Indeed, they have been from the beginning not unlike the knights of old who rode without fear and without reproach to destroy evil and redress wrong.
—ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE, DESCRIBING THE TEXAS RANGERS
News out of Brownsville, Texas, in August 1906 made the headlines scream: “DASTARDLY OUTRAGE BY NEGRO SOLDIERS” and “REIGN OF TERROR.” The papers reported that drunken black army troops had “gone on the warpath” and gunned down innocent white folks. As Captain William J. McDonald saw it, this called for the presence of a courageous Texas Ranger, namely himself, so he caught a train for the old border town.
McDonald was already famous, perhaps the most celebrated Ranger of his time. Many knew him as Captain Bill, a slim gent with a flowing mustache, impeccable penmanship—he had taught handwriting as a young man—and a penchant for informing others of his ample virtues. The very mention of his name, his authorized biographer would write, “makes the pulse of a good citizen, and the feet of an outlaw, move quicker.” Among the bad men of Texas, of whom there were many, “there grew up a superstition that he was bullet-proof.”
And now he headed south at locomotive speed to handle what he came to call the “Brownsville Outrage.”
With a population of about eight thousand, Brownsville was at the beginning of the twentieth century what it had been for decades before: a poor, steamy, verminous place, with recurrent cholera epidemics and outbreaks of yellow fever. The city had yet to install an electrical grid or provide running water. Hewing to its Mexican War origin as a military outpost, Brownsville provided temporary and unhappy quarters to 167 black soldiers from the army’s 25th Infantry—“colored troops,” as they were known.
On the night of August 13, 1906, about a dozen men took to the narrow dirt streets of the town, firing rifles. One citizen, a white man, was killed. Two others were wounded, including a policeman. Suspicion fell immediately on the black soldiers. Residents of Brownsville, already uneasy about the presence of the infantrymen, feared more killing to come.
McDonald was more than five hundred miles away, working as the sergeant-at-arms for the state Democratic convention in Dallas, when he heard about the incident. He insisted he should “go down and settle that Brownsville business.” The man in charge of the Rangers, Adjutant General John A. Hulen, ordered McDonald to stay out of it, because state police had no authority to investigate or arrest federal troops.
That might have stopped lesser men, but McDonald had his reasons: “Why, them hellions have violated the laws of the state.” His talent for such inspired phrasing was notable. One of his aphorisms in particular gained a hallowed place in Ranger lore: “No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and keeps on a-comin’.”
This notion—justice fortified with persistence invariably wins out—may have propelled McDonald toward the border. Or it may have been that he spotted the chance for abundant press coverage. Like any number of Rangers, McDonald did not fear a plunge into perilous situations. Many of them did so with a reluctance to call attention to their actions. Captain Bill suffered from no such reticence.
Born in Mississippi in 1852, McDonald spent his early youth on his family’s cotton plantation, an enterprise with half a dozen slaves. His father, a Confederate major, died in 1862 at the Battle of Corinth, and McDonald’s widowed mother moved the family to Texas.
When McDonald was sixteen, at the height of Reconstruction, a distant relative named Peter Green was murdered in Rusk County in East Texas. Five suspects—all black men—were arrested, after which a white mob pulled them from the county jail and lynched them. There is little doubt McDonald was part of the mob. “If he did not help pull a rope that night,” his sympathetic biographer wrote, “it was only because the rope was fully occupied with other willing hands.” Young McDonald “was hot-blooded in ’sixty-eight,” the biographer explained, while “the situation was not one to develop moral principles.” And he seethed with anger at the death of his “hero father, shot dead while leading his regiment against [the] men in blue.”
Federal troops marched into the county after the lynching and garrisoned themselves in the courthouse. With another relative, McDonald fired random shots at the courthouse windows. He was arrested and prosecuted “for aiding in the crime of treason,” according to his biographer, but was acquitted at trial.
