The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (43 page)

Victorio understood the significance of the Rio Grande, knowing that neither country could send its troops into the other. He would raid in the United States, then cross into Mexico. When the immediate furor died down, he would raid in Mexico, then take refuge in the United States. “This,” according to Baylor, “was a most unfortunate state of affairs, for many of the best and bravest men of each country lost their lives before an agreement was reached allowing the troops of each country to cross the boundary at will.”

The dead included twenty-nine leading citizens of the Mexican town of Carbajal, members of two volunteer expeditions sent out from the town and ambushed and massacred by the Apaches. The other towns in the area began forming a militia company, and they sent to Ysleta asking for Baylor’s help. Among the leaders of the Mexican contingent was Chico Barela, one of the leaders of the mob at San Elizario in the Salt War. Meeting him, the Rangers “gave the old fellow to understand that we were now fighting a common enemy and should act in harmony together.”
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Together the Rangers and Mexicans made several expeditions deep into Chihuahua. Victorio, however, knew the desert and its resources and led them in fruitless pursuits for almost a year. Finally, on October 14, 1880, Mexican regular troops caught up with him. Victorio, sixty warriors, and eighteen women were killed, and the Mexicans took sixty-eight prisoners.

Shortly before the fight with the Mexicans, a small group of warriors and their families deserted and returned to Texas, where they attacked a cavalry camp, killing several soldiers and an Indian scout. For the next two months, they raided the road to El Paso, attacking immigrant trains and military camps. In January 1881, they attacked a stagecoach and killed several people, including a prominent judge. Baylor was notified, and on January 29, 1881, he caught up with the Apaches in their camp in the Diablo Mountains west of Guadalupe Peak. The Indians were wrapped in blankets against the cold, making it hard to distinguish men from women. In the ensuing fight, four warriors, two women, and two children were killed and several were taken prisoner. The Rangers found clothing and military equipment, as well as articles taken from the stage.

This was the last Indian fight in Texas. Baylor had mixed emotions. On the one hand, he was satisfied with the outcome, because he knew this would end the state’s Indian wars forever. But he was not happy that some of the women and children had been killed or wounded. Recalling one two-year-old boy with a toe shot off, Baylor admitted, “I was the bold warrior that shot his toe off as we charged through the camp.”
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THE DAYS OF
the traditional Texas Ranger were over. The death of Major Jones in 1881 coincided with the resignation of many of the leading captains of the Frontier Battalion. Although the battalion itself lingered on until 1900, there really was no further reason for it. The frontier line no longer existed. Texas had no more Indians to fight, and the few great gunfighters and badmen who remained were starting to feel their age. More and more of the state’s law enforcement requirements were being handled by local deputies and police, who often did not want the Rangers in their bailiwicks. Much of the Ranger’s own efforts began to resemble routine police work. The single advantage that the Ranger still had over the locals was his statewide authority.
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The Texas Ranger continued to ride a horse, because automobiles had yet to be introduced, but overall there was a more modern air. One of those who had trouble adjusting was George Wythe Baylor. His heart was not in the new role. He was an Indian fighter and not a hunter of fugitives from justice. The problem was aggravated by the high turnover in his company. Few men stayed more than six months, and they rarely got to know each other well. This situation attracted undesirables and hard cases, some of whom were themselves fugitives. In one letter to Austin, Baylor noted that at least nine former Rangers of Lieutenant Tays’s old detachment had been “killed as highwaymen” since their discharge, and one of his own Rangers was killed for horse stealing.
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Some were little more than bounty hunters, ignoring ordinary law-breakers in favor of those with large rewards. The public, however, was less concerned about reward money than law and order, and said so in letters to the capital. As early as November 1880, Jones had pointedly told Baylor that citizens of El Paso were complaining that he was not making enough effort to hunt for fugitives. “Unless you can make a good showing to the legislature of the work done by the frontier and special forces,” Jones said, “you will not likely get another appointment.”
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There was an ongoing feud with El Paso city marshal Dallas Stoudenmire, who complained to Jones’s successor, Adjutant General Wilburn H. King, about unruliness among the Rangers who came into town. “They . . . take great delight in throwing obstructions in my way whilst in the discharge of my duties,” Stoudenmire wrote. “They come to town fully armed and remain as long as they please, get full [of liquor] and go back to camp shooting up the streets.”

