The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (33 page)

THE KIOWAS, MEANWHILE,
were settling down for a siege. In a murder raid, the purpose was enemy scalps with no losses to their own side, and they were taking no unnecessary chances. The day was hot and the Rangers were about a mile from the nearest water. The Indians decided to wait them out. None of their own had been hurt. The wounded whites were calling for water, but Jones had forbidden anyone to try to reach the creek. Finally, as the sun began to go down and the firing slacked, Ranger Mel Porter said, “I’m going for water, if I get killed.”

“And I’m with you,” David Bailey replied.

They mounted and dashed for the creek. The others could see Bailey sitting on his horse by the bank keeping lookout while Porter filled the canteens. Suddenly, about twenty-five Indians moved in on them. The Rangers in the gully tried to signal by firing their guns, and Bailey shouted for Porter to flee. The two men took off in different directions.

Porter was caught by two warriors near the water hole. Keeping his nerve, he fired at them until his pistol was empty, then threw it at one of the warriors. Using his lance, the warrior levered Porter off his horse, but before he could kill him, firing from the injured Lee Corn and Wheeler drove off the two Indians. They were content to take Porter’s horse, while the Ranger dove into the creek and swam underwater until he came up by Corn and Wheeler. They stayed together until after dark, when they made their way to Loving’s ranch. Bailey was cut off, surrounded, and levered off his horse with a lance. Lone Wolf himself chopped his head to pieces with his brass hatchet-pipe, then disemboweled him.

The Kiowas were satisfied. They had killed at least one Ranger (actually two, because Billy Glass had died), and they began to leave. The badly mauled Rangers tied Glass’s body to a horse and rode back to Loving’s ranch. The Kiowas did not admit to any losses, although Jones claimed at least three had been killed. Glass was buried at Loving’s ranch. About 3
A.M.
the next day, they returned to Lost Valley under cover of darkness and recovered Bailey’s horribly mutilated body. At sunup, a detachment of cavalry arrived from Fort Richardson, and the Rangers and soldiers spent the rest of the day looking for the Indian trail before the Rangers returned to camp.
²⁵

Continuing his inspection tour after the Lost Valley fight, Jones came to Camp Eureka on the Big Wichita River, where he found Capt. E. F. Ikard’s Company C “too far out to render the most effective service” and ordered it into closer proximity to Stevens, so the two companies could come together in an emergency. Meanwhile, scouting parties from both Ikard’s and Stevens’s companies were in the field, keeping pressure on the Indians, and a party from Company C had actually raided a camp and captured forty-three horses and mules, some of which were claimed by citizens from whom they had been stolen.
²⁶

THE RED RIVER
War, which permanently broke the power of the Southern Plains tribes, was almost exclusively a military affair. The army relied on its own scouts, usually Tonkawas from Fort Griffin, Seminole-Negro soldiers from Forts Clark and Duncan, and buffalo hunters familiar with the region; the Rangers had very little role in the actual military operations. Sporadic raiding did continue, however, through the remainder of 1874 and into 1875, and Major Jones was determined that his battalion would be in a position to handle Indians or any other problem that arose.

“During the first six months of service,” Sergeant Gillett recalled, “nearly every company in the battalion had an Indian fight, and some of them two or three.”
²⁷

By December 1, Jones could report fourteen Indian fights, with fifteen warriors known dead, ten wounded, and one captured. “Twenty-eight trails [were] followed, on some of which the Indians were seen, but could not be overtaken, besides small trails found that were too old to follow,” he said.
²⁸

BESIDES FIGHTING INDIANS
and hunting badmen, one of the main duties of the Texas Rangers during the 1870s was handling “difficulties.” In a state where the gift for profound understatement is equal to the talent for gross exaggeration, the term describes differences of opinion or conflicts of interest that will not be resolved until somebody dies. During the nineteenth century, “difficulty” often meant a blood feud as bitter and vicious as any fought in the mountains of West Virginia or Kentucky. And in the decade after the Civil War, Texas abounded in such “difficulties.”

