Frank Hamer exposed a Texas bounty scheme that paid only for dead robbers
In the 1920s Texas bankers offered 5,000 dollars for dead bank robbers and nothing for live ones. Ranger Frank Hamer discovered that some police were setting up petty drifters to be killed for the money. When his superiors would not help, he handed his exposé to reporters at the State Capitol himself.
Hamer, born in 1884 in Fairview, Wilson County, was a blacksmith's son; four of the five brothers became Texas Rangers. Schooling ended after sixth grade, yet he had a remarkable memory, a gift for mathematics and a fascination with the history of the Rangers and the Comanche and Kiowa peoples. He joked that a spell in Oxford, a tiny Llano County settlement now abandoned, made him the only Oxford-educated Ranger.
His first arrest came in 1905, when he caught a horse thief on a West Texas ranch; an impressed sheriff urged him to enlist, and he joined in 1906. He drifted in and out of the service for years, serving as city marshal of the violent boom town of Navasota at 24 and later patrolling the Mexican border during the upheavals of the Mexican Revolution and Prohibition.
His record is far from simple. In 1918 he physically threatened state representative Jose Tomas Canales, who was looking into complaints that Rangers had mistreated people along the lower Rio Grande, and faced no discipline. From 1922 he led the Rangers against the growing Ku Klux Klan and is credited with saving 15 people from lynch mobs. Yet in the Sherman Riot of 1930 his small squad failed to protect a Black defendant, George Hughes, from a mob that burned the courthouse. The 1928 bounty exposé caused public outrage and indictments, though the bankers kept their reward terms and more bounty killings followed in 1930.
After nearly 27 years of on-and-off service he stepped down in 1932, just before Miriam Ferguson returned as governor, remarking later that he quit when a woman was elected. He kept a special commission, and in 1934 he led the posse that tracked down Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, whose crime spree had embarrassed officials across half a dozen states. Biographer John Boessenecker ranks him among the greatest American lawmen of the century. He died in July 1955.
Source: Frank Hamer
