The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (31 page)

The dismal record for 1871 had begun on January 24, when a large band of Kiowas and Comanches massacred four black teamsters on the Salt Creek Prairie between Fort Richardson and Fort Griffin. One of these teamsters was Britt Johnson, a freedman who had become a local hero when he arranged the ransom and recovery of almost all the prisoners taken by the Indians in the brutal Elm Creek Raid of 1864. On February 10, a settler named Steve Hampton was killed. Indians also attacked a ranch on the line between Montague and Wise counties. The owner was gone at the time but the raiders forced their way into the house and killed his wife, a widow who lived with the family, and all the children except an eight-year-old boy, who managed to escape, and an infant girl, who had been left for dead but was revived by the boy, who returned after the raid.
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To bolster the forces in the northwest, Capt. A. H. Cox was ordered to bring Company B to the Brazos, and Captain Sansom’s Company C was sent from the Hill Country to Fort Griffin, where Sansom became senior captain with jurisdiction over Cox and Baker. The settlers understood that whenever Indians attacked, a messenger would immediately take word to the nearest Ranger camp. Then settlers and Rangers would join together in pursuit. The problem was isolation. Sowell pointed out:

Sometimes the nearest neighbor being ten to twelve miles distant; and as the Indians generally raided in bands, from ten to three hundred in number, it would take some time, and a great deal of rapid riding to collect men enough to make a successful fight, if the raiding band was large. And often, the brave and hardy pioneers, would follow them, with an insufficient force, and suffer defeat, and sometimes massacre, then homes would become desolate along the border.
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Despite the odds, the Rangers were willing to try. Almost immediately upon arrival on the Brazos, Cox’s men had gotten into a running fight with a band of Indians, killing eight. Three Rangers were wounded because they were unfamiliar with Indian endurance—shooting down a warrior did not necessarily disable him unless he was actually dead. In each case, the Ranger had run up to a fallen Indian, only to find that he still had enough fight in him to inflict serious injury.

Dr. J. C. Nowlin, surgeon for Captain Sansom’s company, saw first-hand evidence of how much an Indian could take when he examined the body of a warrior killed in a fight near the head of the Big Wichita River. His horse shot from under him, the warrior had charged the Rangers on foot with his bow, sending arrow after arrow at the whites until he finally was killed and scalped. Dr. Nowlin noted he had been shot three times before he fell, and had an old wound that had made one leg shorter than the other.
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The efforts of these Rangers were all the more remarkable because they experienced constant shortages of even the most basic essentials, primarily because of the state’s failure to provide adequate funding. Typical is a series of letters from Captain Cox of Company B to Adjutant General Davidson:

On October 4, 1870, he wrote from Fort Richardson that his company’s horses and mules “need shoeing badly and I have neither Forge nor Tools.” The animals suffered from salt deficiency because no provision had been made for them. He also needed a supply of U.S. Army–size Colt .44 ammunition for his pistols and six thousand rounds of ammunition for Winchester rifles.
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On November 3, Cox wrote from Fort Griffin that he had borrowed subsistence rations from the military, but that he would probably have to relocate to Stephenville, ninety miles to the southeast, or perhaps even to Waco, in order to obtain provisions.
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On November 22, he again wrote, this time from Stephenville, “My Medical Officer reports to Me that he is without Medicines. I would respectfully request that Medical Supplies and Surgical Instruments for this company be forwarded as early as practicable as they are absolutely necessary.”
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DESPITE THE SHORTAGES
and the taint of the governor’s Radicalism, Davis’s Rangers were giving a good account of themselves. Company F’s Lieutenant Hill apparently was prepared to face down anyone who denigrated the Frontier Forces, because on May 17, 1871, he wrote to Davis that those who had opposed the Ranger bonds the year before “deny having done any thing to hinder the negotiation of the
bonds
.” The withdrawal of Rangers from the western part of Coryell County brought an immediate protest from its representative in the legislature.
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It is an interesting coincidence that Lieutenant Hill dated his letter to the governor May 17, for on that day, Gen. W. T. Sherman, general-in-chief of the United States Army, arrived at Fort Richardson on a visit that would change the entire focus of federal military policy in Texas.

