The Rangers were the Scouts of our Army and a more reckless, devil-may-care looking set, it would be impossible to find this side of the Infernal Regions.
—SAMUEL CHAMBERLAIN
American generals in Mexico did not, on the whole, consider the opposing military a well-trained, highly prepared force. The Mexicans doubted themselves too. “Strictly speaking, the army does not exist,” one Mexican politician admitted. “What today bears that name is only a mass of men without training and without weapons.” Much of the weaponry they did possess was of poor quality; the government had purchased used muskets—thirty-year-old surplus weapons—from the British at clearance-sale prices.
Some of the Mexican soldiers did wear striking uniforms, and their swords flashed brilliantly in the bright sunlight. Many of them fought with courage. But a great number of the Mexican infantry were drunks, layabouts, and prisoners pressed into service. Most had never fired a gun before they put on a uniform, if they even had a uniform. A considerable number of them went into combat wearing plain cotton garments and sandals. Indians were captured and brought in chains to barracks, where they were conscripted into the army. Large collections of officers sprang from political hackdom with faint military knowledge or competence. Desertion among the ranks was epidemic.
Still, the U.S. Army faced a daunting task in the invasion of a foreign country. It needed more men, including those of the sort that Texas could uniquely provide. Before the war was officially under way, General Taylor asked the new governor of Texas, James Pinckney Henderson, for four regiments. The governor himself volunteered.
Rangers who enlisted to fight in Mexico no longer held a spot on the state muster rolls, for they now had joined U.S. forces, which meant they served as official Texas Rangers no more. But no one could mistake them for riflemen from, say, New York. If anything, their Ranger-ness was magnified in the new surroundings. They served in their own discrete units, and they were still referred to as Rangers.
Regular U.S. soldiers wore standard uniforms: dark blue jackets with brass buttons, sky blue pants, and belts with buckles that bore the letters US. The Rangers dressed in whatever fashion pleased them, and they honored few of the usual military protocols. Their uniform, it was said with mordant humor, was “a dirty shirt and a five-shooter.” The normal run of troops regarded them with a combination of awe, resentment, and disbelief. “The best of them,” wrote Lieutenant Napoleon Dana, “looked as if they could steal sheep.”
Samuel Chamberlain, an army cavalryman from Boston, had never seen such characters. “Some wore buckskin shirts, black with grease and blood,” he recalled. “Some wore red shirts, their trousers thrust into their high boots.” All of them, Chamberlain said, armed themselves with Bowie knives. Steel blades up to twelve inches long made these knives useful as tools, and they could be deadly weapons in close combat. In addition, the Rangers’ Colt revolvers gave them a decided battlefield advantage over opponents who carried single-shot pistols. Some Mexican soldiers ascribed magical powers to the Texans’ guns. The “untutored greaser,” Ranger Ephraim Daggett said, regarded the Colt revolvers “with holy awe and superstition.” Many of them believed “the ball would revolve in all directions after its victim, run around trees and turn corners, go into houses and climb up stairs, and hunt up folks generally.”
Thus outfitted, the Rangers affected a menacing strut. “With their uncouth costumes, bearded faces, lean and brawny forms, fierce wild eyes and swaggering manners,” Chamberlain said, “they were fit representations of the outlaws which made up the population of the Lone Star State.” To enhance this package, the Rangers employed a bloodcurdling yell on the battlefield, not unlike the one later used by Rebels in the Civil War. “Such yells exploded on the air,” a Texas governor, Oran Roberts, wrote. “[They] have been heard distinctly three miles off across a prairie, above the din of musketry and artillery.”
The Rangers also possessed crucial skills that set them apart from army regulars. “As a mounted soldier [the Ranger] has had no counterpart in any age of country,” wrote Captain Luther Giddings of the Ohio volunteers. “Chivalrous, bold and impetuous in action, he is yet wary and calculating, always impatient of restraint, and sometimes unscrupulous and unmerciful. He is ununiformed, and undrilled and performs his active duties thoroughly, but with little regard to order or system. He is an excellent rider and a dead shot.”
General Joseph Lane of Indiana was impressed with their fire and their grit. The Rangers, he said, “love to fight better, can stand hunger longer and endure more fatigue” than regular soldiers. Major Roswell Ripley acknowledged they would “not easily submit to discipline.” But the Rangers’ hard-won knowledge from the Indian wars, he said, would allow them to “take the field in rough, uncouth habiliments, and, following some leader chosen for his talent and bravery, perform partisan duties in a manner hardly to be surpassed.”
