The Texas Rangers, so called, have been a source of danger to the United States, rather than assistance, in the matter of frontier defense.
—GENERAL WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN, 1877
Ninety-five years after his death, Captain L. H. McNelly appeared at the White House in the form of an oil painting. The portrait belongs to the school of western heroic romance: a strapping McNelly, the literal picture of lanky power, has dismounted from his gray horse. With a Winchester rifle in his right hand and a pistol on his hip, he casts an intense, steely gaze across a broad desert gorge. No sane badman of the badlands would dare tangle with such a force.
Never mind that the real McNelly was short, gaunt, thin of voice, and racked by tuberculosis. To a newspaper correspondent of his day, he appeared as “the very reverse of robust.” One of his own men—an ardent admirer—described him as “sick and puny . . . a little runt of a feller.” At the peak of his career, he was sometimes so weak he could barely stand.
Despite his infirmities, McNelly persevered and prevailed as captain in the Special State Troops of Texas. In 1875 his force of several dozen men did some hard charging on the Texas-Mexico border, and he led them with courage. He “didn’t have a man in his company but what would of stepped in between him and death,” one of his men recalled. “For we all loved him like a father as well as a captain. . . . He never sent us where he wouldn’t go himself.”
McNelly also committed major mistakes. He plotted to start an armed conflict, if not a full-blown war, between the United States and Mexico. His border campaign was notable, even by the loose code of the day, for its summary executions. He invaded another country illegally. And his chief triumph, when the shooting finally stopped, was the recovery of livestock.
Yet this brief and checkered career brought him posthumous fame and an enduring accord approaching reverence, not to mention a painting for the president. Some have called him one of the greatest Texas Ranger commanders, and he holds a coveted spot in the official Rangers Hall of Fame. “McNelly is an appealing composite of warlord and Christ figure,” Texas Monthly magazine declared several decades back. “Courageous and gentlemanly, utterly devoted to his men and his mission, a remorseless killer, and dead himself by the holy age of thirty-three. From McNelly flows the rich blood of Ranger lore.”
Part of his stature derives from McNelly’s bravery and guile. There were others, however, of equal valor and greater success who never achieved his stardom, much less his status as an exemplar of Ranger-ness. McNelly had something many of them didn’t have. He had a writer. This writer—who was also a Ranger—compiled a lengthy record of serious literary offenses. But when it came to birthing a Texas giant in the mind of the public, few performed better.
Leander McNelly arrived in Texas as a child in the 1850s, when his well-to-do farming family—wealthy enough, at least, to own a few slaves—migrated from what is now West Virginia to the Brazos River valley. As a youth McNelly contracted tuberculosis. Still, when the Civil War broke out in 1861, he joined the Fifth Texas Cavalry of the Confederacy. He was sixteen or seventeen. McNelly fought with distinction, rising from private to the rank of captain. As the South neared its defeat, he returned to Texas to hunt Confederate deserters.
After the war, McNelly married and worked his Washington County farm in south-central Texas. Soon he joined the Reconstruction-era Texas State Police. The state police were widely reviled by white Texans, because many of them were black. They were disbanded in 1873, when Democrats—a number of whom were unrepentant Confederates—regained control of state government from Republicans. It is perhaps a testament to McNelly’s qualities that he emerged from the organization with his reputation intact.
The Rangers had passed through the war in a much-weakened and ineffective position, and in the postwar turmoil they barely existed at all. But in 1870 the sclerotic and destitute Texas Legislature authorized Ranger companies of twenty-five to seventy-five men for each county “infested . . . with marauding or thieving parties.” These initial efforts to reestablish the force were ragged at best. Any number of unsavory characters—many of them detritus of the war—signed on.
John “Red” Dunn of Corpus Christi joined a Ranger company in 1870 and found himself among “the worst mixed lot of men that ever came together in one organization . . . the most dilapidated, diseased, moth-eaten specimens of humanity I have ever seen.” And that was only part of the crew. “The rest of the company,” Dunn said, “were fished out of the slums of San Antonio.” They managed a single accomplishment: to be the only company in Ranger history to mutiny in the field, the final act of a dispute over drinking in camp. After that, “we were marched to the old Capitol and disbanded,” Dunn said. “Some of the boys were so drunk that it took two sober ones to hold each of them up while waiting for their discharge.”
In 1874, the Texas Legislature voted to form the Frontier Battalion. The law created six Ranger companies of seventy-five men each. The salary for privates was $40 a month, and each man was required to furnish his own six-shooter and “suitable horse.” The battalion was put under the overall command of Major John B. Jones, who had been an officer in the Confederate Army. At the end of the Civil War, Jones went to Mexico to find a possible site for a Confederate colony but returned to Texas disappointed. Now forty, Jones did not fit the wild and woolly Ranger stereotype that had emerged from the Mexican War. “By birth and education a gentleman, and by profession a lawyer,” the Houston Telegram said, “this daring chief . . . is a small man scarcely of medium height and stature, whose conventional dress of black broadcloth, spotless linen and dainty boot on a small foot would not distinguish him from any other citizen.” Nonetheless, the newspaper said, Jones was “the hero of many a daring assault and wild melee . . . and the terror of frontier forayers.”
