The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (44 page)

El Paso’s better nature, such as it was, could be credited in part to theTexas Rangers. Owen White, an El Paso boy who grew up to become an important contributor to
The American Mercury, The New
York Times,
and other leading Eastern publications, recalled a Saturday night when various gamblers, gunmen, and imported hoodlums from the East decided to take over El Paso for their own amusement. They were shooting up the place when a handful of Rangers rode into town.

“The result was instantaneous; it was miraculous,” White remembered. “The good citizens in El Paso breathed easily; the bad ones put their guns out of sight and kept quiet; and all that the Rangers did was to sit around their camp, roll cigarettes, and, once in a while, go over to the saloon and get a drink.”²

The Rangers were supported by the local Law and Order League, who were determined to clean up the town. Reformers pressured the city council into appointing gunfighter Jeff Milton chief of police. Upon taking office, Milton ran the gamblers out of town and generally made life easier for decent citizens. With the next election, however, Milton was fired and the gamblers were back in business. The Law and Order League petitioned Austin for more Rangers to bolster the company in Ysleta. Then they went to court and got injunctions against the gambling houses. The injunctions had little impact, but they demonstrated that the league meant business.³

DOWNRIVER, PEACE WAS
being established in the railroad camps under the watchful eyes of the Rangers and Judge Roy Bean. Seldom did anyone challenge their combined authority, and when someone tried, the reaction was swift and decisive. In one rare incident, a naive attorney had the temerity to question one of the judge’s rulings. Turning to the senior Ranger present, Roy inquired, “Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What are your orders here?”

“To stand behind you in everything you say,” the sergeant replied.

“What would you do if I told you to take this fellow out and hang him?”

“I’d take him out and hang him.”

The lawyer now saw reason behind Roy’s ruling and let the matter drop for the time being, although he later complained (futilely, of course) to higher authorities.
⁴

Roy had bluffed the attorney, and it worked. Despite a later Hollywood reputation for ruthlessness, he never hanged anyone. He never had that kind of authority, and he was smart enough to know how far he could bend the law. But for all his flaws and eccentricities, Judge Roy Bean was the only law in the Pecos region, and the Rangers were ready to back him in whatever he chose to do.

FOR ALL THE
efforts of the Rangers, Judge Roy Bean, and the El Paso Law and Order League, the strip along the Rio Grande was still a rough area, particularly in the Trans-Pecos. El Paso was a frontier town, and as such had the dubious distinction of being home to some of the West’s last practicing gunfighters. On the side of law and order was shootist Jeff Milton. George Scarborough, who played both sides of the law, was currently serving as deputy U.S. marshal and assisted the Rangers from time to time.

Also playing both ends against the middle were the two John Selmans, father and son. John Sr. was well known to the Rangers as a man who had spent much of his life outside the law. He had been a key figure in a bloody feud in Shackelford County in the mid-1870s, and later headed a west Texas gang of cutthroats known as Selman’s Scouts. By the mid-1880s he had pushed his luck about as far as he dared. The time had come to settle down, to look toward a more respectable career and give more attention to his family. With the move to El Paso, he began the transformation to a venerable, if somewhat dishonest, figure known to the local community as “Uncle John.” He now served as constable, and was said to shake down the local prostitutes for payoffs. John Jr. was a police officer of equally dubious reputation.

In the spring of 1895, El Paso’s diverse collection of gunslingers was joined by the most notorious killer of all, John Wesley Hardin. Hardin had walked out of prison on February 17, 1894, after serving slightly less than sixteen years of his twenty-five-year sentence. The years behind bars had taught him to tone down his viciousness, and he used the time to study law. Six weeks after his release, he received a full pardon, and he was admitted to the bar on July 21. A change of venue on one of his legal cases had brought him to El Paso, and he decided to establish his practice there. Still prone to gambling and drunken brawls, he was not exactly a model citizen, but he generally managed to stay within the law.
⁵