Field conditions in Mexico could range from punishing to deadly, especially in summer, when it was—in one Ranger’s description—“too hot for a lizard to live.” On an infantry march near Reynosa, soldiers felt “the sun pouring its hottest rays directly upon their backs,” one newspaper correspondent wrote. “Several fell to the ground exhausted by the heat.” John Duff Brown, a physician who volunteered for war duty, recalled “Camp Maggot” on the Rio Grande. It sat downstream from the army’s slaughter pens, from which rendering waste was dumped into the river. “We used the river water,” Brown said, “and some days we were forced to wade out fifty or sixty yards to get clear of maggots.” Sickness was constant among the troops.
The Rangers already knew how to survive a sun-scorched, hostile landscape. In the desert, they searched for low ground that might contain stagnant watering holes for them and their horses. “Sometimes we traveled for miles, without a single sign to guide us over the untrodden hills, but the position of the sun in the heavens,” wrote one Ranger. “Sometimes we followed the trail of innumerable droves of wild horses that roamed in freedom over this immense range of waste country.”
Even Texans accustomed to harsh surroundings found Mexico extraordinarily tough. “In all my life I was never as hot. . . . It is so hot that there is danger in exposing our muskets to the sun for fear [of] firing them off,” Ranger James K. Holland wrote in his diary. “The water that we have is not fit for a hog to waller in.”
Other problems arose from waging war in a strange and distant land. Supply lines could be unreliable, owing to hard terrain and attacks by guerrillas. And the Americans were marching across territory unknown and largely uncharted. Again the Rangers brought their unmatched skills and their unbridled embrace of peril.
In mid-May 1846, McCulloch and his men prepared to depart the town of Gonzales for a three hundred-mile ride to the border. They went first to Corpus Christi, then—avoiding the troublesome Nueces Strip—rode toward Padre Island.
This low, sandy barrier isle was only a few hundred yards wide at some spots, but it extended southward for more than a hundred miles, separating the mainland from the Gulf of Mexico. It had once been the hunting grounds of the fierce Karankawas, who lingered now on the cusp of Ranger-assisted extinction. Nearly treeless with waves of dunes, Padre seemed to the sunburned and wind-chapped riders like an endless slice of the Sahara. “Never were a set of men or horses more heartily tired of any one portion of this earth’s surface,” recalled Samuel Reid, a member of the company. “It is one of the most gloomy and desolate looking places which it has ever been our bad fortune to visit.”
Five days later they reached the Palo Alto battlefield, where they camped but did not sleep well, tormented by mosquitoes. The next day they crossed the Resaca de la Palma battlefield into clouds of flies and the stench of dead horses and mules, the carcasses left behind after the battle less than two weeks before. They rode on, and Matamoros finally rose into splendid view—the white adobe walls and turrets catching the light of day’s end, with the American flag flying above it. The site summoned “beautiful dreams of Moorish palaces and Oriental gardens, orange groves and shady avenues,” Reid said.
His exotic visions did not survive close inspection. Reaching the Rio Grande, Reid said, they found “rude mud-built houses . . . windows without glass, hot dusty streets and a dirty, lazy, and most unpoetical looking set of inhabitants.” The Rangers’ makeshift camp was even worse. Because they had not been issued tents, they slept in shelters of sticks and brush. Reid said the bivouac resembled “a collection of huts in a Hottentot hamlet.”
They wouldn’t stay long. Zachary Taylor’s planned next move was an assault on Monterrey, the city to which the Mexican forces had retreated. It lay two hundred miles west of Matamoros—a hard march—and Taylor needed McCulloch to scout the region for the best way to go. McCulloch’s company surveyed possible routes for the presence of Mexican guerrillas and the availability of water.
A correspondent for the New Orleans Picayune, George Wilkins Kendall, accompanied McCulloch’s company of forty men on some of these missions. He wrote of the Rangers enduring fatigue and hunger as they tracked enemy infantry and guerrillas across northern Mexico. Newspapers across America reprinted Kendall’s dispatches as he turned McCulloch and his Rangers into stars of war. “There was not a minute at any time when any man’s pistol or rifle would have missed fire, or he would not have been up and ready for an attack,” Kendall wrote. “I have seen a goodly number of volunteers in my time, but Capt. Ben McCulloch’s men are choice specimens.”
Taylor moved on Monterrey in September 1846. As they marched toward the city, set in a verdant valley, many American soldiers—who before now had seen only searing deserts and ragged villages—were struck by its temperate loveliness. Green fields of corn lined the roads, and in the distance fleecy clouds skimmed the Sierra Madre foothills. “A river, clear as crystal, flows on one side of the city,” wrote Captain Giddings, “on whose borders there are romantic rural cottages, and gardens with thick foliage.” Taylor encamped at a spring-fed grove, which had served as a picnic grounds for Mexicans. So pleasant were the surroundings that many soldiers took to sightseeing strolls along the outskirts of the city, unarmed, as if in a park. Taylor had to put up perimeter guards, and officially forbade his men from straying from camp.
When it came to leisure, the Rangers had other ideas. On September 19 a heavy fog cloaked the valley. The mist began to lift around noon and the “Black Fort,” a citadel outside Monterrey, loomed into view. As their tricolored flag waved above them, Mexicans fired their cannons at the Americans, but they missed high, low, and wide. The artillery’s only effect was to entice the mounted Rangers, who were in a taunting mood.
Against Taylor’s orders the Texans with their trademark yell spurred their horses toward the fort. The Mexicans tried to shoot them, which only added to the Rangers’ excitement. “Every fire was met with a hearty response of 3 cheers and such waving of hats,” Ranger Holland wrote. “The Texans proved their spunk by the utter carelessness with which the[y] [received] the Enemy’s shot.”
Captain Giddings watched the Rangers employ mounted maneuvers that came straight from the Comanches. “Like boys at play . . . those fearless horsemen, in a spirit of boastful rivalry, vied with each other in approaching the very edge of danger,” Giddings wrote. “Riding singly and rapidly, they swept around the plain under the walls, each one in a wider and more perilous circle than his predecessor.” The Mexicans kept firing at them, Giddings said, but “might as well have attempted to bring down skimming swallows as those racing dare-devils.”
The 250 Rangers at Monterrey were under the command of none other than Jack Hays. He answered to General William J. Worth, a New Yorker for whom the city of Fort Worth later was named. Worth reported to Taylor, who decided the Rangers would be at the forefront of an imminent attack. “Now that danger is expected,” Ranger Holland wrote in his diary, “old Taylor has put us in front.” They were among those sent to seize the Saltillo Road as part of the American advance into the city. From this arose another story of Hays’s guile and daring, as related by Ranger sergeant James “Buck” Barry in his memoir.
Two days after the riding display at the fort, the Rangers found themselves on this road, confronted by a regiment of Mexican lancers. Badly outnumbered and not yet ready for battle, the Rangers needed to buy some time. That, Barry said, is when Hays rode ahead, his saber in his hand, and challenged Lieutenant Colonel Juan Najera, the commander of the Mexicans, to a swordfight. Smart money was not on the Ranger leader. “Hays knew no more about saber fighting than I did,” Barry said.
When the two men were about forty yards apart, the Mexican officer charged. All pretensions to chivalry vanished at that point. “Within a few feet of the Mexican,” Barry said, “Hays pulled a pistol and shot him dead from his horse.”
Though quite a tale, it probably isn’t true. Two accounts written by men present—one a Ranger in Hays’s company and the other newspaper correspondent Kendall—make no mention of such an encounter. Nor does Hays’s report. Several histories of the war, including one by General Cadmus Wilcox, who was at Monterrey, cast serious doubt on the story. Wilcox and others say Najera was mortally wounded in the subsequent battle between the two forces.
“The clash was great,” wrote Sam Reid, from McCulloch’s company. “We saw their lieutenant colonel fall, while in the thickest of the fight.” Reid was a lawyer who had only recently arrived in Texas and thus harbored few of the prevailing grudges against Mexicans. That might explain his admiring portrait of Najera as the “brave” and “dashing” commander lay dying: “He was a tall, splendid-looking fellow, with a fierce moustache and beautiful teeth, which were set hard as he lay on the ground with his face partly turned up, his eyes yet glassy in the struggle of death, and his features depicting the most marked determination.”
After overcoming the Mexicans on the Saltillo Road, the Rangers and other volunteers conquered two fortified hills on the edge of town. “The dreaded Texans, who had unnumbered wrongs to avenge, were picking off each his victim at every shot,” Kendall wrote. “From every cover [they] issued a leaden messenger of death.” The assault was accompanied by the Texas yell. “Onward, still onward, pressed the stormers,” Kendall said, “louder and louder grew their shouts as the front ranks of the enemy recoiled.” They took the Bishop’s Palace, which bristled with artillery—the Rangers “brave as lions” in Lieutenant Dana’s view—and pushed into the city itself on the third day of the battle.
“[It] was done in quick time under the heaviest firing of grape Canister and musketry—we faced it like men,” Ranger Holland wrote. “[We] went running in to Town to the astonishment of Genl Taylor—to the great confusion of the Enemy—they did not understand such bold movement.” The Rangers fought from house to house, Holland said, with “bullets whizzing by us on all sides.”
Here every house had a flat roof, with two-foot walls around the roof perimeters. “Which made every house a fortress,” wrote Buck Barry, “and every street a plain road to death.” Walls also lined the streets, so the Rangers used sledgehammers, axes, and crowbars to punch holes in them. “It was nothing strange for the muzzles of the Texans’ and Mexicans’ guns to clash together, both intending to shoot through the hole at the same time,” Barry said.
