Francis Augustus Hamer: The Legendary Texas Ranger (1884–1955)

Francis Augustus Hamer, a prominent Texas Ranger, was born in Fairview, Texas, on March 17, 1884, to Franklin Augustus Hamer  and Lou Emma (Francis) Hamer. Known commonly as Frank or Pancho, he spent his early childhood on the Welch Ranch in San Saba County. In 1894 the family moved to Oxford in Llano County where Hamer worked at his father’s blacksmith shop. He attended a rural school in Oxford through approximately the sixth grade. He also personally trained himself to excel in horsemanship and marksmanship. In 1901 Hamer and his brother, Harrison Hamer, found work as wranglers on Green Berry Ketchum, Jr.’s ranch in Pecos County near Sheffield. Ketchum was a brother of outlaw Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum (see KETCHUM BOYS). In 1905 Sheriff Dudley S. Barker recommended that Hamer, who was working as a cowboy on the Carr Ranch between Sheffield and Fort Stockton, join the Texas Rangers after he captured a horse thief. On April 21, 1906, Hamer enlisted as a private in the Texas Rangers in Capt. John H. Rogers’s Company C. Working primarily along the South Texas border, Hamer became known as an expert shot and was involved in murder investigations, gambling arrests, and was part of Ranger details assigned to protect and transport prisoners, often in the midst of racially-charged environments. He left the Rangers on November 30, 1908, to become city marshal of the lawless town of Navasota, Texas. By the time Hamer resigned as marshall on April 21, 1911, he had restored a semblance of order in the town, in large part by enforcing his authority over the racist White Man’s Union that had run the town’s politics and law. While working in Navasota, Frank Hamer married Mollie Bobadillo Cameron on March 19, 1911, in Hempstead, Texas. They were divorced by early 1915.

From 1911 to 1915 Hamer worked as a special officer in Houston. He rejoined the Rangers  on March 29, 1915, and initially investigated livestock thefts in Kimble County but eventually was stationed along the Rio Grande and patrolled the border. He resigned on November 8, 1915, and became a brand inspector for the Cattle Raisers’ Association of Texas (see TEXAS AND SOUTHWESTERN CATTLE RAISERS ASSOCIATION) but obtained a “Special Ranger” warrant and was attached to Company C.  Hamer married Ida Gladys Johnson on May 12, 1917. Johnson had two daughters from a previous marriage, and Hamer adopted them. Hamer and his wife later had two sons of their own. On October 1, 1918, he enlisted in Company F in Brownsville and fought drug smuggling; he was soon promoted to sergeant.

The ongoing Mexican Revolution fueled a period of domestic turmoil in Mexico and anti-Mexican sentiment in the United States. In 1919 State Representative José Tomás Canales brought before the Joint Committee of the Senate and the House in the Investigation of the Texas State Ranger Force nineteen charges against the Texas Rangers for racial violence. Hamer, in December 1918 in San Benito, had previously confronted and threatened Canales over the investigation. Weeks later Canales encountered him in Austin. Canales accused Hamer of stalking him, commenting that “his presence was made known to me,” and submitted evidence of these threats in the proceedings records. Later in the proceedings, William W. Sterling, who later was made a captain in the Rangers, defended Hamer’s record but conceded that Hamer usually meant the threats he made.

Still with Company F, Hamer investigated illegal arms smuggling along the Rio Grande in late 1918 to early 1919. In one incident, he reportedly refused to “turn a blind eye” as instructed by Capt. William Martin Hanson, regarding a shipment from Houston reportedly going to Pancho Villa, and instead met with Tamaulipas police commander Lt. Col. Manual Bernea to work with Mexican soldiers along the border regarding smugglers. At this time Hamer was placed on detached duty; his warrant of authority ended on June 19, 1919. He was later able to reenlist, in Company B, on November 25, 1919. In 1920 he served as a prohibition officer.

On September 1, 1921, Hamer was appointed captain of Company C at Del Rio. Soon thereafter he led a posse that engaged in a gun battle with Rafael Lopez, who was wanted for murder in Utah, where he had killed six men. Lopez escaped to Texas and became the leader of an outlaw group. Acting on a tip, Rangers ambushed Lopez and his group near the border town of Quemado, Texas, and killed nearly a dozen, including Lopez.

In the summer of 1920 Hamer had purchased a house in Austin, and his family moved there. Regardless of future assignments that took him across the state, Hamer made Austin his permanent home for the rest of his life. Effective January 1, 1922, he took command of the “Headquarters Company” in Austin and was made senior captain. In the early 1920s some of Hamer’s work involved investigations into Ku Klux Klan activites. He arrived with other Rangers in Corpus Christi in October 1922 to investigate the shooting death of well-known citizen and Klan leader Fred Roberts. Nueces County sheriff Frank Robinson, Deputy Joe Acebo, Constable Lee Petzel, and Cleve Goff (a farmer) were arrested on murder charges but were later acquitted. In November 1922 Hamer and a team investigated intimidation and violence by the KKK against local Tejanos and Blacks in the town of Breckenridge, Texas. In this case, no one was brought to justice, but the Rangers’ presence did restore a semblance of order in the community. Also in the 1920s Hamer led Rangers on raids in oil boom towns such as Mexia in 1922 and Borger in 1927 in the effort to clean up corruption and curtail gambling, bootlegging, and prostitution rings.

