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Captain Frank Hamer
Hamer in 1922
Born	Francis Augustus Hamer (1884-03-17)March 17, 1884 Wilson County, Texas
Died	July 10, 1955(1955-07-10) (aged 71) Austin, Texas

Francis Augustus Hamer ('heɪmə) (March 17, 1884 – July 10, 1955) was a Texas Ranger, known in popular culture for his leadership of a 1934 posse to track down and kill the criminal duo Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Hamer acquired legendary status in the Southwest as the archetypal Texas Ranger. In 1922 as senior captain of the Texas Rangers, Hamer led the fight in Texas against the Ku Klux Klan. He is believed to have saved fifteen African Americans from lynch mobs. He is an inductee to the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame.

Early years

Frank Hamer was born in 1884 in Fairview, Wilson County, Texas, where his father operated a blacksmith shop. He was one of five brothers, four of whom became Texas Rangers. His family moved to the Welch ranch in San Saba County, where he grew up. Hamer later spent time in Oxford, Llano County (now a ghost town); he later joked about being the only "Oxford-educated Ranger." In his youth, Hamer worked in his father's shop, and when still under the age of 20 worked as a wrangler on a local ranch.

He is considered to have begun his career in law enforcement in 1905. While working on the Carr Ranch in West Texas, he captured a horse thief. The local sheriff was so impressed that he recommended that Hamer join the Rangers, which he did the following year. Like the cowboys of earlier generations, Hamer was at home on the open Texas prairie and understood the signs and patterns of nature. He interpreted men in terms of animal characteristics: "The criminal is a coyote, always taking a look over his shoulder; a cornered political schemer is a 'crawfish about three days from water'; a reminds him of a sandhill crane walking up a river-bed." He savored the challenges of investigating and solving crimes.

Law enforcement career

Hamer was a Ranger off and on throughout his adult life, resigning often to take other jobs. He first joined Captain John H. Rogers's Company C in Alpine, Texas, on April 21, 1906, and began patrolling the border with Mexico. In 1908 he resigned from the Rangers to become the City Marshal of Navasota, Texas. Navasota was a lawless boom town, wracked by violence: "shootouts on the main street were so frequent that in two years at least a hundred men died." At the age of 24, Hamer moved in and created law and order.

In 1911 he moved to Houston, to work as a special investigator, where he was seconded to the Sheriff's Office of Harris County. In 1914 he was hired as a deputy sheriff in Kimble County, assigned as the department's livestock theft investigator.

Hamer rejoined the Rangers in 1915 and again was assigned to patrol the South Texas border around Brownsville. Because of the constant unrest in Mexico during that country's revolution, the Rangers dealt most seriously with arms smugglers. They also tried to control the bootleggers during the Prohibition era and bandits who plagued the border.

Leaving the Rangers again, he became a range detective for the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. He was commissioned as a Special Ranger to undertake this job.

In 1917 Hamer married Gladys (Johnson) Sims, the widow of Ed Sims, of Snyder, Texas. Gladys and her brother Johnson were charged in 1916 with having murdered her husband Sims that year. In the fall of 1917, the trial of her brother was moved to Baird, Texas. On October 1, 1917, Hamer and Gladys, his brother Gus Hamer, her brother Johnson and his wife, were all on their way to Baird and stopped at a garage in Sweetwater to get gas. By chance they encountered Gus McMeans of Odessa, a brother-in-law of the late Ed Sims, at the garage. The Hamers and McMeans got in a pistol battle. McMeans was a former Texas Ranger and sheriff of Ector County. Hamer and McMeans "were clinched," and the latter died of a shot to the heart. Hamer was wounded. Ten shots were fired in the gunfight. Police collected a total of seven revolvers, two automatic pistols, and three repeating rifles from the members of the two parties. McMeans was survived by his wife and 11-year-old son, and three brothers.

