The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (13 page)

Mexican relations took a disturbing twist when Burleson’s Rangers killed a Mexican agent and recovered papers showing an apparent agreement with the east Texas Cherokees whereby the Mexican government would aid them in an uprising against Texas. Although there was little evidence that the Cherokees did more than simply listen to the Mexican proposals, the incident led to the eventual expulsion of the east Texas Cherokees. On the western frontier, meanwhile, the government was preparing to deal with the Plains Indian tribes.
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AS HORSEMEN AND
guerrilla fighters, the Texans and Indians were about evenly matched, and Indian fights often were inconclusive. Plains warriors themselves rarely attacked unless they had overwhelming numerical superiority, and would scatter when attacked. The rationale was simple: consisting of small, nomadic bands, they could not sustain heavy losses. When a warrior died, he could not be replaced until a youth had reached fighting age; but they were vaguely aware that the loss of even a large group of whites would not materially affect the white ability to make war.
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The disadvantage was that Indians were always in position to fight, whereas economics often tempted the Texas Congress to delay funding for replacement Ranger companies until the next series of raids forced the issue. Even then, the Rangers might prove inadequate for the job at hand. Such was the case in 1839, when Indian depredations on the upper Brazos, Colorado, and Trinity rivers prompted the Texas Congress to pass a series of laws to activate several companies of volunteer Rangers for three months’ service. Each company was to consist of three officers in charge of fifty-six sergeants and privates.
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One of the companies was mustered into service on April 21 under Capt. John Bird and marched from Fort Bend, just south of Houston, to Fort Milam, about twenty miles southeast of the present site of Waco. The detail was ill-starred from the beginning. Provisions soon gave out and the men had to hunt game. Some became so insubordinate that Bird decided to court-martial them. As there were not enough officers for a board, he formed a detail to take the prisoners south to Bastrop, and decided to accompany them.

On the afternoon of May 26, the party of thirty-five men reached a point near the present city of Temple, where they saw a small band of Indians. After checking his men’s weapons, Bird ordered them to give chase. The Indians fled into a thicket, the whites in close pursuit. In an open prairie on the other side, they found themselves confronted by about three hundred Kickapoos, Caddos, and Comanches. The Rangers had been led into a trap by a decoy party, and the main party quickly surrounded them.

One of the men spotted a ravine a short distance away. Bird ordered his men to dismount, and, using their horses for cover, they moved to the ravine. “My heart rose to my throat,” one of the Rangers remembered, “and I felt like I could outrun a race-horse and I thought all the rest felt just as I did.”
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The Indians charged around the ravine several times, and each time Rangers fell, either killed outright or mortally wounded. But Indian losses also were mounting, and about sunset they “raised a hideous yell” and broke off the fight. Five Texans, including Bird and all the officers, were dead or mortally wounded.
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Even so, the Houston
Telegraph
called the fight a victory that

will undoubtedly be of immense benefit to the citizens of the frontier settlements in that section, as these hordes of savages have infested that region for many months, and have hitherto held complete possession of the country. They will now be compelled to retire further northward, and leave those settlers in the undisputed possession of their improvements.

There was no mention of casualties.
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The
Telegraph
was overly optimistic. Far from discouraging the Indians, the beating they had inflicted on the Rangers only made them bolder, and they stepped up their depredations.
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WHILE THE GOVERNMENT
worried about Indians on the one hand, it had to deal with Mexico on the other. One of the great disputes was the exact border of Texas. In the Treaty of Velasco, which ended the War of Independence, Santa Anna recognized the Rio Grande as the boundary. Such it always had been, at least in the southwest where Coahuila was concerned. But from its earliest organization as a Spanish province, the southernmost boundary of Texas was the Nueces River, running westward from Corpus Christi Bay, some 150 miles north of the Rio Grande. The area between the Nueces and the Rio Grande was part of the Spanish province of Nuevo Santander, which, after independence from Spain, became the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.

As far as Mexico was concerned, however, any boundary discussion was a moot point, because immediately after the War of Independence the Mexican Congress had repudiated the Treaty of Velasco and temporarily deposed and exiled Santa Anna. Officially, at least, Texas continued to be a state in rebellion, although few in the Mexican government realistically believed it would be recovered. Both sides therefore settled into an armed truce, with the mostly uninhabited area between Nueces and the Rio Grande more or less a no-man’s-land except for Laredo, which remained under Mexican jurisdiction.

Realities notwithstanding, in December 1836, the First Congress of the Republic of Texas had passed the Boundary Act, attempting to establish a permanent border. The Sabine and Red rivers were fixed as the demarcation between Texas and the United States, with the entire Rio Grande as the southern and western border. This encompassed the so-called Nueces Strip to the south, along with fully half of the Spanish-Mexican province of New Mexico, where the centuries-old towns of Santa Fe and Taos still considered themselves under Mexican jurisdiction.

There was an odd rationale behind Texas’s extravagant claim. Expansionism aside, Lamar realized occupation of the western Rio Grande would give Texas control of the lucrative Santa Fe trade. The country would become the middleman between the United States and Cuba on the one hand and the interior of Mexico on the other. New Orleans merchants, who stood to gain substantially from their end of the trade, encouraged Texas to establish jurisdiction. Many believed the people of Santa Fe would welcome it; even the Mexican governor, Manuel Armijo, doubted their loyalty to Mexico.
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In June 1841, an ill-conceived expedition was organized at Brushy Creek outside of Austin, which, almost two years earlier, had been established specifically as the permanent seat of government. Composed largely of traders and adventurers, the expedition nevertheless had official sanction, carrying a proclamation from Lamar “To the Inhabitants of Santa Fe and other portions of New Mexico, to the East of the Rio Grande,” whom he addressed as “Fellow Citizens.”
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The thirteen-hundred-mile trail betweenAustin and Santa Fe crossed a region virtually uninhabited except by nomadic Indian tribes, and the Texans knew little of the country. By the time they reached New Mexico, they were starving, short on water, and ready to surrender. Governor Armijo, who had known about the expedition even before it left Austin, burned Lamar’s proclamation in the plaza of Las Vegas, New Mexico. Brutally marched to prison in the Mexican interior, the survivors were repatriated during the spring of 1842, giving theTexans another grievance against Mexico, and historians another grievance against Lamar.
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DESPITE FORMAL HOSTILITIES
between Texas and Mexico, trade between the two countries continued, encouraged by Lamar because import duties were virtually the only source of revenue for the Republic. The southern part of Texas around Victoria particularly depended on the Mexican trade, and when bandits began attacking trading expeditions, a group of Victoria citizens petitioned the president for protection.

They pointed out that two “Americans of Credibility” gave depositions that four weeks earlier, in February 1840, a gang of bandits (or “cow-boys” as they were known) had attacked a company of Mexican traders near San Patricio on the north side of the Nueces, severely wounding one of them.
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These cow-boys had hardly gone when “another company of Americans” overhauled them and took their horses. Although the matter was being investigated by the courts, the Victoria citizens doubted any action would be taken, because the bandits “are able at all times to exculpate themselves by means of pliant witnesses.”

“We could mention to your Excellency a number of these outrages which had been committed in defiance of Lawand common decency and their motto being
‘Dead men tell no tales’
it is probable many [raids] are never known but to the perpetrators thereof,” the Victoria men told Lamar.

