The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (29 page)

Altogether there were more than six hundred Indians, who now split into two groups, one moving down each side of Elm Creek. Two warriors came on the Fort Murrah horse herd and were trying to drive it off when a pair of Rangers spotted them. The Rangers rode after them but, judging from the way the warriors maneuvered, concluded they were part of a much larger party. One of the Rangers rode back to Fort Murrah for help, and Lieutenant Carson took fourteen men in pursuit, unaware that the two warriors were leading them into an ambush. Just before riding into the trap, however, Carson saw the main body of about three hundred warriors concealed about fifty yards ahead. Ordering a slow retreat, he managed to reach Murrah, losing five of his men.
²⁸

ELSEWHERE, THE TEXANS
were taken completely by surprise. The Indians caught and killed settler Joel Myers at the confluence of Elm Creek and the Brazos River, then devastated the nearby Fitzpatrick Ranch, catching the women alone. Elizabeth Fitzpatrick and her two grandchildren were taken captive, and her daughter, Sue Durgan (or Durkin), was killed. Many barely escaped ahead of the raiders and fled toward the George Bragg Ranch with its well-built main house and outbuildings. Some arrived too late and were cut off by the Indians. They fled down the bank of Elm Creek and lay flat under a projecting rock shelter concealed by brush, listening to the six-hour battle that raged only a few yards away.

On several ranches, the men were away, and the warriors killed or carried off the defenseless women and children. The badly battered Rangers at Fort Murrah were no match for the Indians and dared not venture beyond their blockhouse. Families at Belknap retreated into the heavy two-story stone commissary building of the abandoned fort and prepared a defense, although the Indians eventually bypassed it. Finally, after dark, the Indians retreated north, leaving behind burning ranches and eleven dead. With their plunder, they had seven women and children as prisoners, not only whites, but blacks from among the families of freedmen and semiliberated slaves who ranched in the area. Over a thousand head of cattle were also taken.
²⁹

That night, young Francis Peveler took a fast horse and made the seventy-five-mile ride to Weatherford for help. Reinforcements arrived the following day. Among them was Ranger Charles Goodnight, who found Fort Belknap “in great turmoil and excitement.” Continuing on through the county, the relief force arrived at the burned-out Fitzpatrick Ranch. The feather beds and pillows had been ripped open and the windblown feathers covered “an acre or more.” To Goodnight, they looked almost like snow. Farther along, he saw equal devastation at the Hamby Ranch. The Hambys, whose home was the first attacked, had survived but lost everything except the clothes on their backs. Goodnight gave Thomas Hamby an Indian blanket.

“The Indians took away all their dead [except one killed in the doorway of the Bragg house], and it will never be known how many were killed, but their loss must have been considerable,” Goodnight recalled. “A day or two later some of us followed the trail about forty miles, and we found several who had died of wounds.” The Indians, however, had a two-day head start, and further pursuit was useless.
³⁰

THERE WERE MANY
Indian fights along the frontier during the Civil War. In the early years of statehood during the antebellum period, the combined resources of the U.S. Army and the Rangers had provided substantial protection but were still unable to completely halt the forays. The strained resources of the Confederacy—fighting for its existence—were totally unequal to the task, and the defense of the Texas frontier was left to a single regiment of Rangers who were classified as Texas state troops.

It is estimated that over four hundred Texans were killed, wounded, or carried into captivity by Indians from the early raids of 1862 to the last major Indian fight of the Civil War at Dove Creek, near what is now San Angelo, in January 1865. Although these losses were devastating to the frontier, they were insignificant compared with the hundreds or even thousands of irreplaceable soldiers the Confederacy might lose in a single battle in the East. The Confederate government did not take the frontier depredations seriously, and, indeed, it scarcely could afford to.
³¹

The best efforts of the Texans themselves were not enough. The state simply did not have the manpower. Nevertheless, the situation would have been far worse if these men had not been available to take on the odds, had been unwilling, or had chosen the more prestigious war against the Union instead of the forgotten, unglamorous war on the Plains.

Now it was over. Texas was an occupied province, and the priorities of its Northern conquerors were far different from the needs of its people on the frontier.

PART 4

THE TEXAS RANGERS

Chapter 10

Reconstruction

The Civil War was costly for Texas. Ben McCulloch was dead,
killed at Pea Ridge in Arkansas. Albert Sidney Johnston—secretary of war for the Republic of Texas, colonel of the United States Army, general of the Confederate States Army—died at Shiloh. Although the state was spared the devastation of modern war inflicted on so much of the South, its frontier was ablazan autocratic priest who ruled his San Elizario parise. The border had been pushed back as much as 150 miles, almost to Fort Worth itself. For years afterward, travelers on the Plains beyond would remark on ruined houses and abandoned ranches in what had been, before the war, a prosperous and well-populated country.¹

Like many Southern states, Texas was in economic and social chaos, the conditions all the more serious because of its position on the frontier. Most counties did not have the money for sheriff’s deputies, courthouses, or jails. Such jails as did exist often were so flimsy that prisoners could simply walk out. Judges rarely leveled fines because the defendants usually couldn’t afford to pay them, and juries often could not be empaneled because few qualified male residents had taken the loyalty oath required of former Confederate citizens. In some areas, outlaws and badmen made up such a large percentage of the population that they could operate with impunity.²

For lack of an immediate federal plan to restore civil authority following the surrender, Governor Murrah continued in office until June 17, 1865, when President Andrew Johnson replaced him with A. J. Hamilton. As provisional governor, Hamilton was empowered to call a constitutional convention composed of those who qualified for federal amnesty by taking the loyalty oath. The Hamilton administration drew widespread opposition, and the governor was often forced to call on Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, whose command included Texas, to maintain law and order with troops. Nevertheless, civil government was reestablished and moderate Unionist J. W. Throckmorton assumed office as elected governor on August 9, 1866.