Some time after that, McDonald settled down and seemed destined for the relatively placid life of a small-town merchant. He graduated from Soule’s Commercial College in New Orleans and opened a grocery store back in East Texas. But he went broke in 1877, after which he worked as a deputy sheriff. He tried ranching in West Texas but kept his connection to law enforcement as a deputy in Hardeman County. In 1891 an old friend, Governor James Hogg, appointed the thirty-eight-year-old McDonald a Ranger captain.
His duties included the pursuit of bank robbers, attempts to settle deadly feuds, and the prevention of prizefights. Boxing matches were illegal in Texas. When a promoter tried to arrange an El Paso bout in 1896, McDonald and at least eighteen Rangers—a “manly looking set of men,” the local newspaper observed—moved in to stop it. The boxers were Bob “Ruby Robert” Fitzsimmons, middleweight champion from New Zealand, and Peter Maher, an Irish brawler and heavyweight champ. Fitzsimmons, also known as the “Fighting Blacksmith” and the “Freckled Wonder,” brought his pet lion, Nero, with him. The lion caused a stir one morning in Juarez when it slipped its collar and killed a Mexican’s goat.
McDonald and the Rangers made it clear that no fight could take place on Texas soil. The promoter then had his workers set up the ring in the Mexican state of Coahuila, on a sandy flat along the Rio Grande. After all that, the match itself wasn’t much. Fitzsimmons knocked out Maher less than two minutes into the first round. The Rangers watched from the Texas side of the river.
Before the Brownsville affair, perhaps McDonald’s most noteworthy incident as a Ranger occurred in 1893, when he engaged in a duel with a county sheriff on a West Texas street. Shot twice, McDonald suffered a broken collarbone and a punctured lung. “Well,” he said as he sank to the ground, “I think I’m a dead rabbit.” But he recovered and, after a long convalescence, went back to work. The sheriff had committed the capital crime of cursing McDonald and had accused the Rangers of rustling. He was shot at least three times and died of an infection.
This had not been a classic, cinematic Wild West showdown, with one flinty-eyed gunfighter facing another at high noon. An examination found the sheriff was shot in the back, quite possibly by some of McDonald’s Rangers. No matter. The fatal encounter made news as far away as California, where the Los Angeles Times ran a story saying Captain Bill, “one of the bravest officers of Texas,” had single-handedly shot it out against four armed adversaries. For the rest of his life McDonald would tell admirers he had so much lead in him that if he tried to swim, he would sink.
Even before the guns went off, racial tension was already at a boil in Brownsville. White residents had expressed deep unhappiness and anxiety about having black troops in the city. “To hell with the colored soldiers,” one white army lieutenant recalled townspeople saying. Nor did the soldiers, many of whom had served in Cuba and the Philippines, want to be stationed where Jim Crow laws of segregation still held. One black soldier walked into a Brownsville saloon called the White Elephant and asked for a drink, the lieutenant said. A deputy marshal—and former Ranger—named W. B. Bates “turned to the solder and said no nigger could drink at the same bar with him.” When the soldier responded he was “as good as any white man,” the lieutenant said, the deputy marshal “drew his revolver and hit the soldier over the head.”
At saloons where they were served, infantrymen said, bartenders broke the glasses from which they had sipped, so that no white man’s lips would touch them. Soldiers said they had been jostled or cursed by whites on the streets, while citizens complained that a black man in uniform had grabbed a white woman by the hair and thrown her to the ground.
Around midnight on August 13, under a near moonless sky, a dozen or so shadowy figures—maybe dressed like soldiers, maybe not—stalked the narrow streets near Fort Brown. With rifles, they began shooting at stores, houses, and a hotel. A mounted police lieutenant was hit, his arm shattered. It had to be amputated. The men fired into the Ruby Saloon and killed a bartender. Another person was wounded. After ten minutes, the shooters melted into the night.
