One Riot, One Ranger.

Today, the Texas Rangers turned 176 years old.

No, not the baseball team.

The Texas Rangers are the oldest law-enforcement agency in North America. They’re kind of the cream of the crop of Texas police — they’ve acted as detectives, riot cops, and paramilitary operatives. And contrary to popular belief, they do not employ Chuck Norris (to my knowledge).

I’ve liked the Rangers — their ideals, their history — since I was a kid. The Rangers are part of the Old Texas/Sparta parallel I need to explore in a later blog entry. When faced with a citywide riot in El Paso in 1896, the Rangers sent one man, as, in his words, there was only one riot. When asked for military aid by a neighboring state, Sparta sent one soldier — it was only one war, after all.

History can be a lot more interesting than fiction, in some cases. I’ve wanted to write something about the Texas Rangers for a while, but I doubt I would be able to make up anything more interesting than the above story.

So what’s your favorite story of historical badassery? The Battle of Thermopolaye? Teddy Roosevelt punching out a rhino?