As true as that may have been, the commander of the new Ranger force encountered a familiar frustration: the state couldn’t pay many of the Rangers on time.
“I find much dissatisfaction,” Jones wrote in a September 1874 report. “I fear serious trouble with many of the men.” Some had debts coming due. “Others have mothers, sisters and brothers dependent upon them to whom they expected to send money.”
A few companies were disbanded, and with reduced manpower the battalion swung into operation. Many of the Rangers went to North and West Texas to fight Indians. “During the first six months of service there were more than forty parties of Indians on our frontier,” Jones said. “We had fourteen engagements with them besides giving chase to many that we could not overtake.” Two years later, Jones reported, only six bands of Comanches and Kiowas were known to be roaming the region. He noted that many of the counties that Anglos had deserted during the Civil War because of Indian attacks were open safely for settlement again. “The appropriation for frontier defense has proven a good investment,” Jones wrote. A letter to the Galveston Daily News, signed only “Ranger,” argued that the battalion’s success could be easily measured: “Though we have not exterminated the Comanches, we are willing to count scalps with the . . . Indians killed while raiding in Texas, and bet that we have ten to their one.”
As those Rangers fought Indians, others headed for the border. The results weren’t so praiseworthy.
Red Dunn enlisted with the Rangers a second time, riding with a company commanded by Captain Warren Wallace that roamed the lower Rio Grande Valley. “The country was over-run with Mexican cattle- and horse-thieves as well as cutthroats,” Dunn said. These Rangers were known to execute suspected lawbreakers on the spot without regard to possible innocence. “We transferred that part of the matter to the Deity,” Dunn explained, “and left them to settle it with Him.” As Adjutant General William Steele noted, “There is a considerable element in the country bordering on the Nueces and west that think the killing of a Mexican no crime.” Many Rangers were part of that element.
Wallace compiled a “registration” of more than eighteen hundred “irresponsible and most generally worthless” Tejano men in the region, and his Rangers set out to eliminate many of them. The Mexican consulate filed protests, and the company was disbanded. “Captain Wallace appears to have exercised no control over the bloodthirsty instincts of many of his company,” Adjutant General Steele concluded. Dunn and several other Rangers were charged with murder but were acquitted. “We had been indicted,” Dunn said, “for the disappearance of every Mexican who did not respond when his mama called.”
Anglos on the border, especially those with property and political power, begged for more protection. “Men have been murdered in cold blood in almost every conceivable way,” said a written declaration by Rip Ford and others in Brownsville. They referred to white Texans murdered by Mexicans, not the reverse. “They have been shot, stabbed, burned alive, and strangled, and their bodies have been indecently mutilated; women have been captured, their person violated; captive children have been held and sold as slaves. . . . It is a contest between civilization and savagery.”
Many blamed their old nemesis, Juan Cortina, who they believed controlled a vast network of bloodthirsty thieves from the office of the mayor—a title held by Cortina himself—across the river in Matamoros. A U.S. government report, assembled by special commissioners friendly with ranchers, cited such desperados. “These thieves have, with astonishing boldness, penetrated at times 100 miles and even farther into Texas,” the report said, “and by day and night have carried on this wholesale plundering.”
By way of response, a Mexican government commission issued its own report, describing Texas as a refuge of evil and depravity. The thieves who took stolen cattle into Mexico, the commission said, were actually Texans. “They are quite capable of any crime in the calendar.”
In reality, the lines were blurred and the loyalties mixed. As Ranger Dunn described it, “Most of the depredations were incited by renegade white men who were living among the Mexicans and were profiting by their crimes.”
In Austin, Governor Richard Coke heard the pleas of the Anglo ranchers. He turned to a proven commodity, a man who could knife through the uncertainties, ambivalence, and danger to deliver the goods: Leander McNelly. Coke named McNelly to the captaincy of Company A of the Washington County Volunteer Militia.
McNelly’s company was not, strictly speaking, a part of the Rangers. It functioned separately from the Frontier Battalion and didn’t report along the usual chain of command, though it did answer to the adjutant general. However, McNelly’s men considered themselves Rangers and called themselves as such. They were young and raw; some had arrived straight off the farm. But they looked like Rangers, with Bowie knives, broad-brimmed hats, and a cast of eye that suggested a yearning for action. “Somehow you wouldn’t pick a one of them to push around,” company member George Durham said. The pay was $32 a month, and—in the Ranger way—each man furnished his own horse and gun.