The next day Taylor ordered the Texans to withdraw so American shelling of Monterrey could commence. This enraged the Rangers. “We had the city almost completely under our command,” Holland said. “If he had let us alone we would soon have had it in such a condition there would have been no need” of bombardment. On September 24 both sides signed a truce. The Rangers were in no mood to celebrate an end to the fight for Monterrey. In fact, Reid wrote, they “were maddened with disappointment.”
Though the Rangers believed their mission was cut short, their reputation as fearless, unbeatable, and merciless combatants had taken root. “Their tiger-like ferocity at Monterrey is but a foretaste of what the Mexicans may expect,” the New York Herald said. “God have mercy on them if the Rangers in an open field pounce down upon them with the war cry of ‘The Alamo.’ Very few prisoners will be taken, you may rest assured.”
The enlistment terms of many of the Texans who volunteered at the start of the war expired after the battle for Monterrey. The army, however, still needed Rangers. After Monterrey, Hays sailed to New Orleans with Walker. “They were warmly greeted by thousands,” a local newspaper said. “The arrival of these gentlemen . . . created a sensation throughout the city.” While Walker went east to recruit, Hays returned to Texas to sign up more volunteers. McCulloch also went to Texas to find more willing combatants. All three soon returned to the front lines in Mexico.
McCulloch and his scouts may have saved hundreds, if not thousands, of American lives. The Rangers slipped behind enemy lines near Agua Nueva in February 1847 and discovered twenty thousand of Santa Anna’s men in position to ambush advancing Americans. Taylor withdrew to a more defensible position and defeated the Mexicans at what came to be known as the Battle of Buena Vista. “The services rendered by Major McCulloch and his men,” Taylor wrote, “were of the highest importance.”
Hays’s new group of Rangers enjoyed a run of successes. Commanders often employed them as a rapid-strike team—a quick reaction force, in modern military terms. In December 1847, Colonel Francis Wynkoop learned that guerrillas had attacked the tail end of a long army march. The soldiers, who had fallen behind and stopped to sleep, were under siege. Wynkoop sent Hays’s Rangers in the dark of night to rescue them. After a few hours—having quickly and efficiently ended the matter—they returned to camp. Two dead American soldiers, whose throats had been slit by the guerrillas, were tied to the back of a mule. The Rangers had shot and killed two Mexicans, but they also turned over two prisoners to Wynkoop. “This is one of the seven wonders, that the Texan rangers brought the guerillas in as prisoners,” Pennsylvania volunteer J. Jacob Oswandel remarked in his journal, “for they generally shoot them on the spot where captured.”
In a November 1847 battle near Puebla, according to an army report, Hays commanded an advance guard of thirty-five men against about two hundred Mexican lancers. They charged the lancers and forced them to retreat into nearby mountains. The Mexicans regrouped and charged the Texans, who were running out of ammunition. Hays ordered his Rangers to retreat. He stayed at the rear of the retreat. As the Mexicans drew closer, Hays stopped, aimed, and shot two of them dead.
“Never did any officer act with more gallantry than did Col. Hays in this affair,” reported General Lane of Indiana. He had led the front of the assault, Lane said, and was “the last man to quit the field” when the battle was done.
Hays had of course gained notice in his battles with the Comanches. His feats in Mexico, said Ranger John “Rip” Ford, only added to his renown. “He was almost idolized by many. . . . He was cool, self-possessed, brave, and a good shot,” Ford wrote. “At Veracruz all the distinguished personages of our army and navy sought his acquaintance and prized his friendship. In passing by the troops of other States of the Union, they would rush from their tents and ‘Hurrah for Colonel Hays!’”
The fighting in Mexico lasted less than two years. More than thirteen thousand U.S. troops died, most of them felled by infection or disease. Mexican deaths were estimated at twenty-five thousand. The war officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848. The treaty ceded California and much of the American Southwest to the United States. Most important to Texas, it set the Rio Grande as the boundary between Texas and Mexico.
American officials sought to portray the Mexican War as one fought with chivalry, decorum, and a humane concern for those caught in the crossfire. Early on the War Department issued a mollifying proclamation that was printed and distributed to Mexicans. “We come to make no war upon the people of Mexico,” it said. “We come among the people of Mexico as friends and republican brethren.”
It was, of course, an absurd declaration. Long after the war’s conclusion, Ulysses S. Grant wrote: “I do not think there was ever a more wicked war. . . . I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.” Thousands of civilians died, and U.S. troops burned a swath of villages across northeastern Mexico. “They make a wasteland and call it peace,” one disgusted American officer said.
One of the worst examples of the wickedness cited by Grant came at the hands of Arkansas volunteers, known as Rackensackers. On Christmas Day 1846 some of the Rackensackers raided a ranch at Agua Nueva, where they raped a number of the women. They were “fighting over their poor victims like dogs,” a witness recalled.
Mexicans retaliated by capturing an Arkansas cavalryman and subjecting him to their most favored form of torturous death: dragging him behind a horse with a rope around his neck. In February 1847, the Rackensackers took their own revenge. They rounded up civilians—none of whom were known to have been involved in the death of the Arkansas soldier—and forced them into a cave near Saltillo.
Samuel Chamberlain of the U.S. Army was among those who happened upon the scene after hearing the shouts and cries of women and children. He recalled the sight: “The cave was full of our volunteers yelling like fiends, while on the rocky floor lay over twenty Mexicans, dead and dying in pools of blood.” The Arkansans had scalped the Mexican men as the women and children shrieked for mercy, Chamberlain said. “A rough crucifix was fastened to a rock,” he added, “and some irreverent wretch had crowned the image with a bloody scalp.”
Though the Rackensackers were arrested, a court of inquiry failed to identify the individuals responsible for the massacre. And General Taylor couldn’t send all the Arkansans home because he needed these troops for battle. Therefore, Chamberlain said, “no one was punished for this outrage.”
The Arkansas volunteers’ actions constituted some of the worst on record. But when it came to the overall wreaking of vengeance in Mexico, Texans seemed to occupy a special tier.
Zachary Taylor both required and rejected the Rangers. “On the day of battle I am glad to have Texas soldiers with me for they are brave and gallant,” he was reported to have said, “but I never want to see them before or afterwards, for they are too hard to control.” Though they performed with valor, a number of them had “disgrace[d] their colors and their country” by committing “extensive depredations and outrages upon peaceful inhabitants,” Taylor wrote.
He didn’t provide specifics, but the general pulled no punches. “There is scarcely a form of crime that has not been reported to me as committed by them,” he said in letter to the army’s adjutant general. “The mounted men from Texas have scarcely made one expedition without unwarrantably killing a Mexican.” Taylor decided he had seen enough, and many of the Texans were sent home. “The constant recurrence of such atrocities . . . is my motive for requesting that no more troops may be sent to this column from the State of Texas.”
Captain Giddings echoed Taylor’s ambivalence toward the Rangers. “They were excellent light troops,” he said, but possessed of a “lawless and vindictive spirit.” Taylor thanked them for their service, Giddings said, “and we saw them turn their faces toward the blood-bought State they represented, with many good wishes and the hope that all honest Mexicans were at a safe distance from their path.”
Among the regular troops, the Rangers owned a deeply rooted reputation as arrant killers. “Most of these rangers are men who have been either prisoners in Mexico, or, in some way, injured by Mexicans,” wrote Frank S. Edwards, a Missouri volunteer. “They . . . spare none, but shoot down every one they meet. It is said that the bushes, skirting the road from Monterrey southward, are strewed with skeletons of Mexicans sacrificed by these desperadoes.”
Edwards recalled the Rangers’ execution of a Mexican they accused—without evidence—of being part of a band of marauders. “The Texians pretended to consider him as such,” he said, “but there was no doubt this was only used as a cloak to cover their insatiable desire to destroy those they so bitterly hate.” They led the man into a public plaza, let him light a small cigar, and shot him. The man “fell a corpse,” Edwards recalled, “with the still smoking cigarito yet between his lips.”
It was no accident that many of those Texans accused of the worst atrocities came under the command of Ranger captain Mustang Gray. Before the war he had led the “Men-Slayers” in the Nueces Strip. Now he was in charge of “Gray’s Company, Texas Mounted Volunteers,” out of Corpus Christi.
The twenty-nine-year-old Gray loved to dance, drink, and kill. Some nights during the war, it was said, he would leave his post, ride his horse miles to town, and dance for four or five hours with Mexican women. The irony of this was not lost on Gray’s biographer of sorts, Jeremiah Clemens: “The loveliest of the mingled blood of the Spaniard and the Aztec learned to forget, in the voluptuous contact of the mazy dance, that the strong arms which held them, and the pleading tones which charmed their willing ears, belonged to their country’s foes.”
When the music stopped, Gray would jump on his horse and be back at camp by daybreak. His various exploits inspired a ballad: There was a noble Ranger / They called him Mustang Gray / He left his home when but a youth / Went ranging far away. Some frontier mothers were known to sing it as a soothing lullaby.
The song left out any references to his heavy drinking. Even an admiring chronicler had to admit that Gray consumed stunning amounts of liquor. Clemens, a Mexican War veteran and U.S. senator from Alabama, wrote in his 1858 book Mustang Gray; A Romance that Gray always traveled with a packhorse bearing casks of alcohol. “It mattered little to him what it was—whiskey, m[e]scal, brandy—anything, as he expressed it, that would make the blood flow more freely,” Clemens wrote. “Or, in the rude, though expressive phraseology of one of his comrades, ‘Anything that would make the drunk come.’”
Clemens praised Gray for bravery in Mexico but acknowledged that he never lost his desire to shoot defenseless Mexicans. “The long habit of retaliation was too firmly fixed to be easily shaken off,” Clemens said. “He could not learn to forget the bloody feuds of years.” After the landmark Battle of Buena Vista, Gray and his men were ordered to escort a number of prisoners from Monterrey to Camargo, Clemens wrote, but the prisoners “never reached their destination.” Gray reported to his superiors the Mexicans had escaped en route, which no one swallowed. “The ‘Mustangers’ (as Gray’s company were called) had established a reputation that threw many doubts on the truth of the story,” Clemens observed. “The General himself utterly disbelieved it.”
Though little noted back in the United States, Gray’s infamy spread throughout the U.S. Army in Mexico. Dr. S. Compton Smith, a field surgeon under General Taylor, admired most Rangers. But Gray’s men composed a “gang of miscreants,” Smith said. “This party, in cold blood, murdered almost the entire male population of the old rancho of Guadalupe—where not a single weapon, offensive or defensive, could be found! Their only object being plunder.”
This incident had its origins in February 1847, when Mexican guerrillas attacked an American wagon train, torturing and killing the teamsters who drove it. By one report, more than forty American teamsters were slain, their bodies mutilated—eyes gouged, hearts cut from their bodies—and left for buzzards and wolves. Some were burned alive. “After being smeared with tar, [they] had been burnt to a crisp upon the wagons,” wrote Captain Giddings, who came upon the scene days later. “I saw the half of a human head, which had been cleft from the crown downward, lying on the road at a great distance from any corpse. The face was upturned to the sun, and the shrunken and ghastly features caused some stanch old horses . . . to snort and tremble with fright.”
Samuel Chamberlain penned a vivid picture of instant retaliation: U.S. commanders “let loose on the country packs of human blood-hounds called Texas Rangers,” he wrote. Mustang Gray and his men rode to a ranch near Agua Fria, Chamberlain reported, and dragged “all the males capable of bearing arms” from the houses. All were tied to posts, and a gun was placed in the hands of a Ranger who had, under unspecified circumstances, “been castrated by Mexicans in Chihuahua.” His name was said to be Greasy Rube.
“The grim old Ranger would coolly fire his rifle from the distance of one hundred yards and send the ball crashing through the poor devil’s brain, keeping tally by cutting a notch on the stock of his fatal Rifle,” Chamberlain wrote. “Thirty-six Mexicans were shot at this place, a half hour given for the horrified survivors, women and children, to remove their little household goods, then the torch was applied to the houses, and by the light of the conflagration the ferocious [Texans] rode off to fresh scenes of blood.”
In a letter to the U.S. Army adjutant general, General Taylor wrote that he believed Rangers and others had committed an “atrocious massacre” at the ranch. But he said he was unable to identify those responsible because terrified survivors would not talk—“doubtless afraid that they might incur a similar fate.” Gray’s Corpus Christi Rangers were mustered out of federal service in 1847. Gray returned to the Nueces Strip and died the next year of cholera.
After the Americans took Mexico City in 1847, Hays and the Rangers arrived in the capital as sensations, parading through the streets with their unique flair. Some rode backward on their horses, while others made their way standing on the saddle. “Here they came, rag-tag and bob-tail, pell-mell and helter-skelter,” reported Lieutenant Colonel Ebenezer Dumont of Indiana. “The head of one [was] covered with a slouched hat, that of another with a towering cocked hat . . . whilst twenty others had caps made of the skins of every variety of wild and tame beasts.”
Many Mexicans strained for a glimpse of them. “They . . . excited as much lively interest as if President Polk and the American Congress had suddenly set themselves down . . . to organize and regulate a government and laws for the people of this benighted land,” a New Orleans correspondent wrote. But other Mexicans fled to safety. “Women, affrighted, rushed from the balconies into houses,” he wrote. “The Mexicans believed them to be a sort of semi-civilized, half-man, half-devil, with a slight mixture of the lion and snapping turtle, and have a more holy horror of them than they have of the old saint himself.”
However fascinated they might have been, sensible locals kept their distance. “The greasers must not interfere with them, as was illustrated this evening,” the correspondent wrote. As the Rangers were passing down a street, a crowd of leperos—derogatory slang for young toughs—gathered around them and began throwing stones. “Never,” Colonel Dumont observed, “was a guilty act more instantly punished.”
The Rangers pulled their guns and fired away. “In a very few minutes there were ten dead Mexicans lying in the street,” the New Orleans reporter wrote, “and two men, badly wounded, taken to the guard house.”
