The FBI, which was not founded by J. Edgar Hoover but established its reputation for slick public relations under him, gets TV shows about itself with history embellished into legend. The Texas Rangers, who are much older than the FBI, get Chuck Norris fiction based upon their legend. Of course there are entirely too many people --- here, in the USA and elsewhere --- who can’t distinguish fiction from non-fiction, but in the popular mind, with some justification, Walker is fiction and J. Edgar Hoover is fact. But of course, the late J. Edgar Hoover fictionalized great parts of his life and his admirers have made it politically incorrect outside of certain left-wing and ethnic minority circles to identify the real man behind the legend for what he was. It presents great difficulties for the conscientious historian.
And so it is with most legendary lawmen. What’s real and what’s fiction about Wyatt Earp? Or Roy Bean? Or Frank Serpico?
Or, for that matter, the first member of Panama’s American community to become a legend in his own time, Ran Runnels?
Runnels was a young man, a veteran of the Texas Rangers and the US forces during the Mexican War, who came down here and laid down the law for the Panama Railroad. So goes the legend.
“There’s still a fairly significant mystery about the guy,” Panama Historial Society president John Carlson told the people gathered at the group’s monthly meeting at the Balboa Niko’s. “No one really knows what happened here.”
If half the legend is true --- as it surely is --- and that true half includes his prior service with the Texas Rangers, then surely this is the stuff of which “Walker” flashback episodes are made. “This would make a great movie” said Carlson, who has for some years been doing research on Runnels, in hope of publishing a serious biography.
The problem is, the Texas Rangers Association has no record of a Ran Runnels.
Of course, their archives are not complete. Over the nearly 170 years of the Rangers’ existence, documents have been lost or destroyed. Moreover, Carlson suspects that the man whose remains lie beneath a Rivas, Nicaragua tombstone marked “Ran Runnels" may have actually been named Hiram Randolph Runnels.
Whatever his past, Runnels came down here in his early 20s and was set up in much the same fashion of modern-day Latin American death squad commanders. He went into the freight business as a front for his true occupation, the extermination of the bandits --- the so-called “Darienni” --- who plagued the isthmian transit zone during railroad construction days. It also seems that the suppression of labor unrest on the Panama Railroad was among his duties.
Much of the information that comes down to us about Runnels is contained in a book called “The Golden Road,” which some Panamanian historians have taken as a legitimate source. However, Carlson dismisses that work as highly fictionalized.
But it is known that Runnels had a sister who lived into the 1930s and who saved his letters. It is known that Runnels died in Nicaragua, after having served as US consul there.
And it is known that Runnels, with the blessing of Colombian, US and British authorities, organized a couple of mass hangings, one of which took the lives of 37 presumed maleantes of many colors, classes and nationalities, whose bodies were found one morning strung up near the Panama City seawall, and another purge in which 41 people died. It didn’t matter whether a person was a Panamanian, an American or whatever, people who knew the score did not want to appear in the Ran Runnels black book.
Runnels was also said to have whipped the mayor of Las Cruces in the town square, and ended at least one labor stoppage with less violent tactics.
By the time that Runnels and his Isthmian Guard had established their reputation and the Panama Railroad was finished, crime very rarely affected the railway.
The last thing that is both well and definitely known about Runnels in Panama was his role in the 1855 Watermelon Slice Incident. That anti-American riot that began when a gringo named Jack Oliver refused to pay for a watermelon slice he ate, the vendor insisted, Oliver pulled a gun, a third person tried to disarm him and the pistol went off. All Hell broke loose and at least 15 people were killed. “It was racially oriented,” Carlson said of the affair, which grew into a series of mob attacks on white people in general and Americans in particular. The violence subsided when Runnels and his men arrived on the scene and those who might have acted otherwise in his absence concluded that it wasn’t such a good day to die after all.
As a result of that incident the US Marines invaded Panama some weeks later. It would be the first of many American military interventions in Panama.
“Then we lose track of Runnels,” Carlson said, “until he turns up as the American consul in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua.”
Carlson’s research has led him to people bearing the Runnels surname in Texas, who know nothing, as well as to the Texas Rangers Association, who also know nothing. He is set to look in old US State Department documents and correspondence, which would be buried in microfilm, probably at Foggy Bottom.
The aim is to distill the facts out of the legend, and if it is fulfilled Panama’s long-established American community would be able to know with more certainty about a prominent figure of its early days.
The Panama Historical Society meets on the first Wednesday of every month, upstairs at the Balboa Niko’s at 7:30 p.m. Usually society business occupies a small part of the meeting, but these gatherings are always built around a presentation on some aspect of isthmian history.
Also in this section:
Association of Chinese-Panamanian Professionals' Kite Fair
Tracking down the Ran Runnels legend
Girl Scouts' 5k run
Afro-Panamanian Cultural Festival