Following this, Hamer left the Cattlemen's Association to accept a position as a federal agent in the Prohibition Unit, where he served for about one year. Though Hamer's service as a prohibition agent was brief, it was eventful. Stationed primarily in El Paso, the scene of countless gunfights during the Prohibition era, Hamer participated in numerous raids and shootouts. In one particularly notable incident in March 1921, Hamer was involved in a gun battle with smugglers that resulted in the death of Prohibition Agent Ernest W. Walker. Returning to state service in 1921, Hamer transferred to Austin, where he served as Senior Ranger Captain.

In 1918, Hamer physically threatened State Representative José Tomás Canales, who was leading an investigation into allegations of abuse by the Texas Rangers of residents of the Rio Grande Valley. Canales reported the threat to the governor, but Hamer was not disciplined. He stalked Canales in the capital. Legislator Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr., father of future U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, was among those who escorted Canales to the early 1919 hearings as protection.

In the 1920s, Hamer became known for bringing order to oil boom towns such as Mexia and Borger. Records from that time indicate that there were complaints about some of Hamer's methods, but the same sources said the area was so lawless that extreme measures may have been needed. In I'm Frank Hamer, Hamer was quoted discussing the restrictions that upstanding citizens would seek to put on a lawman. He said they did not understand that they were in effect asking him to fight with one hand tied behind his back.

Beginning in 1922 Hamer, as senior captain of the Texas Rangers, led the fight in Texas against the Ku Klux Klan, which was still growing in Texas. During his long career, he saved fifteen African Americans from lynch mobs. In 1930 in Sherman, Texas, Hamer and a handful of Rangers protected a black rape suspect from a mob of 6,000. Hamer personally shot and wounded two of the mob's leaders, and forced the lynchers to flee the courthouse. However, the mob set fire to the courthouse and the prisoner died in the inferno. Hamer was the first and only Texas Ranger to lose a prisoner to a lynch mob.

In 1928 Hamer put a halt to a murder for hire ring, and his extraordinary means of accomplishing this made him nationally famous. The Texas Bankers' Association had begun offering rewards of $5,000 "for dead bank robbers—not one cent for live ones." Hamer determined that men were setting up deadbeats and two-bit outlaws to be killed by complicit police officers; the officers would collect the rewards and pay the men their finder's fees. But his investigation hit a stone wall: the police refused him support and the Bankers' Association's position was that "any man that could be induced to participate in a bank robbery ought to be killed." Spurred by urgency to thwart the next set of killings, as well as personally infuriated, Hamer wrote and signed a detailed exposé of the racket, which he termed "the bankers' murder machine." He took his article to the press room of the State Capitol and handed out copies. His revelation about the racket resulted in public outrage, an investigation, and indictments. The bankers did not modify the terms of the reward, however, and more bounty murders took place in 1930.

Hamer retired in 1932 after almost 27 years with the Rangers. He left one week before Miriam "Ma" Ferguson recaptured the governor's office for a second term. She had first been elected after her husband, "Pa" Ferguson, had been impeached and forced to resign as governor; she said she would rely on him for advice (he was prohibited from ever serving again in public office). At least forty Rangers resigned rather than serve again under Ma Ferguson. In her first term as governor of Texas she had proven to be brazenly corrupt. In her second term, she fired all the remaining Rangers and replaced them with her own appointees. A year later Hamer gave his reason for retiring: "When they elected a woman governor, I quit." The commander of the Texas Rangers allowed him to retain a Special Ranger commission as an active Senior Ranger Captain even after his official retirement. The special commission is listed in the state archives in Austin.

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow

In the early 1930s, Bonnie and Clyde's crime spree generated vast media coverage which embarrassed law enforcement and government officials in a half dozen states. On January 16, 1934, Barrow, Parker, and associate Jimmy Mullens raided Eastham prison farm, freeing Raymond Hamilton, Henry Methvin, Hilton Bybee (substituted for Clyde's friend Ralph Fults), and Joe Palmer. Hamilton's brother Floyd wrote that Henry Methvin was not part of the original "invited" group but fled with them during the general confusion. Barrow had particularly wanted to free Fults and Aubrey Skelley, but he considered the raid to be successful retaliation against the prison system. Historian John Neal Phillips says that "paying back" the Department of Corrections for abuse that Barrow had received while imprisoned motivated many of his actions and underlay his crime spree. The Texas Department of Corrections received national negative publicity over the jailbreak, which delighted Barrow, who thought that he finally had his revenge.

