Texas, My Texas: Musings of the Rambling Boy

17. ROY W. ALDRICH, THE ERUDITE RANGER

+17+ ROY W. ALDRICH , THE ERUDITE RANGER NO T L ONG AGO I was prowling around the shelves of the Wildenthai Library at Sui Ross State University, which I often do when I have gone over there to look something up and have some spare time on my hands, and I stumbled on a whole clutch of English fox-hunting memoirs, books with titles like Trencher and Kennel: Some Famous Yorkshire Packs, published in London in 1927, and The Eighth Duke of Badminton and the Badminton Hunt, London, 1901. These seemed to me to be odd volumes to encounter in the library of a West Texas cow college until I remembered Texas Ranger Captain Roy W. Aldrich, whose library and papers were acquired by Sui Ross in 1958. Then it all made sense. Roy Aldrich was undoubtedly the most literate Texas Ranger in the history of the Ranger force, and surely one of the mos.t intellectually curious. By the time of his death in 1955, he had assembled a library of ten thousand volumes, which took up the entire second floor of his large Austin home. The first floor was stuffed with collections of Indian pottery, arrowheads and stone artifacts, horns, spurs, firearms, and other Western memorabilia. The twenty -acre grounds of that home, which was out east of town on Manor Road, included several gardens of native plants and a private zoo. Aldrich was an omnivorous reader who spent most of his salary on books, as the receipts in his papers show. The largest part of his library consisted of volumes on Texas and the Southwest, but he also formed respectable collections on ornithology, natural his- tory, hunting and outdoor life (thus the English fox-hunting memoirs ), and travel. He also collected erotica, racy little volumes with titles like Spanked Ladies. Aldrich's life was as varied and colorful as his library. He was born in 1869 in Illinois and grew up in Golden City, Missouri, where his father owned a bank. He never went to school, but was educated at home by his mother, who had been a teacher. At seventeen he left home and went to Idaho, where he worked as a lumberjack and steamboat hand. In the I890s, Aldrich spent some time as a horse trader and deputy sheriff in Oklahoma Territory, as the owner of a coffee plantation in Mexico, and as a stagecoach driver in Arizona Territory. During the Spanish-American War, he served with a Missouri volunteer regiment in the Philippines, and when that war was over, he took a load of horses to South Africa for the British Army's use during the Boer War. He came to Texas in 1907 and went into the real estate business, first in Corpus Christi and then in San Antonio. But when the border troubles broke out in 1915, he couldn't stay away from the action, and at the age of forty-five, he joined the Texas Rangers as a private in Company A, stationed in Rio Grande City. His talents were quickly recognized, and by 1919 he had been promoted to captain and appointed Quartermaster and Paymaster of the Rangers, a position he held for twenty-eight years until his retirement in 1947. Aldrich first came to the Big Bend on Ranger business in 1920 and returned many times over the years, sometimes on official business and sometimes to collect plants and natural history specimens . He made many friends here, including Sui Ross President Horace Morelock. In 1940, Morelock started trolling for Aldrich 's library and collections, hoping to bring them to Sui Ross. He wrote Aldrich a letter describing the new museum building on the campus, saying that it was "fireproofand had steel doors, every one of which is kept locked." He pointed out that ex-Rangers James B. Gillett and Everett Townsend had recently donated their collections to the museum, adding that "we are specializing in this type of material." When Aldrich failed to take the bait, Morelock got Harry Anthony DeYoung, who ran the Sui Ross summer art program , to paint Aldrich's portrait on horseback to hang in the museum . He persuaded a graduate student to write Aldrich's biography for her master's thesis. Aldrich donated several items to the museum , and told Morelock several times that he wanted his library to eventually go to the college, but he could not bear to part with...