The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (39 page)

Every house in this part of the country has been repeatedly fired into by armed men, from fifteen to twenty in number at a time. The ranchmen’s horses and cattle have been driven from their range, and even from pens at the houses, until the people are left almost destitute of means of support. If anyone had the temerity to protest against being robbed, he was told that he had just so many days to live if he did not leave the country. Some of those who had the courage to remain have been foully murdered.
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McNelly spent three or four days in Carrizo Springs, gathering information on Fisher and his headquarters. Much of it was obtained from a storekeeper who had trouble with the bandits. He also retained a boy named Drew Taylor, who knew the best route to Fisher’s ranch on Pendencia Creek, ten miles out of town, just beyond the north point of Lake Espantosa.

ESPANTOSA
IS A
Spanish word, more or less meaning “haunted.” Formed by an old channel of the Nueces River, Lake Espantosa is notorious in that part of south Texas as a sort of ghost lake. Strange beings are said to appear in the mists that sometimes cover its surface. In frontier days, unwary travelers who camped there supposedly vanished without a trace. Even stagecoaches and wagons attempting to ford at night disappeared into its depths, according to local lore, and the spirits of the lost roam after dark. In modern times its banks are a lovers’ lane because its demonic reputation assures privacy, and in the nineteenth century it was a hangout for badmen for the same reason.
³⁰

If McNelly was even aware of the lake’s reputation, he was as indifferent to it as he was to Fisher’s reputation. Learning that Fisher would be home with about thirty men on a particular day, the captain decided to bring him in. He left a small guard in camp and took twenty-five men out toward Pendencia Creek. They were divided into two squads about two miles apart. Scouts rode ahead with orders to arrest anyone they saw. Fisher did not know the Rangers were coming, and McNelly did not intend for him to find out.

When the Rangers reached a fork where the road to Fisher’s ranch branched from the main trail, they found a sign that said:
THIS IS KING FISHER’S ROAD—TAKE THE OTHER.

Nearing the ranch, McNelly assembled his men in heavy brush, cautioning them, “There may be women present, so don’t shoot till they open fire. We’ll give them a chance to surrender.”

The Rangers formed into a skirmish line and slowly moved through the brush until they sighted the main house in a cottonwood grove. About half a dozen men were playing cards in a lean-to shed. The Rangers formed up in a half-circle, their Winchesters ready. McNelly raised his hand and they charged, jumping their horses over a small fence and coming into the yard.

Surprise was complete. The only show of resistance was when Ranger A. L. Parrott and Fisher gunman Frank Porter faced each other with leveled rifles, but Parrott followed a McNelly adage: no gunman could shoot if he was facing the officer and you had his eye. Parrott’s nerve held and Porter’s didn’t. The badman threw his rifle to the ground.

McNelly had just stepped through the door of the main house when Fisher came into the front room.

“I’m Ranger Lee McNelly,” he said. “Lock your hands behind your head and come out.”

Fisher didn’t argue.
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The Rangers took Fisher and nine of his men to Eagle Pass, on the Rio Grande about forty miles west of Carrizo Springs, and lodged them in the county jail. McNelly, whose health was failing, remained in camp sending scouting parties to comb the area and try to round up more of the gang. Two days later, he and several Rangers were taking a group of prisoners to Eagle Pass when they ran into Fisher and his men on their way home. Fisher boasted that they had made bail and could make bail anytime they were arrested.

Disgusted and undoubtedly in considerable pain, McNelly said, “If we ever come up here again, we’ll come to kill, and if you keep up your system of robbery and murder, you’ll be hearing from us.”

Fisher laughed.
³²

LEANDER MCNELLY PERSONALLY
was in no position to make good on his threat. His tuberculosis was entering its final stages, and he went to San Antonio for treatment. Some time later, several members of his company went to the city on business, making their headquarters at the Menger Hotel, where McNelly was bedridden. To avoid tiring him, Cpl. W. L. Rudd acted as go-between, but occasionally the others would go up to his room for a visit. During one of those visits, Durham noticed that McNelly “was just the same color as the bedsheets.” After a few minutes of conversation, the captain went into a coughing fit. Rudd took Durham by the arm and said, “Let’s get out.”

