The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (24 page)

The truth is probably near to the lower figure, for the whites made quick work of the camp, prompting one Ranger later to admit that he was ashamed of the fight because it amounted to killing women and children. Some, including Gholson, contend that Peta Nacona was killed, while other witnesses say they saw him very much alive years later. Whatever the case, the few prisoners included a woman with an infant girl, captured by Lt. Tom Kelliher, who nearly ruined his exhausted horse chasing them.
⁴³
As Gholson remembered it:

She . . . looked at [Ross] with a wild glare, and Sull [
sic
] hollers out to Callahaw [Kelliher], “Tom, this is a white woman!”

Tom said, “Hell, no, that ain’t no white woman!” for he was mad, and cussing, and was an Irishman, and he said, “Damn that squaw! If I have to worry with her any more I will shoot her.”

Sull contended she was a white woman and he stayed in front of her and finally laid hold of her horse’s bridle.

About that time Antonio Martínez, a scout who knew the Comanches, came up, and Ross asked, “Who is she, Anton?”

“Oh, she is Nacona’s wife,” Martínez replied.
⁴⁴

Beyond that, the Rangers could determine nothing about her, and finally they took her to Camp Cooper and turned her over to the army, which made inquiries among white families known to be seeking missing relatives. Among those contacted was Isaac Parker, who arrived at Camp Cooper and began questioning the woman through the post interpreter. Her recollections were hazy, but, speaking Comanche, she described a childhood home that fit Parker’s Fort. Parker then spoke to her in English, but she obviously did not understand him.

Finally, Parker turned to the interpreter and said, “If this is my niece, her name is Cynthia Ann.”

The name caught her attention. Without waiting for the translation, she slapped herself on the chest and said, “Cynthia Ann!”
⁴⁵

Cynthia Ann Parker was restored to her family after twenty-four years of Indian captivity. The tragedy was that she had become completely Comanchefied and no longer belonged in white society. She was, in effect, more a prisoner among her own race than she had been with the Indians. If her husband was still alive, she would never see him again, nor would she see her two sons, who were growing to manhood somewhere out on the Plains. Her daughter died at the age of five, and she became indifferent to life. In 1870, her health already undermined by self-starvation, she died of influenza.
⁴⁶

Chapter 8

The Cortina War

By the late 1850s, Rangers were accustomed to fighting bandits
along the Mexican border. But the depredations of Juan Nepumoceno Cortina created an entirely new situation.¹ These were no ordinary robber raids, but a carefully crafted campaign of terror and harassment by a man who carried a strong sense of personal grievance, and whose name would become familiar to the Rangers for almost two decades.

To use the word “bandit” for someone like Cortina is to invite controversy, because whether or not a person was a bandit on the Mexican border often depended on his language and ethnic origin. Border people made their own rules, and law and justice were the exclusive domain of the high and the mighty. Initially, Cortina was allied with at least some of Brownsville’s power brokers of Anglo-Saxon or European origin, but after he split with them, his Mexican background made it easy to outlaw him.² Once Cortina was declared a bandit, however, he was not as easily suppressed as most of his Hispanic compatriots. He remained powerful and influential, with ample capacity to fight back.

Cortina was a son from the second marriage of doña María Estefana Gosceascochea de Cavazos y de Cortina, a prominent landholder and a descendant of the original Spanish settlers of the area.³ Rip Ford, who seems to have spent an equal amount of time either hunting Cortina or protecting him, described him as

of medium size, with regular features, and a rather pleasing continence [
sic
]. He was rather fairer than most men of his nationality. He was fearless, self-possessed, and cunning. In some cases he has acted towards personal and political enemies with a clemency worthy of imitation. When he thought he was being pushed to the wall and in hazard of his life, he acted decisively and promptly.
⁴

