How do you and welcome to Wise about Texas your award-winning Texas history podcast. This is your host Ken Wise. Thanks so much

for tuning in today. I want to lead today with a little warning. It's allergy season

here in Texas, which only lasts for 12 months out of the year so if I sound a little

rough today that's the reason today we're going to continue our series on the Texas Rangers and we're going to talk about

one of the earliest Texas Rangers.

My friend and great Texas historian, Dr. Richard McCaslin, who is at the University of

North Texas, he divides the 200 years of the Texas Rangers into four basic periods.

His first period is he calls the Antibellum period from 1823 to 1861 which alluding back

to our last episode episode 119 was mostly a military era where the Rangers

performed as a military unit.

The next period is the frontier battalion period from 1874 to

1902, during which the Rangers were fighting on the Western frontier of Texas protecting the settlements from Indian raids.

They were doing some scouting, etc.

Which was also mostly a military function.

The third era Dr. McCaslin discusses is the Ranger Force, which is

1992 to 1935, which I'll call quasi military, because though you had most of

Texas fairly settled and the Rangers beginning to perform more of a recognizable

to us at least law enforcement function most of the time.

You also had some very rough remote areas which were much more like the frontier and even though they may have

been performing a law enforcement function the service that was necessary looked an awful

like it a lot awful lot like it did on the frontier,

quasi-military.

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