Blood feuds started for many reasons, but the most common was the bitterness caused by the war. As the eminent Texas historian and self-proclaimed “feud collector” C. L. Sonnichsen once noted, the only great outbreak of coordinated bloodshed during the antebellum period was the Regular-Moderator Feud in east Texas in the 1840s. Yet after the war, no sooner had the defeated Confederates returned home than the killing began. Whether the cause was Southerner vs. Northerner, Republican vs. Democrat, Unionist vs. secessionist, or citizen vs. carpetbagger, all had their roots in the great conflict. Throughout the 1870s, the Rangers not only defended the frontier but had to keep otherwise law-abiding Texans from murdering each other in spasms of organized hate.
²⁹

Rangers did not look for feuds, but handled them when ordered to do so. In at least one incident, the Mason County War, they became involved because they happened to be on the scene at the time. The violence in Mason County during the summer and fall of 1875 was a classic Texas communal feud. On one side were German settlers who had been predominantly Unionist during the Civil War and were prosperous stock raisers. On the other were the Anglo-Saxons, resentful former Confederates whom the Germans blamed for an upsurge of cattle thefts in the area.

The killing began in earnest after Sheriff John Clark, a member of the German faction, arrested an Anglo-Saxon rancher named Lige Baccus, his cousin, and three employees, jailing them in the town of Mason on charges of cattle theft. That night a mob formed, and Clark, fearing a lynching, enlisted the aid of Capt. Dan Roberts and Ranger James Trainer, who were in town to buy grain for the Company D horses. The mob, however, stormed into the courthouse, pushed past Roberts and Trainer, rushed upstairs, and cornered Clark in his office. The invading men told the sheriff they meant no harm to him or the Rangers, but demanded that they stay out of the way. Seeing they were outnumbered, Clark told Roberts and Trainer to stand back while he went for help. The mob broke down the door of the jail, took the prisoners about half a mile down the Fredericksburg Road, and began stringing them up from a tree.

About that time, Clark arrived with the Rangers and five or six volunteers. Hearing gunshots, they opened fire and scattered the mob. Baccus, his cousin, and a cowhand were dangling from tree limbs. A fourth prisoner was lying dead “with his brains shot out,” accounting for the gunshots the lawmen had heard. The fifth victim, a man named Johnson, had managed to slip his noose in the confusion and had jumped a fence and fled. The cowhand was still breathing when cut down from the tree. Roberts threw some water on him and rubbed him until he regained consciousness. He could not talk until the next morning. A couple of days later, Johnson staggered into the Ranger camp asking for protection. He later fled the area, and since his departure coincided with the violent death of one prominent citizen and disappearance of another, Roberts suspected Johnson had evened the score on his way out of the country.
³⁰

The lynching set off a series of killings that polarized the Anglo-Saxon and German communities. Among those lending their guns to the Anglo-Saxon faction were Scott Cooley, a former Ranger with Company D, and famed gunman Johnny Ringo. They had a list of people they considered responsible for the deaths of prominent Anglo-Saxons, and they began a campaign of retribution. “No one could tell who would be the next victim of the unerring aim of Scott Cooley’s rifle,” one Ranger observed, “The people of the whole country rose in arms to protect themselves.”
³¹

MAJOR JONES WAS
inspecting Captain Roberts’s camp on the San Saba, about forty miles to the west, in late September when a special courier arrived from Austin with instructions to send a detachment to quell the violence in Mason County. Cutting his visit short, Jones personally took charge of ten men from Roberts’s Company D and, together with thirty from Lt. Ira Long’s Company A, rode toward Mason. At a place called Kellar’s Store, fifteen miles south of town, they encountered fifteen or twenty members of the German faction, armed with Winchesters, carbines, and revolvers. Upon learning that the Anglo-Saxons were supposedly also in the neighborhood, Jones decided to spend the night at Kellar’s Store, hoping to resolve the grievances by discussing the matter with both sides. If that failed, he advised Adjutant General Steele, “I shall resort to other means to quiet the disturbance.”
³²

