Lone Star (112 page)

In northwest, west, and central Texas, the problem was internal, generated by the disorder in Anglo society itself after 1864. In the far south, along the Rio Grande, it took an ethnic cast. The protracted warfare with Mexico was still being carried on. Raiders regularly crossed the Rio Bravo; by the 1870s the lower valley's old nemesis, Cheno Cortinas, directed a huge rustling and cattle smuggling ring out of Mexico. Cortinas was a Mexican patriot and politico, but he shipped tons of Texas beef to Cuba and other points.

Meanwhile, something was being done to end the chaos. When the state government again came under Texan control after a lapse of nine years in 1874, the legislature moved quickly. It reconstituted the Texas Rangers, an act which Reconstruction and Carpetbagger policy had always opposed. Two separate and distinct paramilitary forces were created. The first, the Ranger Special Force, was designed to operate along the Rio Grande and bring Mexican depredations to a halt on that frontier. The second, called the Frontier Battalion, was to become the most famous constabulary in American history. The Frontier Battalion had two missions: a primary one to protect the Indian frontier in the west and a secondary mission to clean up the state behind the frontier line.

Two disparate but entirely effective officers were put in charge of each command. Each, in his own way, was to blaze a legendary trail in Texas history, and leave a marked impression on the thinking of the state.

The old triangle in which the cattle kingdom was born fell into sheer chaos in the aftermath of the Civil War. Its upper fringes were scarred by intramural wars and feuds among Texas ranchers arising out of the disorder of the Carpetbagger years. More serious, large-scale cattle rustling and raiding was initiated from across the Rio Grande. Kickapoos, Mescaleros, Lipans, and other small bands of Indians took to riding across the river between Piedras Negras, opposite Eagle Pass, and Laredo. Further south, between Laredo and Brownsville, the lower valley's implacable enemy, Cheno Cortinas, organized and sponsored vaquero raids. There was a definite alliance, at least for the disposal of booty, between Indians and Mexican officials or powerful rancheros. The basic cause of these attacks was not so much the underlying hostility between American and Mexican as the eternal disorder in Mexico.

After heavy fighting in the north, between Republicans, French, Belgians, Austrians, and Imperialists, United States pressure—there were 52,000 Federal troops on the Mexican border in 1865—caused the French to withdraw from Mexico. Maximilian's empire soon collapsed in defeat and ruin. Despite international protests, Maximilian and his faithful general, Tomás Mejía, were condemned and shot to death at Querétaro in 1867. But this did not bring peace to Mexico. Two generations of internal disorder had fostered anarchy.

The government of Mexico, whether federalist-liberal or centralist-conservative, was not deliberately hostile to the United States. In fact, there was a considerable amount of goodwill engendered by American diplomacy against the French. The problem was that the regimes in the City of Mexico had no real control over the distant marches. There was no infrastructure of citizenry in Mexico. There was a governmental clique, always holding power by some resort to arms, and under this a group of varyingly powerful great landholders,
hacendados
and
rancheros
, who stood between the official government and the mass of common people. These
hacendados
in reality were the local governments, whether they held the titles of state governors, or merely generals; they commanded their own local armies, usually raised upon their own lands. These local warlords engaged in local power struggles; they were uncontrollable from the capital in the 1860s and 1870s; and in the north, few of them naturally had any love for Texas.

They permitted raiding, if they did not actually instigate it. Cortinas, who had become a powerful figure below the river, actually was the chief contractor supplying large amounts of beef to the Cuban market. This beef was all stolen from the American side. Significantly, on one occasion Cortinas entered a border town and hanged the
alcalde
and another man for interfering with the crossing of stolen cattle. This rustling was not a small business. The King Ranch alone lost thousands of head during this period.

General J. J. Reynolds, who commanded the U.S. Army in Texas in 1871, made the following report, in part:

The gradual but heavy loss of property is very discouraging to the people; they are becoming restless, not to say desperate, and seeing the apparent determination of Mexican officials to retain the Kickapoo Indians in Mexico, as a cloak for the evil deeds of the Mexican people, they talk now quite freely of organizing themselves into armed bands and crossing into Mexico to recover their stolen property.

