Soon the name of Texas Rangers will be an echo of the past.
—CAPTAIN GEORGE WYTHE BAYLOR
The Gilded Age dawned over much of America in the late 1870s, a time of great advances in industry and technology. In 1877 alone, Thomas Edison demonstrated the first phonograph, and an astronomer at the Naval Observatory discovered the two moons of Mars. The Brooklyn Bridge neared completion in New York. A telephone was installed for the first time at the White House.
At the same time in Texas, a backcountry version of progress began its slow crawl across the state’s vastness. Railroad tracks were laid through pine forests and over the prairie. Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Houston grew into small cities. The state’s population nearly doubled between 1870 and 1880, reaching almost 1.6 million. Most immigrants, however, were white Southern agrarians, and more than 93 percent of Texans made their homes in rural areas. Many of them, small-stakes farmers and stockmen, lived much like the original settlers: building their own cabins, cutting wood for fuel, killing game for food, and making their own household utensils and furniture.
Even as the population increased, great portions of the Lone Star State remained dangerous and difficult. “Ever since the [Civil] War, Texas, to some extent, has been almost helpless in the hands of lawlessness and crime,” a Dallas newspaper declared in 1877. “Whole districts of country have been terrorized, the laws suspended, the courts insulted, jails ravished [and] good people murdered.”
The Rangers of this period therefore pursued yesterday’s adversaries: Indian raiders, stagecoach robbers, cattle rustlers, and maniacal gunfighters, to name a few. They never wanted for engagements, and they extended their record of triumph and death.
The Civil War ended in 1865, but Texas suffered its unceasing and self-inflicted ravages long after the South’s surrender at Appomattox. Though not so wretched as other regions of the Confederacy—relatively few battles had been waged in Texas, and no protégé of General Sherman had burned a path to the Gulf—the state confronted a Reconstruction economy in shambles. Its plantation agriculture no longer enjoyed the forced labor of slaves (though some slavery persisted in altered forms), and many of its institutions lay in ruins.
As in other former Confederate states, white gangs in Texas hunted and killed emancipated slaves who were guilty of imagined offenses. The era produced a “frightful story of blood,” according to a special committee on lawlessness and violence established by the 1868 Texas constitutional convention. The committee found that from 1865 to 1868, Texas recorded 939 murders. Of those, 373 were murders of blacks committed by whites, but only 10 were of whites by blacks. “‘The war of races,’” the committee concluded, “is all on the part of the whites against the blacks.” A study by the Texas Freedmen’s Bureau over the same period found 1,524 acts of violence by whites against blacks, and 42 by blacks against whites.
Children were not immune from the attacks. In January 1867, the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas received this report from an officer: “I have arrested two citizens of Bosque and McLennan counties for committing one of the most atrocious deeds in the annals of barbarity, that is Castrating a Freedman and he a mere boy.” One month later, in Leon County, white night riders torched four farmhouses occupied by black families. They killed two people, one a twelve-year-old boy who was trapped in his burning house. The freedmen’s offense, according to state reports: their farms were more prosperous than those of some white farmers.
On a February Sunday in 1875, armed men in Houston attacked black churchgoers in Freedmen’s Town, killing twenty-five. It was a “slaughter of the innocents,” the Panola Watchman reported. “Stripping them of their coverings amid horrible jokes and unfeeling laughter,” the newspaper said, the killers “disemboweled and quartered the poor victims, hanging them up by the legs like hogs.”
The Rangers’ Frontier Battalion had its own encounters. In the early spring of 1878, a black woman named Ida Miller sent a letter to Fritz Tegener, a justice of the peace in Travis County. “Dear Sir,” it said in an even hand on lined paper, “I have had my husband and one of my little girls killed the other day by the Rangers.”
The woman wrote of an incident from three months earlier, when five Rangers on a scouting expedition rode into Menard County, 150 miles northwest of Austin. Menard County was home to Fort McKavett, where several hundred U.S. Army “buffalo soldiers,” black members of the 10th Cavalry, were stationed. The 10th Cavalry had fought well in campaigns against the Plains Indians and had performed valuable and comprehensive scouting missions in West Texas.
However, the black soldiers and white locals often did not mix well. In 1869 a white rancher, John M. “Humpy” Jackson, shot and killed a black cavalryman from McKavett for sending a love note to his daughter. Jackson was arrested and jailed by military authorities. He killed his two guards—also black soldiers—and escaped. Though he was recaptured, he was later released and never stood trial.
The Rangers also had several prior run-ins with the 10th Cavalry. In the fall of 1877, near Fort Concho in West Texas, some Rangers were drinking at a saloon when black soldiers began dancing with Mexican senoritas. This displeased the Rangers, who pulled their guns and shot up the establishment. The soldiers retrieved their weapons, and in the subsequent firefight a bystander was killed. “In the place of keeping the peace,” a local citizen complained in a letter to Austin, the Rangers “broke it.”
