The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (15 page)

Oddly enough, the advantages of the Colt’s Patent Revolver were not immediately evident in Texas. The War of Independence had left the country penniless and enormously in debt. Given Houston’s peace policy and his aversion to a standing army, such weapons as remained after the war were deemed sufficient for the Republic’s needs. But President Lamar’s decision to take the offensive against the Indians and maintain a state of preparedness against Mexico required new arms purchases from abroad.
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In the spring of 1839, Lamar received a visit from an old friend, John Fuller, owner of a successful Washington, D.C., hotel. Before embarking on his trip, Fuller had obtained several samples of the company’s products, including the No. 5 pistol.
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Upon arriving in Texas, Fuller demonstrated the arms to Col. George W. Hockley of Texas’s Bureau of Ordnance. A conservative officer who preferred the old-fashioned single-shot flintlock pistols and muskets, Hockley was unimpressed.
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The expanding Texas Navy, however, was delighted with the Colt’s revolver, and on April 29, 1839, Navy captain Edward Moore, on a procuring mission to the United States, was instructed to negotiate purchase of 180 of these handguns for use by naval boarding and landing parties. According to Moore, “The Colt’s pistols used by the Texas Rangers before annexation were all supplied from the Navy, after they had been in constant use by that arm of the service for upwards of four years. . . .”
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Thus Colt’s Texas Paterson revolver, ancestor of the gun that became synonymous with the American West, originally went west as navy surplus!

Jack Hays apparently obtained his first Colt’s revolver in 1839, not long after it appeared in Texas. He may have purchased it through David K. Torrey, a prominent Waco trader, who wrote him from New York about Colt’s “beautiful pattern of belt pistol.” At the time, Colt’s revolvers were almost unknown outside government circles, scarce, and very expensive for private citizens on the frontier, so several years would pass before they became commonplace among either citizens or Rangers.
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WITH OR WITHOUT
Colt’s revolvers, the Rangers still had to contend with Indians. The Comanches had begun to recover from the shock of Plum Creek and were moving back down toward the settlements. By the summer of 1841, they once again were raiding ranches and driving off cattle in the vicinity of San Antonio. On June 24, Hays led an expedition that struck a trail that led northwest to Uvalde Canyon. The command consisted of Hays’s own company, now made up of sixteen Texans, and a company of twenty
tejano
Rangers under a captain identified as “Flores” but who probably was Antonio Pérez.

About two miles from the entrance to the canyon, they encountered a raiding party of ten Indians bound for San Antonio. The Rangers charged, pushing the Indians into a thicket. The Comanches gave ground grudgingly, forcing the Rangers to fight the distance. The thicket was too dense for a charge, so Hays had it surrounded while he and two others slipped in. Fighting broke out, and a fourth Ranger joined. Eight of the Indians were killed, and a wounded warrior and woman were captured. A Ranger named Miller was slightly wounded.

Hays reckoned that the main Comanche camp was within striking range, but when he followed the trail he realized it was farther than he had thought. His horses were becoming jaded, so he returned to San Antonio.
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Still determined to find the main camp, Hays took a company of fifty Rangers and ten Lipan scouts under the war chief Flacco and headed back toward Uvalde Canyon. The Comanches, meanwhile, had retreated westward, deep into the Hill Country, “where the white men had never before made a track.”

As the Rangers and Lipans neared the camp, they ran into a Comanche hunting party, which turned about and rushed back to alert the others. Taking twenty-five of his best riders on fast horses, Hays chased them eight miles, catching the main band as the women were packing to flee. About a hundred warriors rode out to block the Rangers and lead them away from the camp, and a running fight ensued for about ninety minutes. Hays’s exhausted horses finally forced him to abandon the chase. Several Rangers were wounded. Hays could not determine Indian losses, because they recovered their dead and wounded.