Jones’s subsequent investigation determined his Rangers were too closely involved with the Anglo-Saxon faction to render an effective deterrent to the feud. Mason County was within the normal jurisdiction of Company D, and members of the company had friends among local citizens. Many Rangers had served with Scott Cooley, who was now wanted for several murders. A member of the company later admitted:

The Company D boys who had ranged with Cooley [were] in sympathy with the outlaw and . . . making no serious attempt to locate or imperil him. It was even charged that some of the Company D rangers met Cooley at night on the outskirts of Mason and told him they did not care if he killed every damned Dutchman [
sic
] in Mason County [involved in the feud].
³³

Jones responded by discharging three members of Company D and sending the remainder back to camp. Henceforth, he relied on Long’s Company A. The shake-up in the Rangers was the beginning of the end of the Mason County War. Most of Long’s men were from the interior of the state and had no friends or associates on either side. Unable to depend on Long’s Rangers for cover, Scott Cooley moved to Blanco County, where he died a few years later from a cerebral hemorrhage. Johnny Ringo was arrested for one of the killings, but charges were later dismissed.

Major Jones himself left Mason County on October 28, to continue his disrupted inspection tour. He had been in the county exactly one month. He left Lieutenant Long behind to maintain the peace, and the presence of these Rangers had a calming influence. The Mason County War was over.
³⁴

Chapter 12

The Rise of McNelly’s Rangers

The Mason County War was just one of the “difficulties” that caused
the decade of the 1870s to be known in Texas as “the Terrible Seventies.” There were many others, such as the Jaybird-Woodpecker Feud in Fort Bend County just south of Houston, the Horrell-Higgins Feud in Lampasas County northwest of Austin, and the Shackelford County Feud northeast of Abilene. They left in their wake broken families and painful memories. Most terrible of all was DeWitt County’s notorious Taylor-Sutton Feud, which, over the course of thirty years, left scores of people dead and prompted the legislature to create a special unit of peace officers “to assist the civil officers of DeWitt county in enforcing quiet and obedience to the law in that desperado ridden section.”¹

Although the new unit ultimately was absorbed into the regular Ranger Service, initially it was designated Washington County Volunteer Militia Company A. Informally, it was known as the Special Force, Texas State Troops, and McNelly’s Rangers after its commanding officer, Capt. Leander H. McNelly. Whatever its name, the special unit functioned as a ranging company that answered to Adjutant General Steele, and the men of the Washington County Volunteer Militia considered themselves Rangers. Like those of the Frontier Battalion, they were professional, full-time lawmen, and Captain McNelly was an experienced peace officer.²

A Virginian, Leander McNelly was about sixteen years old when he came with his family to Texas in 1860. During the war he served with Confederate forces in New Mexico and Texas and as a captain of scouts in Louisiana, where he gained a reputation as a tenacious fighter. George Durham, who served under McNelly as a Ranger, and whose father had served under him as a Confederate, described the tactics that were his hallmark: “General [Robert E.] Lee made his plans first and then fought. . . . Captain McNelly made his plans like a chicken hawk—after he had located his target and was coming in for the kill.”³

When the war ended, McNelly married and farmed near Brenham in Washington County, about midway between Austin and Houston. On July 1, 1870, he became one of four captains in Davis’s Texas State Police, despite his hatred of the governor’s Reconstruction regime. His reasons were obscure, but it has been suggested he accepted the position at the urging of friends, who perhaps believed that the best way to protect themselves was to have one of their own in command of a force that might oppress them. Whatever the motive, he soon established a reputation for integrity, although his determination to enforce the law—including the Reconstruction edicts—cost him some public confidence. Nevertheless, when the time came to appoint an officer to handle the trouble in DeWitt County, McNelly’s experience and character made him the logical choice.
⁴

Physically, McNelly was thin and frail, his naturally slight build wasted by tuberculosis. When he took command of the new unit he already was a dying man, which makes his career all the more remarkable. Soft-spoken and a sometime lay preacher, he nevertheless resorted to throat-cutting, lynching, and confessions through torture when they served his purposes.
⁵