Their captain had long, silky brown hair and a beard that reached his chest. McNelly dressed neatly in duck pants and calfskin leggings and commanded with quiet authority. “Here was a man who could tell you what to do and you’d do it and never have any suspicion that he might be wrong,” George Durham recalled. “When he spoke we hardly breathed. . . . Even the horses seemed to quit swishing and stomping.”
He demanded toughness; his men would sometimes ride night and day with only brief pause, or go thirty-six hours without rations. They would be so hungry they ate the bitter beans from mesquite trees. McNelly engendered loyalty by enduring the hardships with them.
He also was the sort of man, his company would soon see, who could shoot an opponent in the teeth and read Scripture to him as he expired. They came to understand that he did not hold prisoners. McNelly’s company, like many Ranger forces on the border before him and after, employed la ley de fuga: the law of the fugitive. It meant prisoners were routinely executed, and the Rangers would claim they had been killed while trying to escape.
Now, in the spring of 1875, McNelly and his forty-two men rode toward the border. They crossed the broad, empty coastal plain, a sweep of mesquite, grassland, and the occasional grove of stunted oaks that ran to the flat horizon. Two hundred miles to the south the Rio Grande flowed green and slow, its low banks lined with heavy brush and canebrakes, and emptied into the Gulf of Mexico.
As in years before, savagery reigned in the open country here, where solitary citizens traveled at great peril. “Billy McMahan, a very popular inoffensive American school teacher . . . was waylaid by desperadoes,” a contemporary historian wrote of an 1874 incident. “These men tortured McMahan by cutting off his fingers, toes, wrists and ears. They finally severed his legs from his body and left him lifeless.”
McNelly’s men first pointed their mounts toward the bayside town of Corpus Christi and discovered it battened down in alarm. A few weeks earlier about thirty-five raiders—believed to be Cortinistas—had attacked the nearby hamlet of Nuecestown. They killed a man, burned a store, and took prisoners whom they whipped and tortured before releasing. With that attack the banditti, as they were sometimes called, had ventured far deeper into the interior than ever before.
In reprisal, white vigilante “minute companies” ignited a wave of vengeance across the county, hunting people who had lived there for generations and whose only crime was their ethnicity. The posses hanged farmers and stockmen and burned their houses and ranches. Tejano-owned stores were set afire.
“The acts committed by Americans in this section are horrible to relate,” McNelly wrote to the adjutant general. “Many ranches have been plundered and burned, and the people murdered or driven away; one of these parties confessed to me in Corpus Christi as having killed eleven . . . men on their last raid. Mexican citizens have no security for life or property in this section whatever.” Unlike Ranger captain Wallace, McNelly did not believe Tejanos constituted a broad class of thieves. “I do not know of any Mexican who owns a ranch on this side of the river and who lives in Texas whom I do not consider to be a good citizen,” he said.
McNelly ordered vigilante companies to disband, though he made no move to arrest them. He and his company headed southwest, toward a region known as the Wild Horse Desert. The sun shone bright and hot in the clear April sky as they passed through villages turned to smoking ash by vigilantes. Farther on, they came upon two dead Mexicans, their necks in nooses, dangling from a trestle. The Rangers kept going, to the Santa Gertrudis Ranch and the man with the money, Richard King.
A former Rio Grande steamboat captain, King possessed vision, energy, and a ruthless drive to acquire and dominate. He had begun procuring land in the region in 1853. Much of the property sacked and burned by the Nuecestown vigilantes eventually became his as well; he gained possession after those who lived there were killed or fled. Ultimately his King Ranch would become one of the world’s great cattle empires, covering nearly thirteen hundred square miles, an area bigger than Rhode Island.
As a Texas cattle baron—and by common reckoning the richest man in the state—King enjoyed considerable influence with Governor Coke, so it was no surprise that McNelly’s Rangers came to him. King greeted them warmly and furnished McNelly’s company with shelter, food, fresh horses, saddles, and cash. McNelly himself was given one of King’s most prized horses. And they got new guns to replace their Sharps carbines. “Those old smoke poles were 50 caliber, single-shot weapons, entirely unsuited for combat,” wrote W. W. Sterling, who later served as adjutant general. “Captain King . . . furnished the entire company with the Model 1873, 44-40 caliber Winchesters. These repeating rifles increased McNelly’s firepower nearly tenfold.”
Soon the Rangers were on their way again, this time to the border in search of cattle—a great deal of which had been stolen from King.
By June 1875, McNelly’s company had reached Brownsville and made camp at an old hacienda. “It was only about ten miles back from the Rio Grande,” Durham said, “and seemed to belong to anybody who was man enough to hold it.” At Fort Brown, the army post near the river, officers told McNelly that stolen cattle had been driven across the river by the hundreds. His response: “I think you will hear from us soon.”