The search for the Comanche camp had taken the Rangers so far west of the line of settlement that they were completely out of provisions. On their return trip, they slaughtered and ate their worn-out horses. Nevertheless, the expedition had carried the Texans into an area the Comanches had previously believed secure, and they abandoned their depredations around San Antonio.
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Part of Hays’s success in these early expeditions was attributable to his skill as a tracker who could find an enemy trail that was almost invisible. John W. Lockhart observed:

In the dry and rocky portions of West Texas a squad of fifteen or twenty Indians could go through the country without leaving much sign, consequently a trailer was considered a very effective man. This faculty Captain Hays had to a very marked degree, it almost amounted to instinct with him; he could ride along at a good pace and see the signs where other men could see nothing, hence his great tact in overhauling and finishing Indians. It is said that often he would dismount and observe the small pebbles, and by noticing the slightest displacement made by the horses, could, in a moment, tell in what direction they had gone.
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In the field, Hays would halt his men a couple of hours before sunset, preferably near fresh water. Some were sent to hunt game for supper, while others tended the horses and built fires. After dark, when they had finished eating, they mounted up and rode until they found a secluded spot for camp. The object was to get far away from their cooking fire, whose telltale curl of smoke could be seen for miles. Two hours before dawn, they were in the saddle again. “Thus we passed day after day, and night after night, scouring in all directions the wide plains of Texas,” Nelson Lee wrote.
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GIVEN THE HISTORICAL
record of Hays’s daring and audacity, it is not surprising that he inspired legend as well. The most famous story concerns a single-handed stand against a band of Comanches atop Enchanted Rock near Fredericksburg, some seventy miles west of Austin. The story first appeared in Samuel C. Reid’s
The Scouting Expeditions of McCulloch’s Texas Rangers,
published in Philadelphia in 1847. It was among the Hays exploits that Reid picked up around Ranger camps during the Mexican War.

According to Reid, the incident occurred about 1841 or 1842, when Hays and his men were attacked by Indians near the base of the “hill.” Separated from his men, Hays retreated “to the top of the hill. Reaching the ‘Enchanted Rock,’ he there intrenched himself, and determined to sell his life dearly, for he had scarcely a gleam of hope left to escape.”

For almost an hour, he held them off by bluff, the mere act of raising his rifle enough to keep the Indians under cover. Finally, they grew bolder, and started to rush his position. Hays discharged his rifle, “and then seizing his five-shooter, he felled them on all sides.” After three more hours, his men finally made their way through the horde of warriors and rescued their leader.
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“This,” said the Texian, who told us the story, “was one of
‘Jack’s’
most narrow escapes, and he considers it one of the
tightest little places
that he ever was in. The Indians who had believed for a long time that he bore a charmed life, were then more than ever convinced of the fact.”
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Reid himself obviously never saw Enchanted Rock, because he described it as “forming the apex of a high, round hill, very rugged and difficult of ascent. In the center there is a hollow, in the shape of a bowel, and sufficiently large to allow a small party of men to lie in it, thus forming a small fort, the projecting and elevated sides serving as a protection.”
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In fact, Enchanted Rock is the hill itself, a giant granite dome, formed by a volcanic upheaval about a billion years ago, and one of the oldest geological features of North America. Eons of rain and wear have pitted the top with shallow depressions ranging from a few inches to hundreds of feet across, but scarcely deep enough to protect a man against attackers. But the slopes of the rock are broken by rifts and caves that could shelter a man in a fight. Thus, like many legends, the Enchanted Rock Fight probably was based on an actual event that was embroidered in Ranger camps over the passage of time. Whatever the case, it illustrates the nerve and imagination that made Hays the great captain of the 1840s.

WHILE HAYS AND
his men dealt with Indians, the government struggled to keep afloat. Lamar’s term expired, and on December 13, 1841, Sam Houston resumed the presidency with the finances in shambles. Nine days later, Dr. Anson Jones, the brilliant, Machiavellian secretary of state, bluntly told the cabinet, “The country is
absolutely
without present means of any kind: her resources are large, though
prospective,
but her credit is utterly prostrate.” The government’s entire annual revenue, he continued, would not be sufficient to pay even the interest on the national debt.

