Part III of a five-part series. Continued from Part I and Part II.
Despite Texas’s historical reliance on irregular ranger corps for defense, conventional light cavalry emerged as the dominant manifestation of the state’s Civil War mobilization. This marked increase in more Napoleonic formations, and the corresponding relegation Texas Ranger units to a lower status in recruitment and funding, reflected the intrinsic nature of the primary, existential threat to Texas: the massed might of the Union Army. While Indian opportunists could potentially conduct lightning raids to destroy small communities, Federal divisions threatened to subjugate the entire state at scale. Given these strategic imbalance, tribal incursions along Texas’s northwest frontier remained a peripheral, though highly destructive, threat throughout most of the war, and therefore demanded less prioritization.
Despite this imbalance, the volatile Indian Frontier remained an acute problem for the Texas government. Compelled to engage in a larger scope of irregular warfare than their Confederate Army counterparts in the Trans-Mississippi Region or the Eastern Theater, state-sanctioned mounted riflemen, rangers, and militia conducted guerrilla-type actions as they interdicted Amerindian raids or prosecuted their own asymmetric strikes on Union formations and outposts.
The Governor of Texas at the onset of rebellion, Frances Lubbock, recalled the specialized nature of his frontier units, and the famed leaders who led them, as he explicitly connected the current mobilization with past volunteers from the Wars of the Texas Republic: "Such gallant frontiersmen as Hays, Walker, Burleson, Ford, McCulloch, Ross, and Baylor had in times past made famous the Texas Rangers and demonstrated their superiority over the United States regulars for frontier service, and men of this class were now in special demand."
Thus by 1861, as the United States hurtled towards fragmentation, the frontier polity stood ready to confront a diverse array of impending threat from nearly all directions. In November of the previous year, the Austin State Gazette had praised Texas’s mounted tradition with typical Lone Star bravado: “We believe Texas Rangers make the most formidable cavalry in the world…in addition to their six-shooters and rifles, they should be armed with sabers." This advocacy for the superiority of Texan irregulars reflected the deep and militaristic pride which the state placed in personal valor.
Lone Star mounted regiments and brigades fought across a variety of operational theaters as their state sought to simultaneously defend home territory and meet Confederate expeditionary obligations to the east. The initial, and most underappreciated of these arenas, encompassed the traditional Indian Frontier in North and West Texas. The continued threat of Amerindian attacks along the historical line of Anglo-Indian conflict demanded a renewal of militant Texas Ranger methods. Concurrent to the Confederate operations prosecuted against the Union Army, Texas deployed three phases of state-controlled mounted organizations to secure its northwestern borders between 1861 and 1865. The 1st Regiment of the Texas Mounted Rifles, the Frontier Regiment and Border Battalion, and the Frontier Organization of Texas State Troops, in addition to numerous local militias, successively protected the Confederacy’s western-most state from opportunistic attack by tribal and Mexican raiders.
These frontier defenses reflected a continuation of Texas’s traditional approach to irregular warfare. As such, the state’s operations were typified by forward lines of combat outposts supported by ranging patrols, with several larger offensives in 1864 and 1865 against Comanche threats. This strategy adopted the former Texas Republic’s 1837, 1839, and 1846 concepts of utilizing chains of forward forts to create barriers between the populated counties of Central Texas and enemy tribes to the northwest. Though the defensive construct ultimately proved inadequate in the face of concerted Comanche raids by late 1864, and the inadequacy resulted in a marked retrenchment of Anglo settlement from the Great Plains, the state forces nevertheless represented a continuation of the Texas Ranger tradition began in the Anglo-Indian conflicts of colonial Tejas under Stephen F. Austin.
The establishment of Texas’s defenses under the Confederate banner began immediately upon secession in the spring of 1861 as the state planned to seize control of U.S. Army installations in places such as San Antonio and Austin, in addition to a series of frontier forts. On February 5, the interim Committee of Public Safety first initiated this process by replacing the Federal network with a new military construct. To accomplish the reorganization, they divided command of the Texas’s border areas between three noted Texas Rangers and Mexican War veterans: Ben McCulloch, his brother Henry McCulloch, and the energetic John Salmon Ford. The state accordingly commissioned each of the men, who were also former Texas Rangers, as Colonels of Cavalry in the Provisional Army of Texas.
