Ira Aten was 15 years old in July 1878 when the outlaw Sam Bass was carried into Round Rock with a bullet in him, and he stood close enough to watch the man die. The Rangers who had shot Bass talked about it afterward within his hearing. He decided then what he was going to be, and he spent the next 70 years being it, in Texas and then in a California desert.
Round Rock
Austin Ira Aten was born on September 3, 1862, at Cairo, Illinois, the second of 4 sons of a Methodist circuit rider named Austin Cunningham Aten. The family came to Texas in 1876 and farmed near Round Rock in Williamson County. In March 1883, at 20, he enlisted in Company D of the Frontier Battalion under Captain L. P. Sieker and was sent to the border counties, which is where the Rangers sent men they wanted to test.
The Braeutigam case
His first famous work was in the Hill Country. On September 3, 1884, Johann Wolfgang Braeutigam was shot dead at his beer garden in the old buildings of Fort Martin Scott, outside Fredericksburg. Three suspects were jailed and then escaped, and one of them died when the Fredericksburg jail burned in 1885. The case was going cold when Aten took it up.
He brought Jack Beam in to Fredericksburg on March 6, 1886. Beam confessed, named a man called Jim Fannin as the shooter, and went to the penitentiary for 9 years. Wesley Collier was harder. Aten traded shots with him on April 29, 1886, and lost him. On May 25, with a young rancher named John R. Hughes tracking for him, he found Collier at a house in the hills, and when Collier went for his gun Aten shot him once, near the heart. Hughes joined the Rangers on Aten's recommendation and became one of the great captains of the force. In July 1887 the 2 of them ran down and killed the fugitive Judd Roberts.
The dynamite
The thing most people remember about Ira Aten is the fences. Texas was being fenced in the 1880s, and in dry years the men on the wrong side of the wire cut it. In 1888 the adjutant general sent Aten, undercover, into Navarro County, where the cutting had become a nightly business. He could not catch anyone in the act, so he rigged dynamite charges along the disputed fence lines, wired so that cutting the wire would set them off, and let it be known that he had. Austin ordered him to take the charges out. He did, by setting them off, and then spread the word that there were more. The cutting in Navarro County stopped. The adjutant general was not amused, and the story has been told at Ranger reunions ever since.
He made sergeant under Captain Frank Jones. In August 1889 Governor Sul Ross sent him with a handful of Rangers into Fort Bend County, where the Jaybird and Woodpecker factions had just fought it out with rifles on the streets of Richmond. When the shooting stopped the county's leading men asked for him as sheriff, and he served through 1890.
The Panhandle, then the desert
On February 3, 1892, he married Imogen Boyce at the Central Christian Church in Austin and took her home to a dugout near Dimmitt, in Castro County, in the Panhandle. Castro County drafted him as sheriff in 1893. In 1895 the Capitol Syndicate hired him to stop the rustling on the XIT, the 3,000,000-acre ranch the state had traded for its capitol building; he ran the Escarbada division with a force of about 20 armed hands, including the former Rangers Ed Connell and Wood Saunders, until 1904.
That year he moved his wife and 5 children to the Imperial Valley of California, then mostly desert below sea level. He farmed, and in 1923 he was seated on the board of the Imperial Irrigation District, where he worked for the legislation that built Boulder Dam and the All-American Canal. The last of the Frontier Battalion's manhunters spent his old age arguing about water.
After
J. Marvin Hunter published Aten's memoirs in Frontier Times in 1945. He died of pneumonia at his daughter's home in Burlingame, California, on August 5, 1953, a month short of 91, and is buried in Evergreen Cemetery at El Centro. When the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame in Waco named its first class on February 6, 1976, Ira Aten was in it.
Sources: Handbook of Texas, Ira Aten; Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, Waco, Hall of Fame biography; Bob Alexander, "Rawhide Ranger, Ira Aten: Enforcing Law on the Texas Frontier" (University of North Texas Press, 2011); Chuck Parsons, "Captain John R. Hughes, Lone Star Ranger" (University of North Texas Press, 2011); Darren L. Ivey, "The Ranger Ideal, Volume 2" (University of North Texas Press, 2018); Ira Aten, "Six and One-Half Years in the Ranger Service," Frontier Times, 1945; Fort Bend County Historical Commission, roster of elected officials.