Now, on New Year’s Eve, 1877, the five Rangers set up camp near Fort McKavett. With tidy buildings of native limestone, the fort had been called the prettiest in Texas. But across the narrow, rocky San Saba River lay Scabtown, a collection of unpainted shacks along dirt streets. Scabtown’s smoky and raucous saloons, dice rooms, brothels, and dance halls drew current and former soldiers from the fort. This, as some Rangers saw it, upset the natural balance of race relations. “These blacks had associated with white gamblers and lewd women until they thought themselves the equals of white men,” wrote Ranger James B. Gillett, “and became mean and overbearing.”
The five Rangers were tired and bedded down. But their cook—“our negro, George,” Gillett called him—wished to attend a dance in Scabtown. “He was a light mulatto, almost white, but well thought of by all the boys in the company,” Gillett said. “He obtained Lieutenant [N. O.] Reynolds’ permission to attend the dance, and borrowed Tim McCarty’s pistol to carry to it.”
At the dance, held in the house of an ex–buffalo soldier named Charles Miller, the husband of Ida Miller, the locals fingered the cook as an interloper. “They jumped on George, took his pistol, and kicked him out of the place,” Gillett said.
When they learned of the incident, the five Rangers went to the house to retrieve their gun. “The negroes refused to deliver the pistol,” the county sheriff wrote. Ida Miller tried to end the standoff. She took the gun and was about to hand it over, the sheriff said, when her husband snatched it from her and told the Rangers, “Here, take your damned old pistol.”
The sheriff’s account continued: “Tim McCarty stepped up to receive it, and when within four feet of the door [Charles] Miller fired at him but missed. McCarty and Miller fired about the same time. [McCarty] fell, saying, ‘Lieutenant, I am killed . . . ’ Several shots were fired and Miller fell. The others were then ordered to surrender. . . . They answered, ‘No, we’ll die first.’”
The Rangers opened fire as the “negroes emptied their six-shooters,” Ranger Henry McGhee recounted. “It was right lively for a little while. I got in ten shots with my Winchester rifle, and I would not be surprised if I did some damage.” Even the cook took part. “Negro George fought like a tiger,” Gillett said. Once the guns fell silent, the Rangers charged into the house. “When the smoke of battle cleared,” Gillett said, “they found four dead men and a little girl who had been killed by accident.”
Ida Miller put it wrenchingly in her letter: “My little child’s head was shot to pieces.” The girl was four years old. Mrs. Miller’s husband was dead as well.
The Rangers believed their actions to be justified and appreciated. “The Citizens are Jubilent over the Killing of the Negroes,” Lieutenant Reynolds wrote to the adjutant general, “and I think this Place will be quiet for Some time to Come.” A subsequent letter from Ranger McGhee was published in a Waco newspaper. Fort McKavett was “a pretty rough place,” McGhee said, “and the negroes here need killing.” A white coroner’s jury in Menard County seemed to agree. The jury ruled that the ex-soldiers “came to their death while resisting officers in the discharge of their duty.”
About three months after the incident, Mrs. Miller wrote her woeful letter to Tegener, the justice of the peace. “Since they killed my people . . . they have robbed me of my property in Menard County and left me helpless with one arm broken into pieces,” she said. “They threatened my life if I should go back to McKavett to look after my effects or to make complaints, as the Lieutenant of the Rangers fears the consequences of his bloody work should I appear at District Court.” Mrs. Miller asked Tegener, for whom she once worked as a laundress, to use his influence “to bring the murderers of my husband and child to summary justice.” The justice of the peace referred the letter to the governor’s office, where it had no apparent effect.
The dead child was forgotten. The capture of John Wesley Hardin, however, became an eternal part of the Ranger legend.
The diminutive son of a Methodist minister, Hardin committed his first murder at age fifteen, pumping five bullets into a freed slave who had beaten him in a wrestling match. About six weeks later, in East Texas, he claimed to have shot and killed three soldiers who were searching for him.
The skein of slayings grew longer over the next few years: a rival gambler, a pimp, an Indian, a Mexican, a cowboy, a member of a traveling circus troupe, and more. It is said that in Abilene, Kansas, he backed down Wild Bill Hickok. In a famous and perhaps apocryphal story, Hardin shot a man for snoring. “He did not like to be disturbed in his sleep,” a newspaper story explained, “and so he arose in the silent night and slew the snorer.”