One of Throckmorton’s first acts was to call for the “withdrawal or non-interference of the military,” which essentially meant relocation of the troops from the population centers of the state to the frontier area. Although the federal government was unwilling to relocate troops, President Johnson directed that the army not interfere with civil matters.³

Now that the state had control of its own affairs—for the time being, at least—it once again turned its attention to frontier defense. The demands for some sort of action were vehement, because the people felt—with reason—that they had been abandoned to their fate by the federal government. Typical was a petition to the governor, signed by fifty-nine leading residents of Lampasas County in July 1866, more than a year after the war ended:

Whole Settlements have been broken up, families reduced from affluence to want, the rewards of a lifetime of industry have passed off before their eyes[,] the scalping knife not unfrequently used, and . . . to the present time the Cries of Suffering humanity have not been heard by the [federal] Government.

Similar petitions and complaints came from other citizens’ groups and individuals in many frontier counties. In every case, the message was the same—they wanted the state to raise Ranger companies, and were prepared to serve if only the governor would allow them. Some correspondence in the Indian Papers of the Texas State Archives indicates ad hoc companies were formed without waiting for official authorization.
⁴

The state was prepared to help. On September 21, 1866, the legislature enacted a law stating:

That there may be raised three battalions of Texas Rangers for the protection of the northern and western frontier of the State of Texas, to consist of ten companies, giving two battalions three, and one battalion four companies . . . to consist of one captain, two lieutenants, four sergeants, four corporals, one bugler, one farrier and eighty-seven privates each. . . .

Said men shall furnish themselves with horses, arms and accoutrements, and shall be furnished with ammunition, and shall be enlisted for twelve months unless sooner discharged.

As far as can be determined, this is the first time in history that the designation “Texas Rangers” appears in legislation. The new law expected the border counties to provide “the requisite number of men” whenever possible, because they were the counties that would be defended by the new battalions. They would be subject to the rules and regulations of the United States Army but always subject to the authority of the state for frontier service. They were not to venture beyond the limits of the state “except for the purpose of following and chastising marauding bands of Indians whenever found.”
⁵

Despite the nominal significance of this law, it is difficult to determine whether any sort of Ranger force actually was created. The bill to finance the new companies failed. There are virtually no records of the immediate postwar years in the Texas Adjutant General’s files in Austin, nor are there accounts from other sources to indicate that Ranger units were organized under state authority.

Meanwhile, many Texans remained defiant of the Union. In Bonham and Weatherford, mobs destroyed the U.S. flag, and newly freed slaves were in danger of violence. The passage of black codes to restrict the movement of the freedmen and the general resistance by reenfranchised Democrats and even by Texas Unionists and conservative Republicans to changes wrought by the war brought the onus of Congressional Reconstruction onto the state. This allowed military authorities to remove Governor Throckmorton in 1867, on the grounds that he was impeding Reconstruction. The following year, a delegation from Texas requested the federal Congress to authorize a regiment of state cavalry for one year’s service on the frontier, but there is no indication that Congress acted. As the Radical Reconstructionists in Congress saw it, any Texan under arms was a potential rebel, and the federal government did not intend to permit organized bodies of armed Texans to function under state jurisdiction. Frontier defense—if any—was the responsibility of the federal military. The military, however, was less inclined to defend the frontier than enforce Reconstruction edicts.
⁶

WITH THE INSTALLATION
of Radical Republican Edmund J. Davis as governor, the full force of Reconstruction fell on Texas. He and other Radicals were elected through the intervention of the military, and placed in office on January 8, 1870, by order of Col. Joseph J. Reynolds, commander of the Department of Texas. The Florida-born Davis was no carpetbagger, having already spent more than two decades in Texas and achieved distinction as customs collector, district attorney, and district court judge on the antebellum Rio Grande. In 1852, his name had been put forward as a candidate to command a Ranger company, although nothing came of it. Two years later, he chaired a public meeting in Laredo where citizens of Webb County enumerated raids by Lipans, demanded protection, and castigated the federal government for issuing provisions to the same Indians at Fort Inge. During the Cortina War he had bolstered the morale of Tobin’s Rangers by personally accompanying them on their scout for Heintzelman’s troops at Ebonal Ranch.

Davis had opted for the Union during the war and commanded a regiment of pro-Union Texas cavalry that spent the war skirmishing with Confederate Texas cavalry along the Mexican border. But it was his politics rather than his war record that made him attractive to the state’s military rulers.

Personally honest, Davis acted as a watchdog against legislative corruption, and as a result used the power of his office to spare Texas much of the crushing debt imposed on other Southern states by freewheeling carpetbag legislatures. Nevertheless, he was not averse to patronage, abuses were widespread, and that, together with the governor’s determination to impose his Radicalism on the state, earned him the contempt of much of its citizenry. Consequently, and despite his prewar record, he is called the carpetbag governor, and “the governor Texans love to hate.”
⁷