The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (17 page)

If the Americans were complacent, the Texans were certain of war and used the idle time to prepare. Ranger Robert Hall, who joined a company mustered by Capt. Ben McCulloch, spent $25 for “the finest bowie knife I ever saw.” He knew that Mexican
rancheros,
the irregular equivalents of Mustang Gray’s “cow-boys,” fought with lariats, roping an enemy around the neck, jerking him off his horse, and dragging and choking him to death.
⁹

ON FEBRUARY 24,
Taylor started marching overland toward the Rio Grande. Texas was now an integral part of the United States, and the new governor, J. Pinckney Henderson, had been notified to expect quotas of troops for federal service. Taylor himself was to enforce the Texas–U.S. claim of the Rio Grande as the boundary. On March 21, the troops reached the Arroyo Colorado, a northern channel of the river, driving off a small contingent of Mexicans that threatened them from the south bank.
¹⁰
The following day, Taylor took the bulk of his forces to Point Isabel (now Port Isabel) to seize the port facilities as a depot and erect an earthen defense work. Once that was done, he moved to the main channel of the Rio Grande, opposite Matamoros, about twenty miles above the mouth of the river, where work began on a second set of earthen fortifications.
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In San Antonio, meanwhile, Ranger enlistments had expired. Tired of the inactivity, Sam Walker took a large contingent south to join Taylor in hopes of finding some excitement. The timing was right. Although Taylor considered Texans an undisciplined rabble, he was in a bad spot. He was ignorant of the country, and one patrol that clashed with the Mexicans was unable even to relocate the scene of their fight, much less recover the body of an officer who had been killed in the skirmish. Taylor’s quartermaster, Col. Truman Cross, had wandered away from camp and was captured and killed by
rancheros,
indicating a need for American irregulars who could function as scouts and counterguerrilla fighters. The situation was all the more acute because a shift in Mexican forces threatened his supply line.
¹²

“There is no doubt the enemy are crossing the river, and that all communication with Point Isabel is extremely hazardous,” one officer noted.
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About this time, Walker arrived in Point Isabel with seventy-seven men ready to serve as Rangers. The commanding officer, Maj. John Monroe, ordered him to gather intelligence and establish communications with General Taylor. They were formally mustered into federal service for a three-month enlistment on April 21. Three days later, a company of dragoons under Capt. Seth Thornton clashed with a large contingent of Mexican regulars in territory claimed by the United States. Sixteen were killed and the rest taken back to Matamoros as prisoners. Taylor considered this an act of war and called on Governor Henderson to send four regiments of troops—two mounted and two infantry—to augment Walker’s Rangers.
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Samuel Hamilton Walker was the classic mercenary who, in another era, might have been a Swiss Guard or a Foreign Legionnaire. Sometimes called “Mad Walker” because of his reckless bravado, he enjoyed fighting and appeared to have a natural gift for logistics and command. A native of Maryland, he had served in the U.S. Army in the Seminole Wars and had written a monograph on the command system. As the fighting in Florida drew to a close, he left the army and went to Texas in hopes of finding further use for his talents on the frontier. His arrival in 1842 coincided with Woll’s Raid on San Antonio, and he joined Somervell’s expedition. He was among the Mier prisoners, drew a white bean, and was incarcerated in Perote. Upon being repatriated in 1843, he joined Jack Hays’s company, and he had been a Ranger ever since.
¹⁵

J. H. Kuykendall, who met the thirty-two-year-old Walker shortly after the latter’s arrival in Texas, recalled:

There was nothing in the personal appearance of Capt. Walker that denoted the hero. His intellect was mediocre and not much cultivated, but he was modest, moral, high-minded, and the “bravest of the brave.”
¹⁶

Despite such accolades, and his casual attitude and appearance, he had a well-earned reputation as a man who took few prisoners.
¹⁷

ON APRIL 28,
rancheros
attacked Walker’s camp on the plain between Point Isabel and Matamoros. Walker himself was scouting with his most experienced men, leaving the camp in the hands of recruits, who apparently grew careless. Of the fifteen Rangers in the fight, five were killed and five listed as missing. One of the missing men reportedly was lariated to death, a fate that unsettled the Americans, who had never seen the method.
¹⁸

This attack, together with reports of a large force of Mexican regulars crossing the river below Matamoros, convinced Monroe that his depot was threatened. Late on the night of April 29, Walker and six Rangers slipped out of Point Isabel and started toward Taylor’s camp on the Rio Grande. They were within eight miles of the river when they encountered Mexican troops stretched across the prairie in front. There was a quick conference to discuss the best means of going around them when, in the words of Nelson Lee, Walker “coolly announced he was going
through
them.”

The Rangers started their horses toward the Mexican line at a walk. Because their attire was very similar to that of the
rancheros,
the Mexicans apparently mistook them and made no challenge. Then, at fifty yards, Walker ordered a charge. “Instantly the spurs were buried deep in the sides of our good horses, which bounded forward like the wind, and greeting them with a terrific yell, we dashed right through,” Lee wrote. The Mexicans were so startled that the Rangers were a good 150 yards beyond before anyone had the presence of mind to shoot at them. The Texans rushed up toward Taylor’s fortified camp, waving a white handkerchief to the American dragoons coming out to meet them.
¹⁹

Concerned for his depot, Taylor took the bulk of his troops back to the coast. The nearly completed fort on the Rio Grande was left under command of Maj. Jacob Brown. The threat against Point Isabel proved to be a false alarm, but on May 3, the American troops camped by the bay heard cannon fire from the direction of the Rio Grande. After one unsuccessful attempt to communicate by courier and cavalry escort, Taylor sent Walker and his men. The Rangers slipped into the fort a little before 3
A.M.
, May 4, found it under bombardment from artillery emplacements in Matamoros, and returned to Point Isabel with a report from Brown. After strengthening his defenses at the depot, Taylor ordered his army back toward the river and prepared for battle.
²⁰

There is no record that Rangers were actively involved in the American victories at Palo Alto on May 8 or Resaca de la Palma the following day. The former was an artillery duel fought at long range, and the latter largely depended on infantry. The siege of the fort was lifted, the defeated Mexican army withdrew, and Taylor occupied Matamoros. The fort itself was designated Fort Brown, in honor of its commander, who was killed during the bombardment.