In the late 1920s he led a campaign against the Texas Bankers Association’s standing $5,000 reward for dead bank robbers. Hamer claimed that some law officers were setting up inexperienced bank robbers so they could kill them and claim the bounty. In some cases, robbers double-crossed their own accomplices and shared in the blood money. Hamer could not secure legal action against local law enforcement nor could he gain any support from grand jurors, and the Bankers Association refused to rescind the reward. In one case, Glasscock County deputy Calvin Baze and accomplice Lee Smith “planted” Norberto Diaz, J. Hilario Núñez, and Victor Ramos at the bank in Stanton, Texas, then shot the three—killing two of the “robbers.” Ramos, who survived, testified on the killing of his unarmed companions, and Hamer was called upon to present evidence to the grand jury. The final outcome resulted in one conviction for murder. Hamer took his crusade to the media and described the bounty as creating “as perfect a murder machine as can be devised, supported by the Bankers’ Association, operated by the officers of the state and directed by the small group of greedy men who furnish the victims and take their cut of the money.” His investigation continued into the early 1930s, but many cases never went to trial and other charges were quashed on technicalities. No members of the Bankers Association were held accountable, but the bounty was revised to apply to bank robbers “dead or alive.”

While pursuing reform for the Texas Bankers Association reward policy, Hamer conducted an array of law enforcement duties, including investigations of unsolved homicides, enforcing liquor laws, and monitoring elections. Rangers were called to provide protection of prisoners and their due process, often in circumstances that were racially-charged, but in May 1930 Hamer was unable to prevent the lynching of George Hughes, a Black man charged with rape. The presiding judge, Roger Mills Carter, had requested Texas Ranger assistance to maintain order during the examining trial, and he also ordered that Hughes be secured in a walk-in vault in the courthouse for protection against a lynch mob. Hamer and two Rangers repulsed attacks by a White lynch mob inside the Grayson County courthouse four times, including Hamer’s firing of birdshot into the crowd. During a fifth attack, two youths threw a gasoline can and ignition source through the window of a basement office. Fire quickly spread through the courthouse, and the Rangers, with no combination to the vault, failed to rescue Hughes who suffocated. Hamer and the other Rangers also did not prevent the mob from desecrating Hughes’s body or destroying Sherman’s Black neighborhood (see SHERMAN RIOT OF 1930). Hamer and Ranger Thomas R. Hickman soon arrested sixty-six people in connection with the riot, but ultimately only one person, the youth who had been seen wielding the gasoline can, was convicted.

When Miriam Ferguson won the 1932 Texas governor’s race, she fired the Ranger force (including Hamer) that had openly supported her opponent Governor Ross Sterling in the Democratic primary. Texas prison system director Marshall Lee Simmons hired Hamer in February 1934 as a special investigator for the Texas prison system in order to participate in the hunt for outlaws Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. He was subsequently commissioned a state highway patrolman in order to have arrest powers. On May 23, 1934, Hamer and local police lured Barrow and Parker into a trap near Gibsland, Louisiana, and shot and killed them. Congress awarded Hamer a special citation for catching the pair. Two films later dramatized Hamer’s hunt for Barrow and Parker. Denver Pyle played Hamer in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. In 1968 Hamer’s widow and his son Frank Jr. sued the producers for their portrayal of Hamer and charged defamation of character among other things. In 1971 they were awarded a settlement out of court. Kevin Costner portrayed Hamer in the 2019 film The Highwaymen.

In an interview given shortly after his work as special investigator of the hunt for Barrow and Parker was completed, Hamer stated that he had been in fifty-two gunfights and had been shot twenty-three times. In 1937, with ex-Houston police chief Roy T. Rogers, Hamer formed a private security company to protect the property of refineries, oilfields, building projects, wharves, and other assets. By 1940 he held the position of special investigator for the Texas Company (see TEXACO). During World War II, his son Billy was killed in action at Iwo Jima.

In 1948 Coke Stevenson enlisted Hamer to help review election results in his disputed Senate race against Lyndon B. Johnson. Hamer sold his interest in his security company to his partner Rogers and retired in 1949. He died of congenital heart failure in his sleep on July 10, 1955, at his home in Austin and was buried in Austin Memorial Park Cemetery. Officiating over his funeral, Texas Rangers chaplain Pierre Bernard Hill characterized Hamer as a “man who feared Almighty God, but never feared the face of any man.” Hamer is an inductee in the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame.