Frank Hamer: The Texas Ranger Who Tracked Down Bonnie and Clyde

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Frank Hamer survived 17 gunshot wounds, was left for dead four times, and killed somewhere between 53 and 70 people, all while wearing a badge. Born in 1884 in rural Texas, the son of a blacksmith, he left school after the sixth grade but had a near photographic memory and learned tracking by studying the Comanche and the Kiowa. At 21 he captured a horse thief on his own, and by 1906 he was a Texas Ranger on the Mexican border. He thought of an outlaw as a coyote, always looking over its shoulder, and built his detective work on that idea.

This episode weighs the contradictions in his record. He fought the Ku Klux Klan and stood down lynch mobs, yet the Sherman riot of 1930 ended with the man he was guarding killed. He exposed fellow officers who murdered innocents for bank reward money, then quit the Rangers in 1932 because he refused to serve under a female governor. In 1934 he was hired to stop Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, mapped their loop between Dallas, Joplin, and northwest Louisiana, and ended the chase on a dirt road near Gibsland on May 23.

• The Texas Bankers Association offered $5,000 for dead bank robbers and nothing for live ones. In 1928 Hamer took proof that corrupt officers were framing and killing men for the bounty straight to the capitol press room.
• Prison chief Lee Simmons hired him at $180 a month after Clyde's January 1934 prison farm break, with a promise of reward money and his pick of the gang's possessions.
• Because police submachine gun rounds had bounced off Clyde's V-8 Ford, Hamer ordered a Remington Model 8 rifle with a 20 round magazine. The posse fired more than 150 rounds in the ambush.
• In 1948, while investigating disputed ballots in Alice, Texas for Coke Stevenson during his Senate race against Lyndon B. Johnson, Hamer cleared two groups of armed men from a bank without drawing a gun.
• After the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde portrayed him as a bumbling fool, his widow and son sued the studio and won an out of court settlement.