Texas Legislature establishes Frontier Regiment

(TSHA) The Frontier Regiment is the name history has given to a regiment of rangers authorized by the Ninth Legislature of Texas on December 21, 1861, for the protection of the northern and western frontier of Texas. The act and the raising of the regiment was the state's political and military response to the vulnerabilities posed to the state's frontier settlements by the planned withdrawal and redeployment of the Confederate First Regiment, Texas Mounted Riflemen, from their frontier forts. Already withering Comanche and Kiowa Indian raids in 1861 were killing settlers, slaughtering livestock, and stealing horses in communities along the entire northern and western frontier. These settlements, substantively weakened by the mass exodus of their young men for service with the Confederacy in the Civil War, faced the grim prospect of continuing Indian depredations, as they were known in that time. Continued