The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (48 page)

The situation received a new twist through two unrelated events. On January 31, 1915, Hughes retired from the Rangers. A lifelong bachelor and always thrifty, he had acquired substantial business interests in El Paso and New Mexico, and his departure removed a stabilizing influence over the Revolutionary leaders in their relations with Texas. The same year, the Wilson administration recognized Pancho Villa’s rival, Venustiano Carranza, as de facto president of Mexico, providing arms and assistance to Carranza while placing an embargo against Villa. This cost Villa prestige and denied him the means to continue his war. He retaliated with a series of raids, first against Carranza strongholds in Chihuahua, culminating in 1916 with attacks on Columbus, New Mexico, and various border settlements in Texas.
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ASIDE FROM HIS
age (he was sixty and had been a Ranger for a record twenty-eight years), Hughes’s retirement was prompted by politics. As governor, Pa Ferguson was a firm practitioner of patronage and cronyism, and he made his appointments accordingly. The quality of state service, including the Rangers, declined, and this was reflected by Capt. Monroe Fox’s Company B, which was transferred to the Big Bend country as federal troops took over defense of the Lower Rio Grande. Even at best, Fox faced an impossible assignment—patrolling more than four thousand square miles of wild, unfamiliar country from his headquarters in Marfa with only eleven Rangers. It was made worse by the fact that only a few of his men were duly appointed peace officers, and even these were largely Ferguson’s Special Rangers. The rest were informal appointments—men who simply showed up and offered to help.
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The Rangers faced an atmosphere of hate and fear. The shooting of the three inspectors in 1913 had frightened many local ranchers. Three years later, in 1916, one of the survivors of the initial shooting, customs inspector Joe Sitters, who had since joined the Rangers, and Ranger Eugene Hulen, son of the adjutant general of Texas, were gunned down and killed near the little town of Porvenir. The attacks on lawmen, the flood of refugees fleeing the chaos in Mexico, and bandit raids against the ranches and settlements created a situation that could explode into mindless violence at any moment.
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One local citizen summed up the feelings of the Anglo-Saxon community in the Big Bend:

We used to contend with the Comanches every light moon. We knew what we were going up against when we seen a bunch of Comanches. . . . You meet a bunch of Mexicans and you don’t know what you are going up against; whether they are civilized or not.
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The breaking point came on Christmas Day 1917, when bandits attacked Lucas C. Brite’s ranch about midway between the town of Valentine and the Rio Grande. Like many of the large, isolated spreads in the region, Brite’s was less a ranch than a small community, with its own post office and a general store that served not only the ranch hands but citizens and other ranchers in the surrounding area. Shouting,
“Mueran a
los gringos!”
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the bandits shot up the ranch and looted the store, although they failed to break open the large safe. The raid was more noise and plunder than anything else, until the mail hack from Candelaria, on the Rio Grande, arrived. They opened fire, killing two passengers and taking the mail driver prisoner. Initially they were inclined to turn the driver loose, but when he began to argue with them about his mules, they cut his throat. After about five hours of terrorizing the ranch people, the bandits rode away. The next day, U.S. troops caught fifteen of them four miles above the river, killed ten, and recovered some of the plunder from the ranch. The rest managed to cross into Mexico after a running fight.
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THE ANGLO COMMUNITY
demanded retaliation for the Brite raid, and suspicion fell on Porvenir, a little community of 140 people, a large number of whom were refugees from Mexico, with the balance being native
tejanos
. It was located on the Texas side of the river, a few miles up from Pilares, Chihuahua. The people scratched out a living raising cattle and goats and did their trading at Brite’s store, a hard day’s ride on horseback. The only semblance of modernity was a school. Local ranchers, who viewed the Porvenirians as squatters on ranch land, claimed it was a bandit hideout, and Captain Fox and his Rangers were ready to believe it. On January 23, 1918, Fox ordered a detachment of his Rangers to investigate the town. En route, they were joined by local ranchers, bringing the total number to about forty.

