The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (16 page)

Woll held San Antonio until September 20, when he started back toward Mexico. In November a force of 750 Rangers and militia under Gen. Alexander Somervell marched toward Laredo on a retaliatory raid. They occupied the town on December 8, then continued down the Rio Grande, and on December 19, the force was ordered to return to Gonzales. A retaliatory blow—however minor—had been struck in Laredo, and as Jones had warned, Texas could not afford more heroes.

Hays and many of the other ranking Rangers joined Somervell in obeying the order. But some three hundred men, including prominent Rangers Big Foot Wallace and Samuel Walker, refused. Organizing themselves into a separate command under Col. William Fisher, they started toward Mier, southwest of the Rio Grande, about ten miles from the present city of Roma, Texas. The ensuing debacle, known to history as the Mier Expedition, was an act of sheer mutiny not involving Rangers in any sort of legitimate capacity. However, the roster included former and future Rangers, and the fate of the expedition had a far-reaching impact on Texan-Mexican relations. For those reasons, some discussion is in order.

The three hundred Texans seized Mier, but soon found themselves surrounded and vastly outnumbered by Mexican regular troops. After a desperate battle on the town square, the survivors surrendered and were marched south into the Mexican interior. At Hacienda Salado, south of Saltillo, they overpowered their guards and escaped. Some died in the wastes of northern Mexico, and others simply disappeared. A scant handful, including Ranger Nelson Lee, managed to reach Texas and safety. The remainder, unfamiliar with the country, were rounded up and returned to Salado, where Santa Anna ordered them decimated by firing squad. There being 176 prisoners, a jar was filled with 159 white beans and seventeen black beans. A white bean meant life; a black one death.
⁴⁵

The drawing was in alphabetical order, and when it reached
W,
Big Foot Wallace found only a few beans left on the bottom of the jar. His hand, which was as outsized as his feet, barely fit in the neck, and he had to feel around for a bean with two fingers. It was white. When he gave it to the Mexican officer supervising the drawing, the latter grasped his hand and called the other officers to come look at its size. Wallace would remember the man because of that incident.
⁴⁶

The men who had drawn the black beans were shot immediately after the lottery, and an eighteenth man, Capt. Ewen Cameron, was later shot near Mexico City on special orders of Santa Anna because Cameron had led the initial break at Hacienda Salado. The remainder, including Wallace and Sam Walker, joined Woll’s prisoners from San Antonio in the grim fortress of Perote on the road between Mexico City and Veracruz.

WHILE THE SAN
Antonio and Mier prisoners sat in Perote, waiting repatriation and nursing their hatred toward Mexico and all things Mexican, life at home returned to normal. Texans are a resilient people, and Houston, eager to reestablish some semblance of peace, confined his efforts against Mexico to diplomacy. As early as September 14, 1842, with Woll in San Antonio, the president had written Jack Hays:

The situation of our frontier is very unhappy in its influence upon the prosperity of individuals, as well as upon the general interests, settlement and growth of our country. To remedy existing evils is a matter of primary importance to our situation. You are so situated [in San Antonio] that you can determine what course will be proper and safe to pursue. I have thought that advantage might result to us if trade were opened to San Antonio and to such other points as would be safe. In 1838 we had friendly relations and commerce with Mexico, so far as the frontiers were concerned, and had it not been for the cow boys and Canales and his gang, we would never have had any further troubles. . . .
⁴⁷

Hays himself appears to have been willing enough to comply. He realized that his Rangers were primarily scouts and mounted riflemen, more adept at fighting Indians and keeping an eye on Mexican movements than provoking an open conflict with Mexico. Most of his efforts continued around his Indian expeditions.