Cheno, as his family called him, appears to have been a prodigal son. Although his mother’s other children from both marriages became well educated, he rejected schooling and was illiterate, not learning to read or write until well into middle age. He rode with the rough-and-tumble Mexican stock herders of the region, and soon was respected among them as a leader. He also had a reputation as a brawler. Nevertheless, after serving as a mule skinner during the Mexican War, he was discharged at Fort Brown with credit for faithful service. Over the next few years, he ran cattle, got into fights, and dabbled in local politics.
⁵

The change of sovereignty on the Lower Rio Grande boded ill for the local Hispanic population. The rank and file were lower-class, and the Americans viewed them with undisguised contempt except at election time, when their votes were needed. Among the leading families, resentment flared when some lost their land to American squatters or in title disputes as the Spanish-Mexican property laws were replaced by those of Texas. By the summer of 1859, after thirteen years of American rule, many were ready to rise up against their English-speaking leaders. The time was ripe for reprisal, because earlier in the year, Fort Brown had been deactivated and the troops withdrawn. All they needed was someone to stand up for them. Cortina was the likely candidate. He was already under indictment for cattle theft, a charge commonly used by south Texas power brokers to rid themselves of political opponents, and was widely known for his determination.
⁶

The trouble began on July 13, 1859, when Cortina shot and wounded Brownsville town marshal Robert Shears for pistol-whipping an old man named Cabrera, who had once worked for Cortina’s mother. Over the next two months, Cortina and Shears exchanged recriminations, until in September Cortina decided to settle the matter by killing the marshal. He also wanted the blood of Adolphus Glaevecke, the man responsible for the indictment against him.
⁷

The Cortina War broke out shortly before dawn on September 28, 1859, when Cortina led seventy-five men into town. Shouting “Viva Cheno Cortina! Mueran los gringos! Viva la República de México!”
⁸
they rode down Elizabeth Street, Brownsville’s main thoroughfare. After taking control of the town, Cortina divided his men into squads to hunt down Glaevecke, Shears, and several others, among them William Neale and George Morris, whom Cortina contended (and a U.S. government official later agreed) had wantonly killed several Mexicans.
⁹
They shot Neale through the window of his home, mortally wounding him as he lay asleep. Morris was found under his house and, according to one account, killed three of Cortina’s men from that hiding place. Glaevecke had taken refuge in a nearby office, where he prepared for a fight. Cortina wandered up and glanced in the window as Glaevecke drew a bead on him. But Cortina had seen nothing in his quick glance, and he moved on before Glaevecke could fire.
¹⁰

A delegation of dignitaries from Matamoros persuaded Cortina to leave Brownsville. Once he was gone, local officials requested protection from Mexican troops, who crossed the river and occupied the city for several days until Cortina shifted into Mexico. On October 12, a sheriff’s posse from Brownsville rode upriver to the Cortina ranch, where they caught his sixty-five-year-old lieutenant, Tomás Cabrera (probably the same Cabrera pistol-whipped by Marshal Shears), and brought him back to town as a prisoner. Cortina, who was in Matamoros, sent word to release Cabrera immediately or he would “lay the town in ashes, &c.” That night, he recrossed the river into Texas.

A local militia unit was formed and, together with
tejano
citizens and seventy-five Mexican national guardsmen from Matamoros, started upriver. They had two cannon, one left by the army at Fort Brown and another brought by the Mexicans. The expedition left Brownsville on October 22. Two days later, Cortina ambushed the column and sent it fleeing back to Brownsville, abandoning both guns, which Cortina quickly recovered and took to his camp. Meanwhile, citizens sent a letter to the influential New Orleans
Picayune
pleading, “For God’s sake, urge the government to send us relief. Let . . . the soldiers of Uncle Samuel keep marauders here in check, or practically the line of boundary between the United States and Mexico must be moved back to the Nueces.”
¹¹

THE FIRST HELP
from the outside was a company of Rangers commanded by Capt. William G. Tobin of San Antonio, who had been authorized by Governor Runnels to raise a company of one hundred men to “quell the lawlessness and bloody disturbances at the City of Brownsville.” The governor’s instructions were explicit:

You will be prudent and refrain from disturbing Mexican or American Citizens or encroaching upon Mexican soil, the sole object of your mission being to arrest offenders and prevent further violent and lawless assaults upon the Citizens in that vicinity and their property.
¹²

Cortina, however, intercepted the mail to Brownsville, and learning that the Rangers had been sent, made plans to ambush them. Glaevecke apparently got wind of it, for on the night of November 10, he rode out to meet them on the road and guide them into town. The Rangers, as it turned out, had more to fear from the nervous citizens of Brownsville, who fired at them with a cannon loaded with grapeshot before they were identified.

