TL;DR: You may not be familiar with his name, but I found so much to say about Frank that I couldn’t fit it all into the last post about Bonnie and Clyde. All three of these historical characters were featured in the time travel drama Timeless, S1E09 "The Last Ride of Bonnie and Clyde" (original release date 12/5/2016).
Bonnie and Clyde were famously and brutally gunned down by law enforcement. That may be the most memorable thing about them but I consider it the least important. Believe whatever you like about what happened and hold any opinion you care to about the matter. Personally, I think someone just made it all up.
Their crime spree (or at least the narrative) was brought to an end by a Texas Ranger who came out of retirement specifically to bring them to justice: Frank Hamer (1884-1955). In this post, I will quote liberally from Wikipedia but there is one thing they just won’t say out loud: the guy was a homicidal psycho. Obviously I will explain why I think so.
(Before we begin, I would like to interject something. I always try to be as brief and to the point as possible when quoting from Wikipedia, or any other source for that matter. In this post, there are more quotes and of greater length than usual. Let me tell you why.
I often get the suspicion that people don’t like to read for themselves, and something like the fairly lengthy Wikipedia page for Frank totally puts them off. Moreover, they don’t like to read while questioning the veracity of the material. After all, every one of us had a decade or two of schooling where we were never to question anything we read. Finally, people get extremely uncomfortable exercising their own judgment, and to decide for themselves—with no other authority—how to interpret something in that material.
Here, with a few of these longer passages, I hope you get used to reading such material as I do. After you take it in, you may conclude for yourself things like, “That is some horseshit right there”, or “Doesn’t anybody get how batshit that is?” I would say that I give you permission to have such thoughts, but the level of consciousness I hope you get to is where you realize you don’t need anyone’s permission to think such things. </sermon>)
Top question: was Frank a Salem Witch? I’ll be frank: not that I could show with direct evidence. But as we’ll see, he’s got so many “tells” it’s hard to believe he isn’t. The primary one is that time and again, for actions that would get anyone else hauled off to pound-you-in-the-ass prison, Frank just skates away. Trust me, you’ll see.
His genealogy appears to be a box canyon, nowhere to go, but let’s stand inside it and look around. I can’t find anything interesting in his ancestry at the Wikitree page for Francis Augustus Hamer. Or is there? You see, if you compare it to his Geni page at Francis Augustus Hamer, it turns out Wikitree has missed one whole wife.
Fine, a clerical error perhaps. However, the wife listed on both sites is Ida Gladys Hamer (Johnson) (1890 - 1976). Yes indeed, a Salem Witch name, although I admit it’s not unusual and there is nothing incriminating to be found in her quite limited ancestry. We’ll see Gladys Johnson again, though.
The overlooked wife is Mollie Cameron Ford (1887 - 1937). Is Ford a Salem Witch name? Turns out there’s a lot to that question and it’s going to take a whole post. The provocative intersection here is that in this episode of Timeless, there is a whole scene about Clyde Barrow’s intersection with Henry Ford. Does that seem like mere coincidence to you?
Speaking of the episode itself, Frank Hamer is portrayed as a stoic man dedicated to justice, no matter what it takes. He recounts to another character the story of blocking the courthouse doors against a mob of thousands looking to lynch a black man accused of murder who, BTW, Hamer knows is guilty. Legendary! As in the sense of fictional, in my opinion.
Hamer’s cinematic treatment in the landmark movie Bonnie and Clyde half a century previous was far different, and in a legally-actionable way:
The film is considered to stray far from fact in its portrayal of Frank Hamer as a vengeful bungler who was captured, humiliated, and released by Bonnie and Clyde. Hamer was a decorated Texas Ranger when he was coaxed out of semi-retirement to hunt the couple down…. In 1968, Hamer's widow and son sued the movie producers for defamation of character over his portrayal.
Besmirching the image of a man dedicated to justice. Warren Beatty, how dare you!? Let’s all take a tiptoe through Frank’s Wikipedia page, and keep in mind: this is the stuff They will admit to, the stuff They want us all to believe.
Hamer began his career in law enforcement in 1905 while working on the Carr Ranch in West Texas….
We start off with a bang. Ann Putnam Senior (1661-1699) "would play an important role as an accuser and primary witness" in the Salem Witch Trials. She was born Ann Carr.
In 1911, he moved to Houston to work as a special investigator for Mayor Horace Baldwin Rice….