“But I couldn’t move,” Durham remembered. “I just looked at Captain and maybe sort of puddled up.”
³³

During their conversation, McNelly told Durham he expected the company to be disbanded after that year’s election. He had become too controversial. His strong-arm methods were a campaign issue, and his raids into Mexico were creating such furor along the border that some members of the legislature were pushing for appointment of a discreet, level-headed officer to the company, one who would curb the captain’s enthusiasm. This had been the reason behind Lee Hall’s appointment as lieutenant—to keep an eye on him and perhaps even to be groomed as his replacement. The Rangers suspected the latter. Durham commented that Hall’s arrival “meant Captain [McNelly] was on his way out. . . . So we didn’t fall over ourselves welcoming Lieutenant Hall.”
³⁴

KING FISHER STILL
ran loose, and the area above Laredo remained his private fiefdom. From his bed, McNelly ordered members of his company to clean up the Fisher gang. John Armstrong was to proceed to Carrizo Springs with twenty-five men and set to work. He started his men off that night. Determined to surprise Fisher, he ordered the men to carry only ammunition without the usual trail packs of extra equipment. They were to arrest anyone they saw. The following day, they remained in “dry camp,” which is to say no fires allowed for cooking or coffee, and that night came to the vicinity of Carrizo.

By sunup they had five prisoners, “and we persuaded them to talk,” Durham observed dryly. One of the prisoners was Noley Key, a young horse thief who associated with Fisher’s gang. According to Jennings, Armstrong “took Key aside and drew from him the information that a band of horse thieves were in camp on the banks of Lake Espantoso [
sic
], six or seven miles distant.” Durham was more explicit, admitting that they hoisted Key “a couple of feet off the ground” with a rope around his neck until he agreed to guide the Rangers.
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Key said there were about six or eight horse thieves holding a herd of horses stolen from east Texas, which would be driven northwest toward the Devil’s River in another day or so. King Fisher himself had departed for west Texas a couple of days earlier with 150 steers. That night, Armstrong set a guard over the prisoners and sent a detail to investigate bandit activities at another ranch. Then he took six Rangers and Noley Key toward the lake. They rode for about an hour until they were within a quarter of a mile of the camp, then dismounted. Rangers Thomas N. Devine and Thomas N. Evans were detailed to watch both the horses and Key. If Key tried to escape, they were to kill him. Although Armstrong said this within Key’s earshot to make certain he understood his situation, the prisoner was slightly deaf and may not have heard him.

Leaving the others behind, Armstrong, Durham, Jennings, A. L. Parrott, and George Boyd started on foot toward the horse thieves’camp.

“Boys,” Armstrong told them, “we are going to capture those thieves or kill them. The reason I did not bring more men along was because I was afraid that these fellows wouldn’t resist if we were so many. Key tells me that they stood off the sheriff and his posse a few nights ago, and so they’ll be looking for officers and be prepared to fight. That’s just what we want. If they only fire at us, we can rush in on them and kill them all. Nothing but that will break up this gang of cold-blooded desperadoes. I only hope they’ll show fight. Now, come along and don’t make any noise.”
³⁶

The Rangers slipped up, circling so that the desperadoes had their backs to the lake. By the light of the half-moon, they could see a sentry about fifty yards out from the camp. To the north were the shadows of the stolen horses with several riders as herd guard. Seven men sat around a large campfire. Before the Rangers could move in, however, the sentry saw them and fired.

“Damn you, you’ll shoot at an officer, will you?” Armstrong shouted.

“The scrap was on,” Durham commented. “We crouched and charged in with our repeater rifles blazing away, wasting ammunition. But we sprayed the camp good.”

Jennings added, “We rushed in on them and there was a continual blaze from the firearms.”