In October 1871, two members of the Reconstruction-era Texas State Police, both of them black, came to the Central Texas town of Smiley Lake to look for Hardin. They found him in a local store, eating cheese and crackers. One of the officers, Green Paramore, drew on him. In his memoirs, Hardin described Paramore as “a big black negro with his pistol cocked.” When Paramore demanded that he surrender his weapon, Hardin extended his Colt .45 revolvers with the butts outward. It was an old trick of his. “One of the pistols turned a somerset in my hand and went off,” Hardin said. “Down came the negro, with his pistol cocked.” Paramore was dying on the floor “with a bullet through his head, quivering in blood.” From the store, Hardin shot through a window and wounded the other officer, who escaped on a mule.
Hardin claimed—without corroboration—that a revenge-minded “posse of negroes from Austin” next came to capture him. “I met them prepared and killed three of them,” he wrote. “They returned sadder and wiser.”
On his twenty-first birthday, Hardin enhanced his notoriety by shooting to death a deputy sheriff outside a West Texas saloon. “He kills men just to see them kick,” wrote a Ranger who used the pen name Pidge. “He can take two six-shooters and turn them like wheels in his hands and fire a shot from each at every revolution. . . . He is said to have killed thirty men and is a dead shot.”
With a $4,000 reward hanging over him, and pursued by Rangers, Hardin fled Texas. A special Ranger named Jack Duncan—a Pinkerton detective appointed by the governor—trailed him to Alabama. Duncan wired Ranger lieutenant John B. Armstrong, who had served with Leander McNelly’s Special Forces on the border, and who was now chasing Hardin. Armstrong met Duncan in Alabama, and they followed Hardin to Florida. Outside Pensacola, Armstrong recruited a local sheriff to assist. On August 23, 1877, the Ranger, the Pinkerton man, the sheriff, and a deputy boarded a train where Hardin and three accomplices relaxed in a passenger car.
The story of what happened next varies with the storyteller. This is Hardin’s version, recounted in a letter to his wife: “4 men grabed me one by each arm and one by each Leg.” Hardin struggled for his gun but could not free himself. At one point he yelled, “Texas, by God!” Armstrong raised his Colt revolver and brought it down hard on Hardin’s head, knocking him unconscious. During the melee one of Hardin’s men pulled a gun, but someone—by some accounts Armstrong—shot him dead. Passengers panicked. “Everybody in the car stampeded,” Duncan said, “and went out of the windows and doors.”
Later that day, Ranger Armstrong sent a victorious telegram to the adjutant general: “Arrested John Wesley Hardin, Pensacola, Florida this afternoon. He had four men with him, and we had some lively shooting. . . . Hardin fought desperately.” Hardin softened by the time he was back in Texas. From the Travis County jail he told a reporter, “The officers treated me kindly, and they deserve the greatest praise for capturing me alive.”
Hardin stood trial for the murder of the deputy sheriff; he was found guilty and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. Armstrong and Duncan apparently pocketed the $4,000 reward. And the Rangers won plaudits as an effective force for law and order, as chronicled in the Austin Statesman. “The arrest of this notorious character with two of his men, and the killing of the fourth, not only adds new laurels to the achieved honors of the State troops,” the capital’s newspaper said. “The event will be the means of causing consternation and demoralization among the desperate characters and thieving bands that curse some localities.” The Dallas Daily Herald agreed. “No police organization has ever rendered better service than this force has,” the newspaper said of the Rangers. “Hardin’s arrest . . . is its crowning glory.”
Hardin’s capture marked a high point for the Rangers, but the humiliation of the Salt War—which happened a few months later—faded some of the acclaim. The Rangers needed another outlaw to restore their luster. Sam Bass gave them that.
Bass was an illiterate, orphaned Indiana farm boy who arrived in Texas as a nineteen-year-old. He indulged an early interest in horse racing and herded longhorn cattle from Texas to Dodge City, Kansas. From there he wandered to Deadwood, South Dakota, the legendary gold-mining town of gambling dens and bordellos. Deadwood proved to be a good place to recruit criminals, and by 1877, Bass had assembled a gang to rob stagecoaches. Their big score was the holdup of a Union Pacific passenger train in Nebraska. Bass and his bandits took $60,000 in newly minted twenty-dollar gold pieces.
Returning to Texas, Bass—by now an outlaw folk hero—robbed more stagecoaches and trains and plotted to hit banks. The Rangers mounted a company in pursuit, but their incompetence and Bass’s caginess caused them to be outwitted at every turn. “Bass and his gang . . . played with it as a child plays with toys,” Ranger Jim Gillett wrote. Many suspected that citizens and authorities in Bass’s adopted hometown of Denton, north of Dallas, protected him. “His friends watch and even question every stranger that visits Denton, reporting every move to Bass, who pays liberally,” one newspaper wrote. “It is said he has six men, regularly employed, who receive $60 gold each, per month, besides their drinking free.”