To reduce the pressure on the administration, Jones proposed a virtual shutdown of the country’s military, and a corresponding overhaul of priorities.

Our policy, as regards Mexico, should be to act strictly on the
defensive.
So soon as she finds we are willing to let her alone,
she will let us alone.

The navy should be put in ordinary; and no troops kept in commission, except a few Rangers on the frontiers.

The Indians should be conciliated by every means in our power. It is much cheaper and more humane to
purchase
their friendship than to
fight
them. A small sum will be sufficient for the former; the latter would require millions.

By a steady, uniform, firm, undeviating adherence to this policy for two or three years, Texas may and will recover from her present utter prostration. It is the stern law of necessity which requires it, and she must yield to it, or perish!

Jones concluded with a direct attack against the national preoccupation with adventure, stating bluntly that Texas “cannot afford to raise another crop of ‘Heroes.’ ”
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Houston proposed drastic cuts in the national budget. The navy, cruising the Bay of Campeche to support insurgents in Yucatán, was to be brought home and laid up. New peace emissaries would be sent to the Indians. Government departments would be consolidated, and many positions established under Lamar would be eliminated. Inflated paper money would be recalled, and replaced with a strictly controlled currency.
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The president believed if the Texas Congress adopted his recommendations he might “yet save the country.” Nevertheless he was uneasy about troubles on the Indian frontier, and the Mexican attitude plainly worried him. The Santa Fe Expedition had infuriated Mexico, as did the Texas Navy’s presence in the Bay of Campeche. More than anything else, however, the Mexicans were enraged because some of the “cow-boy” gangs of the Nueces Strip had joined an ill-fated effort by rebel leader Antonio Canales to establish an independent republic of Mexican states along the Rio Grande. Despite Jones’s wait-and-see position, on December 29 Houston wrote his wife, “Our chance . . . for invasion by Mexico is greater than it has been since 1836.”
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HOUSTON’S FEARS WERE
realized. In March 1842, the Mexican general Rafael Vásquez invaded Texas and occupied San Antonio. The city was largely deserted, because Rangers had shadowed the invading force and the citizens were more or less prepared for evacuation. After two days of plundering, Vásquez freed three of Hays’s Rangers whom he had captured and started back for Mexico.
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Throughout the spring and summer, fear mounted over the prospect that Vásquez’s incursion was only a prelude. By August, the Texans in San Antonio were unable to obtain ammunition locally, because it had all been sold to Mexicans. Ranger William A. A. Wallace, called “Big Foot” because his feet were outsized even for his six-foot-two-inch, 240-pound frame, told Hays he had seen “at least a dozen strange Mexicans in town . . . who did not live there.” Because Wallace knew virtually every
tejano,
this was ominous.
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Hays sent Wallace and another Ranger to Austin to obtain ammunition. Upon arriving, they found the capital in an uproar over an Indian raid and were pressed into service to hunt down the marauders. When they finally headed back to San Antonio, they encountered a couple of Hays’s men, who told them the city was occupied by a large Mexican expeditionary force under Gen. Adrian Woll.
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Woll’s invasion caught San Antonio completely off-guard. Hays and most of the Rangers were on a scouting expedition, and those who had remained in town barely escaped the Mexican cavalry. The Mexicans found the district court in session, and judge and attorneys were among the prisoners marched in chains back to Mexico. Besides the immediate blow to the legal system in San Antonio, the threat of a repeated invasion canceled courts in at least four other western counties over the next several months. Austin was only sixty miles to the north, and Houston, who despised Lamar’s artificial capital almost as much as he despised Lamar himself, used the invasion as an excuse to relocate the government to Washington-on-the-Brazos. It remained there for over two years until returning permanently to Austin.
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