker
The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, The Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde
To most Americans, Frank Hamer is known only as the “villain” of the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. Now, in Texas Ranger, historian John Boessenecker sets out to restore Hamer’s good name and prove that he was, in fact, a classic American hero. From the horseback days of the Old West through the gangster days of the 1930s, Hamer stood on the frontlines of American history. He participated in the Bandit War of 1915, survived the climactic gunfight in the last blood feud of the Old West, battled the Mexican Revolution’s spillover across the border, protected African Americans from lynch mobs and the Ku Klux Klan, and ran down gangsters, bootleggers, and Communists. When at last his career came to an end, it was only when he ran up against another legendary Texan: Lyndon B. Johnson.
Mike Cochran
John B. Denton: The Bigger-Than-Life Story of the Fighting Parson and Texas Ranger
Denton County and the City of Denton, Texas are named for pioneer preacher, lawyer, and Texas Ranger John B. Denton. He was an orphan in frontier Arkansas who became a circuit-riding Methodist preacher and an early settler to North Texas. He answered a call from William B. Travis to bring Methodists to the new Republic of Texas. Denton then became a Texas Ranger on the frontier, ultimately being killed in the Tarrant Expedition near modern day Fort Worth and Arlington on May 24, 1841.
Doug Dukes
Firearms of the Texas Rangers: From the Frontier Era to the Modern Age
From their founding in the 1820s up to the modern age, the Texas Rangers have shown the ability to adapt and survive. Part of that survival depended on their use of firearms. The evolving technology of these weapons often determined the effectiveness of these early-day Rangers.
Firearms of the Texas Rangers, with more than 180 photographs, tells the history of the Texas Rangers primarily through the use of their firearms. Author Doug Dukes narrates famous episodes in Ranger history, including Jack Hays and the Paterson, the Walker Colt, the McCulloch Colt Revolver (smuggled through the Union blockade during the Civil War), and the Frontier Battalion and their use of the Colt Peacemaker and Winchester and Sharps carbines. Readers will delight in learning of Frank Hamer’s marksmanship with his Colt Single Action Army and his Remington, along with Captain J.W. McCormick and his two .45 Colt pistols, complete with photos.
Whether it was a Ranger in 1844 with his Paterson on patrol for Indians north of San Antonio, or a Ranger in 2016 with his LaRue 7.62 rifle working the Rio Grande looking for smugglers and terrorists, the technology may have changed, but the gritty job of the Rangers has not.
Jody Edward Ginn
East Texas Troubles: The Allred Rangers' Cleanup of San Augustine
Between 1931 and 1934, San Augustine County had seen at least three murders in broad daylight, the latest developments in the decade‐long rule of the criminal McClanahan‐Burleson gang. Armed with handguns, Jim Crow regulations and corrupt special Ranger commissions from Ferguson administrations, the gang racketeered and bootlegged its way into power in San Augustine County, where it took up robbing and extorting local black sharecroppers as its main activity. In 1935, Governor James V. Allred sent a team of qualified Texas Rangers to San Augustine County to investigate organized crime. The author tells of their year‐and‐a‐half‐long cleanup of the county, which was the inaugural effort in Governor Allred’s transformation of the Texas Rangers into a professional law enforcement agency. A multifaceted history of the reform of the Texas Rangers and of an unexpected alliance between the legendary frontier lawmen and black residents of the Jim Crow South.
Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler
The Texas Rangers in Transition: From Gunfighters to Criminal Investigators 1921-1935
This book continues the story of the Texas Rangers in the early 20th Century from the point where The Bloodiest Decade ended and carries it through to the establishment of the Texas Department of Public Safety in 1935. It is a detailed narrative of the Rangers’ evolution into a professional law enforcement agency.