See Sarah Davis Rice, "accused but survived" the SWTs. She doesn’t merit her own Wikipedia page, but at least she made the list. We won’t get into it, but Horace Baldwin Rice (1861-1929) does indeed look like a Salem Witch himself and, if you were wondering, he is the nephew of the founder of prestigious Rice University. We’re getting the drift and now we can get into it:
In 1917, Hamer married Gladys (Johnson) Sims, the widow of Ed Sims of Snyder, Texas; she and her brother, Sidney Arthur Johnson, had been charged in 1916 with murdering Sims. Hamer and Gladys and other family members were stopped at a garage on October 1, 1917 to get gasoline in Sweetwater when they suddenly encountered Gus McMeans of Odessa, Ed Sims' brother-in-law, and the Hamers and McMeans got into a pistol battle. McMeans was a former Texas Ranger and sheriff of Ector County, and he and Hamer "were clinched"; McMeans died of a shot to the heart and Hamer was wounded.
Whoa! Read that as you will, but I think anyone would have a shitstorm descend upon them after that. What about Frank?
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.
Right, sure, he gets hired as a Federal agent. Okay, but just stay of trouble, Frank, would ya?
His service was brief but eventful while stationed in El Paso, the scene of countless gunfights during the Prohibition era. He participated in numerous raids and shootouts, and he was involved in a gun battle with smugglers on March 21 which resulted in the death of Prohibition Agent Ernest W. Walker.
BTW, not saying this guy is or isn’t, but Walker is a Salem Witch name. Anyway, well, that’s only a few strikes against him. Let’s not count him out, huh?
In 1918, Hamer physically threatened State Representative José Tomás Canales, who was leading an investigation into Texas Rangers accused of abusing residents of the Rio Grande Valley. Canales reported the threat to the governor, but Hamer was not disciplined. According to a 2019 Washington Post movie review by activist Monica Muñoz Martinez, Hamer supposedly stalked Canales in the capital and Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr., father of future President Lyndon B. Johnson, was among those who escorted Canales to the early 1919 hearings.
I need to break this down. Lyndon Johnson was most certainly a Salem Witch, and thus his father Samuel was too. Fucking Hamer was so out of fucking control that his Salem Witch wife’s Salem Witch relatives had to try to wrangle him.
Which brings us to the incident recounted in Timeless where Frank risked his life to protect the black murderer at the courthouse. Only it didn’t go down exactly as told, because the black man was accused of rape, not murder. Aaaaand…
… the mob set fire to the courthouse. Hamer and the Rangers escaped the building, but could not reach Hughes, who had been locked in the vault for his safety. They got into a borrowed car and drove away from Sherman, later regrouping at the sheriff's office. If Hughes had survived the fire, he did not survive the mob afterward, who used dynamite on the vault he'd been locked in and strung Hughes's dead body up. Sherman's black district was looted by the mob afterward, with the Rangers unwilling or unable to stop them.
Just, uh, too much detail for a TV script, right? Before this diligent public servant comes out of retirement to retire Bonnie and Clyde, I think he himself sensed the heat right around the corner:
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, and at least 40 Rangers resigned rather than serve again under her.
Okay, sports fans, let’s look at the stats for this icon of law enforcement:
He was wounded 17 times during his life and left for dead four times. He is credited with having killed between 53 and 70 people.
What a kill/death ratio! He did indeed play the game of life on the “Legendary” setting. Or alternatively he was a Salem Witch, and a sociopath who got totally out of hand. I suspect that may explain his very incomplete genealogy. I’ve sometimes remarked how surprised I am at how much genealogy They have left lying around when it would be so easy to vaporize. I wonder if perhaps, in this case, Frank was so embarrassing that They decided to erase some of it.
Finally, you really need to take a look at Wiki’s profile pic for Francis Augustus Hamer. This guy has got deader eyes than Kendall Jenner and Billie Eilish put together.
Unrelated bonus: I feel that this post was light on the kind of genealogy that makes you go, “Whaaaaaat?!” Since I can’t just make stuff up, I’ll have to give you something only tenuously related. Really, though, I want to accentuate the point that these people work over very long time scales.
A little over a year ago, I wrote a post about that most controversial of animators, Trey Parker. In it, I had little to say about his partner, Matt Stone, other than to note that he was raised in Littleton (site of the Columbine “event”) and that his mom was Jewish. I never looked at him beyond that, and why should I have? After all, it was a Parker I was after, not a Joo.
At the top, I linked to the previous post which was about Bonnie and Clyde. In that post, I happened to mention a certain Captain John Parker, commander of the Minutemen at Lexington.
Recently looking at the page with his genealogy, I just happened to notice that his mother was Anna Parker formerly Stone (1694-1760). Will coincidences never cease?
Thanks for reading!