Sherman discounted the hue and cry over Indians, believing that the Texans simply were trying to draw federal troops away from Reconstruction duty. The army had a vague western defense line of posts constructed after the war, including Fort Richardson, Fort Griffin, and Fort Concho, but Indian fighting had not been a priority. Despite his skepticism, Sherman had included the Texas forts on a general inspection tour, although upon his arrival at Fort Richardson, after a broad, circular trip through the state, he had seen nothing to convince him the Indian problem was more than hysteria.
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The general-in-chief was blissfully unaware that as he crossed the dangerous Salt Creek Prairie the last few miles before Fort Richardson, he had been watched by a war party of some 150 Kiowas and Comanches from Oklahoma. They easily could have overwhelmed his train, but had been restrained by their leader, the
do-ha-te,
or medicine man, Maman-ti, architect of many of the raids, who told them the oracles were against it. Wait one more day, Maman-ti advised, and a second party of whites would appear that would be easy plunder.

Maman-ti’s vision proved correct, because the following morning, a wagon train appeared, carrying corn to Fort Griffin on a government contract. The Indians attacked, killed seven teamsters, ransacked the wagons, and rode back to Oklahoma with the loot from the train and forty mules. Five whites managed to escape because they had run for the cover of some timber and the Indians were more interested in the wagons than in chasing them. That night two of the survivors, one badly wounded, managed to reach Fort Richardson, where Sherman personally listened to their account.

The general’s reaction was immediate. Troops were sent out in pursuit, and ultimately followed the Indians to the Kiowa-Comanche Reservation near Fort Sill. Upon arriving at Sill, Sherman arranged with the Indian agent to arrest three of the chiefs involved in the raid and send them to Texas for trial. One of the chiefs, an old warrior named Satank, jumped a guard and was killed at Fort Sill, but the others, Satanta and Big Tree, were tried and convicted of murder and sent to the penitentiary.

Now that Sherman had personally seen the result of Indian depredations, he was ready to assume responsibility for frontier defense. In Texas, the army’s priority shifted from Reconstruction to Indian fighting, relieving the Texas Rangers of much of their heavy burden.
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Meanwhile, throughout Texas, reaction was building against Davis and his Radical regime, and in a hotly contested election in the fall of 1873, voters elected Richard Coke governor. On January 17, 1874, Coke moved into the executive offices. Reconstruction in Texas was truly over and the state, once again, was in the hands of its own people.
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For the Texas Rangers, this was a turning point. The need for a militia or minuteman type of Ranger to defend the frontier was drawing to a close, and the era of the professional lawman was dawning.

Chapter 11

The Frontier Battalion

Texas in 1874 was changing, whether or not anyone consciously
recognized the fact. Rangers still fought Indians, but the U.S. Army had assumed the bulk of that responsibility. Although the Mexican border continued to simmer, the frontier as a whole was evolving into a less fluid, more stable society that needed law and order. Even if Texans did not want to admit it, Governor Davis’s State Police had demonstrated the value of a permanent constabulary, and his successor, Richard Coke, was ready to provide one, albeit more in keeping with the traditional guardians of the Texas frontier. On April 10, the legislature responded by creating the Frontier Battalion, Texas Rangers. In theory, the battalion served at the will and pleasure of the governor; in fact, it established the Rangers as a permanent, professional statewide gendarmerie. The era of the citizen-Ranger was over. For the duration of their enlistments, the men of the Frontier Battalion had no occupation in life save as Rangers.¹