Between these expeditions the Rangers passed their time amusing themselves with the social and sporting life of San Antonio. Their profession was dangerous, and about half of all Rangers were killed every year. The life expectancy of the average Ranger upon joining the service was two years, and they intended to make the most of their leisure time. Cockfighting was a major event in San Antonio on Sundays. After church everyone, including the priest, joined in the sport. Most nights, the
tejanos
held dances and the Rangers attended. Hays himself “was sometimes seen whirling around with some fair señorita.”
⁴⁸

Economics still plagued Texas, and eventually the Ranger companies authorized under the 1841 defense acts were disbanded. Houston, however, was certain theTexas Congress would authorize a new peacekeeping force, and when Hays called on him in January 1844, the president suggested he arm his men from the Texas Navy’s supply of Colt’s revolvers. From his own experience, Hays knew the value of the weapon. After getting an order from the secretary of war, he went to the naval depot at Galveston, where he drew the revolvers, extra cylinders and bullet molds, and other accessories. The Colt’s revolver’s time had come.
⁴⁹

AS ANTICIPATED, THE
Texas Congress approved a new defense act, designating Hays by name to command a Ranger company of forty privates and one lieutenant. They were to be enlisted for four months, although this could be extended by presidential order in an emergency.
⁵⁰
And, thanks to Houston’s foresight, they were armed with revolvers. As a frontier weapon, the Colt’s had its baptism of fire on June 8, 1844, after reports arrived in San Antonio of Indian depredations along the Guadalupe River northwest of the city. Hays, who was now a major, took fifteen of his new Rangers, including Sam Walker, who had returned to Texas following his release from Perote. They hunted for the Indians as far as the Pedernales River west of Austin and, finding nothing, were returning home when they discovered the Comanches had crossed their trail and were following them.

A small group of warriors taunted the Rangers, retreating when the Texans started toward them. Surmising this was a decoy party trying to lead him into a trap, Hays ordered his men to take cover in a stand of timber. As the Rangers neared the woods, however, the main band of Comanches emerged from the trees. Hays estimated “some sixty-five or seventy warriors . . . led by two especially brave and daring chiefs.”

The Rangers charged, and after a vicious hand-to-hand fight, the Indians slowly began falling back. One of the chiefs, however, started exhorting the warriors, raising himself up in his saddle and gesturing to hit the Rangers one more time.

“Any man who has a load, kill that chief,” Hays ordered.

“I’ll do it,” Richard Addison (Ad) Gillespie answered, and, taking careful aim with his long rifle, he shot the chief out of his saddle.

The Indians charged a second time. The Rangers used their revolvers, “two cylinders and both loaded,” one survivor recalled.

“The repeating pistols, the ‘five shooters’ made great havoc among [the Indians],” Indian Superintendent Thomas Western reported to Houston, “some 30 or more were the killed and wounded, finally they fell back carrying off their dead and wounded and encamped in sight, where they remained, the belligerent camps in sight of each other. . . .”
⁵¹

Sam Walker was badly wounded—at first the Rangers feared mortally—and Gillespie was severely injured. Hays was afraid to move them, so he sent one of his men into San Antonio for help. The Indians were too badly battered to travel far, and the two camps glared at each other across the prairie until Ben McCulloch arrived with twelve more men. The Indians departed, and the Rangers remained in place until Walker and Gillespie were well enough to be moved.
⁵²

Walker recovered from his wounds and drew a sketch of the fight showing a small band of pistol-packing Rangers chasing a horde of Indians. He sent the sketch to Sam Colt, who had artist W. L. Ormsby engrave it on the cylinders of the heavy .44-caliber six-shooters introduced in 1847. Ormsby’s imaginative interpretation erroneously depicts the Rangers as uniformed soldiers, but this does not detract from the cold, functional beauty of the weapon.
⁵³

Chapter 5

Bound for the Rio Grande

As frontier defenders of an independent nation, Hays, Walker,
and other Rangers were fighting for a lost cause. But in 1844, most Texans never would have admitted their days as a sovereign people were drawing to a close. In that year’s presidential election, when annexation to the United States was a key issue, they supported Dr. Anson Jones, an opponent of annexation, over frontiersman Ed Burleson, who advocated it.

Jones probably was the most capable of Texas’s three constitutional presidents. Despite his election stand, his service as Houston’s secretary of state made him cold-bloodedly realistic. He knew that if the Republic could not stabilize its finances and conclude a formal peace with Mexico, its position in the international community would be increasingly precarious.

During his second term, Sam Houston had bowed to public sentiment by strengthening commercial relations with Great Britain and France. This, combined with the dispute between the United States and Great Britain over possession of Oregon, awakened American fears of European encirclement. American emotions also were stirred by the treatment of the Santa Fe and Mier prisoners. Thus, even as Texas was electing an anti-annexation president in Jones, the United States elected a pro-annexation president, James K. Polk.

Whether Jones actually believed his own campaign rhetoric or simply was playing the United States against the European powers to secure the best bargaining position remains debatable. Whatever his own thoughts, when the United States finally offered favorable annexation terms, Jones started the machinery in motion for a convention and public referendum on the issue.¹

In June 1845, as the question was being decided, the United States ordered Bvt. Brig. Gen. Zachary Taylor to assemble two thousand troops at Fort Jessup, Louisiana. The Texas government had demanded a strong American military presence for protection in case the country opted for annexation. American expansionism had alarmed Mexico, and the Mexican government was now prepared to formally recognize the independence of Texas as a buffer state against the United States. But Mexico was equally clear that annexation could lead to armed conflict.²

THE CONVENTION ASSEMBLED
July 4 in Austin and opted to join the United States. Now the American troops were needed along the disputed area between the Nueces and Rio Grande to block any move Mexico might make during Texas’s last months as a sovereign nation. The first of Taylor’s troops embarked for Corpus Christi Bay on July 22.
³

On August 6, the U.S. adjutant general, Roger Jones, ordered Taylor to contact the Texas government about raising local troops. Because the United States had no provision for paying Texans (they were still foreign citizens), they would be called into service only in the event of a Mexican invasion. In that case, however, Jones was certain the U.S. Congress would authorize pay.
⁴

Taylor also got a letter from Jack Hays, offering to form “a Volunteer Company of Mounted Men” in San Antonio. The general was already aware of Hays’s “reputation as a partisan,” and on September 12, Taylor’s adjutant and son-in-law, Capt. W. W. Bliss, wrote to advise him the company would be mustered into service in conformity with U.S. Militia regulations. Hays would serve as major, and the company would function as Rangers.

This company will be particularly charged with the duty of procuring intelligence of the movements of the Mexicans and protecting the Frontier against Indian Depredations, and the General desires me to say that he places great confidence in your known activity and experience in Frontier service. [Taylor’s] own instructions from the U.S. War Department enjoin him not to disturb any Mexican Establishment on this side [of] the Rio Grande unless it be rendered necessary by an attack or demonstration . . . and he therefore wishes it particularly understood that you are not to push your scouts into the Mexican settlements or commit any overt act calculated to provoke hostilities.
⁵

Taylor and Bliss saw no problem with these instructions. They were professionals, prepared to carry out the military policy of their government without any personal animosity toward the Mexican people. But in Texas and Mexico, it was an entirely different matter. As U. S. Grant, then a young second lieutenant in the United States Army, noticed upon arrival at Corpus Christi, “The hostilities between Texans and Mexicans was so great that neither was safe in the neighborhood of the other. . . .”
⁶

A. J. Sowell, whose cousin was shot after drawing a black bean at Hacienda Salado, remarked that many Rangers “had old scores to settle with the Mexicans. Only three years before, some in the regiment had drawn [beans] for their lives and worked on the streets in chains, footsore and nearly starved.” They were not interested in policy. They wanted revenge.
⁷

No doubt Taylor was aware of the Texan attitude. While he needed the intelligence Hays might provide on Mexican movements, he seems to have been primarily interested in using the Rangers to cover the Indian frontier. They would serve a three-month enlistment, and if the war scare with Mexico subsided, could be mustered out by the end of the year. The first company was mustered into service in Victoria and Goliad counties in late September, under command of Capt. John T. Price. A few days later, on September 28, Ad Gillespie mustered a company in San Antonio. That, however, was as far as it went. The Indians were relatively quiet, and the Rangers hung around San Antonio, Victoria, and Goliad, while Taylor assembled and drilled his troops at Corpus Christi.
⁸