With his frustration building, Major Jones, commander of the Frontier Battalion, persuaded a low-level bandit named Jim Murphy to infiltrate the Bass gang. Murphy managed to pull it off and told the Rangers that Bass would be in the town of Round Rock, north of Austin, to case a bank.
Jones and three other Rangers took the train to Round Rock. On the morning of July 19, 1878, lawmen spotted Bass and his accomplices in a general store. A broad-daylight shootout followed, and Bass was hit in the hand and back. He fled on horseback. The Rangers found him the next day, mortally wounded beneath a tree. They took Bass to a small house, where a correspondent for the Galveston Daily News interviewed him as he lay on a cot dying. Among his last words, the writer said, were: “I am Sam Bass, shot to pieces, and no use to deny.” He died forty-eight hours after the gunfight, at age twenty-seven.
The story of the infamous robber’s demise hit newspapers across the country. “The name of Sam Bass, the dead robber chieftain, is on every lip in Texas,” wrote a florid correspondent for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, “and all other topics have been for the last few days sunk in the blaze of romance in which the ill-fated sun of this modern Robin Hood has descended to its last and final rest.”
Bass’s capture thus enhanced the Rangers’ image of tireless man-hunters. That didn’t do much, however, to ease the lingering Salt War rancor in far West Texas. The adjutant general said he required a new commander there “of some established character,” an officer who would “avoid further trouble.” He sent forty-six-year-old George W. Baylor, a man of letters who played the violin and had twice been acquitted of murder. “I want you to remember,” Governor Oran Roberts told Baylor, “that out in the far, wild country, you represent the honor and dignity of the great state of Texas.”
A tall, teetotaling Episcopalian, Baylor came from a Texas family both prominent and infamous. An uncle, R. E. B. Baylor, had cofounded Baylor University. After completing his education at that institution, George Baylor sought his fortune in the California goldfields. He amassed no riches, but he did join a group of vigilantes and killed a “dangerous character”—as the locals described him—in a shootout. Baylor, who was wounded in the gunfight, stood trial in the man’s death. A jury found him not guilty. “It did not take them long,” he wrote, “to bring in a verdict in substance, ‘served ’em right.’”
Returning to Texas in 1859, he reunited with his brother, John R. Baylor, the zealous Indian scourge who published the White Man newspaper. George Baylor accompanied his brother’s missions to slay Comanches and apparently notched his share. One press account, George Baylor noted with some pride, said he had “killed and scalped six Indians one morning before breakfast.” In the 1860 census he listed his occupation as “Indian Killer.”
With the outbreak of the Civil War, Baylor joined the Confederate Army as a lieutenant. He fought in the Battle of Shiloh, was promoted to colonel, and saw more fighting in Louisiana. Near the end of the war, he settled a personal dispute with a Rebel general by drawing his Colt revolver and shooting the unarmed man dead in a Houston hotel. Though he was acquitted of murder charges, Baylor said the incident lingered for years as a “matter of sorrow and regret.” Nonetheless, he said, “I would do the same thing again.”
Now, in August 1879, he was riding into history as a newly commissioned Ranger. Baylor, his wife, two daughters, and a sister-in-law departed San Antonio for the trip west. Six Rangers, including James Gillett, accompanied them on horseback. One wagon carried household goods, including a piano and Baylor’s beloved violin. At the rear of the wagon was a coop full of game hens. The women and children clustered in a hack drawn by a pair of mules.
The six hundred-mile trek took them through some of the most barren and dangerous land in the Southwest. “Not a drop of rain fell,” Gillett recalled. Near the Pecos River they passed the charred remains of a wagon train attacked by Indians only months before. “All the mules had been captured, the teamsters killed, and the train of sixteen big wagons burned,” Gillett said. “Had the same Indians encountered our little party . . . we would all have been massacred.”
After forty-two days they reached Ysleta, the scene of numerous Ranger assaults on the populace after the Salt War. Baylor, who spoke fluent Spanish—“the sweet Castilian tongue,” he called it—commenced mending fences. “His open, friendly personality endeared him to the Mexicans,” Gillett said. “Always they showed him every courtesy in their power.”
The quality of his new Ranger company, however, often fell short, as Baylor proved to be a poor judge of character. “He was as tender-hearted as a child and would listen to any tale of woe,” Gillett said. “All men looked alike to him, and he would enlist anyone when there was a vacancy in the company. The result was that some of the worst . . . rustlers got into the command and gave us no end of trouble, nearly causing one or two killings in our camp.” They behaved poorly in town too. The marshal of El Paso, Dallas Stoudenmire, complained to the state attorney general that Rangers were “more ready to aggravate” than serve, and they rode “shooting through the streets.”