Another significant difference was that for the first time in their history, the Rangers had civil police powers. This, according to Adjutant General Wilburn Hill King in his 1898 history of the service, “did not modify nor lessen their duties as soldiers, [but] it greatly widened their field of usefulness in another direction and brought them into closer touch with law-abiding people by giving them authority to act as peace officers.”² The authority was desperately needed because the state was rampant with stagecoach and train robbers, cattle and horse thieves, and fence cutters. The shift in priorities is demonstrated by the fact that during the first year of the Frontier Battalion’s existence, and despite many Indian fights during that year, the Rangers recovered twice as much stolen property from civil lawbreakers as from Indians.³

“This new work was less romantic than the old Indian warfare,” Ranger sergeant James B. Gillett later wrote, “but it was every bit as dangerous and as necessary in the building up of the fast developing state.”
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Coming largely from common backgrounds, familiar with the hardships of the frontier, and bound together in what they felt was a unique organization, the Rangers developed a sense of elitism. Describing his enlistment as a member of Capt. Dan W. Roberts’s Company D, Gillett recalled, “At ten o’clock we were formed in line, mounted, and the oath of allegiance to the state of Texas was read to us by Captain Roberts. When we had all signed this oath we were pronounced Texas Rangers. This was probably the happiest day of my life, for in joining the rangers I had realized one of my greatest ambitions.”
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Company D was one of six companies, designated A through F, established on May 6, 1874, when Adjutant General William Steele ordered the Frontier Battalion formally organized. Each company consisted of seventy-five men commanded by a captain and two lieutenants enlisted for a period of twelve months. “As it is expected that this force will be kept actively employed during their term of service,” Steele wrote, “only sound young men without families and with good horses will be received. Persons under indictment or of known bad character or habitual drunkards will be rejected.”

Captains received $100 a month; lieutenants, $75; sergeants, $50; and corporals and privates initially $40 each. Later, however, the parsimonious legislature reduced the pay for privates to $30 a month, “a mere pittance for the hazardous service demanded of them,” Gillett complained.
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THE FRONTIER BATTALION
was probably the best-organized and best-disciplined Ranger unit of the nineteenth century, and credit for this belongs to the battalion commander, thirty-nine-year-old Maj. John B. Jones of Corsicana. Captain Roberts of Company D called him “the right man in the right place.”
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Although he was soft-spoken and sparely built (he was about five feet eight inches tall and weighed about 135 pounds), Jones’s dignified bearing automatically won respect. Moreover, he was unique among the Rangers as an administrator and strategist. Where Ford, McCulloch, Hays, and other leaders had been tacticians and field officers, Jones was a supreme commander, viewing the frontier as a whole and placing entire companies where they would be most useful.
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A native of South Carolina, Jones was brought to Texas by his family in 1838. He enlisted as a private with Texas forces in the Confederate Army, ending the war as a major and brigade assistant adjutant general. After the war, a group of disgruntled Confederates who detested the idea of Republican rule sent Jones to Latin America to investigate the possibility of expatriate settlements. His grim report on conditions there influenced most of them to remain in Texas. He was elected to the legislature in 1868, but was denied his seat by the Radical Republicans. In short, he was the perfect man to restore public confidence in state law enforcement in the wake of Davis’s State Police.

Personally, the new major was abstentious. He neither smoked nor drank. His only vice appears to have been an addiction to coffee, developed in the field, where the stagnant, gypsum-saturated water was unsafe to drink straight from the pools. He was an active Freemason, ultimately becoming grand master of Texas.
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Jones did not tolerate the traditional casual attitude that heretofore had characterized the Rangers when they were not actually engaged in a fight. Inspecting Capt. W. J. Maltby’s Company E, he found “the men in good health and the horses in good order, but doing nothing at this time; the men are all in camp idle, their officers all absent.” Detailing the problem to Adjutant General Steele, he wrote:

I find it the most dificult [
sic
] thing to make the men of this command and some of the officers, understand that they are not at liberty to go home when they please or get substitutes or have their brother or friend take their place for a while. I have established the rule however and am determined to maintain it, hoping that I will be sustained by the Governor and yourself, otherwise I can have no system or discipline in the command.
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