Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum
By the fall of 1883, damage to barbed wire fences destroyed by vigilante “open range advocates” was estimated at $20 million across Texas. The Texas Rangers were dispatched to quell the furor of the Fence Cutting Wars and restore order. Ranger Ira Aten was assigned to find and arrest fence-cutters in Navarro County. But in 1888, Aten would take an unorthodox step to address the problem: he planted bombs below the fence, so that when they were tampered with – the bomb exploded. Even after Aten was forced to remove all the bombs he planted, the fear of remaining bombs effectively stopped fence-cutting in the county. Aten is remembered in the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, which contains many artifacts from the Rangers’ last two centuries of service.