The Texas Rangers are one of the oldest, most storied law enforcement agencies in the world, so it’s remarkable that there are so few films about them. Not films with Texas Rangers in them: there are scores of those, dating back to the silent era, when early cowboy stars such as Tom Mix and Buck Jones churned out a one-reeler a week playing interchangeable Rangers tasked with rounding up cattle rustlers and Mexican “banditos” before marrying the sweet farm girl back home. But like the nineteenth-century saloon songs and dime-store novels that first celebrated the Rangers’ exploits, those on-screen depictions were more interested in legends than history lessons. In pop culture, at least, the Texas Ranger has proved most durable as an idea—the stoic, square-jawed manifestation of all that is honorable and exceptional about our state.
The facts would only get in the way of that adulation, particularly given that the true story of the Texas Rangers is a messy one, intermittently ugly and inspiring. When the law enforcement agency was founded in 1823, it was a loose coalition of men tasked by Stephen F. Austin with fending off “hostile Indians.” As the Rangers trained their sights first on Mexican soldiers, then eventually on anyone else they deemed to be a threat, Texas’s oldest police force became an all-purpose purveyor of frontier justice, with all the racism, brutality, and extrajudicial murder that implies. In most popular accounts of the Rangers, these excesses have been largely excused, if not ignored.
Across more than a century of movies and TV shows in which the Texas Rangers have played some part, they’ve almost always been presented as heroes—complex, occasionally deeply flawed heroes, perhaps, but heroes nonetheless. In tandem with Texas Monthly’s new podcast, White Hats, which delves into the warts-and-all true history of the Texas Rangers, we’ve rounded up five fictional portrayals that have proved the most influential in shaping that cultural perception. Maybe these depictions don’t tell us who the Texas Rangers really are. But they do tell us plenty about who we want them to be.