Two guards were shot by the escapers during the breakout, guard Major Crowson fatally. He died in the hospital on January 27 soon after Simmons assured him that he would send his killer Joe Palmer to the electric chair. Simmons then turned his attention to restoring the reputation of the Texas prison system.

Hamer leads the hunt

Simmons persuaded Hamer to hunt down the Barrow Gang. Hamer was commissioned as an officer of the Texas Highway Patrol, then seconded to the prison system as a special investigator charged with apprehending Barrow and his colleagues. Hamer balked at the compensation of $180 a month, less than half his current pay, but Simmons reiterated that Hamer would collect his fair share of the reward money. He further added to the deal by authorizing Hamer to take whatever he wanted from among the Barrow Gang's possessions when he caught them. Simmons said that he wouldn't presume to tell Hamer how to do his job, but he suggested that Hamer "put 'em on the spot, know you're right—and shoot everybody in sight."

Hamer examined the pattern of Barrow's movements, discovering that he essentially made a wide circle through the lower Midwest, skirting state borders wherever he could to take advantage of the fact that law officers could not pursue suspects across state lines. The circle's anchor points were Dallas, Joplin, Missouri, and northwest Louisiana, with wider arcs outward for bank robberies. Hamer that he learned Barrow's statistics, but "this was not enough. An officer must know the habits of the outlaw, how he thinks and how he will act in different situations. When I began to understand Clyde Barrow's mind, I felt that I was making progress."

In the next couple of months, Barrow, Parker, and Henry Methvin (an Eastham escaper whom Barrow had taken up) robbed banks in Lancaster, Texas, Poteau, Oklahoma, and the Iowa towns of Rembrandt, Knierim, Stuart, and Everly. Hamer was always following close behind.

Shootings propel public outrage

The push-pins on Hamer's mental tracking map weren't limited to bank robberies, but also to murders. The killing of two Texas Highway Patrol officers at Grapevine, Texas on Easter Sunday (April 1, 1934) inflamed public sentiment against Barrow and Parker, even though it was Barrow and Methvin who were the two shooters. This site is in present day Southlake, Texas on Dove Rd, just east of state highway 114. There is a historical marker on the side of the road, along the fence line that borders a pasture across from the Verizon Network Operations Center.

An eyewitness account given massive newspaper coverage stated that a drunken Bonnie had emptied her gun into the prone body of Patrolman Murphy at Grapevine, laughing as she fired at the way his "head bounced like a rubber ball" on the road. This was later disputed. Another story that caught on was that a cigar butt "bearing tiny teethmarks" (as if it were Bonnie's) was found in the gravel. The lurid newspaper stories and the furor they created increased the pressure on government and law enforcement to capture the criminals. Governor Ferguson placed a $500 bounty on Bonnie's head for her perceived role in the murder of Patrolman Murphy.

Popular opinion turned even further against the fugitives when five days later Barrow and Methvin killed Constable Calvin Campbell, a sixty-year-old single father, near Commerce, Oklahoma. They kidnapped Commerce Chief of Police Percy Boyd, drove him across the border into Kansas, where they released him. He posted their names at the top of the Campbell murder warrants, issued against Barrow, Parker, and John Doe (Methvin) later that week.

Hamer knew that Barrow did not intend to be taken alive, and the Barrow Gang's history made it practical to assume that Bonnie would not voluntarily part from him.