. . . The ranchmen live from ten to thirty miles apart, and incursions from the south side of the Rio Grande . . . cannot be prevented by a reasonable force in Texas, unaided by any force, civil or military, from the Mexican side.

It is believed that these depredations can be effectually and permanently stopped by pursuing marauding bands into Mexico with troops accompanied by owners of the stock and records of the brands.

In July 1871, the
Daily State Journal
at Austin reported:

. . . The stock west of the Nueces is being driven over the Rio Grande by every available pass. At one crossing in Hidalgo County five thousand head of beeves have been driven since last June . . . for the merchants and traders in Mexico, who receive the stolen property and are the allies and sleeping partners of the thieves.

It is also charged that General Cortina[s], commanding the Mexican forces on the Rio Grande, protects and shelters this organized robbery, so that no redress can be obtained from Mexican law. Unless something . . . is done . . . the stock interest between the Nueces and the Rio Grande will be ruined. The thieves ride in companies, well mounted and strongly armed. They defy the resistance of the scattered ranchmen, and in broad daylight harry the country . . .
 

A federal commission made essentially the same report in 1873. It called strongly for "protection due citizens and residents whose members have been depleted by the arrow of the Indian and the knife and pistol of the Mexican assassin."

The raids were bloody and brutal. In Encinal County two ranches were besieged by bands of forty raiders, and Live Oak County was harassed; these areas were more than a hundred miles from the river. There were literally dozens of small depredations and individual killings. At Howard's Well, a particularly hideous event occurred in April 1872: twenty Mexican bandits, accompanied by some Indians, captured a group of American teamsters and tortured them to death by fire. In this border warfare, there was very little to distinguish between Indian and Mexican cruelty. The principal difference was that the Mexicans came during the dark of the moon.

The Texans responded to robbery and cruelty with characteristic brutality. Unfortunately, this fell primarily upon the ethnic Mexicans of south Texas; the white population was as little able to distinguish between a peaceable Mexican resident and a raider as it was between Cherokees and Comanches. The "minute" companies around Corpus Christi staged counterraids, not across the border, but against suspected ethnic Mexican allies of the bandits. On one of these excursions, eleven men were executed. The Mexican population seethed with unrest, but this was even less heard in the United States than the protests of the ranchers.

The government did bring pressure on Mexico to remove the Kickapoo Indians, which both governments, by a sort of diplomatic fiction, decided were the main cause of the depredations. This did not relieve the lower valley. As one Texas editor, reflecting the viewpoint of all Anglo-Texans, wrote: "The State Department made a pretense of
protesting
and
protesting
and PROTESTING." The disgust for such protests, which received polite replies but accomplished little, was choleric and profound. But Washington believed the only solution had to be political, not military; Reynolds's and other officers' recommendations were not followed.

The military itself was powerless to defend the border. Two hundred and sixty miles of almost unsettled ranch country extended along the river from Eagle Pass to Brownsville. On dark nights raiders could ford the river in hundreds of places. The U.S. garrisons were composed of Negro infantry, whose radius of operations against mounted bandits was pitifully small. Robert E. Lee had written that 20,000 soldiers were required to police this frontier; the Congress had no intention of stationing such a number or even the requisite but much more expensive cavalry.

For logical reasons, but reasons no Texan accepted, the raiding and bloodshed went on, keeping blood feuds and mutual hatred alive on both banks.

In the spring of 1874, Captain Leander H. McNelly of the newly reconstituted Rangers had been diverted to DeWitt County, south of Gonzales, by an outbreak of the smoldering Sutton-Taylor feud. This, like all the countywide feuds that erupted during these years, was beyond the ability of local peace officers to control. Sheriffs were intimidated, juries suborned, and witnesses, more often than not, murdered outright. If parties were arrested, jail breaks were common. Terror ruled, and a continual, guerrilla warfare ensued, drawing in more and more men on either side. Bands of armed men congregated, who in some cases degenerated into rebellious mobs. Court writs were powerless, because they could rarely be served; local officials had to move warily in counties almost evenly divided between two armed camps. McNelly did not accomplish much toward ending the Sutton-Taylor affair; only time could end blood-feud hatreds, but he damped it. Armed Rangers could serve writs and guard prisoners and make arrests; they created a climate in which the law could gradually reassume its place.