Caught between the Rangers and the lake, the thieves never got completely organized, and they fired haphazardly. Some jumped into the water, but three men, already wounded, held their ground and kept firing. One of them, a hard case named John Martin, emptied his pistol and threw it away, then drew a knife and started toward George Boyd. The Ranger raised his Winchester, but it jammed. He managed to jump backward as Martin slashed at him, then got out his own knife. Boyd was small, wiry, and light on his feet, while Martin was staggering from a bullet wound in his hip. Even so, he managed to cut Boyd before the Ranger jumped on him and the two tumbled into the lake. They rolled and splashed for a couple of minutes until Boyd emerged dizzy and bleeding heavily. Martin was dead.

Jennings, meanwhile, was facing a desperado named Jim McAlister. The badman was emptying his revolver and yelling loud obscenities when the Ranger fired. The bullet caught McAlister in his open mouth, and he went down with part of his jaw shot off.

The entire fight lasted only three or four minutes, but Jennings estimated two hundred shots were fired. Three of the badmen were dead, and McAlister was badly wounded. The rest managed to escape by jumping into the lake. About that time, they heard firing in the direction of their horses and hurried back. They found Evans and Devine standing close together.

“Where’s Noley Key?” Armstrong demanded.

“Dead,” Devine answered.

“Dead?”

“Yes. When he heard the firing, he jumped up and started to run, and we fired at him. One of us killed him, for there’s a bullet hole in his back.”

They went over and found Key’s body, facedown.
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Returning to the main camp, they learned that the detachment sent to the other ranch had seven prisoners, and had killed one who they said resisted arrest.
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Despite the night’s work, King Fisher continued to elude them. Durham sourly commented, “Maybe King Fisher was the head and brains of this stock-rustling bunch [at Lake Espantosa]. I don’t know. All I know is that we never did make a case on him.”
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Fisher continued to reign supreme over south Texas. Soon after the Lake Espantosa fight, he moved up to Uvalde County and managed to become chief deputy. In 1884, he even ran for sheriff and appeared to be a sure bet, because he had no opposition. He never made it, though, because in March of that year, he and his good friend Ben Thompson were gunned down in a drunken brawl in a San Antonio saloon. Ranger sergeant James B. Gillett noted the event by scribbling “Killed” next to Fisher’s name in the index of his copy of the
List of Fugitives from Justice
.
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The deaths of Fisher and Thompson and John Wesley Hardin’s imprisonment accounted for three of Texas’s “Big Four” badmen. In spite of the dozens of killings on their combined records, only Bill Longley paid the extreme penalty, going to the gallows in Giddings, east of Austin, on October 11, 1878. Like Brown Bowen, Longley expressed some irritation at the unfairness of his sentence compared with Hardin’s, but then people didn’t care much for Longley either.
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LEANDER MCNELLY NEVER
again assumed effective command of his company. He remained on disability until November 20, and aside from escorting five members of the feuding Suttons from DeWitt County to jail in Galveston, he performed no further duties for the state. On January 21, 1877, his physician notified Adjutant General Steele that he would be unfit for duty for the remainder of the winter. Soon after, when McNelly’s company was reorganized, his name was deleted from the roster. The official reason was health. Steele pointed out that McNelly underwent medical treatment almost continuously from July 1876 through January 1877, and at state expense.

“The bills paid on his account were nearly one-third of the whole amount paid for his company,” the adjutant general explained, adding, “I do not consider that the command of the few men that can be paid from the small remnant of the appropriation for this company as the proper place to put an incompetent man, no matter what his previous service may have been.”

Durham, however, attributed the dismissal to McNelly’s high-handed methods. In particular, the near-strangulation of and suspicious death of Noley Key at Lake Espantosa brought an adverse public reaction; although McNelly was not present, these were his men following his well-known procedures.

Whatever his faults, many felt McNelly had been treated shabbily. But it made no difference. He had angered too many people, and he had to go. McNelly returned to his farm and lived another ten months, dying on September 4, 1877. He was thirty-three years old.

When the company was reorganized, Lee Hall, promoted to captain, was placed in command. Wilburn King, the history-minded future adjutant general, described Hall as “well fitted to command a body of men intended for peculiarly arduous service against ruthless and cruel Mexican cut-throats, as well as against many desperate criminals of his own race. . . .”