The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (37 page)

“Every man break for the river, or we’ll be cut off,” McNelly ordered. “Keep low and don’t shoot unless overhauled. Break lines and make it your own way.”

The river was more than two miles away in a direct line through heavy brush. Had the Mexicans known the true situation, Durham believed, they would have moved in and cut them to pieces. As it was, Sgt. George Hall with four mounted Rangers held them back and they advanced slowly, giving the others time to get ahead. They reached the river without opposition.

McNelly’s next move defies comprehension. Instead of crossing the river back into Texas under the covering fire of U.S. troops, he ordered his men to dig in. He told them that the Mexicans would believe they had fled in panic across the river. Even so, there was no reason for him to remain, because he had totally failed in his objective. Perhaps he was still hoping to induce the soldiers into coming over. Whatever his motives, he established the mounted men as a picket line in the brush, then retreated about 150 yards across an open field.

Soon they heard gunfire, and the pickets came dashing across the field with Mexican horsemen chasing them. George Hall and John B. Armstrong lost their horses and came running on foot. McNelly’s men opened fire, killing Juan Flores, and the Mexicans retreated. Soon Lieutenant Randlett crossed the river with thirty soldiers and a Gatling gun, and opened fire.

“If there is an inanimate object in this whole world for which I have a pure and unadulterated veneration, respect and love, that object is a Gatling gun,” Pidge later told his readers. Right now, though, he had little time to reflect. Despite the heavy fire, the Mexicans held firm, and McNelly ordered him to charge and break them up.
⁵¹

A QUIET DESCENDED
over the river. About 5
P.M.
, a Mexican appeared with a flag of truce and a letter addressed to “Commander of the American forces on Mexican soil.” McNelly refused to receive it, so it was handed to Randlett. The message was from the mayor of Camargo, under whose jurisdiction Las Cuevas fell. He assured the recipient that Mexican authorities were taking steps “to secure the capture of the cattle thieves and their punishment in conformity with the law,” and demanded United States forces withdraw from the country.
⁵²

Randlett had no option but to comply. McNelly, however, refused to consider it until the Mexicans delivered the stolen cattle and the thieves. After some negotiation, both sides agreed to a cease-fire and settled down for the night.

As the fight dragged into its second day, the army dealt with the implications of a military incursion into a foreign nation that, officially at least, was friendly. In San Antonio, General Ord had received orders from army headquarters to stay on the U.S. side of the boundary. He telegraphed Colonel Potter at Fort Brown to advise the Mexican authorities that United States soldiers would not cross the river. Potter, in turn, notified Maj. A. J. Alexander, who had superseded Major Clendennin at Las Cuevas crossing, that McNelly was on his own as long as he remained in Mexico.

“Inform him that you are directed not to support him in anyway [
sic
] while he remains on Mexican territory,” Potter directed. “If McNelly is attacked by Mexican forces on Mexican ground do not render him any assistance.”
⁵³

As the day progressed, the Mexicans appeared amiable. Early in the morning, they had raised a flag of truce and returned the horses lost by George Hall and Armstrong. One of the saddles was missing, but they promised to look for it and return it later in the day. In turn, McNelly agreed to keep his flag of truce up and to give one hour’s notice before resuming the fight. Privately, he realized his situation was becoming desperate. He was surrounded and he knew the Mexicans had been reinforced. He began to consider asking the Mexicans for terms. Thomas F. Wilson, the U.S. consul in Matamoros, believed he had no choice and sent a telegram advising him to surrender to Mexican federal authorities.

In one last effort to avoid humiliation, McNelly decided to try a bluff. At 4
P.M.
on November 20, he notified the Mexicans that he expected the stolen stock and thieves to be delivered to him at Rio Grande City by 10
A.M.
the following day. Otherwise he would advance immediately against their lines. Several notes were exchanged, and the Mexicans agreed to consider it.