Tobin wasted no time. Cortina’s planned ambush and the near-panic in Brownsville seemed to convince him that an immediate example was necessary, the governor’s orders notwithstanding. The night after the Rangers arrived, Tomás Cabrera was taken from jail and lynched, and it is generally agreed that Tobin’s men were responsible. In patrols of the surrounding vicinity, the company made almost as much trouble as Cortina himself; a local story holds that Tobin had one good man in his company, but that individual fell and broke his neck soon after arriving in Brownsville.
¹³

Cortina lost little time retaliating. Eight days after Tobin’s arrival, a detachment of thirty men was ambushed near the old Palo Alto battlefield. Three Rangers were killed, four badly wounded, and one captured. The others fled back to Brownsville. The following day, the Rangers went out to retrieve and bury the bodies; they found them mutilated and the captured Ranger dead. They continued on to Cortina’s headquarters at Santa Rita but, knowing he had artillery, withdrew after making “a demonstration.” This was the first of several “demonstrations” Tobin would make without actually attacking Cortina, in part because of his growing strength and in part because no one among either the Rangers or the citizens seemed sure what to do. “Tobin does well,” one citizen wrote to a friend, “but has not the confidence of the men as Jack [Hays] had.” The Mexicans, on the other hand, were particularly confident because the deactivation of Fort Brown and Fort Ringgold (then known as Ringgold Barracks) convinced them that the federal government had abandoned Texas.
¹⁴

As the situation deteriorated, Brig. Gen. David E. Twiggs, commander of the Department of Texas, ordered Maj. Samuel P. Heintzelman to the Rio Grande with five officers and 117 men to investigate and report on the situation.
¹⁵

“Cortinas [
sic
],” Heintzelman noted, “was now a great man; he had defeated the ‘G[r]ingos,’ and his position was impregnable; he had the Mexican flag flying in his camp, and numbers were flocking to his standard. When he visited Matamoras [
sic
] he was received as the champion of his race—as the man who would right the wrongs the Mexicans had received; that he would drive back the hated Americans to the Nueces, and some even spoke of the Sabine as the future boundary.”

One problem the soldiers faced was the lack of accurate intelligence. The overbearing attitude of the Americans had earned them enemies among all classes of Mexicans, and although Cortina’s movements were well known in Matamoros, “we were answered with vague and exaggerated accounts.” Even Americans who had lived in the area for years and were married to Mexican women, a situation that usually would make them privy to anything, could not get reliable information.

Under normal circumstances, Rangers would fill in the gap by scouting and observing, but Heintzelman, who did not care for Rangers in the first place, found them virtually useless. The Rangers, he noted in his diary, were on the verge of mutiny, and Tobin seemed to have little control over them. Tobin placed himself under the major’s command, and Heintzelman asked him to reconnoiter Cortina’s position. He later commented in his official report, “Several went, but none of them ever got near enough to give me any information.”
¹⁶

IN THE ABSENCE
of reliable information, hearsay abounded. In Austin it was reported that Cortina had burned Corpus Christi. The legislature was in session, and when former Ranger Rip Ford ran into Gen. Forbes Britton, Corpus Christi’s senator, on Congress Avenue, he found Britton “uneasy, if nothing more.” Ford discounted the rumor and had nearly succeeded in calming the senator when Governor Runnels strolled up. With the governor present, Britton went into near-hysterics and, as Ford recalled,