Focus shifts to Louisiana

In mid-March Henry Methvin's family contacted Bienville Parish Sheriff Henderson Jordan about their son, his legal troubles and his involvement with Barrow. Though Hamer was a lone wolf by nature, after much complicated politicking and negotiation, he formed an inter-jurisdictional posse, and began to create a plan to ambush the couple. First to join him were Sheriff Jordan and his deputy Prentiss Oakley, an excellent marksman. Hamer brought in fellow former Ranger Maney Gault, who had resigned from the Ranger force when "Ma" Ferguson was elected and now worked for the Texas Highway Patrol. Hamer asked Dallas County Sheriff Smoot Schmid to assign his deputy Bob Alcorn full time to the case; Schmid sent Alcorn and Ted Hinton, another Dallas County deputy. The two deputies and Schmid had tried to ambush Bonnie and Clyde once before, in late November 1933, near Sowers, Texas. After examining Barrow's abandoned V-8 Ford at Sowers and seeing that the barrage from his Thompson submachine gun hadn't penetrated its body, Hinton requested a BAR.

At 9:15 a.m. on May 23, 1934, after 102 days tracking the duo, the lawmen confronted Bonnie and Clyde on a rural road near Gibsland, Louisiana. Barrow stopped his car at the ambush spot and the posse's 150-round fusillade was so thunderous that people for miles around thought a logging crew had used dynamite to fell a particularly huge tree. Accounts of the last moment before gunfire erupted vary widely: Sheriff Jordan said he was calling out to Barrow to halt as the shooting started; Deputy Alcorn said that Captain Hamer was calling out; Deputy Hinton wrote that Alcorn called out. The only agreement between all six was that Deputy Oakley, perhaps nervously jumping the gun, stood and fired the opening burst from his Remington Model 8, and that his bullet into Barrow's left temple killed the outlaw instantly. The posse fired off another hundred-plus rounds, any number of which would have been fatal to Parker and also to Barrow.

Hamer used a customized .35 Remington Model 8 semiautomatic rifle with a special-order 15-round magazine that he’d ordered from Petmeckey's Sporting Goods store in Austin, Texas. He was shipped serial number 10045, and this was just one of at least two Model 8's used in the ambush. The rifle was modified to accept a "police only" 20-round magazine obtained through the Peace Officers Equipment Company in St. Joseph, Missouri.

Although state, local and other sources had pledged monies to the Barrow reward fund that brought the pre-ambush total to some $26,000, most reneged on their pledges. Each posse member received a check for a meager $200.23. They were allowed to take some of the goods and belongings of the gang; Hamer took most of the guns.

Hamer, who had learned a great deal about the lives of Barrow and Parker in the preceding months, later told reporters, "I would have gotten sick , but when I thought about her crimes, I didn’t. I hated to shoot a woman—but I remembered the way in which Bonnie had taken part in the murder of nine peace officers. I remembered how she kicked the body of the highway patrolman at Grapevine and fired a bullet into his body as he lay on the ground." In the same interviews Hamer famously said, "I hate to bust the cap on a woman, especially when she was sitting down, however if it wouldn't have been [sic] her, it would have been us."

Later years

During the 1930s Hamer applied his skills in keeping the civil peace on behalf of various oil companies and shippers, which were resisting unionization of their workers. He often performed as a strike breaker. The first of these engagements was for the city of Houston, during the 1935 Gulf Coast longshoremen's strike. Hamer headed "a special force of twenty ex-Rangers and sheriffs to prevent sabotage and looting." Hamer was also active the following year during the 1936 Gulf Coast maritime workers' strike.

At the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, he and 49 other retired Texas Rangers offered their services to King George VI, to help protect the United Kingdom in case of Nazi invasion. His son, Billy Hamer, joined the U.S. Marine Corps and died during the Battle of Iwo Jima.

In 1948 he was called again to Ranger duty to play a small role in a notorious episode in an election acknowledged to have been one of the most corrupt in Texas history. Hamer was hired by Governor Coke Stevenson, whose name by now was synonymous with old-school Texan conservative integrity, to accompany him to the Texas State Bank in Alice, the county seat of Jim Wells County in South Texas. Stevenson wanted to examine the tally sheets for ballot box 13, which held ballots for his opponent, then-Representative Lyndon Johnson, which he knew were fraudulent, and not in a way that favored him. Outside the bank stood two glowering groups of armed men. Hamer got out of the car. He approached the first group and said, "Git." They did. To the second group blocking the doors of the bank he said, "Fall back." They did. In the end, Johnson won the election, even though the Johnson campaign stuffed the ballot box with over 300 nonexistent ballots/voters. This is clearly stated in "Texas Ranger" by John Boessenecker.