The Rangers and ranchers rode into Porvenir about 1
A.M.
, shook the local population out of bed and into the cold, and marched the men about a quarter of a mile along the road to the river. Then they began ransacking the huts looking for arms. They found one pistol belonging to John J. Bailey, the lone Anglo living in the village, and a Winchester rifle, a Mauser rifle with forty cartridges, a shotgun, and a .22-caliber rifle. The weapons were confiscated. Three of the men were placed under arrest because they wore a brand of shoe carried by Brite’s store. The rest were told they could return to their homes. The three prisoners were taken to the Ranger camp in an abandoned railroad tunnel and questioned about the raid. The following day they were also released. One man departed for Mexico. The others returned to Porvenir, thinking the matter was over.
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The Rangers, however, had other plans. On January 27, they went to the Eighth Cavalry post at Camp Evetts, about four miles from Porvenir, where they presented Capt. Henry A. Anderson with a letter from Col. George Langhorne, commanding officer of the Eighth, directing him to assist the Rangers in pacifying Porvenir. Anderson balked. There was bad blood between the army and the Rangers, who frequently extorted money from the soldiers on trumped-up arrests. He also was familiar with Porvenir and its people, knew them to be peaceful and hardworking, and wondered just who or what he was expected to assist in pacifying. A phone call to Colonel Langhorne at Camp Marfa confirmed the orders, however, and Anderson ordered his men to get ready to ride. They were to cordon off the village, see that no one left, and confiscate all weapons.

The Rangers, soldiers, and four ranchers who had been on the previous raid to Porvenir arrived at the village just after midnight on January 28. The Rangers stood apart while the soldiers went through the village, turning everyone out. Someone built a fire, and the townspeople huddled around it, trying to get warm. The soldiers assured them they were searching for weapons, after which everyone could return to bed. One old gun and a few knives were recovered, but nothing suitable for bandit activity, and no plunder from Brite’s.

When the soldiers finished, the Rangers moved in and herded fifteen men and boys along the road to the river, just as they had done a few nights earlier. They told Anderson he could withdraw his troops, that they would question the prisoners in Spanish. Anderson agreed, but considered it a waste of time. No weapons had been found, he said. He knew all of them and there were no bandits in Porvenir. Then he started his men back to Camp Evetts. A few minutes later, the soldiers heard a fusillade of gunshots. Anderson sent one trooper back to see what was happening. Arriving on the scene, the trooper found the Rangers standing over the corpses of the fifteen men and boys. Turning to the Rangers, the soldier “cursed them and told them ‘what a nice piece of work you have done tonight!’ ”
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THE YOUNGEST OF
the fifteen Porvenir victims was about sixteen. The oldest was about forty-seven. Harry Warren, teacher at the Porvenir school, saw the bodies laid out side by side where they had been killed. “Some were partly lying upon others, about a hundred or so yards from the road, by a little rock bluff,” he wrote. The women, children, and old men fled across the river and found shelter in a little Mexican town, also named Porvenir. Later they obtained permission to transport the bodies to Mexico for burial.
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The incident might have been covered up and forgotten, except that schoolteacher Harry Warren would not allow it to be. “The quiet little village of Porvenir with its peaceful farms and happy homes was no more!” he wrote. “The Rangers and the four cow-men made 42 orphans that night.

“Now what was the cause of this wholesale destruction of these Mexicans, these peaceful farmers and small stock-raisers?” Warren asked.

He specifically named one of the ranchers who participated in both raids, saying the rancher had stolen mares and colts belonging to the Porvenir people and had taken them to Valentine for sale. Fearing prosecution, Warren said, the rancher decided to eliminate any witnesses by telling the Rangers that the Porvenirians were involved in the Brite raid. The Rangers were only too eager to believe him.
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Despite pressure from the military, which considered him a troublemaker, Warren continued to speak out about the atrocity. He was aided by Justice of the Peace J. J. Kilpatrick of Candelaria, who accused the army of a cover-up. Soon the Porvenir survivors were giving statements in Mexican courts, and it took very little time for word to reach Washington, where the Mexican ambassador lodged a formal protest. The federal government began its own investigation into the affair.