Darren L. Ivey
The Ranger Ideal: Texas Rangers in the Hall of Fame, Volume 1 1823-1861
Established in Waco in 1964, the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum honors the iconic Texas Rangers, a service which has existed since 1823. They are legendary symbols of Texas and the American West. Thirty‐one Rangers, with lives spanning more than two centuries, have been enshrined in the Hall of Fame. The first volume presents capsule biographies of the seven inductees to the Hall of Fame, who served Texas before the Civil War. Stephen F. Austin, John Coffee Hays, Ben McCulloch, William A.A. “Bigfoot” Wallace, Samuel H. Walker, John S. “Rip” Ford and Lawrence Sullivan “Sul” Ross.
The Ranger Ideal: Texas Rangers in the Hall of Fame, Volume 2 1874-1930
The second volume presents the twelve Hall of Fame inductees who served Texas in the latter half of the 19th century. John B. Jones, Leander H. McNelly, John B. Armstrong, James B. Gillett, Jesse L. Hall, George W. Baylor, Bryan Marsh, Ira Aten, James A. Brooks, William J. McDonald, John R. Hughes and John H. Rogers.
The Ranger Ideal: Texas Rangers in the Hall of Fame, Volume 3 1898‐1987
The last volume of Ivey’s monumental 2,300 page study of Hall of Fame Rangers includes twelve inductees who served Texas in the twentieth century. William L. Wright, Frank A. Hamer, Thomas R. Hickman, Charles E. Miller, Manuel T. Gonzaullas, Marvin Burton, Robert A. Crowder, John J. Klevenhagen, Clinton T. Peoples, James E. Riddles, Bobby Paul Doherty and Stanley Keith Guffey.
Dietmar Kuegler
The Texas Rangers: The World's Most Legendary Police Force [Die Texas Rangers: Die legendärste Polizeitruppe der Welt]
Keugler's book is now the #1 bestselling US History book on Amazon in Germany. Die Texas Rangers has been accepted into the Bicentennial Publications Program as the first overseas book. This makes two national Bestsellers—US and Germany—in the Bicentennial series.
Kuegler's book outlines the history of the Texas Rangers, one of the most legendary police organizations in the world. The Rangers are as much a symbol of the state of Texas as the "Lone Star". They represent a vital chapter of the pioneering era of the American West. Kuegler documents the Ranger's astonishing 200 year development from frontiermen into a highly qualified elite police force of the 21st century.
Richard B. McCaslin
Texas Ranger Captain William L. Wright
William L. Wright (1868–1942) was born to be a Texas Ranger, and hard work made him a great one. Wright tried working as a cowboy and farmer, but it did not suit him. Instead, he became a deputy sheriff and then a Ranger in 1899, battling a mob in the Laredo Smallpox Riot, policing both sides in the Reese-Townsend Feud, and winning a gunfight at Cotulla.
His need for a better salary led him to leave the Rangers and become a sheriff. He stayed in that office longer than any of his predecessors in Wilson County, keeping the peace during the so-called Bandit Wars, investigating numerous violent crimes, and surviving being stabbed on the gallows by the man he was hanging. When demands for Ranger reform peaked, he was appointed as a captain and served for most of the next twenty years, retiring in 1939 after commanding dozens of Rangers.
Wright emerged unscathed from the Canales investigation, enforced Prohibition in South Texas, and policed oil towns in West Texas, as well as tackling many other legal problems. When he retired, he was the only Ranger in service who had worked under seven governors. Wright has also been honored as an inductee into the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame at Waco.
Thomas O. McDonald
Texas Rangers, Ranchers, and Realtors - James Hughes Callahan and the Day Family in the Guadalupe River Basin
Native Georgian, James Hughes Callahan (1812–1856) migrated to Texas to serve in the Texas Revolution in exchange for land. In Seguin, Texas, where he settled, he met and married a divorcée, Sarah Medissa Day (1822–1856). The lives of these two Texas pioneers.
Callahan was a soldier, a Texas Ranger, a rancher, and a land developer, at every turn making his mark on the evolving Guadalupe River Basin. Sarah’s family’s journey reflected the experience of many immigrants to Texas after its war of independence.
