The rangers continued to serve the state after peace was made with Mexico. In 1862 the legislature passed a law for the protection of the frontier. This law provided for the raising of ten companies of rangers of one hundred men each. Each company was to be divided, and the two detachments stationed about one day’s ride apart, just beyond the settlements. The command of this regiment was given to Colonel J. H. Norris. He went at once to the frontier. He distributed his soldiers from the Red River to the Rio Grande, with orders for each company to send a scout every day from one station to the next, the scout to return the following day. This plan gave a patrol scout from Red River to the Rio Grande every day. In addition to this, each company kept out a flying scout all the time. “This,” remarks an old ranger (E. L. Deaton), “was a busy year for both rangers and Indians.” On the 8th of January, 1864, five hundred rangers, under Captains Gillentine, Fossett, and Totten, met and defeated two thousand Comanche Indians on Dove Creek in what is now Tom Green County. This was one of the last pitched battles fought with Indians on Texas soil. In later years the rangers have served as a sort of state police. Many a stronghold of cattle thieves has been raided by them; many a nest of desperadoes has been broken up; many a bitter neighborhood feud has been settled. At the present time (1896) there are about two hundred rangers in the service. They furnish their own horses, and receive forty dollars a month; their rations and their arms being supplied by the state. Some of those noted for steady nerve and daring courage among the ranger captains of earlier and later times are Colonel “Rip” Ford, Lawrence Sullivan Ross (since governor of Texas, and called by his old comrades “Sul” Ross), Colonel “Buck” Barry, Lieutenant Chrisman, Sergeants J. B. Armstrong and L. P. Selker, and Captains Tom Wright, Jesse Lee Hall, and L. B. McNulty. 5. A CLOUD IN THE SKY. In the spring of 1848 there appeared on the streets of Austin a young man wearing a costume which attracted much attention. It was composed of gray stockings and knee breeches, with a black velvet tunic and broad-brimmed, gray felt hat. The rather dashing-looking stranger was evidently French, but he called himself an Icarian. He was, in fact, on his way from New Braunfels, where he had been living, to Icaria, a new settlement near the Cross Timbers in Fannin County. This settlement was founded by Etienne Cabet (Ca-bā), a Frenchman who dreamed of establishing a community where nobody would be rich and nobody would be poor, but all money and other property would be held in common. Devotion to women and children, honesty, and the ability and willingness to work for the good of the brotherhood were the chief rules of the fraternity. They numbered in France in 1847 many thousand persons of all classes.