WHILE THE COUNTRY
celebrated its victories, Taylor tackled the problem of conducting a war. He desperately needed troops. Price’s Rangers had arrived from Victoria and Goliad, but so far his was the only state contingent besides Walker’s.
²¹
Nevertheless, volunteers were coming, though not always with enthusiasm. James K. Holland, a member of a Ranger company recruited in Harrison County in east Texas, remembered the departure for the war zone on May 24.

We left Elysian Field on this day about 11 o’clock—for the Rio Grande—women in tears, God bless them—their tears would make a recreant brave—we all felt gloomy of course for such a separation I look upon as worse if possible than death—for when death comes upon us the grief subsides and now we are parting from our friends perchance never to meet again—which leaves them in miserable suspence as to our future fate but such is the call—let us respond like men—like Texians.
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Throughout July, Texans banded together to organize the First Texas Mounted Rifles as part of the state’s quota for federal service. When the enlistments expired for Walker’s and Price’s Ranger companies, they were reenlisted into the new regiment. Jack Hays was named colonel and Sam Walker lieutenant colonel. Seven of the ten company captains were Rangers, and the regiment incorporated so many former Rangers that it remained essentially a Ranger unit.
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Weapons carried by these Ranger/soldiers appeared to be a mixture of personal property and arms and equipment drawn from U.S. ordnance officers when they reported for duty. In Walker’s case, it included Colt’s revolvers, because by now his belief in them was absolute. When mustered into federal service, he drew as many revolvers as he could get his hands on—thirty-two in all—for issue to his men.
²⁴
Besides the Colt’s revolver, an idea of Ranger weaponry can be formed by an inventory of federal arms and accessories provided by Walker’s company in Matamoros on July 22, 1846:

9    Colts revolving carbines

3    Contract brown full stock rifles

6    Halls Carbines

9    Carbine or Rifle Cartridge boxes

3    do. do. waist belts

7    do. do. do. plates

4    Colts Bullet Moulds

3    do. Pistol Flasks

3    Colts wrenches & screwdrivers

2    Rifle Wipers

4    Capper Flask’s

5    Rifle Pouches
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ONE OF THE
most prominent units in the First Texas was a company commanded by Ben McCulloch and known as McCulloch’s Rangers. Like so many Texans of his era, McCulloch was a Tennessean, born in Rutherford County, November 11, 1811. That part of the state was still a wilderness, and the McCulloch children received the rudiments of formal education augmented by good frontier sense. The family supplemented its farm diet by hunting, and the boys learned to be self-reliant. Frontiersman and congressman Davy Crockett was a neighbor, and Ben was a close friend of his sons, particularly William Crockett, who was about the same age.

In 1833, Ben McCulloch and his brothers began rafting logs down the Mississippi to New Orleans, as well as flatboating cargo. In 1835, McCulloch returned from one of his rafting ventures to find Crockett on the verge of losing his Congressional seat, and Old Davy mentioned the possibility of going to Texas. Crockett left for Texas in October of that year, and Ben and his brother Henry soon followed. They arrived as the War of Independence broke out.

McCulloch served with distinction in the war, and after the battle of San Jacinto received a field promotion to lieutenant of the artillery. After a brief stint in the army, he traveled back to Tennessee, but returned to Texas and served a term in Congress before joining the Rangers, where he distinguished himself against Comanches at Plum Creek and other fights. In the summer of 1846, he was thirty-four years old, six feet tall with light hair, but his fair skin and features were rough from long exposure to the Texas sun. One of his most striking traits was his clear blue eyes, which stand out even in the primitive photographs of the period.
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Samuel Reid, who resigned his appointment as adjutant of a Louisiana Volunteer regiment in hopes of finding more excitement with the Rangers, recorded his first impressions when he joined McCulloch’s company in Matamoros on July 1, 1846.

Here was a scene worthy of the pencil. Men in groups with long beards and moustaches, dressed in every variety of garment, with one exception, the slouched hat, the unmistakable uniform of a Texas Ranger, and a belt of pistols around their waists, were occupied drying their blankets, cleaning and fixing their guns, and some employed cooking at different fires, while others were grooming their horses. A rougher looking set we never saw. They were without tents, and a miserable shed afforded them the only shelter. . . . Notwithstanding their ferocious and outlaw look, there were among them doctors and lawyers, and many a college graduate.
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There was a casual informality about the group. As McCulloch introduced Reid around the camp, one Ranger arrived with two ducks he had killed on a hunt. Walking up to the company commander, he said, “Ben, if you hav’nt [
sic
] had dinner, you’d better mess with me, for I know none of the rest have fresh grub to-day.”
²⁸

AS THE ARMY
settled in for occupation, complaints against it began to mount. Volunteer troops from throughout the Union were arriving and, not subject to the same discipline as regulars, doubtless took their cue from the Texans. Commenting to his fiancée, Julia Dent, Lt. U. S. Grant wrote: