Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier, 1875-1910 (review)

The traditions of "one riot, one ranger" and "the Mountie always gets his man," epitomize popular perceptions about the heroic Texas Rangers and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (previously the North-West Mounted Police). Although both constabularies are less written about today than they were in the frontier era of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they are generally respected as reliable protectors of the public trust. Andrew R. Graybill, assistant professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, builds on the most recent scholarship to challenge some of the older hagiographic images and to compare the two police forces. His work emerges as one of the most carefully crafted examples of comparative and transnational history published in recent years, and it stands as a model study for other frontier law enforcement agencies around the world.

On the most elemental of levels, the two forces shared one common legacy. Both protected the established order of their respective regions by confining and removing Native Americans, restricting the freedoms of mixed-blood populations such as Hispanics and Blacks in Texas and Métis in western Canada, protecting large ranching operations against small stockmen and farmers who fenced the land, and by breaking the power of labor unions that organized against industrial corporations.

The objectives of the two agencies were similar, but the means they used to achieve their goals were quite different. This contrast is most readily identifiable in the subjugation of indigenous tribal peoples. The Texas Ranger units, first organized in 1823, were composed of frontiersmen whose viewpoints were shaped by racism and whose strongest motivations were to open Indian lands to white settlement. They ridiculed soldiers of the United States Army for being too protective of Indians, and oftentimes the Rangers' aggressive actions caused more Indian problems than they solved. By contrast, the Mounties operated in the Plains and Mountain regions of western Canada where relatively few white settlers lived in the early years of contact to complicate delicate diplomatic relations. They therefore resorted to less overt violence in achieving their primary goal of moving tribes to the reserves. The Mounties were more professionalized than the Texas Rangers, they were answerable to a national entity in distant Ottawa, and they were less affected by the expansionist clamoring of a large frontier population. By the mid-1870s, Texas had rid itself of virtually all its Native American people, just as Canada began to accommodate its western indigenous tribes to life on the reserves.

Racism also entered into policy-making and law enforcement strategies when dealing with other minorities. Anglo Texans generated a fiercely anti-Hispanic environment that grew out of the 1836 Texas Revolution and the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War. Hispanic Tejanos became a disenfranchised and economically marginalized population as the nineteenth century wore on. They also became frequent victims of "gunpowder justice" as it was meted out on both a legalized and informal basis. Graybill describes dozens of instances where Texas Rangers served as both judge and jury in their assaults on Hispanic citizens of the state. Racial animosities boiled over again during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, as Rangers sometimes operated outside the boundaries of established law. Canada also discriminated against its mixed-blood Métis population and made them a virtual landless people in their own land. Prejudice also entered into Canadian policies that culminated in the controversial suppression of Louis Riel's 1885 revolt, but the level of racially-motivated violence never eclipsed that found in Texas.

The final two chapters on preserving the authority of cattle barons and industrial moguls amid labor strikes are among the best in the book. Ranger suppression of worker activism in the railroad and coal-mining town of Thurber and Mountie response to strikes in Lethbridge provide evidence of law enforcement double standards, but they also point to...