King passed the complaint on to Baylor, who was affronted and claimed that Stoudenmire was part of the problem, being a heavy drinker, and also involved with some feuds of his own. In fact, he contended, only the presence of the Rangers prevented the marshal from settling a grudge with his enemies by gunplay.
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Nevertheless, even Gillett, who liked and admired Baylor, admitted that he was a poor judge of character and indifferent to discipline.

All men looked alike to him, and he would enlist anyone when there was a vacancy in the company. The result was that some of the worst San Simon Valley [New Mexico] rustlers got into the command and gave us no end of trouble, nearly causing one or two killings in our camp.
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Despite the differences, Baylor outlasted Stoudenmire, who resigned as city marshal on May 29, 1882, and was succeeded by Gillett. Ultimately Baylor adjusted to the new conditions and remained with the Rangers until April 15, 1885, when his unit, Company A, was disbanded.
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IN SOUTH TEXAS,
Lee Hall’s succession of Leander McNelly likewise represented a shift away from the traditional Ranger. Hall had no intention of emulating McNelly, concentrating instead on obtaining arrests and indictments and generally keeping things quiet. Still, he faced a problem that was all too familiar to Jones, McNelly, and other Ranger commanders of the nineteenth century—money. By the summer of 1877, the legislature was considering disbanding his company as an economy measure. Addressing the issue as members of the West Texas Stock Association prepared to meet in Goliad, the
Goliad Guard
urged the stockmen to act on their own to keep Hall’s men in the field.

Hall’s Company has restored peace to the country, and we are just beginning to enjoy the fruits of the victory they have achieved, but no well informed man will deny the fact that security will cease as soon as the Police is [
sic
] disbanded. The people cannot afford to lose the vantage ground gained by these brave men. If they allow this advantage to be lost by indifference or illiberality on their part, the relapse into crime and outlawry will rebound with greater disasters upon them than before, and the valuable services of our police force in the past will have been thrown away. . . . Legislative appropriations have been exhausted, but the people of Western Texas are too much interested to fail to contribute from their own private means a sufficient amount to retain Hall’s company in service, and we believe the Legislature of Texas too loyal to the great State they represent to refuse to appropriate at their next session money to refund the contributions of private citizens.
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Nevertheless, the company was disbanded, an act that proved premature, because the Southwest was still too unsettled. To rectify the mistake, the legislature in 1879 authorized a special company with Hall as captain. For the next several years, Hall and his successors policed the Nueces Strip, rounding up fence-cutters and cattle thieves and bringing them to the conventional justice of the courtroom. Occasionally they also ventured over into DeWitt County, to make sure the Taylors and Suttons remained quiet.
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THE NEW EMPHASIS
on courtroom justice was yet another shift from tradition. The classic Ranger settled things with a rope or a firearm, but the new generation was beginning to rely on due process, improvising some semblance of due process where none was readily available. The definitive case of improvisation was in the rough-and-tumble railroad construction camps on the Pecos River west of Del Rio. The Rangers had been dispatched at the request of the railroad contractor, who complained to the adjutant general about the hard cases that hung around the camps. A detachment arrived under Capt. T. L. Oglesby and began cleaning up.