Hardin’s arrival in El Paso was simply one gunfighter too many as far as John Selman, Sr., was concerned. He had lived in El Paso for about ten years and was fifty-five, getting on in years for a gunfighter. Unlike Hardin, he didn’t go around looking for trouble, but neither did he back away from it. He was particularly touchy about any threat involving his family, and with John Jr. serving as a police officer in the rough-and-tumble border town, he had ample opportunity to get touchy. Age may have outwardly mellowed him, but John Selman remained a ruthless, cold-blooded killer. Thus, in the summer of 1895, El Paso had two gunfighters on a collision course—Hardin with his tendency to look for trouble, and Selman with his tendency to accommodate.
⁶

Of all the gunmen in El Paso, Hardin naturally attracted the most attention. It seemed everyone was interested in him. In August, Ranger captain John Hughes and gunfighting deputy marshal George Scarborough were helping Davis County officials track down bandits who had robbed a store and killed a local peace officer in Valentine, 145 miles southeast of El Paso. As they combed the mountains of the Big Bend country, Hardin’s name came up.

“They say Wes Hardin is cutting capers in El Paso,” the Davis County sheriff told Hughes. “What’s going to happen, Captain?”

“Why, someone will kill him,” Hughes observed.

“Who?”

“See that man in the blue britches?” Hughes asked, indicating Scarborough. “He might do it.”
⁷

HUGHES WAS RIGHT
about someone killing Hardin, but wrong about who would do it. While the posse sought the bandits, Hardin was exchanging threats with gunfighter-turned-constable John Selman. All summer, trouble had been brewing between the two, much of it centering around John Jr., who had arrested the widowed Hardin’s latest paramour for being drunk and disorderly. About 7
P.M.
on August 19, Uncle John encountered Hardin on the street. Words and insults flew, and the two men separated.
⁸
Hardin went to the Wigwam Saloon and got gloriously drunk. About 10
P.M.
, he staggered into the Acme Saloon. He was rolling dice for drinks at the bar with Henry S. Brown when Selman slipped up to the door of the saloon. Hardin threw the dice on the counter and said, “Brown, you’ve got four sixes to beat.”

Selman’s gun exploded. The .45-caliber slug struck Hardin in the back of the head and came out through his left eyelid. He was dead before he hit the floor. Selman pumped two more bullets into the prone body for good measure. Two .41-caliber Colt’s revolvers were found on the body, but he had not used either. He never knew what hit him.
⁹

The next morning, Hughes and Scarborough boarded the train for El Paso, after their fruitless hunt for the Valentine killers. As he checked their passes, the conductor asked, “Have you heard the news in El Paso?”

“What news?” Scarborough asked.

“Why, Wes Hardin was killed.”

“Who did it?”

“John Selman,” the conductor replied.

“I’ll bet he shot him in the back,” was Scarborough’s only comment.
¹⁰

Eight months later, on April 5, 1896, Scarborough and Selman got into an argument in an alley behind the Wigwam. Guns flashed, and Selman went down. He died the next morning, following surgery.
¹¹

THE DEATHS OF
John Wesley Hardin and John Selman marked the end of the era of the gunfighters. Texas was becoming civilized in spite of itself. By the time Hardin died, even prizefighting was coming under fire. But the sport wasn’t going down without a full count. One of the most absurd matches in the history of boxing brought virtually every Ranger in Texas to El Paso and, for one brief moment of glory, made a forgotten little whistle-stop in the middle of the desert the center of attention for the sporting crowd on both sides of the Atlantic.

Pugilism was still very popular with the male population of Texas during the final decade of the nineteenth century, but the United States as a whole was in the throes of conscience. Temperance societies abounded, animal rights activists were vocal, and boxing was seen as a bastion of sin because of the violence within the ring, its male orientation, the large purses, and the fortunes that changed hands in wagers. By 1895, when Dallas promoter Dan Stuart secured a match between undefeated heavyweight champion James J. (Gentleman Jim) Corbett and Australian contender Robert (Ruby Bob) Fitzsimmons, Texas was one of the few states in the Union where fighters could face off for prize money. A prohibitionary statute did exist, but it was ambiguous enough to be ineffective.
¹²

The fight initially was set for Dallas. The purse was $15,000, with a $10,000 side bet between Corbett and Fitzsimmons. Stuart began constructing an arena, and the attention of the sporting world turned toward Dallas. Preparations were well under way when Governor Charles Culberson, himself a Dallas man, speaking for what he considered “the better class of citizens” of Texas, announced there would be no prizefighting in the state. When Stuart countered that the existing Texas law was invalid, Culberson convened a special session of the legislature to get an improved version.
¹³

With prizefighting so severely restricted in the United States, the showdown between Stuart and Culberson was followed throughout the country. “If it should turn out that Stuart has the law on his side,” the
Chicago
Tribune
predicted, “Dallas is certain to hold one of the biggest crowds on the day that the carnival begins that have ever gathered at a ringside in this or any other country, and should the Governor be right, then it looks as though the battle would certainly take place on Mexican soil and within easy reach of San Antonio.”

Regardless of where the fight was held, “Chicago will have a big representation . . . already two special trains have been arranged for and the chances are that still another will be found necessary to accommodate the crowd who propose to take the journey.” Odds were two to one in favor of Corbett, and were rising to three to one.
¹⁴

THE THIRTY-TWO
-year-old Culberson was no prig. One of his friends and supporters told a
Chicago Tribune
sportswriter that the governor

stands ready without the slightest hesitation to sample most any kind of invigorator. . . in a bottle. When he is irritated he can swear like a teamster, and he doesn’t hesitate to garnish the ordinary conversation with a reasonable degree of profanity.
¹⁵

But Culberson had come up through various local and state offices to the governorship with powerful support from the Dallas pulpits, and now he had to stand by them in the prizefighting controversy.
¹⁶

One Dallas County elected official (who asked not to be identified because he couldn’t afford to alienate the church vote) told
Chicago Tribune
sportswriter George Siler that if the governor ran out of other options,

he could play the rangers on us. These rangers are sort of a little standing army; they are entirely under the command of the Governor, and they make a speciality of going it blind and shooting up everybody and everything the Governor tells them to.

The man doubted Culberson would go to that extreme, but said if he did, “there’s likely to be a heap of trouble,” because a large percentage of the anticipated sixty thousand fight fans would be cowboys. “Now a cow puncher doesn’t like a Texas ranger, no how, and if he ever meets him in Dallas at this fight, and there is enough of him to make it worth while, there’s liable to be trouble in a minute.” In fact, the Dallas man said, Ranger vs. Cowboy would be a bigger event than Fitzsimmons vs. Corbett.
¹⁷

While Culberson lobbied a not-so-compliant state legislature, a Dallas judge ruling in another case overturned Texas’s existing law prohibiting prizefighting. Attorney General Martin M. Crane prepared to battle it out in appeals. It seemed everybody was getting into the act. Looking ahead, in case Texas did ban the fight, federal officials announced they would not permit the fight north of the Red River in the Indian Territory. Culberson’s wife was quoted as saying, “[I]f Texans want a prizefight, let them have it, I say. . . . What’s use of poor Charles working himself to death to prevent something the whole State wants?” Meanwhile, on September 28, Ruby Bob Fitzsimmons arrived in Houston to wide public acclaim, and he gave an exhibition fight that night.
¹⁸

WITH SOME EFFORT,
Culberson managed to get the necessary vote in the legislature, and a clear-cut law against prizefighting went on the books in Texas. Not a man to be discouraged, Dan Stuart then announced that the fight would be held in Hot Springs, Arkansas. After more than a century, what happened next is not clear, but Arkansas governor James P. Clarke appears to have quashed it by having Corbett and Fitzsimmons arrested for conspiracy to assault each other.
¹⁹

Corbett, who was not particularly interested in boxing in the first place, had grown weary of delays. On November 11, he attended a fight in Nevada—the only Western state where professional boxing was still legal—and watched Irish heavyweight Peter Maher trounce Steve O’Donnell. This was Corbett’s way out. Although he had no right to do so, he announced he was retiring the championship in favor of Maher. Fitzsimmons, however, made no objections; he had already beaten Maher in 1892, and was confident he could do it again.