Frank Hamer retired in 1949 and lived in Austin until his death.

Health and death

In 1953, Frank Hamer suffered a stroke and though he lived two more years, never regained his health. He was buried near his son Billy Hamer in Memorial Park Cemetery in Austin. In his life he was wounded 17 times and left for dead four times. He is credited with having killed between 53 and almost 70 people.

Popular culture

In "The Barrow Gang," an episode of the TV version of Gang Busters, Jim Davis plays Texas Ranger Captain "Bob Stewart," a thinly fictionalized depiction of Hamer who is personally assigned to run down Bonnie and Clyde by Governor "Ma" Ferguson. This episode was later incorporated into the theatrical release Guns Don't Argue (1957), a low-budget film about the FBI in the 1930s.

In the 1958 film The Bonnie Parker Story, Douglas Kennedy plays Ranger Captain "Tom Steel," another fictionalized Hamer figure on the trail of the bandit couple.

In the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, Hamer appears as a character under his own name, and is portrayed by Denver Pyle. He is depicted as incompetent. The Barrow gang is shown capturing, teasing and humiliating him. Their ambush at the end of the film is suggested as his personal revenge. After the film's release, his widow Mrs. Frank Hamer, the former Gladys (Johnson) Sims, and son Frank Hamer, Jr., sued Warner Bros.-Seven Arts for defamation of character of Frank Hamer. In 1971 they received an undisclosed out-of-court settlement.

Gene Shelton's novel, Manhunter - The Life and Times of Frank Hamer (2017), attempts to depict the lawman's whole career, but concentrates primarily on his pursuit of Bonnie and Clyde.

Frank Hamer appears as a character in the musical Bonnie and Clyde (2009).

In the 2013 TV-movie Bonnie and Clyde, Frank Hamer is portrayed by the actor William Hurt. He is portrayed as a righteous law officer, uncomfortable with the limelight.

In the 2013 direct-to-video film Bonnie and Clyde – Justified, Hamer is portrayed by Eric Roberts as a flamboyant showman who enjoys his celebrity status.

In the Timeless episode "Last Ride of Bonnie and Clyde", Hamer is played by Chris Mulkey.

Kevin Costner portrays Hamer in the 2019 Netflix original film The Highwaymen, which was released to theaters for a short run and, subsequently, began streaming in late March. Woody Harrelson played Maney Gault.

See also

• Red Lopez – outlaw pursued by Hamer

Notes

1. One thing the is the striking number of Rangers who were related to other Rangers; often one is dealing with law enforcement clans. This phenomenon is especially the case for Wilson County, southeast of San Antonio, which produced a disproportionate number of Rangers, mainly from . Over the decades Wilson County produced forty-four Rangers, nearly half of them from the tiny community of Fairview...now a ghost town." Harris p. 6.
2. Simmons, chief of the Dept. of Corrections, wrote in his memoir that Hamer was one of two lawmen whom he had in mind. According to Ranger historian Ben Proctor, two former Ranger captains later said that Simmons had approached each of them first, and that they each turned him down for the identical reason: "We don't ambush people, and we don't kill women." Guinn p. 410. Ralph Fults heard the story from one of the Rangers in 1948. Phillips, p. 354 n. 3.
3. Hinton remembered Bonnie from the Dallas café where she had waited tables four years before. Alcorn had once picked up, but did not arrest, 16-year-old Clyde in West Dallas, for stealing chickens.
4. Dynamiting trees was forbidden and logging crews were angered at the sound, thinking someone was violating the ban.
5. Guinn bases his description of the ambush itself on Sandy Jones's exhaustive 1998 inquiry and forensic reenactment.