As a result, they said, trade with Mexico had come to an almost complete standstill, not only hurting the local economy but robbing the Republic of import duties on the Mexican goods.
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In response, the Texas War Department authorized formation of local ranger-type militia companies in Victoria. These, however, proved little better than the bandits themselves, because they took their commissions to mean a license to operate against Mexicans on the pretense that they were enemies of the Republic. Not only did it further disrupt trade, it alienated the Mexicans of the borderlands who otherwise wanted friendly commerce with Texas. One ad hoc company even went so far as to confiscate horses from the Corpus Christi trading firm of Aubrey & Kinney on the grounds that they were “Mexican property” (Henry Lawrence Kinney was suspected of being a Mexican sympathizer).
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On August 18, 1841, Corpus Christi settler S. L. Jones wrote Lamar, detailing the problems caused by the local companies and suggesting “that a force should be stationed somewhere in this Vicinity under the command of a disinterested and responsible officer such a Gentleman as Capt Hayes [
sic
] or any other equally respectable.”
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Little appears to have been done, and the depredations continued. One of the most notorious bandits, who one day would earn an equally odious reputation as a Ranger, was Mabry B. Gray, better known as Mustang Gray, described by one contemporary as “a cold-blooded assassin.”
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In 1842, Gray belonged to a band of cow-boys who accepted the hospitality of a small group of Mexican traders camped outside Goliad. After joining the Mexicans for supper, Gray calmly announced the Texans intended to kill them. The victims were roped together, given a few minutes to pray, and then gunned down. The Mexican train was plundered and the bodies of the victims were stripped. One Mexican survived and, badly wounded, managed to reach Victoria. No one was ever brought to trial for the crime, no doubt because of the “pliant witnesses” cited by the Victoria men in their original petition.
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The “Capt Hayes” mentioned in Jones’s letter was John Coffee “Jack” Hays, who, more than any other leader, came to symbolize the Rangers of the Republic.

Chapter 4

A Great Captain and a New Weapon

Jack Hays was only one of several outstanding Ranger captains
during the Republic, but he is the most famous because he was the type of frontiersman who inspires legends. Barely an adult when he rose to command, he nevertheless won the admiration of Sam Houston himself, who observed, “The frontier of our country would have been defenceless but for his gallantry and vigilance united With fine capacity.”¹ Indeed, he was so widely known by reputation that people were surprised when they saw him for the first time. Pioneer John W. Lockhart, who met Hays in a hotel lobby in Washington-on-the-Brazos, said:

I thought that my eyes had deceived me. Could that
Small, Boyish Looking Youngster,
not a particle of beard on his face, homely palefaced young man, be the veritable Jack Hays, the celebrated Indian fighter, the man whose name was sung with praise by all Texians? It could not be, I thought, but I soon found out that it was the veritable “Captain Jack.”²

John Coffee Hays had the right credentials to achieve greatness in Texas. Like Sam Houston, he was a Tennessean, born on his family’s plantation near Nashville on January 28, 1817. His father, Harmon Hays, was related to Andrew Jackson’s wife, Rachel, and named his son for longtime family friend and Jackson protégé Col. John Coffee. The area’s social life centered around the Hermitage, which the Jacksons had built on land purchased from Harmon Hays. Here Jack and his brothers met the great men of the frontier and nation, including the up-and-coming Houston, who numbered Harmon among his friends.

Harmon Hays died when Jack was fifteen years old, and he was placed with a well-meaning uncle who urged him to try for West Point. Not liking the prospect of military regimentation, he left his uncle’s home and worked his way westward over the next four years. He arrived in Texas shortly after the Battle of San Jacinto and, finding the new republic’s rough-and-tumble army suited him better than the spit and polish of the American military, promptly enlisted as a scout and surveyor. After a stint in the army, he joined a Ranger company commanded by Henry Karnes, distinguishing himself in fights against Indians and Mexicans and developing a reputation for cool, daring leadership.³

Besides being an outstanding leader, Hays more than any other individual is responsible for arming the Rangers with another great Texas legend—the Colt’s revolver.

HAYS ACHIEVED HIS
reputation as a leader in the 1840s, a decade unusually rife with bloodshed, for the Texans were beset by both Comanches and Mexicans. Despite several peace treaties, Comanche raids had stepped up during the second half of the 1830s, and the number of captive women and children had grown.
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