McNelly had learned during the Civil War the importance of gathering intelligence on his enemy, and he continued this strategy on the border. First, he established a network of informants within the rustlers’ gangs. “I am well posted in all that the thieves are doing by spies (Mexican cattle thieves) on the other side,” he wrote to Mifflin Kenedy, a former business partner of Richard King’s. “I have kept in constant employment four men at the rate of sixty dollars per month each.” McNelly obtained about half that from the state by listing the men on his company roll. The rest came from ranchers. “I need some money at once,” McNelly wrote to Kenedy from Brownsville. “I would like to get some help from you and Capt. King.”
McNelly’s second mode of intelligence gathering was interrogation. He sent his Rangers on scouting expeditions with orders to arrest anyone they encountered. The captives were brought back to camp, where they were questioned by Jesus Sandoval, who went by the moniker Casoose.
Casoose had long red hair, a scraggly beard, and blue eyes that, to Durham, “seemed to throw off sparks.” He had been a South Texas rancher, and he claimed that Mexican raiders had raped his wife and killed his daughter. Though lacking in evidence, this tale was widely believed—in part, Durham said, because he “looked like a crazy man.” Casoose spoke little English, Ranger Bill Callicott recalled, “but he could say, ‘Son-of-a-bitch, kill ’em.’”
To interrogate someone, Casoose stood the man on the back of the horse. A noose was fastened around the captive’s neck, with the other end over a tree limb. The rope would be tightened when persuasion was required. “As far as we knew,” Callicott said, “this treatment always brought out the truth.” Once the Rangers believed they had gained all possible information, Casoose would slap the horse’s hindquarters, and the animal would bolt, leaving the captive kicking the air as he died. Fellow Rangers admired Casoose’s professionally meticulous approach and honored it with mordant humor. “Their own mothers could not be more tender,” one said, “their own children no more respectful. . . . He is so kind and considerate that it is almost a pleasure to be hanged by such a nice gentleman.”
McNelly learned from spies and at least one man questioned by Casoose that some Cortinistas were heading for the Rio Grande with stolen cattle. The Rangers chased and found the raiders on the plain of Palo Alto, the site of the first major battle, in 1846, of the Mexican War. With McNelly in front, the Rangers charged the rustlers, firing their rifles. One Ranger, L. B. “Sonny” Smith, was killed in the gunfight. He was believed to be seventeen. “Dear Madam, he is gone,” a member of the company wrote Smith’s mother, “and while we (his companions in arms) deeply sympathise with a mother who has lost a son, we almost envy him his Glorious death. Who would not be wiling to die fighting for the liberty and the rights of mankind?”
Post-battle, McNelly acknowledged some respect for the enemy. “I have never seen men fight with such desperation,” he said of the Cortinistas. “Many of them after being shot from their horses, and severely wounded three or four times would rise on their elbows and fire at my men as they passed.” Despite the Ranger’s death, McNelly’s men had scored a clear victory. “Had a fight with raiders,” the captain said in a triumphant telegram to the adjutant general, “killed twelve and captured two hundred and sixty-five beeves. Wish you were here.” The Galveston Daily News told of the battle in a story topped with this headline: “Captain McNelly and His Rangers Heard From. They Give the Greasers a Taste of Old Times.”
An ebullient Governor Coke sent a letter of congratulations to McNelly. “The skill and gallantry displayed by all in the signal blow struck [against] the freebooters . . . merit and receive the highest praise from the authorities and the people of the State,” the governor wrote. “The pride of true Texans in the historic fame of the Texas ranger is fully gratified in the record your command is making.”
The dead rustlers’ bodies were collected and put on bloated display, in the heat and the flies, at the Brownsville plaza. Private Smith, whose father also was a member of the Ranger company, received a full military-style funeral—McNelly’s orders. Neither action proved popular with some of the townspeople. “The Mexican residents of Brownsville . . . are public and violent in the denunciation of the killing,” McNelly said in a report, “and the attention given my dead soldier seems to have exasperated them beyond measure.”
The Rangers did not try to placate them, George Durham said. “They claimed that Palo Alto was a butcher job, that some fine, decent citizens were shot down and their bodies were stacked like cordwood on the plaza. Captain could have . . . proved the talkers wrong, but he wasn’t one to jaw and palaver.”
McNelly had no time for that. Soon he was busy planning his next move: to make a strike, he wrote, “that will forever stop our border troubles.”
international plunderers and big ranchers from Texas had long pined to seize a great swath of northern Mexico. Though their vision of a slavery-based empire there was now obsolete, many still dreamt of pushing the border well below the Rio Grande. But that would take more than the Rangers. The U.S. military would have to be drawn into the fight.
McNelly now placed himself and his men in service to this stratagem. “You may feel sure that I am going to have the U.S. authorities onto it as much as I am,” he wrote to Kenedy, “as that is the only effectual way of getting into a ‘row’ that cannot be compromised.” In late 1875, McNelly learned that a band of rustlers was herding stolen cattle toward a large ranch—believed to be a refuge for Cortina’s forces—in Las Cuevas, Mexico. This would provide him with the opportunity he had sought. He hatched a plan with, of all people, a U.S. Navy officer.