The criminality of his men may not have mattered much to Baylor. He showed little interest in the pursuit of robbers, killers, rustlers, and the ordinary run of lawbreakers. “Sometimes we would have as many as six or eight criminals chained up in camp at one time,” Gillett said, “but [he] would never come to see them, for he could not bear to see anyone in trouble.” The Ranger leader chose instead to go after Indians. He was, after all, a Baylor.
Although the Rangers fought the Comanches hard for years—and struck some crippling blows—it was the U.S. Army that finally pushed them out of Texas. In 1874 the cavalry began a campaign against the Comanches and the Kiowas that became known as the Red River War. The army engaged the weakened Indians over the course of a few months and pushed them back into the Oklahoma Indian Territory. Never again did Comanches significantly threaten Anglo settlers in Texas. The guns of the white man had reduced them, like the buffalo, from overwhelming presence to vestigial oblivion.
Like the Comanches, bands of Apaches had been forced onto a reservation—this one in Arizona. Conditions were miserable: bad water, poor rations, disease, and no game to hunt. Several hundred tribesmen left with Victorio, a legendary if aging chief of the Eastern Chiricahua and Mescalero Apaches. In the 1850s Victorio had ridden with Geronimo on raids into Texas. American military commanders considered him to be a skilled battlefield tactician. Though he was now at least fifty-five, Victorio and his band of warriors began marauding again.
Many of the raids took place in Mexico, but Texans around El Paso believed he would hit them too. “Victorio knew every foot of the country and where to find wood, water, grass and abundance of game,” Baylor said. “I knew it was only a question of time before old Victorio would be on our side again murdering and robbing.”
In the summer of 1880, Baylor and his Rangers rode in pursuit, though with little success. A few months later Mexican soldiers managed to trap the chief and his warriors, along with women and children, in the Tres Castillos Mountains. Victorio was killed, as were most of the others. Only a dozen or so warriors, along with a handful of women and children, managed to escape to Texas. “At once this band began a series of pillages and murders that has no parallel,” Gillett said, “considering the small size of the party.”
Their last attack came in early January 1881, as the Overland Mail stage bumped through rocky, desolate Quitman Canyon, southeast of El Paso. The driver, whose name was Morgan, had worked the San Antonio to El Paso route dozens of times. He carried one passenger this day, a gambler named Crenshaw. Pulled by mules, the stage clattered through a narrow passage known as the Apache Post Office, so named because of pictographs on the rock walls. It was there that Victorio’s remnant band ambushed them.
When the stage failed to make its next stop at Fort Quitman, ranchmen and Overland employees mounted a search. Leading them was none other than Rip Ford, the former Ranger, now living nearby. The searchers found the abandoned stagecoach. One mule was dead. Mailbags had been cut open, the mail scattered on the ground. Morgan and Crenshaw, dead or alive, were nowhere to be seen. Ford sent a letter to Baylor describing the scene. There were some initial suspicions, Baylor said, that the driver and passenger of the stage might have faked the robbery. “I deemed it best to go down & see for myself,” he wrote.
On January 16, 1881, Baylor—who had been promoted to captain—and twelve of his men from Company A left the town of Ysleta to investigate. Three Pueblo Indians rode with them. They loaded ten days’ worth of rations on two pack mules and headed into the rough country of desert foothills. Within several days, the Rangers found the trail and followed it into Mexico. Along the way, a dead horse—butchered for food—and a pair of old moccasins told them they were following Indians. “Next morning the trail crossed back to Texas,” Baylor said, and “we all felt in some degree the pleasure of being again on our own soil.”
They rode into the Eagle Mountains and discovered a hastily abandoned camp. Blankets and baskets had been left behind. A mule tongue stewed over a fire. Some postcards from the stagecoach mailbag lay nearby. But because “the night had been bitterly cold,” Baylor wrote, and the ground was frozen “hard as flint rock,” the Rangers had lost the trail. They had the good fortune to encounter another Ranger search party as they turned back toward Mexico. From them, Baylor learned of a fresh trail. Though rations had run low, the pursuit continued into the sere and forbidding Sierra Diablo Mountains.
The Rangers spent the night on some cliffs overlooking Rattlesnake Springs. The next day they found another abandoned camp. The Indians couldn’t have gone far; their fires were still burning. “The chase was getting to be exciting,” Baylor wrote. On the morning of January 29, almost two weeks since the Rangers had begun their quest, one of the Pueblo scouts pointed and whispered, “Están los Indios.” Baylor gazed across the valley and saw their campfires.
On foot, the Rangers crept undetected within two hundred yards of the camp. The Apaches “were huddled up around their fires cooking breakfast,” Baylor said, “and not conscious of a Ranger being within a hundred miles.” Baylor knelt and motioned his men to form a line. With the signal of a gunshot, “we charged them with a Texas yell.”