General Winfield Scott heard of the Rangers’ actions and pronounced himself deeply troubled. “Having exerted himself to suppress all disorder and prevent all outrages, the commanding general was extremely wrathy, and despatched an order for Col. Hays to appear instantly before him,” Dumont said. Scott demanded to know if the accounts were true. Hays responded that the information was correct, Dumont said, and told the general the Rangers were “not in the habit of being insulted without resenting it.” The general’s anger soon abated. “The two men talked pleasantly over coffee,” Dumont said, “then the Texas Ranger returned to his command to tell his boys that they must watch their step from now on.”
They didn’t. Early in 1848 a Ranger named Adam Allsens—also identified as Alsans and Alsence—wandered alone into a part of Mexico City known as Cutthroat, where a mob attacked him. “He was assailed by a murderous crowd and almost literally cut to pieces,” wrote Ranger Rip Ford. “Those who saw him said his heart was visible, and its pulsations were plainly perceptible.” After eight hours he died, and the Rangers buried him with full military honors. “He was a good and a brave man,” Ford said, “and had the esteem and the confidence of the whole command.”
His fellow Rangers brooded in silence, Ford said, until that night, when fifteen or twenty Texans made their way to the dark streets of Cutthroat. From their headquarters, American officers heard multiple gunshots. The firing continued for more than an hour. Hays dismissed it as a company of “horse marines” conducting drills. When it was over, more than eighty Mexicans lay dead—“a fearful outburst of revenge,” Ford said. Though the incident was reported in American newspapers, the U.S. Army apparently did not investigate.
Early in the war a New York newspaper correspondent wrote that the Rangers had one overriding goal in Mexico: to kill General Santa Anna. “He may capitulate—he may surrender—he may be under the shelter of . . . Gen. Taylor, but if the Rangers come within reach of him, they will slay him,” the writer predicted, “even if it be at the table of the American commander.”
They had their chance in the spring of 1848. With the fighting finally at an end, Santa Anna found himself at such a table—not of the commander, but of a U.S. Army officer. Deposed and defeated, he was by now a morose, portly has-been with a peg leg, dependent on the Americans for dispensation until he could transit to exile in Jamaica.
On this afternoon he took his dinner with his wife and daughter at an estate near Jalapa. A crowd had formed outside the door to the dining room. Major John R. Kenly of Maryland, who was with the general, noticed Hays among the onlookers. The famous Ranger wore a sombrero, a jacket, and, around his waist, a silk sash. Kenly knew Hays, and he had heard of Rangers’ threats to kill Santa Anna. A lawyer by training, the major sought to defuse the situation. He went to Hays and said, “Suppose you let me present you to General Santa Anna.”
Santa Anna was eating fruit as the two men approached the table. He started to rise, and Kenly introduced Hays. “When I pronounced this name, [Santa Anna’s] whole appearance and demeanor changed,” Kenly recalled, “and if a loaded bombshell, with fuse burning and sputtering, had fallen on that dinner-table, a greater sensation would not have been caused.”
Mexican officers rose in alarm, Kenly said, and the general’s wife turned pale. Santa Anna abruptly sat down and resumed eating his fruit, his gaze on the table. “Colonel Hays, gentleman as he was, bowed politely and withdrew from the room,” Kenly said. The matter of Santa Anna’s future safety, Kenly thought, had now been defused.
That wasn’t exactly true. About the same time Hays was showing courtesy to the general, others were plotting his death. Hearing of these plans, adjutant Rip Ford rode to the nearby Ranger camp. “We discovered everything at a white heat,” Ford wrote. “Revenge was the ruling passion of the hour.”
The Rangers once more presented their litany of Santa Anna’s offenses: the Alamo, Goliad, the black bean incident—all part of an “inhuman and un-Christian war upon the people of Texas,” Ford acknowledged. They said they planned to line the road on which Santa Anna would soon travel and kill him as he rolled past in his gilded carriage.
Ford believed he had to head this off. Instead of vowing to punish the men, he said, he appealed to reason and honor. “Santa Anna dishonored himself by murdering prisoners of war,” Ford said he told them. If the Rangers responded by assassinating him, Ford said, “you would dishonor Texas.”
The appointed hour arrived. After his postprandial cigar, Santa Anna prepared to depart with his wife and daughter. They boarded their carriage, pulled by eight mules, and left the estate. A line of Rangers formed on each side of the road. They sat silently on a stone wall as Santa Anna, flanked by a badly outmanned honor guard, rolled toward them. “There were several hundred of them,” Major Kenly said of the Rangers, “as quiet as if at a camp-meeting listening to a sermon.”
The carriage passed into the Texans’ gauntlet. Now would have been the time to show their fury, but the Rangers stayed silent, as did Santa Anna. “The old warrior’s face blanched a little at the sight of his enemies of long standing,” Ford said. “He might have thought of the bitter recollections these bronze and fearless men had garnered up from the past, and how easy it would be for them to strike for vengeance and for retribution.”
