Howdy folks and greetings from the Great Plains of North Texas!
We're in a series about one of the best Texas Rangers to ever wear the badge, the great Frank Hamer, who was brought out of retirement to take down Bonnie and Clyde.
Recap
In the last post of this series Frank had been appointed a Captainship in the Texas Rangers and was assigned back to the U.S./Mexico border at Del Rio, Texas.
The company that he was assigned to was pretty much in shambles and desperately needed his professionalism to shape it up. The year was 1921.
Today's story..
isn't going to be about Frank. It ends up with Frank but it starts out far from Texas, way up North in Bingham, Utah. In 1913 the Oquirrh Mountains were home to important silver and lead mines and attracted cheap labor from all over the world.
Men came from Greece, Serbia, Italy, Japan, Scandinavia, and of course, Mexico. The miners went on a big strike in 1912 and many foreigners were brought in to work in their place. One of these men was Raphael Lopez, a 26 yr old Mexican.
He was a little different though in that he spoke fluent English and was very good with guns. An expert actually. He practiced all the time and he could hit silver dollars thrown in the air.
After the miner's strike ended he stayed on with a partner named Juan Valdez. Hey, isn't that the name of the coffee guy? lol. From those coffee commercials?
Well those guys leased a section of a mine and were doing fairly well until they hit a snag in their relationship.
It involved a woman of course..they both liked the same girl. One weekend Ol Ralphie wanted to call on this girl so he showed up at her cabin. Even brought a box of candy.
Wait your turn dude!
The problem was...when he got there she refused to let him in because she was entertaining Juan Valdez(and enjoying the coffee he'd brought her. .lol).
Well that didn't go over well at all. In fact, poor Ralphie had a fit, threw down the box of candy and stormed back to his place where he changed from his datin clothes into his killin clothes and grabbed his Winchester rifle and two semi-automatic pistols.
He didn't handle rejection very well
He went back and waited for Don Juan to come out of the cabin and he finally did at 1:00 AM in the morning. Ralphie took one shot and put poor Juan down, screaming in agony. That was what Ralphie wanted to hear so he left him there.
Poor Juan kicked the bucket and was dead by the time the Sheriff got there. He then climbed up the mountain behind the cabin. The sheriff assembled a small posse.
The hunt was on
They caught up with Ralphie the next evening at a ranch near Saratoga Springs. He hid in a ravine and opened fire from cover and killed two of the officers, one of them was the chief of police.
There were two deputies left and they charged forward but Ralphie shot one of them dead. Then he vanished into the dark night.
As you can imagine, this created a massive manhunt.
Ralphie was out there killin officers left and right. The search for him intensifies in the next post.
Thanks for reading folks, God bless you all!
-jonboy
Texas
PS- Check out this vending machine. It's not a funny one, just an interesting one. At least to me. Obviously this is in Germany(I think) in the 40's or 50's I assume.
Why would you want to buy dress shirts and ties from a vending machine? What if they don't fit? You can't take them back. Maybe you guys know.