President U. S. Grant had received numerous entreaties for assistance on the border, so he ordered the navy to help. In response, the USS Rio Bravo, a twenty-year-old sidewheeling gunboat armed with four cannons, steamed up the shallow Rio Grande. It was intended as a show of force and a means to interdict river-crossing rustlers. But McNelly and the captain of the Rio Bravo, Lieutenant Commander DeWitt Clinton Kells, had other ideas.
In late October or early November 1875, Kells and McNelly met with army colonel Joseph Potter from Brownsville. “The meeting was held by order of Gen. [E. O. C.] Ord,” McNelly wrote. Ord was commander of federal troops in Texas. At this conference, McNelly said, “Capt. Kells says to me that Gen. Ord told him to do anything I advised.” Therefore, McNelly predicted, “something can be done & done at once.”
He and Kells hoped to provoke Mexicans to fire on the Rio Bravo. If that didn’t work, they proposed sending Rangers across the river and having them pretend to be Mexicans firing shots at the gunboat. And when that happened, McNelly promised rancher Kenedy, the U.S. Cavalry “will cross the river anytime that I will lead the way.” The intent was clear: to start an armed conflict between the United States and Mexico.
Thomas Wilson, the American consul in Matamoros, learned of the plan. Wilson suspected it was part of a larger design by “men of means” in South Texas—men like Kenedy and King—who could “expect to reap large profits” by selling supplies and services to the army if such a conflict should occur. He alerted Washington, and officials ordered Kells to stop any maneuvers with the Rio Bravo. Kells was removed from his command and court-martialed.
The great scheme for invasion and war had fallen apart. McNelly prepared to cross the river anyway.
On the night of November 18, 1875, McNelly assembled his company, now numbering twenty-five to thirty, on the muddy banks of the Rio Grande. “He said, ‘It is like going into the jaws of death . . . in a foreign country where we have no right according to law,’” Callicott wrote. “He said, ‘Some of us might get back, or part of us, or maybe all of us, or maybe none of us will get back.’” McNelly offered to let any of the Rangers having second thoughts to “step aside.” When none did, Callicott recalled, “He said, ‘All right, boys, that’s the way to talk it. We will learn them a lesson that they have forgotten since the old Mexican War.’”
The Rangers crossed the river, three at a time—not in a U.S. Navy vessel but in a small, leaky dugout canoe. In a thick fog, they followed a narrow cow trail through the brush. At dawn they reached a ranch and prepared to attack. “I want you to kill all you see,” McNelly told the Rangers, “except old men, women and children.”
Casoose led the charge with a “Comanche Indian yell,” Callicott said, and the Mexicans never knew what hit them. “If the angels of heaven had flown down amongst them they would not have been any more surprised, as we were the first Rangers or soldiers that had been in Mexico since the old Mexican War,” Callicott said. “Lots of the men were on their woodpiles cutting wood while their wives were cooking breakfast outdoors. Not one of them moved a muscle. We shot them down on their woodpiles and wherever we saw one. We killed till we killed all we saw at the ranch.” George Durham added: “I heard later it was twelve.”
There was a good reason for the Mexicans’ surprise, and for their complete lack of resistance: the Rangers had raided the wrong ranch.
McNelly and his company did not pause to consider their mistake or aid the wounded. “The Captain said, ‘Come on, boys,’” Callicott wrote. Their real target lay about half a mile up the trail. There they found several hundred hostile Mexicans waiting for them. After a brief gunfight, McNelly ordered his men to retreat. The Rangers ran back through the first ranch they had attacked, “and there was nothing there except the dead,” Callicott said, “and they lay like they fell, on the woodpiles and in the streets or roads.” Reaching the river, the Rangers gathered with their backs to the Rio Grande, ready to make a last stand. “If they charge us,” McNelly said, “they will have to come across that open field for a hundred and fifty yards and we can stand here and mow them down with but little danger of even getting hit with a bullet unless it is in the head. And if you do, the pain won’t last long.”
The Mexicans did charge, several times, and the Rangers repulsed them. On the Texas side of the river, army captain James Randlett watched, and heard McNelly yell. “He now cried out, ‘Randlett, for God’s sake, come over and help us,’” the army captain said. “I believed his command was in danger of annihilation.” Against orders, Randlett sent forty of his soldiers across the river to assist. More Mexican attacks followed. The Rangers and the soldiers fired back, killing General Juan Flores Salinas, the alcalde of Las Cuevas.
On the next day, November 20, the Rangers dug a trench into the riverbank. It would be a second Alamo, some said. But eventually a white flag came out on the Mexican side and talks began. The final result: McNelly bluffed the Mexicans into turning over sixty-five head of cattle.
Though that was but a small portion of the livestock at Las Cuevas, Texans hailed a victory engineered by McNelly. “Instead of being surrounded by Mexicans and treating for surrender,” the Galveston Daily News said, “he actually dictated the terms of his withdrawal from Mexico, which were that Mexican authorities promised to return the stolen cattle and surrender the thieves.”
In truth, no thieves were surrendered, but—good news for the Rangers—about thirty of the cattle were found to have belonged to Richard King. Four of McNelly’s men were selected to drive the livestock back to his ranch. “Captain King sent Captain McNelly a check on the Brownsville Bank for one thousand dollars,” Callicott said, “to divide with the twenty-six of us that were there with him in Mexico.”
For Mexico, a different set of heroes emerged from the clash. The townspeople of Las Cuevas saw the battle as the resounding defeat of an invading force. They erected a monument to General Juan Flores Salinas, the slain alcalde. Its inscription memorialized him as a man who died fighting for his country.
McNelly’s Ranger company moved on to less spectacular missions. However, it did make at least one noteworthy arrest—that of outlaw King Fisher in June 1876. The flamboyant Fisher, who carried two ivory-handled pistols, led a South Texas gang of robbers and rustlers and was rumored to have killed more than a few men. But two days after his arrest by the Rangers, Fisher was released on bond and managed to avoid trial. “It is useless to bring prisoners here,” McNelly complained, speaking of Eagle Pass, “[because] the authorities are much too alarmed to try them.”
The captain still harbored plans for a takeover of northern Mexico—hoping to assemble an invasion force of five hundred—but worsening tuberculosis kept him in bed much of the time. An odd New York Herald story in December 1875, written from Brownsville, had praised McNelly as a paragon of elegance, vigor, and herculean strength. “He can lift two bales of cotton at a time, one with each hand,” the Herald said, “or better, lift 1,200 pounds with both.” That would constitute a world record then and now. In October 1876, McNelly wrote the adjutant general that his doctor had ordered him to stay indoors, because “exposure just now would doubtless result fatally.” Another doctor found that he had “fever, tape-worm and pulmonary disease.” He was not, a medical report said, “fit for active service” in his current state.
In early 1877, Adjutant General Steele unceremoniously removed McNelly from the Rangers. Steele said he took the action because the captain’s medical bills were mounting, and a successor captain “in the full vigor of early manhood and health” waited in the wings. Complicating matters, McNelly had been “extremely negligent in making his reports,” Steele said, which made accurate bookkeeping impossible.
Soon the state’s newspapers started a death watch. “The dashing frontier soldier is gradually sinking,” the San Antonio Herald reported in August 1877. “Even as we write, the dread summons may have come and this truly brave man be numbered with the historic dead.” McNelly lasted a few more weeks in an opiate-instilled delirium. He died on September 4, 1877, at age thirty-three, and was buried in Washington County. His soaring granite tombstone—a “very handsome monument,” the local newspaper reported—cost $3,000. Rancher Richard King paid for it.
A flurry of obituaries followed. But in the twenty or so years after his death, McNelly was seldom mentioned in public print. True, he had acted with cold-blooded effectiveness, but not in pursuit of liberty or freedom. He had, in the starkest analysis, killed some people and caught some cows. Like many other lawmen of his time and place, McNelly seemed fated to obscurity, remembered if at all in remote monographs, yellowing records, and small-town monuments.
But that was about to change, thanks to an ex-Ranger growing long of tooth and light in bank accounts, toiling in the outer reaches of working-class Brooklyn, New York.
Napoleon Augustus Jennings was born in 1856, the son of a successful Philadelphia businessman. He received a prep school education in New England and could have eased himself into a life of merchant-class gentility. But stirred by “a spirit of unrest,” he decided at nineteen that he would seek his fortune in a wild and dangerous place he had only read about in magazines. “I made up my mind that life would not be worth living outside of Texas,” he said. “I should be a cattle-king, the owner of countless herds of beeves and unlimited acres of land.”
Young Jennings made his way to Austin by train and to San Antonio by stagecoach. Abandoning his plans to purchase a ranch, he worked as a cowhand and, a bit later, managed to join McNelly’s company as a clerk. Jennings spent about eight months with the Rangers before mustering out. After that he turned to journalism, writing for several New York newspapers. He took to calling himself “Colonel” Jennings, and managed the European career of his wife, an aspiring opera singer.
By the 1890s, he had returned to Texas, this time in the company of R. G. Dyrenforth, a professional rainmaker. Or as Jennings called him, “General Jupiter Pluvius Dyrenforth,” a man of science who could “turn on the heavenly faucet whenever and wherever he pleases.” Dyrenforth was, in the parlance of the times, a “concussionist.” He—and many others—propounded the theory that airborne explosions would bring rain to thirsty lands. By the firing of cannons and raising dynamite on balloons and kites, Dyrenforth believed, a low-pressure vortex would form and attract “moisture-laden” air.
Jennings, sporting a thick mustache and a pith helmet, functioned as Dyrenforth’s rainmaking assistant and chief propagandist on a swing through bone-dry West Texas in the summer of 1891. On a cattle ranch near Midland, Dyrenforth filled the sky with explosives, and Jennings crafted dispatches that proclaimed the general’s monsoonlike triumph to two dozen newspapers across the country. “Great is the name of Dyrenforth” in West Texas, Jennings declared. When the general “did literally pull cold water down upon this parched country,” Jennings reported, cowboys wore slickers to their “festive roundups” and jackrabbits were forced to “use their ears as umbrellas.”
It took a correspondent from the Farm Implement News to expose them. The Texas experiments, he wrote, were in truth a ridiculous failure. A writer for the New York Times examined one of Jennings’s newspaper reports on Dyrenforth. “This article,” the Times found, “is a tissue of falsehoods from beginning to end and describes thunder storms that never occurred.” The newspaper had to acknowledge, however, that Jennings depicted the bogus storms “in a most realistic manner.” Additional press reports ridiculed Dyrenforth as the “Rain Fraud” and “General Dryhenceforth.” Funding for his experiments, some of which had been provided by the federal Department of Agriculture, evaporated.
Undaunted, Jennings returned to the East Coast and put his hand to poetry and patriotic songwriting. He also pursued a new subject in promotional newspapering: the Texas Rangers. In 1895 he penned an article for numerous big-city papers that portrayed them as fearless crusaders of the plains. “There is, I will venture to say, not a member of the Texas Rangers today who would not go merrily to certain death to uphold the ancient glory of the name that he bears,” Jennings wrote. “They live the hardest, roughest lives and danger is their delight.”
From a modest cottage on Surf Avenue in Coney Island, Jennings regaled visitors with tales of his Ranger days. He displayed Bowie knives on the walls and said nicks on the blades were from the bones of men those knives had killed. Among the talents he perfected with the Rangers, Jennings boasted, was the mimicking of a diamondback’s rattle, which he employed to clear western saloons of riffraff.
And now he was working on a book. “I am a writing man,” he explained. “I needed money. I had a story to tell. I told it.” In 1899, Scribner published A Texas Ranger, Jennings’s tale of Captain McNelly—years dead and generally forgotten—and his company of volunteers. It was an action-packed, heroic first-person account.
Jennings’s colorful description of McNelly’s Rangers may be unrivaled in west-of-the-Mississippi literature: “Their broad-brimmed, picturesque cowboy hats, flannel shirts open at the throat, high boots, well-filled cartridge belts with dangling pistol holsters and bowie-knife scabbards, their carbines slung at the side of the saddles, their easy and perfect manner of riding, their sun-tanned faces, their general air of wild, happy, devil-may-care freedom and supreme confidence in themselves, showed that the Captain indeed chose wisely when he picked out the men for his dangerous mission.”
As for McNelly, Jennings said the captain “was greatly loved by all the men” and “a more cool and collected individual under fire it would be impossible to imagine.” Here was a Ranger captain who sacrificed his health—who drove himself to death, really—for the sake of decency and justice.
In a postpublication letter to McNelly’s widow, Jennings said he strove to give readers “a true idea of the life of the old Rangers” and of her late husband. “I must have succeeded, if I may judge by the hundreds of splendid notices the book has received,” he wrote. “Without a single exception they have been of a highly complimentary nature. From Maine to California the papers and reviews have treated the work most kindly and my publishers report big sales, not only in the West, but in the New England states!”
Jennings noted that the San Francisco Chronicle said the book would prove to be “the Rangers’ most enduring monument.” The Detroit Free Press cited the book’s accuracy and liveliness in its depiction of “that famous body of frontier fighters.” Other publications echoed the praise. “So, you see,” Jennings assured Mrs. McNelly, “after all these years the world will know of the work your brave husband and his men did for civilization in Texas, and it is well that such deeds be made a matter of record.”
There was but one problem. As with the West Texas rainmaker, Jennings had fabricated much of the story. Or, as George Durham put it, “The boy took it mostly out of his head.”
Jennings told, for example, of joining McNelly in his courageous charge against the rustlers at Palo Alto. “Captain put spurs to his horse and we followed him with a yell,” Jennings wrote. “The next instant we were upon them, shooting and yelling like demons. They stood their ground for a moment only; then turned and fled.” He added this vivid eyewitness account of the death of Ranger Sonny Smith: “We all saw him fall and the sight roused a fury in our hearts that boded ill for the men in front of us.” Jennings, McNelly, and the Rangers responded. “Crack! bang! bang! went our revolvers, and at nearly every shot one of the raiders went tumbling from his saddle. . . . We flew over the prairie at a killing pace, intent only on avenging our comrade’s death.”