None of the Rangers moved. They watched their sworn enemy fade untouched into the distance, and returned to a subdued camp. “The memories of the bloody past were buried,” Ford said, “and no one cared to disturb their repose.”
They had passed on the chance to kill their most hated foe, but the Rangers’ thirst for revenge did not abate. “Some seventy-five or eighty of the Texas Rangers, officers as well as men, discharged from our service a few weeks since . . . have banded together for the purpose of robbing the defenceless Mexicans this side [of] the mountains,” the New York Tribune reported in late 1848. The newspaper said the Rangers had descended on the town of Los Sabinos, near Mexico City, “and after various murders and other outrages . . . demanded a contribution of a large sum of money, threatening in the alternative the total destruction of the town.” Once the “imbecile inhabitants” paid them, the newspaper said, the Rangers moved to another village and employed the same scheme. The correspondent had nothing but contempt for Mexicans, who were “treacherous and heartless.” Yet the Rangers were worse, he said. “The Texan stock of Americans . . . so far surpass in brutality and universal scoundrelism all Mexican examples as to set at defiance any attempts at comparison.”
Hays, McCulloch, and many others returned to Texas to great and deserved acclaim. But some Rangers kept the rampages going well after their service in Mexico. “The Rangers . . . are the very dregs of society, and the most degraded of human creatures,” said Emmanuel Domenech, a Catholic priest from France who found himself on the border at war’s end. He described an attack by the Rangers on a Lipan Apache camp—a purportedly peaceful village—west of San Antonio. “They slew all, neither woman nor child was spared,” Domenech said. “These blood-thirsty men . . . have neither faith nor moral feeling.”
The Mexican War turned the United States into a continental empire, though it never quite captured the national imagination as either a grand victory or a just cause. However, Zachary Taylor, fresh from success in Mexico, was elected president in 1848. And the Rangers, despite some coverage of their worst moments, emerged from the war with an aura of honorable swashbuckling that resonated with the American public—an image that preceded by several decades, and set the tone for, the national infatuation with the cowboy West.
As soon as the shooting stopped, a novel hit print: The Texan Ranger; or, The Maid of Matamoras, a Tale of the Mexican War. Sam Walker makes an appearance in the book as a Mexican officer laments, “Nothing born south of the Rio Grande can withstand Walker and his Rangers.” In another scene a Ranger comes upon a wounded Mexican soldier. The surrendering Mexicans expect to have their throats cut “as they would have cut the throats of their conquerers had the battle gone the other way.” But the fictional Ranger declares, “Texians kill men only in fair combat, not murder them when they are beaten. . . . Do you think I am a butcher?” He gives the wounded man water. “In this manner,” the author explains, “did the brave Rangers temper their war-like courage with the sweet virtues of humanity.”
So went the American dehorning of the Texas Devils. The Rangers’ excesses in Mexico, should they merit a mention, were generally passed off as more than justified. “Was it a wonder that it was sometimes difficult to restrain these men . . . who were standing face to face with the people whose troops had committed these bloody deeds?” wrote Rip Ford.
Samuel Reid, after riding with McCulloch, published in 1847 a well-received account of the war that depicted the Rangers as valorous and essential. As Reid noted, many of the Rangers encountered Mexicans who had killed other Texans. “Yes! some of the incarnate fiends . . . boldly walked the streets,” he said. But Reid described the Rangers’ response obliquely and raised the novel theory that Mexicans had committed suicide out of guilt. “If some of the most notorious of these villains were found shot or hung up in the chaparral . . . the government was charitably bound to suppose, that during some fit of remorse and desperation, tortured by conscience for the many evil deeds they had committed, they had recklessly laid violent hands upon their own lives!”
Big-Foot Wallace, who fought with Hays, explained the Rangers’ actions with his own winking approach. “Is it any wonder,” he said, “with the recollection of such treatment still fresh in their memory, that in the war . . . the Texans should have sent many a ‘greaser’ ‘up the spout,’ without the formality of a court-martial to decide upon his guilt or innocence.” Wallace, whose brother died in the Goliad massacre, said he never killed any Mexicans in cold blood. However: “I always turned them loose first and gave them a chance for their life; nevertheless, very few of them ever were heard of again, as in those days I was hard to beat in a ‘foot-race.’”
Thus did the Rangers gain a reputation they have held since. Even a military man well aware of their excesses in Mexico draped them in virtue, patriotism, and wide-open-spaces individualism. “A nobler set of fellows than these . . . never unsheathed a sword in their country’s cause,” Lieutenant Colonel Dumont of Indiana wrote. “Young and vigorous, kind, generous and brave . . . they are neither regulars nor volunteers common, but Texas Rangers—as free and unrestrained as the air they breathe.”
The war between Mexico and the United States was over. The war between Mexicans and these free and unrestrained Rangers had many more years to run. The fighting would be, in many cases, just as fierce.