Donna Marie Miller
Texas Secessionist Standoff: The 1997 Republic of Texas "War"
On April 27, 1997, Richard Lance McLaren and his followers in the so-called "Republic of Texas (ROT)" militia held hostages inside their home at the Davis Mountain Resort, near Fort Davis, Texas, and demanded the release of jailed ROT members. McLaren's demand initiated a seven-day standoff with local law enforcement and the Texas Rangers that came to be called the "Republic of Texas War."
Opening with a foreword by the FBI negotiator who served as an on-site consultant throughout the crisis, author Donna Marie Miller presents the first full-length book treatment of the events leading up to McLaren’s “declaration of war” and its aftermath. The result is an absorbing account of manipulation by a leader as charismatic as he was deluded; of misinformed individuals motivated by desperation who aligned themselves with an extremist; and of law enforcement officials caught in the tension between their duty to protect the public and their desire to avoid a repeat of disasters like those at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas.
Central to the story is Jo Ann Turner, a frantic woman drowning in debt who was drawn into the false ideology espoused by McLaren, which eventually led to her personal undoing. Based on archival research and interviews with persons involved—including McLaren, who has been incarcerated since 1998—this riveting account provides a multifaceted perspective of the historical incident and a detailed chronicle of a modern American anti-government militia, its victims, and the events that led to its eventual downfall.
Bill O'Neal
John S. "Rip" Ford - Texian Hero
Rip Ford was a bold, fearless combat leader, an expert pistoleer, and a master tactician. Ford was a ferocious warrior against the enemies of his beloved Texas. During the 1850s, Rip Ford was called upon to lead Rangers in defense of frontier Texas. Usually, he campaigned against raiders and stock thieves along the Rio Grande, but in 1858, he planned and executed a dangerous attack north into Comancheria against horseback war parties.
He came to Texas from Tennessee as a young physician and would later practice law, survey work, and journalism. He held multiple political offices, including being a part of the Texas legislative bodies and serving as the mayor of Austin and of Brownsville. Ford wrote a lengthy account of nineteenth-century Texas history, and he was a founding member of the Texas State Historical Association.
Joe Pappalardo
Red Sky Morning: The Epic True Store of Texas Ranger Company F
The explosive and bloody true history of Texas Rangers Company F, made up of hard men who risked their lives to bring justice to a lawless frontier.
Between 1886 and 1888, Sergeant James Brooks, of Texas Ranger Company F, was engaged in three fatal gunfights, endured disfiguring bullet wounds, engaged in countless manhunts, was convicted of second-degree murder, and rattled Washington, D.C. with a request for a pardon from the US president. His story anchors the tale of Joe Pappalardo's Red Sky Morning, an epic saga of lawmen and criminals set in Texas during the waning years of the “Old West.”
Alongside Brooks are the Rangers of Company F, who range from a pious teetotaler to a cowboy fleeing retribution for killing a man. They are all led by Captain William Scott, who cut his teeth as a freelance undercover informant but was facing the end of his Ranger career. Company F hunted criminals across Texas and beyond and were confident they could bring anyone to justice. But Brooks’ men met their match in the Conner family, East Texas master hunters and jailbreakers who were wanted for their part in a bloody family feud.
The full story of Company F’s showdown with the Conner family is finally being told, with long dead voices being heard for the first time. This truly hidden history paints the grim picture of neighbors and relatives becoming snitches and bounty hunters, and a company of Texas Rangers who waded into the conflict only to find themselves over their heads – and in the fight of their lives.
Chuck Parsons
Texas Ranger Lee Hall: From the Red River to the Rio Grande
Jesse Lee Hall (1849–1911) came to Texas in 1870. Initially working as a school teacher, he became a deputy sheriff, later joining the Texas Rangers and commanding Capt. Leander McNelly’s Special State Troops on the border. He rounded up the King Fisher gang, ended the Sutton-Taylor Feud and participated in the Sam Bass gun fight in Round Rock. Chuck Parsons has authored eight books about Texas Rangers, feuds and Reconstruction.