Hamer's Posse

Bonnie and Clyde

Few criminals have fired imaginations like Bonnie and Clyde.  A multitude of books, an academy award winning movie and a 1967 chart-topping song have told their story for over seventy years.  Often viewed as a romantic pair of Robin Hoods, their lives were anything but.  They were constantly on the dodge, lived out of stolen cars, and made little from their holdups.  Even worse, innocent people were killed.  As their notoriety grew, they were always recognized, forcing them to avoid family and friends for extended periods.  After a four year crime spree (1931-1934), it all came to a gruesome end, brought about by an unrelenting Texas Ranger. 

Clyde Barrow was born to a sharecropper family seeking a better way of life.   The Barrows settled in West Dallas, an extremely poor community during the Depression Era.  Homeless, the Barrows lived under their wagon until they could afford a more commodious abode - a tent.  With little work available, young men turned to crime instead.  Clyde started his life of crime while still a child, going from petty theft to robbery before he turned twenty.  A stint at the Eastham State Prison Farm, near Huntsville, stoked his criminal behavior rather than rehabilitate it.  The guards beat him unmercifully and one inmate named “Big Ed” raped him.  In a blind fury, Clyde dispatched Ed with a pipe, but was not charged for the murder.   Eager to get out of the grinding work details, he had a fellow prisoner chop off two of his toes with an ax.  Ironically, through the efforts of his mother, Clyde was paroled shortly after he lost his toes.  During a visit to a friend’s house in Dallas, he met the love of his violent life, Bonnie Parker.

Bonnie Parker also grew up in West Dallas.  Her family residence was in Cement City, a factory town dominated by a large cement factory that emitted clouds of choking gray dust.  Unlike her future boyfriend Clyde, Bonnie was a gentle soul who liked to write poetry.  She was lauded by her teachers for her good grades and sweet attitude.  Pretty and petite, it would seem Bonnie was destined for a better life.  The environs of West Dallas dictated otherwise.  Her dad, a bricklayer, died when she was young, leaving her mom destitute.  Bonnie had to wait tables to help her out.  At sixteen, she married a petty criminal, who abandoned her for long stretches while pursuing his profession.  Because of her own criminal life, she never got around to divorcing him.  Photos of Bonnie, found at a Barrow Gang hideout in Joplin, Missouri, shows her posing with a variety of firearms while smoking a cigar.  Bonnie was never that manly; she only smoked cigarettes.  Former gang members have stated she never fired a gun at the police.

Bonnie and Clyde were attracted to each other the moment they met.  She stayed with him throughout their four year spree.  Along with Clyde’s brother, Buck, and Buck’s wife, Blanch, they robbed a number of small town stores and gas stations, shooting those that got in their way.  When feasible, they robbed small town banks, though their take wasn’t much.  The Depression kept those banks to a very minimal cash reserve - $3,000 or less.  Before their demise, the Barrow Gang killed 12 men; most of them were in law enforcement.  They traveled as far north as Minnesota, with brief stops in Joplin and Platte City, Missouri.  At both places, they fled after shootouts with the local police.  Buck was killed from a gunshot wound to the head.  Blanche lost an eye and was captured.  Bonnie’s legs were severely burned when Clyde, ignoring a warning sign, drove their car off a riverbank.  Applications of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) saved her legs and probably her life.

Under-budgeted police and sheriff departments couldn’t match Bonnie and Clyde’s firepower.   Clyde kept his gang well armed with automatic rifles stolen from state guard armories.  His favorite was the Browning automatic rifle, later used as a light machine gun during World War II. To make matters worse, they couldn’t give chase beyond their own jurisdictions, making it difficult to apprehend them.   Outgunned and outdistanced, a new approach was needed.  The impetus came from two events:  a daring prison breakout, engineered by Clyde, which freed several convicts from Eastham, and the deaths of two Grapevine patrol officers gunned down by Clyde.  Under mounting pressure from the public, Texas’ first female governor, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, assigned Texas Ranger Frank Hamer the job of bringing down Bonnie and Clyde.

Frank Hamer was an old school ranger, more at home on the back of a horse than a police car seat.  As a city marshal, he cleaned up the Texas boomtown of Navasota.  The town was so violent; a hundred men had been gunned down on the main street within a year.  As a Texas Ranger, he took on bootleggers and the Klu Klux Klan, preventing 15 lynchings.  As his tough guy image grew, Hamer could clear the streets of an angry mob with one simple command - “Git !” 