That was enough for McNelly. He had saved face. He led his men back across the river and up to Fort Ringgold. The following day, sixty-five head of cattle were delivered, and the mayor of Camargo and a delegation of citizens called with assurances that Mexico would take steps to stop the raids.

McNelly did not believe it, but it did not matter.
⁵⁴
He had made a terrific fool of himself by attacking the wrong settlement, and had caused the deaths of innocent people. He had created an international incident. And he had put his own men in serious danger of annihilation. In the end, however, he had managed to save his command, and make enough impression on the Mexican officials to get at least a portion of the stolen cattle returned.

Chapter 13

Bad Times for Badmen

One of the problems perennially facing the Texas Rangers was
money. When Indians or badmen were active, or when the Mexican border was in turmoil, the legislature willingly voted money for a frontier force. When things were quiet—and sometimes even when they weren’t—the need for law enforcement or defense somehow didn’t seem as immediate, and lawmakers began cutting back until the next emergency.

As early as October 27, 1874, when the Frontier Battalion was only five months old, Major Jones was forced to issue a general order forbidding the sharing of rations with “camp-followers and loafers” who hung around the camps on the pretext of waiting for an opening for enlistment. “In view of the fact that it may be necessary to disband a portion of the command before a great while, no more recruits will be received until further orders.”¹

A year later, on October 25, 1875, he issued yet another order stating:

On account of the meager appropriation for frontier defense, for the current year and the consequent necessity for economizing its expenditures as much as possible; on the 30th of November next commanders of companies will reduce the force of their respective companies by discharging all except two Sergeants, one corporal, and seventeen privates, giving to the men discharged final statements of their accounts, as has been done heretofore in similar cases.²

The dilemma with these cutbacks was that although the Indian threat was drawing to a close and the iron-fisted rule of Porfirio Díaz ultimately would bring the Mexican border under control, the badman problem remained serious. In a lengthy report to Adjutant General Steele in December 1874, Jones wrote:

Besides . . . scouting for Indians, the battalion has rendered much service to the frontier people by breaking up bands of outlaws and desperadoes who had established themselves in these thirty settled Counties [patrolled by the Rangers], where they could depredate upon the property of good citizens, secure from arrest by the ordinary process of law, and by arresting and turning over to the proper civil authorities many cattle and horse thieves, and other fugitives from justice. . . .

Although the force is too small and the appropriation insufficient to give anything like adequate protection to so large a territory, the people seem to think we have rendered valuable service to them, and there is a degree of security felt in the frontier counties, that has not been exhibited [or] experienced for years before.³

Despite Jones’s reasoning, the legislature continued to cut funds, and each year he had to juggle the books to find enough men and equipment to do the job. The situation was particularly serious because the decade of the 1870s was the era of a group of killers who might easily be styled the“BigFour”of Texas, and even of the entire Midwest. The worst was, of course, John Wesley Hardin. “It has been said by some wag that Texas, the largest state in the Union, has never produced a real world’s champion at anything,” Sgt. James B. Gillett remarked. “Surely this critic overlooked Hardin, the champion desperado of the world.” Second only to Hardin was John King Fisher, followed in no particular order by the murderous Bill Longley and stylish, Yorkshire-born Ben Thompson.
⁴

Of the four, the Rangers were most concerned with Hardin and Fisher, a frustrating situation because those two, together with Thompson, were almost folk heroes in Texas and often more popular than the lawmen who hunted them. Badmen defied authority, and this appealed to the independent nature of the average Texan as the state began assuming the trappings of a modern regulatory bureaucracy. And because the badmen took on unpopular institutions, such as banks, railroads, and the autocratic cattle kings, ordinary citizens and cowhands were often ready to cover for them and help them along.
⁵

AS PREVIOUSLY NOTED,
Wes Hardin had returned to his family home in Comanche County after the killing of Bill Sutton. Accompanied by Jim Taylor, he arrived in Comanche, the county seat, about April 28, 1874, and despite a $500 reward for Taylor stemming from the feud with the Suttons, they had a quiet month racing horses, while Wes joined his brother Joe’s cattle business.