This fight took place months before Jennings became a Ranger. The entire volume is similarly filled with dramatic descriptions of events the author—who often gave himself a starring role—could not possibly have witnessed. And it contains numerous factual errors.
“You probably noticed in the book,” Jennings wrote to McNelly’s widow, “that I made myself a member of the company a year before I actually joined.” He had his reasons. “I did that to add interest,” Jennings said. “Told in the first person, adventures hold the attention of the reader much more closely than at second hand.”
With that, the McNelly saga took flight.
In 1914, Zane Grey, the dentist turned famous western pulp novelist, published The Lone Star Ranger, a fictional treatment. Gunslinger Buck Duane joins McNelly’s company in this tale and finds the captain to be “shrewd, stern, strong, yet not wanting in kindness.” Just before a shootout, McNelly offers Buck timely advice for his courtship of a fetching lass: “You can win her, Duane! Oh, you can’t fool me. I was wise in a minute. Fight with us from cover—then go back to her. . . . That girl loves you! I saw it in her eyes.”
Grey’s novel was made into movies in 1919, 1923 (starring Tom Mix), and 1930. Also in 1930, Jennings’s McNelly book was reissued, and J. Frank Dobie, one of Texas’s leading men of letters, wrote an enthusiastic introduction for that edition. “I defy anyone to read it without being engaged by its brightness and ranger-swift directness,” Dobie said. Jennings may have “telescoped some events,” Dobie acknowledged, and distorted others. But the book was, he said, “a brave, clean-cut narrative, simply and honestly told, about those brave and clean-cut frontiersmen, the Texas rangers.”
C. L. Douglas’s 1934 book The Gentlemen in the White Hats was purported to be nonfiction. It devoted three chapters to McNelly, “one of the greatest of the bold captains who rode the wild border.” About that same time, a San Antonio newspaper writer tracked down former McNelly Ranger Durham, who was working on the King Ranch. The two collaborated on an autobiography published first in serial form in 1937 and later as a book. Though Durham stuck to the facts as he knew them, he was recalling his story after more than five decades. “The farther the years moved us away from the man,” Durham said of McNelly, “the bigger he and his time looked.”
In 1942 one more remake of Grey’s Lone Star Ranger hit the screens. A year after that, a Liberty ship—a World War II freighter—was named for the captain. The SS L. H. McNelly sailed from the port of Houston as an Associated Press story about the christening termed Jennings’s book “perhaps the best account of the Ranger chieftain’s exploits.”
During another war, the Ranger captain became a favorite character in tales told by President Lyndon Johnson. “One of the stories . . . I have repeated most often through the years,” Johnson wrote in 1965, was that of McNelly’s determination. “Captain McNelly repeatedly told his men that ‘courage is a man who keeps on coming on.’” When, under LBJ’s administration, the country found itself mired in Vietnam, the president was said to have invoked that aphorism—however apocryphal it might be—with regularity. “As if, literally, such men were bulletproof,” writer Larry L. King lamented. “He took the Texas Ranger myth . . . too much to heart; it made him say foolish things.”
The man who succeeded Johnson in the Oval Office, Richard Nixon, didn’t do much Ranger quoting, as far as was known, but he was the recipient of the portrait rendering the vibrant McNelly. Painted by Texan Joe Grandee, it was presented at the White House in 1972 to celebrate the coming 150th anniversary of the Rangers’ creation. The portrait subsequently joined the holdings of the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, where it remains.
One of the more recent McNelly tributes is the 2001 feature film Texas Rangers, which tells the story of his company of volunteers. Bringing the matter full circle, the original screenplay was based on N. A. Jennings’s book.
The film stars Dylan McDermott, who plays McNelly as a brooding leader with traces of a Yonkers accent. As with most such movies, reality takes a back seat to dramatic necessities, and in this case the liberties far exceed any of Jennings’s. A few among many: Here McNelly is driven not by a need to recover stolen cattle but by personal tragedy; bandits have abducted his wife and three sons. King Fisher reigns as the film’s chief villain, the leader of a band of sombrero-wearing thieves, rapists, and murderers who open the film by gunning down dozens of innocent townspeople. In a climactic scene, Fisher is shot dead by a character based on none other than N. A. Jennings. (The real Fisher lived to become the sheriff of Uvalde County.) And in a reversal of geography and gravity, the river that is supposed to be the Rio Grande flows away from the Gulf of Mexico.
Throughout the film, McNelly’s methods are depicted as harsh, but in service to a far greater good—the elimination of a roving gang of killers. McNelly’s death scene rounds the story to a close, as he whispers some final words for the Jennings-based character to record for posterity: “Let them not remember us as men of vengeance, but as men of law and justice.” The real captain didn’t glide toward his exit like that. But as a newspaperman in a more famous western movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, once said: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”