Frank Hamer
Francis Augustus Hamer was an American lawman and Texas Ranger who led the 1934 posse that tracked down and killed criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Renowned for his toughness, marksmanship, and investigative skill, he acquired status in the Southwest as the archetypal Texas Ranger. He was inducted into the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame.
Hamer has been described by biographer John Boessenecker as "one of the greatest American lawmen of the twentieth century".
Early years
Frank Hamer was born in 1884 in Fairview, Wilson County, Texas, where his father operated a blacksmith shop. Growing up in a devoutly Presbyterian family, he was one of five sons, four of whom became Texas Rangers. Hamer grew up on the Welch ranch in San Saba County, and later spent time in Oxford, Llano County, which is now a ghost town; he later joked about being the only "Oxford-educated Ranger". Although his formal education ended after the sixth grade, as a youth Hamer displayed several unusual abilities, including an extremely high level of intelligence and a near eidetic memory. He excelled at mathematics and developed a deep interest in history, particularly that of the Texas Rangers and the region's Native American tribes, such as the Comanche, Kiowa, and Kiowa Apache. Hamer worked in his father's shop as a youth, and as a wrangler on a local ranch.Hamer began his career in law enforcement in 1905 while working on the Carr Ranch in West Texas, when he captured a horse thief. The local sheriff was so impressed that he recommended that Hamer join the Rangers, which he did the following year. He was at home on the open Texas prairie and understood the signs and patterns of nature. He interpreted men in terms of animal characteristics: "The criminal is a coyote, always taking a look over his shoulder."
Law enforcement career
Hamer was a Ranger off and on throughout his adult life, resigning often to take other jobs. He joined Captain John H. Rogers' Company C in Alpine, Texas, on April 21, 1906, and began patrolling the Mexican border. In 1908, he resigned from the Rangers to become the City Marshal of Navasota, Texas, a lawless boom-town wracked by violence; "shootouts on the main street were so frequent that in two years at least a hundred men died." Hamer moved in at age 24 and enforced law and order. In 1911, he moved to Houston to work as a special investigator for Mayor Horace Baldwin Rice, where he was seconded to the Sheriff's Office of Harris County. In 1914, he was hired as a deputy sheriff in Kimble County, assigned as the department's livestock theft investigator.Hamer rejoined the Rangers in 1915 and was assigned to patrol the South Texas border around Brownsville during the Bandit War and La Matanza. The Rangers dealt with arms smugglers because of the constant unrest in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. They also tried to control the bootleggers during the Prohibition era and bandits who plagued the border. He left the Rangers and was commissioned as a Special Ranger for the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association.
In 1917, Hamer married Gladys Sims, the widow of Ed Sims of Snyder, Texas; she and her brother, Sidney Arthur Johnson, had been charged in 1916 with murdering Sims. Hamer and Gladys and other family members were stopped at a garage on October 1, 1917 to get gasoline in Sweetwater when they suddenly encountered Gus McMeans of Odessa, Ed Sims' brother-in-law, and the Hamers and McMeans got into a pistol battle. McMeans was a former Texas Ranger and sheriff of Ector County, and he and Hamer "were clinched"; McMeans died of a shot to the heart and Hamer was wounded. Ten shots were fired in the gunfight, and police collected a total of seven revolvers, two semi-automatic pistols, and three rifles from the two parties.
Following this, Hamer left the Cattlemen's Association to accept a position as a federal agent in the Prohibition Unit, where he served for about one year. His service was brief but eventful while stationed in El Paso, the scene of countless gunfights during the Prohibition era. He participated in numerous raids and shootouts, and he was involved in a gun battle with smugglers on March 21 which resulted in the death of Prohibition Agent Ernest W. Walker. Hamer transferred to Austin in 1921 where he served as Senior Ranger Captain.
In 1918, Hamer physically threatened State Representative José Tomás Canales, who was leading an investigation into Texas Rangers accused of abusing residents of the Rio Grande Valley. Canales reported the threat to the governor, but Hamer was not disciplined. According to a 2019 Washington Post movie review by activist Monica Muñoz Martinez, Hamer supposedly stalked Canales in the capital and Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr., father of future President Lyndon B. Johnson, was among those who escorted Canales to the early 1919 hearings.
Beginning in 1922 Hamer led the fight in Texas against the Ku Klux Klan as senior captain of the Texas Rangers, which was still growing in Texas, and he saved 15 people from lynch mobs throughout his career. A less successful incident happened during the Sherman Riot of 1930, however. Hamer and a handful of Rangers were charged with protecting the trial of a black rape suspect, George Hughes, in the town of Sherman. A large mob approached the courthouse, and Hamer personally shot and wounded two of the mob's members. However, the mob set fire to the courthouse. Hamer and the Rangers escaped the building, but could not reach Hughes, who had been locked in the vault for his safety. They got into a borrowed car and drove away from Sherman, later regrouping at the sheriff's office. If Hughes had survived the fire, he did not survive the mob afterward, who used dynamite on the vault he'd been locked in and strung Hughes's dead body up. Sherman's black district was looted by the mob afterward, with the Rangers unwilling or unable to stop them.
In 1928, Hamer put a halt to a murder for hire ring, and his extraordinary means of accomplishing this made him nationally famous. The Texas Bankers' Association had begun offering rewards of $5,000 "for dead bank robbers—not one cent for live ones." Hamer determined that men were setting up deadbeats and two-bit outlaws to be killed by complicit police officers; the officers would collect the rewards and pay the men their finder's fees. But the police refused him support and the Bankers' Association's position was that "any man that could be induced to participate in a bank robbery ought to be killed." Hamer wrote a detailed exposé of the racket, which he termed "the bankers' murder machine", and he took his article to the press room of the State Capitol and handed out copies. His revelation about the racket resulted in public outrage, an investigation, and indictments. The bankers did not modify the terms of the reward, however, and more bounty murders took place in 1930.
Hamer retired in 1932 after almost 27 years with the Rangers. He left one week before Miriam "Ma" Ferguson recaptured the governor's office for a second term. She had first been elected after her husband "Pa" Ferguson had been impeached and forced to resign as governor, and at least 40 Rangers resigned rather than serve again under her. A year later, Hamer gave his reason for retiring: "When they elected a woman governor, I quit." The commander of the Texas Rangers allowed him to retain a Special Ranger commission as an active Senior Ranger Captain even after his official retirement. The special commission is listed in the state archives in Austin.
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow
In the early 1930s, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker's crime spree generated vast media coverage which embarrassed law enforcement and government officials in a half dozen states. On January 16, 1934, Barrow, Parker, and associate Jimmy Mullens raided Eastham prison farm, freeing Raymond Hamilton, Henry Methvin, Hilton Bybee, and Joe Palmer. Hamilton's brother Floyd wrote that Henry Methvin was not part of the original "invited" group but fled with them during the general confusion. Barrow had particularly wanted to free Ralph Fults and Aubrey Skelley, but he considered the raid to be successful retaliation against the prison system. Historian John Neal Phillips says that "paying back" the Department of Corrections for abuse that Barrow had received while imprisoned motivated many of his actions and underlay his crime spree. The Texas Department of Corrections received national negative publicity over the jailbreak, which delighted Barrow, who thought that he finally had his revenge.Two guards were shot by the escapees during the breakout, guard Major Crowson fatally. He died in the hospital on January 27 soon after Texas prison administrator Lee Simmons assured him that he would send his killer Joe Palmer to the electric chair. Simmons then turned his attention to restoring the reputation of the Texas prison system.
Hamer leads the hunt
Simmons persuaded Hamer to hunt down the Barrow Gang. Hamer was commissioned as an officer of the Texas Highway Patrol, then seconded to the prison system as a special investigator charged with apprehending Barrow and his colleagues. Hamer balked at the compensation of $180 a month, less than half his current pay, but Simmons reiterated that Hamer would collect his fair share of the reward money. He further added to the deal by authorizing Hamer to take whatever he wanted from among the Barrow Gang's possessions when he caught them. Simmons said that he wouldn't presume to tell Hamer how to do his job, but he suggested that Hamer "put 'em on the spot, know you're right—and shoot everybody in sight."Hamer examined the pattern of Barrow's movements, discovering that he essentially made a wide circle through the lower Midwest, skirting state borders wherever he could to take advantage of the fact that law officers could not pursue suspects across state lines. The circle's anchor points were Dallas, Joplin, Missouri, and northwest Louisiana, with wider arcs outward for bank robberies. Hamer felt that he learned Barrow's statistics, but "this was not enough. An officer must know the habits of the outlaw, how he thinks and how he will act in different situations. When I began to understand Clyde Barrow's mind, I felt that I was making progress."
In the next couple of months, Barrow, Parker, and Henry Methvin robbed banks in Lancaster, Texas, Poteau, Oklahoma, and the Iowa towns of Rembrandt, Knierim, Stuart, and Everly. Hamer was always following close behind.