 Frank Hammer

After his appointment, Hamer formed a detail of four hardened law enforcement veterans.  He knew that in order to catch the ever moving crime duo, you had to live like they did.  That entailed endless driving, camping outdoors, and long periods away from their homes, just like an Old West posse.  Hamer’s posse included Manny Gault, of the Texas Highway Patrol, Bob Alcon, of the Dallas County Sheriff’s Dept., and Ted Hinton, of the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department.  Hinton had grown up in West Dallas and knew the Barrow family.  Bob Alcorn had been waited on by Bonnie during her stints as a cafe waitress. After months on the road, they finally tracked Bonnie and Clyde to Bienville Parish, Louisiana, the home of one of their gang members, Henry Methvin.

Hamer noticed the crime duo followed a familiar pattern during their years of crime; they tended to stay close to county and state boundary lines.  By doing this, they could evade local law enforcement by simply crossing over jurisdiction lines.  In addition, they routinely stopped to visit their families and those of their gang members.  Hamer knew about the family visits and was informed in Shreveport that Bonnie and Clyde were due to visit the Methvin home at Gibsland, a remote town in Bienville Parish.  Hamer added Bienville Parish sheriff, Henderson Jordan, and his deputy, Prentiss Oakey, to his posse.  With the assistance of Henry Methvin’s father, Ivy, an ambush was set up along a road near the Methvin home.  Posse members disagree on whether or not a deal was made with Ivy - a lighter sentence for his son in return for his cooperation.  Nevertheless, Ivy’s truck was parked off the side of the road as bait for the ambush.  Thinking Ivy’s truck was broken down, Clyde would stop to help.  Hamer would then make his move.

On May 23, 1934, Bonnie and Clyde were driving a stolen Ford Sedan when they spotted Ivy’s truck.  Bonnie was eating a sandwich with a map on her lap.  Clyde was driving in his stocking feet with a shotgun between his legs.  They stopped.  From there, the accounts differ on what happened next.  Were Bonnie and Clyde told they were under arrest before the shooting began?  Tired of the chase and the government pressure, it would seem doubtful Hamer would leave anything to chance.  Considering the past gunfights Clyde was involved in, it was also doubtful he would have peacefully surrendered.  A hailstorm of bullets hit Clyde’s car.  Bonnie and Clyde were riddled from head to toe.  Bonnie’s nose and lower jaw were almost shot away, leaving her distorted mouth full of broken teeth.  What happened next was a festival of the grotesque.

Instead of using discretion, the bullet-riddled car, with Bonnie and Clyde still inside, was towed to a furniture store in Arcadia that doubled as a funeral home.  Because of the eight mile distance to Arcadia, a faulty tow truck, and overheard phone calls from Hamer to Texas law enforcement officials, word spread like wildfire about the ambush.  Morbidly curious, a mob gathered outside of the Conger Furniture Store.  At one point, the tow truck broke down in front of a Gibsland elementary school.  School children ran out to view the car and its ghastly contents.  Needless to say, they recoiled in horror.  One of the students fainted.  It only grew worse from there; a tightly packed crowd surrounded the car when it reached the furniture store.  Beer and sandwiches were sold at inflated prices to the crowd.  Ladies dipped their handkerchiefs in the blood, bits of bloody hair were snipped from the corpses, and one man tried to cut off one of Clyde’s ears while another tried to saw off a finger.  Laid out inside the store's mortuary, the bodies were almost too riddled to be embalmed.  Bonnie and Clyde were laid to rest at separate cemeteries in Dallas.  Clyde Barrow’s funeral was one of the largest attended in Dallas history.  At the time of their deaths, Bonnie was only twenty-three years old.  Clyde was twenty-five.

After the deaths of Bonnie and Clyde, Hamer, along with twenty rangers, prevented sabotage during the 1935 Gulf Coast longshoremen’s strike.  Next to the Bonnie and Clyde ambush, Hamer’s most controversial role came when he accompanied Governor Coke Stevenson, who had just lost a tight Congressional race, to Alice, Texas in the notoriously corrupt Jim Wells County.  Hamer told an armed crowd of locals to get lost while the tally seats were examined for fraud, especially the votes from a mysterious Precinct 13 ballot box.  Although the box was stuffed with over three hundred nonexistent voters, Stephenson’s opponent still won the election.  The opponent was Lyndon B. Johnson.  Hamer died on July 10, 1955 from the effects of a stroke two years earlier.  He was buried near his son, who was killed at Iwo Jima, at Memorial Park Cemetery in Austin.