References

1. ^ John Boessenecker, Texas Ranger: the Epic Life of Frank Hamer, the Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde, St. Martin’s, 2016
2. Webb, p. 522.
3. Caro, p. 326.
4. Sitton, p. 28.
5. Dunwody, Will A. (October 4, 1917). "The Aspermont Star (Aspermont, Tex.), Vol. 20, No. 11, Ed. 1 Thursday, October 4, 1917". The Portal to Texas History.
6. Dolan, Samuel K. Cowboys and Gangsters: Stories of an Untamed Southwest (TwoDot Books, 2016) ISBN 978-1-4422-4669-0
7. Martinez, Monica Muñoz (31 March 2019). "How 'The Highwaymen' whitewashes Frank Hamer and the Texas Rangers". Washington Post. Retrieved 3 April 2019.
8. Webb, pp. 533–38. "Hamer Called in Robbery Inquiry", April 5, 1928. "Bonds on Murder Charge Forfeited", Nov. 12, 1928. Upton County News. Transcribed, Texas Genealogy Trails
9. Phillips, pp. 254–55, n. 22.
10. ^ I'm Frank Hamer, Chapters 20–23. Methvin Online
11. "The Official Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum - Waco, Texas". Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum.
12. "Shot the Devil Out of Them". New York Times. May 24, 1934. p. 3.
13. Frank Hamer, Texas Ranger Warrant of Authority, 1931. Texas State Library & Archives Commission
14. Guinn, p. 410 n. 248.
15. Phillips.
16. ^ Guinn, p. 254.
17. Parker; Simmons p. 128.
18. Webb, p. 540.
19. ^ Ramsey.
20. Guinn, pp. 267–69.
21. "The Officer Down Memorial Page". Archived from the original on December 12, 2009. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
22. Guinn, p. 284.
23. Phillips, p. 351 n. 21.
24. Guinn, p. 287, Knight p. 147.
25. "The Officer Down Memorial Page". Archived from the original on December 12, 2009. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
26. Knight and Davis, p. 217, n. 12.
27. Blanche Barrow, Guinn, Hinton, Knight, Phillips, Milner, Ramsey.
28. Guinn, p. 288
29. ^ Cartledge, Rick. "The Guns of Frank Hamer." The Sight's M1911 .45 ACP Page Archived 2010-03-10 at the Wayback Machine
30. Guinn, p. 341
31. Guinn, p. 426
32. Guinn, p. 340.
33. Herring, p. 224.
34. Guinn, p. 352.
35. Cox, p. 161.
36. Roth, Mitchel P.; Kennedy, Tom (2012). Houston Blue: The Story of the Houston Police Department. University of North Texas Press. p. 100. Retrieved 15 April 2017.
37. Boessenecker, John (2016). Texas Ranger: The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, the Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde. Macmillan. pp. 447–48. Retrieved 15 April 2017.
38. "The Official Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum - Waco, Texas". Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum.
39. Olson, p. 252; Plantinga, p. 152; Wolff, Henry Jr., "Box 13 Is a Black Mark on Texas Politics." The Victoria Advocate, November 8, 2000.
40. Tolchin, Martin. "How Johnson Won Election He'd Lost." The New York Times, Feb. 11, 1990.
41. Caro, Robert. "My Search for Coke Stevenson." Adapted from afterword to the paperback edition of "Means of Ascent." securedata.net Archived 2010-03-10 at the Wayback Machine
42. Dallek, pp. 332–34.
43. Milner, p. 158.
44. "The Official Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum - Waco, Texas". Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum.
45. Toland, p. 296.
46. Guinn, p. 364
47. "The Highwaymen Is a Pleasant Throwback of a Movie". The Atlantic. March 29, 2019. Retrieved April 1, 2019. Netflix's latest offering tells the story of Bonnie and Clyde from the perspective of the lawmen—played by Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson—who pursued and killed them.
48. Sperlin, Nicole (March 15, 2019). "How The Highwaymen Sets the Record Straight on Bonnie and Clyde". Vanity Fair. Retrieved April 7, 2019.