The problem was that the nearest court with jurisdiction was over two hundred miles away in Fort Stockton, and in 1882 the round-trip was twelve days on horseback, in a parched desert. A solution presented itself in July of that year, when the Rangers arrested a man named Joe Bell for aggravated assault. Rather than ride all the way to Fort Stockton, the Rangers hauled him before Roy Bean, an aging, gray-bearded saloon keeper who, like a biblical patriarch, dispensed homespun justice built on sagacity, common sense, and a feel for the locale. Although he had no legal authority whatsoever, Bean found Bell guilty. The Rangers were satisfied, and Captain Oglesby recommended that the saloon keeper be formally appointed justice of the peace. Bowing to frontier realities, the Pecos County Commissioners’ Court formalized Roy’s position by naming him justice of the peace on August 2, 1882, thereby creating the legendary Judge Roy Bean.
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A classic product of the frontier, Roy Bean never admitted to being completely honest either as a judge or as a businessman. He amused himself by fleecing the customers in his saloon and daring them to do anything about it. None did. Generally speaking, the “law” as interpreted by Judge Roy Bean was his will, enforced by his overbearing personality, a natural talent for bluff, and the Rangers who stopped by from time to time. In reality, Roy owed his position to the fact that he was the only person who could demand—and get—respect from the brawling railroad men and frontier toughs. And in the Pecos country, the respect of the railroad men and frontier toughs counted for a lot more than the conventional law of the civilized world.

IT IS IRONIC
that one of the most famous of all Ranger sayings, “One riot—one Ranger,” comes not from the frontier but from urban disturbances. The statement is attributed to Capt. William J. McDonald, whose protégés included President Theodore Roosevelt, and who represented the new generation of Ranger. The remark itself is apocryphal, but like many such sayings, it developed from a series of real incidents where McDonald dealt with potentially dangerous problems of the modern, industrial era.

Like many other Rangers of the new generation, McDonald got his start in one of the old frontier companies, but was young enough to make the shift when the frontier began to die. By the mid-1890s, when Texas was plagued with a series of labor disputes, he and his men often were used to put down disturbances. Among them was a strike of workers at the Fort Worth and Denver Railroad that had brought operations in Wichita Falls to a standstill.

McDonald went alone to Wichita Falls, to the hall where the workers were holding a closed meeting. When the doorkeeper refused him entry, he said, “I am Captain McDonald of the Rangers, and I’m here to talk to you men and see what the trouble is. You’re all here now, and I think I’ll talk to you together.”

“Where are your Rangers?” the doorkeeper demanded.

“I didn’t bring any. I don’t need any. I’m a pretty good single-handed talker, myself.”

With that, he pushed past the doorkeeper and confronted the angry strikers, eventually persuading them to take their grievances to the president of the railroad.

McDonald used the same ploy with striking coal miners in Thurber in east Texas, telling the president of the mines, “I’m using my men in other places. I’ll look around a little and do what I can.”

Like many labor disturbances of the era, this one had anarchist elements, and when McDonald arrived at the miners’ meeting, a speaker was advocating blowing up the mines. He interrupted and told the group, “I’m here alone, but I’ll have my men here, if I need them, and I’ll hang just such fellows as this man,” indicating the speaker.

One of the crowd shouted he would be killed if he continued to interfere.

“That’s been tried on me more than once without much success,” McDonald replied. “You see I’m here yet.”

The classic McDonald emerged when Dallas community leaders asked for a company of Rangers to break up an impending prizefight. McDonald stepped off the train alone, and the mayor asked, “Where are the others?”

“Hell!” McDonald snapped. “Ain’t I enough? There’s only one prizefight!”
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Chapter 16

Gunmen, Pugilists,
and a “Fistic Carnival”

By 1895, the Texas frontier had been reduced to an isolated
strip along the Rio Grande. Starting just beyond Brownsville, near the mouth, the wild country ran north and west, following the river until it reached El Paso. El Paso itself was the biggest thing in the Trans-Pecos. No longer a cluster of settlements centering around Fort Bliss or a suburb of San Elizario, it was the county seat. The arrival of the railroads in 1881 boosted the city until, by 1895, it had thirteen thousand people. As the hub of the railroads, it had become completely Americanized and even showed signs of respectability, although the usual frontier mixture of good and bad (with a large helping of the latter) could make a Saturday night pretty lively.¹