Joe Hardin’s “business” generally involved phony bills of sale on stolen cattle, bills of sale on nonexistent herds, or herds that on delivery turned out to be short-counted. This was not lost on the honest cattlemen of the neighborhood; even before Wes’s arrival they had called on the law to do something about the Hardins and their associates.
⁶

The situation boiled over on May 26, John Wesley Hardin’s twenty-first birthday. He had a standing feud with Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb of adjacent Brown County, and when Webb showed up in Comanche in the midst of Hardin’s birthday revelries, Wes, his cousin Bud Dixon, and Jim Taylor gunned him down on the street in broad daylight. As he died, Webb managed to get off one shot, grazing Hardin in the left side. Wes and his associates escaped to his parents’ home, where his mother dressed his wound, then hid out a few miles west of Comanche.
⁷

On May 30, twenty-two citizens of Comanche County petitioned Governor Coke for a detachment of Rangers to end lawlessness in general, and specifically to capture John Wesley Hardin and Jim Taylor. The petition, however, had been anticipated, because Company A, consisting of fifty-five men under command of Capt. John R. Waller, had arrived in Comanche three days earlier. One Ranger remembered, “The country was overr Run [
sic
] with lawless caracters [
sic
] & among them was that notorious Killer John Wesley Hardin.”
⁸

As far as Hardin was concerned, the coming of the Rangers virtually guaranteed that he would be lynched if caught.

The sheriff told [Waller] he could and would arrest me whenever he was sure he could protect me. He tried to get Waller to assist him in doing this, but Waller was really the captain of a “vigilant” band and would not do it. Even my father and brother told Waller that if he would himself guarantee me protection, I would come in and surrender. Waller could guarantee nothing, but persisted in hunting me with his mob, composed of the enemies of all law and order. He aroused the whole country and had about 500 men scouting for me, whose avowed purpose was to hang me.
⁹

For once, Hardin’s observations may have been more accurate than self-serving, for, as his biographer Leon Metz has pointed out, Waller was notoriously indifferent to the safety of prisoners. As events soon would show, he did not particularly care whether or not a jailed suspect fell victim to a lynch mob.
¹⁰

THE RANGERS WENT
to work immediately. Wes’s parents, the Rev. and Mrs. James G. Hardin; Wes’s wife, Jane; Joe Hardin and his wife; Tom and Bud Dixon; and several other Hardin relatives and adherents were detained. James Hardin and the women were placed under house arrest, while the others were lodged in a two-story stone building on the Comanche town square that served in lieu of a jail. Three days later, on May 30, the Rangers learned that Wes, Alec Barekman (another of his innumerable cousins), Jim Taylor, and Hamilton Anderson were camped about six miles west of Comanche, and several running gunfights ensued. During one of these fights, Hardin’s horse was slightly wounded, and the Rangers seem to have mistakenly assumed they had wounded Hardin himself.

Wes Hardin realized old friendships and family connections no longer protected him from the outraged citizenry. Barekman and Anderson, however, did not understand the gravity of the situation. They had had enough. Separating from Hardin and Taylor, they hoped to slip home, but on June 1, the Rangers found them and gunned them down.

Barekman and Anderson were not the only ones to die that day. About midnight, some twenty prominent cattlemen gathered in Brown County and, heavily armed, rode toward Comanche. Arriving at the stone building where Joe Hardin and the others were being held, they disarmed the guards and announced they had come for the men who had killed Charles Webb. In fact, they had come to clean up the Hardin gang, because they took not only the Dixon boys, who had been present when Webb was killed, but Joe Hardin, who had been elsewhere. The three were strung up from a live oak tree a short distance out of town with Joe protesting his innocence right up until the rope choked him off for good.
¹¹

Waller’s company stayed in Comanche until June 12, and a report of the Frontier Battalion’s activities during that period observes: