Texas Ranger Pay, 1875: $40 a Month, and Bring Your Own Horse

In April 1874 Texas wrote down what it would give a Texas Ranger and what he had to bring: forty dollars a month, paid quarterly; his own horse, paid for by the State only if killed in battle; a carbine sold to him at cost, out of his first pay. We read that Frontier Battalion law one clause at a time, beside the memoir of James B. Gillett, a cowhand who enlisted in 1875 at eighteen: Texas Ranger pay, horse, guns, rations, the winter his company was cut to twenty men, and the Fourth of July 1879, when a private's forty dollars became thirty. CHAPTERS 00:00 Forty dollars a month, and the horse 01:39 The pay clause: "forty dollars each, per month" 05:59 "Shall furnish his own horse": what a Ranger had to bring 13:43 "A cavalry gun, at cost": the carbine and the Winchesters 17:22 "Shall not exceed the following": rations and camp 23:31 "Not designed as a standing force" 27:05 "All the powers of a peace officer": who could arrest 30:39 "Thirty dollars per month": the Fourth of July, 1879 Sources: An Act to Provide for the Protection of the Frontier of the State of Texas, approved April 10, 1874, as transcribed by the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum — https://archive.texasranger.org/texas... H. P. N. Gammel, The Laws of Texas 1822–1897, vol. 9 (1898): General Laws, 16th Legislature, called session, chapter XV, approved July 4, 1879 — https://archive.org/details/lawstexas... General Laws of the State of Texas, 15th Legislature (1876) — https://archive.org/details/generalla... Special Report of the Adjutant-General of the State of Texas, September, 1884 — https://archive.org/details/specialre... James B. Gillett, Six Years with the Texas Rangers, 1875 to 1881 (Austin, 1921) — https://archive.org/details/sixyearsw... Dan W. Roberts, Rangers and Sovereignty (San Antonio, 1914) — https://archive.org/details/rangersso... N. A. Jennings, A Texas Ranger (New York, 1899) — https://archive.org/details/texasrang... Handbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Association, "Frontier Battalion" and related entries — https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/e... We read the 1874 act in the museum's transcription, not on the printed session-law page. The prices for Gillett's horse ($125), his Sharps carbine ($17.50) and the Winchester ($40 and $50) are his memory, printed in 1921. Jennings served in McNelly's Special Force, not the Frontier Battalion, and historians disagree about how far his book can be trusted; we say so each time we use him. Two memoirs give different figures for the first appropriation ($300,000 and $75,000); we could not open the appropriation act. We found no record of what the State paid for any ranger's horse, of whether pay was ever late, or of what a pay warrant sold for. Every sum and multiple is our own arithmetic. We opened no account by Comanche, Kiowa or Apache people or by Mexican Texan families of the Rio Grande country and the El Paso valley. Illustrations are AI-generated recreations; narration uses a synthetic voice. #TexasRangers #OldWest #TexasHistory