Bibliography

• Boessenecker, John (2016). Texas Ranger – The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, the Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-1-250-06998-6.
• Burrough, Bryan (2004). Public Enemies. New York: The Penguin Press. ISBN 1-59420-021-1.
• Caro, Robert A. (1982). The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-394-49973-5.
• Cox, Mike (2009). Time of the Rangers. New York: Tom Doherty Associates. ISBN 0-7653-1815-6.
• Dallek, Robert (1991). Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908–1960. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-505435-0.
• Dolan, Samuel K (2016). Cowboys and Gangsters: Stories of an Untamed Southwest. TwoDot Books. ISBN 978-1-4422-4669-0
• Guinn, Jeff (2009). Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 1-4165-5706-7
• Harris, Charles H., and Louis R. Sadler (2007). The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The Bloodiest Decade, 1910–1920. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 0-8263-3483-0.
• Herring, Hal (2008). Famous Firearms of the Old West: From Wild Bill Hickok's Colt Revolvers to Geronimo's Winchester, Twelve Guns That Shaped Our History. TwoDot. ISBN 0-7627-4508-8.
• Hinton, Ted (1979). Ambush: The Real Story of Bonnie and Clyde. Austin: Shoal Creek Publishers, Inc. ISBN 978-0-88319-041-8.
• Knight, James R., with Jonathan Davis (2003). Bonnie and Clyde: A 21st Century Update. Austin, Texas: Eakin Press. ISBN 1-57168-794-7.
• Milner, E.R. (2003). The Lives and Times of Bonnie and Clyde. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 0-8093-2552-7.
• Olson, James Stuart (1999). Historical Dictionary of the 1960s. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-29271-X.
• Parker, Emma Krause, Nell Barrow Cowan and Jan I. Fortune (1968). The True Story of Bonnie and Clyde. New York: New American Library. ISBN 0-8488-2154-8. Originally published 1934 as Fugitives.
• Phillips, John Neal (1996). Running with Bonnie & Clyde: The Ten Fast Years of Ralph Fults. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 0-8061-3429-1.
• Plantinga, Cornelius (1995). Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. ISBN 0-8028-4218-6.
• Ramsey, Winston G., ed. (2003). On The Trail of Bonnie and Clyde. London: After The Battle Books. ISBN 1-870067-51-7.
• Simmons, Lee (1957). Assignment: Huntsville. Austin: University of Texas Press. ISBN 1-881515-50-8
• Sitton, Thad (2000). The Texas Sheriff: Lord of the County Line. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 0-8061-3216-7.
• Toland, John (1995). The Dillinger Days. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80626-6.
• Treherne, John (2000). The Strange History of Bonnie & Clyde. Cooper Square Press. ISBN 0-8154-1106-5.
• Webb, Walter Prescott (1935). The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense. Austin: University of Texas Press. ISBN 0-292-78110-5.

Further reading

• DeFord, Miriam Allen (1968). The Real Bonnie and Clyde. Sphere Books.
• Frost, H. Gordon and John H. Jenkins (1968). I'm Frank Hamer. Austin: Pemberton Press. ISBN 0-938349-95-3.
• Nieman, Robert (2006). Interview with Bud Hamer, Bobbie Hamer and Harrison Hamer. Texas Ranger Oral History Interviews.Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum
• Steele, Phillip W. and Marie Barrow Scoma (2000). The Family Story of Bonnie and Clyde. Pelican Publishing Company. ISBN 1-56554-756-X.

• Shelton, Gene (1997). The Life and Times of Frank Hamer. Berkeley Books. ISBN 0-425-15973-6. This is a novel, a fictionalized account.

External links

• Frank Hamer at Find a Grave

• 1884 births
• 1955 deaths
• Texas sheriffs
• People from Austin, Texas
• Members of the Texas Ranger Division
• People from Wilson County, Texas
• Cowboys
• 20th-century American politicians
• People from San Saba County, Texas
• People from Llano County, Texas
• People from Navasota, Texas