In Austin, meanwhile, Captain Fox had lost his patron in the Governor’s Mansion. Sometime earlier, Pa Ferguson had made the politically fatal mistake of trying to extend his patronage into the University of Texas. He was impeached, convicted, removed from office, and prohibited from ever again holding state office in Texas. Lieutenant Governor William P. Hobby was sworn in to succeed him. On June 6, 1918, Hobby disbanded Company B and fired five of its Rangers. Adjutant General James A. Harley demanded Fox’s resignation. Fox complied, but claimed it was a political vendetta because of his Ferguson ties. This brought a scathing public reply from Harley.
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In an open letter to Fox, published in the
Brownsville Herald
on July 12, the adjutant general wrote:

The Governor had personally nothing to do with your resignation nor any politics being in it.—The evidence disclosed, after a thorough investigation, as you know,
that fifteen mexicans
[
sic
]
were
killed while in the custody of your men after they had been arrested and disarmed. This is verified by all proof
even to the admission from the parties and information gathered by this office and by
agents of the United States Government
. We are not interested in your politics when a question of the honor and decency of the state is involved. . . . You know as all peace officers should know that every man whether he be white or black, yellow or brown,
has the constitutional rights to a trial by jury,
and that no organized band operating under the laws of this state has the right to constitute itself judge and executioner and shooting men upon no provocation when they are helpless and disarmed. We are fighting a world war now to overthrow ruthless autocracy and do not propose to tolerate it here at home. You were not forced to resign by the Governor for political reasons, but your forced resignation came in the interest of humanity, decency, law and order.
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THIS WAS NOT
the end of the affair. In Austin, State Representative J. T. Canales of Brownsville, a collateral descendant of old Juan Cortina, leveled eighteen charges of abuse and corruption against the Rangers. Addressing a joint committee investigating the conduct of the Rangers, Canales said:

There are now and have been for some time, in the state Ranger force men of desperate character, notoriously known as gunmen, their only qualification being they can kill a man first and then investigate afterward. The character of these men is notorious and well known and the Adjutant General is either negligent in the selection of his men or else it is his policy to have such characters in the Ranger force to terrorize and intimidate the citizens of the state.
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This was more than Adjutant General Harley was willing to tolerate, and he responded with a five-page letter putting much of the blame squarely on the legislature itself.“ ‘Every laborer is worthy of his hire,’ ”Harley wrote,“ and no man is going to render higher service than the standard you fix for him by his remuneration, save in a few exceptional cases.” For years, he said, the Rangers had labored under low pay, shortages of equipment, and other handicaps that could easily be remedied by legislative action. Nevertheless, he said, as an organization, the Rangers had rendered faithful and valiant service.
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It was an admirable effort on the adjutant general’s part, and it contained a certain amount of truth. Even so, testimony revealed incidents such as the killings after the Olmito train wreck, pistol whippings, extortion, torture, floggings, and other abuses of power. Porvenir was the centerpiece, and although testimony was not taken, many pages of depositions were placed on the record. When it was over, the legislature abolished the Special Rangers, reducing the service back to four companies, each with a captain, a sergeant, and no more than twelve privates. Citizens were allowed to bring charges against Rangers, and the adjutant general was required to investigate and, if the evidence warranted, take legal action.
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Canales had detractors who accused him of political ambitions, but even historian and Ranger partisan Walter Prescott Webb admitted that his true aim seemed to have been to improve the quality of the service. Canales himself expressed support for the Ranger Service as a whole, going so far as to introduce legislation to increase the pay and upgrade the caliber of applicant for the service. Longtime ranger Bill Sterling remarked, “Many members of the House and Senate knew the charges brought by Mr. Canales to be true, but they believed that the Rangers could be saved by a good housecleaning. . . . I always supported the position taken by Judge Canales.”
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