But the raiding situation further south was coming to a boil. In April 1875, Adjutant General Steele received the following wire from John McClure, the Nueces County sheriff: "Is Capt. McNelly coming. We are in trouble. Five ranches burned by disguised men near La Parra last week. Answer."

Steele's answer was to send McNelly, with authority to form a Special Company of forty men, to the border region. Ranger captains, armed with the state's commission, recruited their own men, and like Ford, McNelly enlisted men on whom he could rely. They were young, horse-hardened youth; the youngest, Berry Smith, had had no experience; he was barely sixteen. Smith enlisted because his father was in the troop.

McNelly was a great captain. He was the epitome of the Texan in action, and he set a record of courage, cunning, and audacity that was never to be surpassed. McNelly himself was young, just thirty-one. He had been a partisan soldier for the Confederacy as a teenager in the Civil War, later served in Davis's State Police. Nothing was more revealing of his ability, honesty, and his reputation than the fact that he went from the State Police to the Rangers with equivalent rank. In Davis's service he had been blunt, outspoken, incorruptible, and had been seriously wounded in battle with outlaws.

He was a "tallish man of quiet manner, and with the soft voice of a timid Methodist minister," Webb wrote. There was very little braggadocio when men still went armed on the Texas frontier. McNelly ruled by example and force of personality; he was never a formal disciplinarian, but as Callicott, one of his privates said, there was no man in the Special Force that would not have stepped between the captain and death. McNelly was superbly equipped for his time and place. He left a legend that other leaders could never quite live up to.

McNelly rode into the triangle in May 1875. He found a veritable state of war. Iron-handed, he ordered both groups of armed Mexicans and Texans who were coalescing to disband, and very probably averted a civil war. McNelly was not fooled as to the true situation; he wrote the Adjutant General: "The acts committed by Americans are horrible to relate; many ranches have been plundered and, burned, and the people murdered or driven away." These orders were instantly obeyed. But McNelly also knew the source from whence trouble flowed. He rode on to the Rio Grande at Hidalgo, then to Brownsville.

Here he found much alarm in the countryside, and Potter, the commandant at Fort Brown, with only 250 Negro soldiers, admitted he could not control. McNelly reported this situation, and added: "I think you will hear from us soon."

McNelly believed in intelligence, and like most capable Rangers, he formed his own network. He learned that a ship stood three miles off Bagdad, awaiting beef for Cuba, and that a number of Cortinas's cronies were operating on the Texas side. He planned to ambush a raiding party, and he went about it coolly and efficiently. Everything that now happened did not enter his report, clear and concise as it was.

McNelly's methods can only be judged in the anarchy and terror of his times. He was not a law-man, but a guerrilla soldier, in a land where there the established formal law was a fiction. He had been sent to stop the raids, and his verbal orders were quite clear: to deal with cattle thieves as the Frontier Battalion dealt with Indians. He was empowered to kill any rustler caught north of the river, and to take no prisoners. He understood partisan warfare, and the Rangers were considered a military force, not policemen.

One of McNelly's Rangers was a Texas-Mexican cowman named Jesús Sandoval. The Anglo Rangers called this man "Casuse." Sandoval, along with an American, had some ten years before caught four Mexican bandits and hung them all to one tree, and thus began a blood feud with the Mexicans south of the Bravo. He could not live in his own house for fears of la venganza. He knew the country, and almost every inhabitant in it, and McNelly gladly enlisted him when he applied. Sandoval went on the rolls at $40 a month, the same as the Anglos, and he was issued a Colt .45 and a needle gun, or one of the new center-fire Springfield rifles with which the Rangers were armed. Sandoval was to prove invaluable.