Roaring Ranger

Ranger is named for the Texas Rangers, who in the 1870s kept a camp in a valley about two miles northeast of town, on a prong of Palo Pinto Creek. By 1879 the valley held a tent city with tent churches, schools, a hotel and a store, known as Ranger Camp Valley. When the Texas and Pacific laid tracks two miles west in 1880, residents moved to them, and James M. Davis became postmaster that December. By 1904 Ranger, a trade center for Stephens County's wheat country, had 750 people and a women's literary club.

What the plaque says

Boom of high excitement and strategic importance. When oil demand was high during World War I, Texas Pacific Coal Company general manager W.K. Gordon, a believer in deep drilling, persuaded his company to make the venture that started Ranger's oil boom at McClesky No. 1 (1 mi. S). This blew in, October 1917, as a 1700-barrels-a-day gusher. Later gushers yielded up to 7,000 and 11,000-barrels-a-day each. Ten daily trains brought in prospectors packed in the aisles or on tops of coaches. Ranger's dozen or so houses became a city of drillers, suppliers, oil company offices. Living quarters were so scarce that not only were beds of day-tour men occupied by the graveyard-tour men, but overstuffed chairs were also rented for sleeping. Food was hard to get and prices were high. For two rainy years, Ranger was a sea of mud. A sled taxied people across streets, or a man in hip boots carried them piggyback. However, money was plentiful, and forces of vice moved in. After five murders occurred in one day, law officers arrested many criminals and expelled gamblers and vagrants. Ranger's success overshadowed its troubles. It is said to have yielded in a year twice the wealth of best years in California and Klondike gold fields. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse — 9.4 mi
  A horned lizard in a glass-topped casket in the 1928 Eastland courthouse, the creature said to have come out alive from the old building's cornerstone after thirty-one years.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 18 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.

More markers nearby

• First Oil Well Drilled in Eastland County — steps away
• Site of J.H. McCleskey No. 1, Discovery Well of the Ranger Oil Boom — 1.5 mi
• Merriman Cemetery — 3.3 mi
• Mount Zion Cemetery — 8.5 mi