CHAPTER 1“TEXIAN DEVILS!”
It is generally agreed that Stephen Austin created the Texas Rangers with a few strokes of his quill pen in August 1823. In this call to arms, he did indeed use the word “rangers,” but before this missive there already were “rangers” in Texas. It would take two years before Austin’s group were called the Texas Rangers.
When Anglo settlers first arrived in 1821 and began to put roots down in the fertile soil of the eastern section of Spanish Texas, the most serious threat they faced was the tribe known as the Karankawas. There were close to two thousand members of the tribe spread out between Galveston Bay and Corpus Christi Bay. They had a fearsome reputation—purportedly, they practiced cannibalism with captured and killed enemies—and an appearance few white men had encountered before. The Karankawa men were tall and muscular. During the summer they wore deerskin breechcloths or nothing at all, and in winter they donned buffalo and deer robes. Their bodies were painted and tattooed and pierced with small pieces of cane. They often smeared themselves with a mixture of mud and alligator or shark grease to ward off mosquitoes. The women also painted and tattooed their bodies and wore knee-length skirts of animal skin.
Anglo settlers suddenly appearing with ambitions to establish ranches and farms on traditional hunting grounds were not greeted warmly by the Karankawa. Immediately, there was conflict. One incident resulted in the death of two Anglos—or “Texians,” as they began to be called. They were attacked and killed as they were transporting corn on a raft up the Colorado River.1 Robert Kuykendall, a Kentuckian who was one of the original Anglo settlers, called upon two dozen other colonists to join him in a revenge ride. They knew the Karankawa had a camp on a tributary of the Colorado River known as Skull Creek, and that was where they rode.
The Karankawa were indeed there. The colonists stealthily approached, and after a quiet preparation of weapons, they attacked. Caught completely by surprise, the tribe’s men, women, and children tried to flee. Many could not outrun the Texan long rifles. When the firing stopped, there were between nineteen and twenty-three Karankawa bodies left behind. This battle would turn out to be the first of many between Texans and the native inhabitants during the next six decades.
Having been so successful in their first foray, Kuykendall and another colonist leader, John Jackson Tumlinson, thought it a good idea to have a sort of militia always ready for future provocations. The Mexican government approved, and 1823 saw the establishment of a ten-man unit, to be led by Moses Morrison, who had served in the U.S. Army. They were not technically Rangers but pretty much served as such until Stephen Austin gave them a name. Their original purpose would expand to include battling interloping Mexicans, cattle rustlers, and others lumped together as bandits or “border ruffians.” Many Mexicans soon came to calling them Los diablos tejanos!—“Texian devils!”
In August 1823, Stephen Austin resided at the colony he had established on the Colorado River in Spanish Texas. The colony contained a coastal prairie good for grazing and farming. He noted in his diary, “The country is the most beautiful & desirable to live in I ever saw.”
But looking past the beauty, Austin could clearly see the dangers. He was becoming increasingly alarmed because, as he wrote to local authorities, “The roads are full of errant thieves united with Indians.” With Mexican authorities apparently helpless to protect their own citizens, let alone the newcomer American settlers, Austin took matters into his own hands. He wrote and issued a plea for men with their own horses and guns to gather as a sort of militia. Austin vowed to pay fifteen dollars a month to each man. However, because he was strapped for cash, his offer really was that each month a volunteer would earn fifteen dollars’ worth of land. At the time, the only thing Stephen Austin had a lot of, in addition to trouble, was land.
Most significant about this call to arms was Austin’s writing that men were being sought “to act as rangers for the common defence.” By 1823 in North America, a militia was a well-known entity. But for the first time in a Texas document the word “rangers” was used. To this day, it is one of the most familiar words associated with Texas.
Copyright © 2023 by Tom Clavin
