In the 1880s the Texas Rangers set up a camp near Palo Duro creek in Eastland County, a base for operations against Comanches. The camp soon grew into a tent city called Ranger Camp Valley. When the Texas and Pacific railway laid tracks nearby, the inhabitants moved the tent city to the nearby railroad and established the town of Ranger. It became an important trade center for wheat crops grown nearby.
Comes the drought of 1917 and economic hard times. Citizens urged the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company to drill some test wells. The second try struck a major oil field that led to an oil boom in Ranger. Drilling rigs sat all over town. Population swelled to 30,000 and included the usual assortment of gamblers, murderers, saloons, dance hall girls. Not everything went well, however. The drought broke with torrential rains, and typhoid fever followed. Reportedly, a mule fell and drowned on main street.
Two years later the boom was spent. No more oil flowed. Economic collapse followed, fertile ground for the Ku Klux Klan with its racial and religious biases. The Klan promised to “defend American values.”
It’s easy to draw a comparison with Appalachia and the unemployed coal miners, and the way some of our leaders blame their poor economic times on “outsiders.”
The Klan didn’t last in Ranger, Texas. Opposition groups formed immediately. The Klan lost out in the 1924 local elections, and disappeared from Ranger after that. Today Ranger has a population of some 2,500, an economy supported by sheep ranching and crop cultivation. The Roaring Ranger Museum tells the story of boom times.
The Texas Rangers didn’t impact the town named for them.
Dac Crossley
October 25, 2017
“To talk well and eloquently is a very great art, but that an equally great one is to know the right moment to stop.” – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.