The staggering Indians could not mount a defense. “The Apaches ran like a herd of deer,” Baylor said. “Unlike our Comanches . . . these cowardly rascals ran like sheep.” With the warriors in retreat, “of course the women were the sufferers.” The women stumbled from their tipis, wrapped in blankets, and the Rangers cut them down. “Few could tell men from women,” Baylor said. Not that it mattered. “In fact the law under which the [Frontier Battalion] was organized don’t require it.”
Two women were killed, and one was mortally wounded. Baylor listed others: “2 children killed & 1 squaw captured [with] the latter wounded having 3 bullets in her hand and 2 children captured, one of them shot through the foot.” Baylor considered taking the injured child home as a souvenir for one of his daughters. “My little girl had always asked me to bring her ferns, flowers, pretty rocks or something every time I went on a scout.” For this last mission, he said, she issued a special request. “As we rode off she said: ‘Papa, please bring me a little Indian.’” The captain thought better of it when the Indian child came upon the bodies of those the Rangers had killed. “Her eyes flashed fire and she looked like some wild animal.”
After the last shot was fired, Baylor’s men combed the camp. They found six saddles, Baylor said, that had belonged to a U.S. Army patrol ambushed several months before. They also recovered some guns and the harness reins from the stagecoach attacked at Quitman Canyon. This proved, he believed, that they had found the remnants of Victorio’s band.
The Rangers now were hungry, having eaten nothing since the night before. They roasted the Apaches’ venison and ate it on the spot. “We took our breakfast on the ground occupied by the Indians,” Baylor wrote, “which we all enjoyed.” As the Rangers ate, they marveled at the spectacular vista of the surrounding mountains and canyons, and tried not to look at the bullet-riddled bodies of women and children a few feet away. “We had almost a boundless view from our breakfast table. . . . The beauty of the scenery [was] only marred by man’s inhumanity to man,” Baylor said, noting “the ghostly forms of the dead lying around.”
The captain admitted to one regret: his men didn’t carry breech-loading shotguns. If they did, he said, they could have unleashed quicker and more lethal rounds, and “I don’t believe a single Indian would have escaped.” Still, he regarded the engagement with satisfaction. Never again, Baylor said, would the Indians “sit down to eat breakfast without looking around to see if the Rangers are in sight.”
The boast was obsolete even as he made it. All the epic clashes, the blood-soaked but forgotten skirmishes, the scalpings, the tortures, the bravery, and the depravities had now run their course. This small, obscure massacre would come to assume monumental proportions. With Company A’s purge of these few Apaches on a cold morning, the Rangers had fought their last battle with Indians.
The Frontier Battalion was witnessing the end of the frontier. With most of the Indians dead, pacified, or on distant reservations, the Texas range opened. Cattle raisers pushed into regions of the state where, only a few years before, encroachment would have been tantamount to suicide. At the same time, the era of the great and legendary cattle trail drives was drawing to a close, replaced by the spread of ranches. This tectonic shift, combined with a new type of fence, brought the Rangers into a different sort of conflict.
Modern barbed wire, developed by an Illinois famer, was patented in 1874. The product initially found little use in Texas. Reasons varied, but many Texans simply believed the thin strands would not hold cattle. In 1876, while taking his dinner in a San Antonio chili parlor, an enterprising salesman had a vision. John Warne Gates, a twenty-one-year-old drummer for a fencing company, decided to build a small corral of barbed wire in San Antonio’s central Military Plaza. He filled it with 25 to 135—the reports differ—longhorn steers.
The new fencing was, he crowed, “light as air, stronger than whiskey and cheaper than dirt.” And as he demonstrated to the large crowd that had gathered, it would keep cattle from stampeding or wandering away. Angry longhorns charged the fence, only to be repulsed by the barbs. By the end of the day Gates had sold hundreds of miles of the wire at eighteen cents a pound, and a revolution had begun. Soon mile upon mile of barbed wire, nailed to mesquite and cedar posts, stretched across what had been Texas open range. Standing Deer, a Pueblo Indian chief, described the confounding scene to Ranger and rancher Charles Goodnight: “Wire, wire, wire! Everywhere!”
Landowners fenced their property with it, and they fenced government land they perhaps intended to buy. They fenced roads and rivers. They sometimes fenced entire towns. Nomadic grazing practices that had prevailed since the Spaniards claimed Texas became obsolete almost overnight. Cattle owners who had grown accustomed to free access to pastures and watering holes now found themselves cut off by endless stretches of the devil’s rope. Naturally, the backlash hit hard. As fast as some fences went up, fence cutters armed with wire snips took them down. An unconfirmed story has it that the first fence cutting in Texas was done by the old Ranger Big-Foot Wallace, who was said to declare that the men “who whipped the Indians out of the country should have first choice of the range.”
However noble Wallace’s sentiment might have been, it couldn’t beat money. Over more than three years, the cash-starved state government had sold vast tracts of public land for fifty cents an acre. This allowed men of foresight and capital to assemble some of the great, sprawling cattle ranches that became a part of Texas lore. The land for the world’s largest ranch, the XIT Ranch in the Texas Panhandle, was deeded to a Chicago syndicate in return for building the new capitol. Much of the XIT’s three million acres of arid grazing land came to be protected by wire fence, which ultimately stretched for six thousand miles.
In many if not most cases, the fence-cutting disputes pitted the big ranchers—a number of whom had international financial backing—against small, struggling stockmen. “Down with monopolies,” read a handbill posted on the streets of the West Texas town of Coleman in 1883. “Away with your foreign capitalists; the range and soil of Texas belong to the heroes of the South.”
The severe drought of 1883 made matters worse, as farmers found themselves cut off from dwindling sources of water by endless stretches of barbed wire. A letter writer to the Galveston Daily News urged the state to act. “I do not believe,” he wrote, “that eternal Providence created land for cattle to live fat and people to starve.”
Brown County, a patch of rolling grassland near the geographic center of the state, had been for decades the domain of the Comanches. Later John Wesley Hardin and his gang ran rampant there. Now fence cutting was reported to be widespread and the opposing sides on hair trigger. One estimate placed the losses from destroyed fences at $1 million. Others put the cost even higher. Landowners said the fence cutters not only did their usual destructive work but delivered dire threats and damaged other property as well. Coffins were placed on doorsteps as not-so-subtle intimidation. Houses went up in flames. Shots were fired into homes at night, and some ranchers were told to leave the area or be killed.
Panic seized the county seat in December 1883, as the Austin Statesman reported a looming peasant revolt: “Yesterday was a very awful day in Brownwood. About three o’clock in the morning it was announced that over two hundred fence cutters were in arms, and determined to lay Brownwood in ashes and kill some of its citizens. All the citizens were immediately notified and flew to arms, and the opera house was at once converted into an arsenal.” The attack did not occur, but the fear remained.
As the problem spread, Governor John Ireland threw his support to the cattle kings with a rousing 1884 speech to the Texas Live Stock Association. “I believe the man who can educate himself to think that it is not wrong to maliciously tear down and destroy persons’ fences,” the governor said, “is also capable of educating himself into the belief that it is not wrong to set fire to our houses or to hurl dynamite into our public buildings.” The audience responded with hearty applause.
Ireland called a special session of the Texas Legislature, in part to “provide a remedy for wanton destruction of fences.” Lawmakers made fence cutting a felony, punishable by one to five years in prison. With the statute on the books, it was time to send in the enforcers.
At first the state hired private eyes, including some from the famed Pinkerton agency. But detectives out of Chicago—even those who were sworn as Rangers—somehow couldn’t crack cases on the Texas range. One Pinkerton operative, for instance, spent several days hanging around a saloon in the town of Taylor, but reported that “fence cutting was not discussed with much feeling.”
Adjutant General Wilburn King decided that actual Rangers should perform some detective work, though most had little experience in undercover operations. One of those assigned was Ira Aten, a garrulous and energetic twenty-four-year-old. Aten claimed to have witnessed the shooting of Sam Bass, which made him want to be a Ranger. Now, in pursuit of fence cutters, he knew his superiors had inserted him where others had failed. “Detectives has been sent into that country many times but to no avail,” Aten wrote. “Several of them barely escaped with their lives.”
Some of the fence cutters were rustlers or common outlaws. Ranger captain Baylor believed a few of them “may have been drawn into fence cutting under communistic teachings.” Other cutters merely wanted water and grass for their cattle. Whatever their motives, the “knights of the nippers” were hard to catch. To solve the crime, a Ranger or sheriff had to penetrate a family or a gang of night riders who admitted no outsiders. “They are the best organized band that I ever worked after,” lamented Ranger John R. Hughes, who became a captain. “They keep spies out all the time.”
It didn’t help the Rangers that many in the rural precincts saw the cutters as heroes. “The big pasture men live in town and people in the country are almost all in sympathy with the wire cutters,” Hughes said. When authorities managed to make arrests, local juries often refused to convict their neighbors for destroying the fences of absentee owners. A law enforcement operative in Erath County complained that a member of the grand jury, which had refused to indict any fence cutters despite ample evidence, was “one of the chief advocates of wire-cutting.” And the Erath County sheriff, the operative said in a report to the adjutant general, enjoyed “strong support among the fence-cutters.”
In the town of Sweetwater, Ranger private Ben Warren gathered evidence on a fence-cutting gang and was prepared to testify against them at trial. Warren stood in the office of the Central Hotel one winter’s night, tending a stove, when someone fired a shot through a window. The bullet struck Warren in the face, and—blood spurting from the hole in his cheek—he collapsed in a chair, where he died. The primary suspects were two of the accused fence cutters. “The fence cutting element in the interior,” the Austin Statesman said in the murder’s aftermath, “are much elated.”
