Frank Hamer, Legendary Texas Lawman Who Bagged Bonnie and Clyde

16. A Boom in Banditry and Crime

Throughout the Wild West, banditry and crime in general, from violent assaults to brazen fraud on an epic scale, boomed. Many criminals frequently transitioned from outlaws to lawmen and back again, and crossed and re-crossed that line multiple times during their lifetimes. Quite a few gave in to the temptation of easy riches in a region abounding with readily portable wealth, be it cash, gold, cattle or horses. Stagecoaches became a primary target for outlaws before the arrival of the railroad, because they frequently transported valuables and payrolls in their strongboxes, and required relatively little effort to rob aside from the robber’s audacity. More importantly, they could be halted in isolated locales, which gave the robbers time to flee before law enforcement arrived and attempted to track down the culprits.

15. A Law Enforcement Career That Tracked the Transition From Lawlessness to Law and Order

The arrival of the railroads added another lucrative target, albeit a more labor intensive one. It required teamwork from a sizeable outlaw gang to subdue an entire train in order to rob its hold and passengers. And throughout, banks were a standby target of choice. Lawman and Texas Ranger Frank Augustus Hamer (1884 – 1955) began his career in the dying days of classical Old West lawmen who strove to tame the wildness of the Wild West. His decades in law enforcement witnessed the transition from frequent lawlessness to the final victory of rule of law.

14. From Chasing Cattle Rustlers on Horseback to Tracking Down Criminals With Airplanes and Radios

When Frank Hamer first joined Texas law enforcement in 1905, lawmen still chased cattle rustlers, bandits, and other outlaws across the West on horseback. Policing was minimal and often ad hoc, and sheriffs routinely rounded up posses when extra bodies were needed. By the time Hamer retired in 1949, lawmen were part of an established bureaucracy of law enforcement. They now went from thither to yon by automobiles, used airplanes, and communicated via radios and wireless devices. Hamer’s career thus witnessed the transformation of law enforcement from that of legendary Old West lawmen, to the era of modern policing.

13. A Legend’s Start

Francis “Frank” Augustus Hamer was born in Fairview, Texas, in 1884. In his youth he was noted for keen intelligence, a photographic memory, and was a crackshot with a pistol. Raised in a devoutly religious family, he wanted to become a preacher when he grew up. When he was sixteen and employed in a ranch that belonged to a Dan McSween, the proprietor offered him $150 to shoot a business associate. He refused, and warned the marked man. In retaliation, McSween shot Hamer in the back and left side of the head, and left him for dead. He was saved by a black field hand, and never forgot it until his dying day: “A colored man was the best friend I ever had in my life. That colored man caused me to be living today“.

12. A More Accomplished Gunfighter than the Wild West’s Most Famous Gunslingers

Frank Hamer survived 52 gunfights, was wounded 23 times in the line of duty, killed between 53 and 70 men, and was declared dead four times. To put that in perspective, if we add up all the gunfights that Old West legends Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, and Billy the Kid took part in, the total comes to a possible maximum of 21 gunfights. Emphasis should be placed on the word “possible” when it comes to Earp, Hickok, and the Kid, because some of those gunfight accounts rest on shaky grounds. But even if we accept all known accounts of those legendary figures’ gunfights as true, Hamer still went through more than twice the combined number of gunfights that three of the Old West’s most famous characters had participated in. And his tally of up to 70 killed men made him deadlier than just about any Wild West gunfighter.

11. An Auspicious Beginning

Frank Hamer performed his first notable crime-busting feat when he was still a private citizen. In 1905, he was employed at a ranch when two horses were stolen. He picked up the trail, and followed it for several days on his own until he closed in on the culprits. Hamer used natural terrain features as cover, made his way through a gully until he got in front them, then waited until they showed up and took them by surprise with a leveled Winchester. He took the thieves prisoner, delivered them to the local sheriff, and returned the stolen horses to his employer.

10. Joining the Texas Rangers

The thrill of his first manhunt was a rush that Hamer wanted more of. So a few months later, he once again set out on his own and tracked down and captured another horse thief. The sheriff was impressed. “This is the second time you’ve done my work. You did a mighty fine job of catching this man, Frank. How’d you like to be a Texas Ranger?” Hamer was interested, and the sheriff arranged to get him accepted into the most famous – and controversial – law enforcement organization of the American West. From then until his retirement in 1949, Hamer was a Texas Ranger off and on – he resigned on various occasions to take other jobs, then rejoined the force.

9. Establishing Law and Order in a Lawless Town

Hamer’s first stint with the Texas Rangers lasted for two years, which he spent along the Mexican border. He resigned in 1908 to become City Marshal of Navasota, TX. A boomtown, Navasota was wracked by out of control violence, and shootouts on its main street were so frequent that in a two year stretch more than a hundred people were killed. 24-year-old Hamer took over as the town’s top cop, and within a short time, he got things under control and managed to reestablish law and order. It was a feat helped in no small part by his willingness to add to the town’s body count.

8. A Lawman Not to be Messed With

After a few shootouts in which he killed some miscreants, Frank Hamer established his reputation as a law enforcement officer that bad guys did not want to mess with. After order was restored in Navasota, he moved on to a few more law enforcement stints, including Houston, before he rejoined the Texas Rangers in 1915. He was sent to patrol the border near Brownsville, and arrived at the height of one of the Rangers’ most controversial stretches. It was La Matanza (“The Slaughter”) – a time of intense anti-Mexican violence that lasted from 1910 to 1920.

