Know your Rangers
- Forest Ranger: An officer in charge of protecting or managing a section of a public forest.
- Texas Ranger: A member of a former mounted force of Texans organized in 1835 and active in maintaining order on the frontier. More recently, a member of the Texas Rangers baseball team.
- Bushrangers, or bush rangers, were outlaws in the early years of the European settlement of Australia who had the survival skills necessary to use the Australian bush as a refuge to hide from the authorities. (thank you wikipedia!)
- Barbary Coast Ranger: A thief, swindler, or operator of a dive bar in San Francisco’s notorious Barbary Coast. The term came into vogue in the local papers around the middle 1860s and persisted for about twenty years. I haven’t seen any direct evidence that ‘Barbary Coast Ranger’ was coined as a local variant of the Australian Bush Ranger, but it seems possible, especially since the crime ridden area that the Barbary Coast evolved from was so heavily Australian around 1849 that it was called Sydney Town, after the Australian city in New South Wales.
Your average Barbary Coast hoodlum aspired to graduate to Barbary Coast Ranger status, a Ranger being described by Herbert Asbury, in his book The Barbary Coast, as a man possessed of ” . . . notoriety and a long and sinful life as a man about the coast.” Who could not want that?
Fortunately for all concerned, the Rangers’ dress habits went out with them. Rangers in the late 1880s were noted for swaggering about “. . . with his hair oiled, puffed, and curled at the sides and parted in the middle; clad in a velvet vest, a black or olive frock coat with a peaked sleeve that rose to his ear, knee high boots of calfskin, a sombrero, a ruffled white shirt with a low collar, a black string tie, and tight fawn colored trousers.” Even in today’s San Francisco, that might draw a little attention.