Facing such obstacles, a Ranger could not simply ride into town, eyeball the suspects, and toss them in the county jail. Ranger Aten, sent to Brown County, adopted infiltration as his initial tactic. “I posed as a poor orphan boy with no home, who was just being kicked about from pillar to post,” he said. He had a secret list of suspected fence cutters. “I hung around a store in the neighborhood where these men lived, sleeping in hay stacks or wherever I could get shelter for several days.”
One of the suspects hired Aten to do odd jobs. “I milked the cow, fed the chickens and pigs, chopped the wood, and was just a handy boy around the ranch,” Aten said. Still, he provoked suspicion. “Some of this man’s friends said I was no good and should be killed or run out of the country.”
He stayed, though, and “at last the opportunity I sought arrived.” He was offered the chance to sell some stolen horses, which he pretended to do. This gained him more credence with the cutters, and “I was ready to spring the trap I was laying.” He positioned a company of Rangers to ambush midnight nippers. Shots were fired—the Rangers may or may not have pulled their triggers first—and two of the cutters lay dying on the fence line. In the parlance of the day, it was a “Ranger conviction.” And that “stopped the fence cutting in Brown County,” Aten said.
He moved on to Navarro County, about fifty miles south of Dallas. Aten and another Ranger posed as itinerants—“wagon hoboes,” Aten said, “out hunting cotton to pick.” A few weeks in the cotton fields, however, left him restless and bored, so “I got a scheme in my head.” He decided to booby-trap some of the fences. “They sent me here to stop fence-cutting any way I could,” he reasoned. “And that is what I am doing.”
Using old shotguns and some dynamite he bought in Dallas, Aten fashioned an underground device that would explode when the barbed wire was cut and the supporting post fell. “Well,” he wrote, “if that don’t kill the parties that cuts the fence, it will scare them so bad they will never cut another.”
Aten called his invention the “dynamite boom” and the “boom rocket.” He assured his supervisors in Austin that he was taking precautions to set the traps safely, though accidents could happen. “Keep your ears pricked, you may hear my boom clear down there,” Aten said. “However, if I get blowed up, you will know I was doing a good cause.”
To Aten’s surprise, officials in the state capital did not share his enthusiasm. He was ordered to meet with Governor Sul Ross, the ex-Ranger who had succeeded Ireland. Aten tried to explain to the governor how the boom rocket would work, which only seemed to infuriate Ross. “That bald head of his got redder and redder, and when I finished my story it was on fire,” Aten said. “I thought he was going to have me court-martialed and then shot.”
He promised the governor he would remove the dynamite. “Instead, I exploded the bombs and they were heard for miles around,” he said. “Next day people gathered about the little store to see what it all meant, and the word was passed through the crowd there were bombs planted on all the fences, and these people were ready to believe it. That settled the fence cutting activities in Navarro County.”
Afterward, he and Governor Ross “became fast friends,” Aten said. And his dynamite boom put him in the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame, one of only thirty-one men to be so honored.
As the nineteenth century drew to an end, a story in a Pennsylvania newspaper asked if the Rangers were destined now to fade away, victims of their own success. “With the disappearance of the bad men and the gradual extinction of the wild tribes of Indians infesting Texas and the Southwestern frontier, another hardly less important and far more picturesque and necessary type of men are becoming memories of the past as the days of their usefulness are drawing to a close,” the Philadelphia Times said. “The pride of the Lone Star State, the Texas Ranger . . . is gradually shrinking away to mere nothingness before the march of civilization, law and order.”
Only a writer some fifteen hundred miles away on the East Coast could think enlightenment had waltzed across Texas, or that most of the state’s “bad men” had been contained. It was true that the Rangers’ duties were shifting, making them less a paramilitary group and more a statewide police force. Some Rangers now rode trains instead of horses. Others had never even killed an Indian.
The state disbanded the Frontier Battalion and replaced it with a Ranger Force in 1901. (Officials had discovered well after the fact that under the original law creating the battalion, Ranger privates did not have the power of arrest. Thus the Rangers had been policing illegally for a quarter century.) The new statute empowered the governor to assemble four companies of one captain, one sergeant and twenty privates each. Captains were to make $100 a month, privates $40, and they would “always be under the command of the Governor.” The law strictly prescribed daily rations for every Ranger, from beef and bacon down to the amount of pickles: “one sixth gill,” or less than an ounce.
As always, the force was underfunded, but the Rangers remained quite alive. Abundant wildness persisted in Texas yet. There was, for example, that perpetual cauldron, the Texas-Mexico border, where much trouble awaited.