7. La Matanza Along the Border

During La Matanza, the Texas Rangers spearheaded a wave of extra judicial killings, lynchings, and massacres amidst operations against cross border raids known as the Bandit Wars. The raids were carried out by rebels from south of the border, amidst the chaos of the Mexican Revolution that was taking place at that time. Coupled with ever-present anti-Mexican racism, the raids triggered a violent backlash that extended to all Mexican-Americans in Texas, and especially those living along the border. Those suspected of harboring any sympathy for the rebels were blacklisted by the Texas Rangers, and often “disappeared”.

6. The “Time of Blood“

In a campaign led by the Rangers and joined by vigilantes and local law enforcement, thousands of Mexican-Americans were murdered, and thousands more fled across the border into Mexico. The violence peaked between August, 1915, to June, 1916. That period came to be named Hora de Sangre (“Time of Blood”). As a contemporary recalled: “all the Rangers had to was get a suspicion on somebody, any little thing, and they would take ’em out and shoot ’em down“. Hundreds of Mexicans were indiscriminately murdered in South Texas, which triggered a flight to Mexico so severe that ranchers and farmers complained that all their field hands had left. Even Mexican-American landowners fled, some with such urgency that they abandoned thousands of cattle behind.

5. Bad Blood That Ended in a Shootout

In 1917, Frank Hamer took a break from La Matanza to marry Gladys Johnson Sims, the widow of a prosperous Snyder, Texas, man named Ed Sims. She had become a widow in dubious circumstances: in 1916, Gladys and her brother were charged with the murder of her husband. On October 1^st, 1917, Hamer, Gladys, and some relatives were at a gas station when they came across the deceased Ed Sims’ brother in law Gus McMeans, a former Texas Ranger and sheriff of Ector County. A shootout erupted between Hamer’s party and that of McMeans, and as Hamer and McMeans were clinched in a grapple, the latter was shot in the heart and killed. Hamer was wounded, but he survived and made a full recovery. When the gun smoke cleared and the cops arrived, they collected two semiautomatic pistols, three rifles, and seven revolvers from the parties.

4. Leading the Fight Against the Ku Klux Klan

Soon after he recovered, Hamer became a federal Prohibition agent, and took part in numerous raids and shootouts against bootleggers. He was not a progressive on the issue of race by any means, and harbored his share of the era’s widespread racism. However, Hamer had a sense of fairness and justice, and a respect for law and order that rendered lynchings and mob violence against blacks repugnant in his eyes. After a year as a federal Prohibition agent, he rejoined the Texas Rangers, and was assigned to Austin as a Senior Ranger Captain. In 1922, Hamer led the fight in the Lone Star Republic against the Ku Klux Klan, which was experiencing a boom at the time.

3. Thwarting KKK Lynch Mobs

Throughout his career, Hamer saved at least 15 people from lynch mobs led by the KKK, often by threatening to shoot the baying rioters. By then, his reputation as a deadly lawman you don’t want to mess with had been solidly established not just in Texas, but throughout the entire West. Hamer’s only failure occurred in 1930, when he and a handful of Rangers were tasked with protecting a black rape suspect in Sherman, Texas. A huge mob stormed the courthouse, and although Hamer shot two of them, they set the building on fire and forced the Rangers to retreat.

2. Tracking Down Bonnie and Clyde

Frank Hamer was already a law enforcement legend when the authorities turned to him in 1934 to hunt down and end the depredations of Bonnie and Clyde. In the early 1930s, Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and her boyfriend Clyde Chestnut Barrow had kicked off a violent crime spree that generated intense media coverage and embarrassed law enforcement across numerous states. Hamer, who had retired in 1932, was talked into going after the Barrow Gang, and was given a special commission and a free hand. He studied the gang’s pattern of movements, and realized that they usually operated in a wide circle through the lower Midwest with anchor points in Dallas, Joplin, Missouri, and northern Louisiana.

1. Hamer’s Most Famous Accomplishment: Ending a Bandit Couple’s Depredations

Hamer formed a posse that drew personnel from various jurisdictions, and tracked the gang for months. Finally, after 102 days, he got a solid tip that Bonnie and Clyde would drive on a rural road near Gibsland, Louisiana, and set up an ambush. On the morning of May 23^rd, 1934, Clyde stopped his car at the ambush site, and he and Bonnie were almost immediately riddled with a fusillade of more than 150 bullets. That further cemented Hamer’s status as the greatest lawman of the American West. Afterwards, he worked as the head of private security for various oil and shipping companies, then rejoined the Texas Rangers in 1948. Frank Hamer retired for a final time in 1949, suffered a heat stroke in 1953, and lingered in poor health until he died in Austin in 1955.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Bossenecker, John – Texas Ranger: The Legendary Life of Frank Hamer, the Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde (2016)

History Collection – The Fake Nobleman Who Scammed Millions

True West Magazine, March 15^th, 2019 – Frank Hamer vs Bonnie and Clyde

Waco Tribune-Herald, May 30^th, 2019 – Frank Hamer Was True Texas Ranger Legend