Circumstantial evidence pointed to the soldiers. The area of the shootings was close to their barracks. Empty shells found on the sidewalk appeared to come from army rifles. And eight townspeople claimed they recognized the men as soldiers. However, their commander, Major Charles Penrose, insisted they had been confined to barracks that night. Brigadier General William S. McCaskey, who oversaw the army’s Southwestern Division, warned of a rush to judgment. “Citizens of Brownsville entertain race hatred to an extreme degree,” he advised in a telegram to the War Department.
On a sweltering evening one week later, McDonald stepped off the train at Brownsville. Four Rangers from his Company B joined him. The captain launched his investigation by meeting with local officials. They informed him that Major Penrose had vowed to solve the case if it took ten years. McDonald erupted. “I told them he could do it in ten minutes if he tried,” he said.
Next he went to Fort Brown, where the soldiers were garrisoned, to see Penrose. McDonald wore a holster with two pearl-handled .45-caliber revolvers and cradled a shotgun. “The guns he carried were almost half his size,” a Brownsville resident observed, “and helped him, proportionately, to the publicity he craved.”
Armed guards blocked his entrance. According to his authorized biography, McDonald began dispensing orders: “You niggers, hold up there! You’ve already got into trouble with them old guns of yours. I’m Captain McDonald of the State Rangers, and I’m down here to investigate a foul murder you scoundrels have committed. I’ll show you niggers something you’ve never been used to. Put up them guns!”
As the episode suggests, he did not shy from confrontation. “If McDonald started hellwards,” an admiring correspondent once wrote, “he would come back with the devil handcuffed and tied across the pommel of his saddle.” And he was, like many of his day, an unreconstructed and unapologetic racist. “A white man who has committed a crime is, to him always a ‘scoundrel,’ or worse,” his biographer wrote. “A black offender, to him, is not a negro, or a colored man, but a ‘nigger,’ usually with pictorial adjectives.”
So it went in the confrontation with the black soldiers. The Houston Post gave this fawning account, based on an interview with McDonald: “There was a ring in the captain’s voice that they did not mistake. That ring carried time backward in its flight more than forty years. It was not United States soldiers standing menacingly over a civilian. It was negroes—the old-time plantation negroes—in the presence of a Southern gentleman. ‘Yas, sir, cap’n; yas, sir. Majah Penrose he ovah dar in his house.’ ‘One of you black scoundrels show me to him.’ They all bent their bodies in a bow.” Then, “a darkey led the way.”
The Rangers learned that a bar frequented by the soldiers had closed early the night of the riot, which McDonald believed was proof an assault had been planned. He interrogated soldiers rapid-fire and considered their silence an admission of guilt. “We didn’t say anything because there was nothing to say,” Private Dorsie Willis recalled. “We didn’t do it.”
McDonald also discovered that a cap bearing the initials of one of the soldiers had been found along the route of the riot on the morning after. This made the man, Captain Bill said, “one of the guilty parties.” When Major Penrose did not leap to agree with his conclusions, McDonald reminded him that “people who tried to shield criminals were accessories to the crime.”
A Brownsville citizens committee conducted its own investigation, which foundered. No one who witnessed the shootings could identify a single soldier, and a check of the soldiers’ rifles showed that they had not been recently fired. But an undeterred McDonald secured from a local judge arrest warrants for twelve soldiers and one ex-soldier. “I hereby demand the delivery to me of the men of your command that I yesterday gave you warrants for,” McDonald wrote to Major Penrose. The major’s written response: “After a most careful investigation, I am unable to find any one or party in any way connected with the crime of which you speak.”
The army planned to ship the men elsewhere, while McDonald wanted them to stay in town and face prosecution. The Ranger captain launched a counteroffensive. He telegrammed a report to Governor Samuel W. T. Lanham: “The [army] officers are trying to cover up the diabolical crime I am about to uncover and it will be a shame to allow this to be done,” he wrote. “Please send assistance.” He wired U.S. senator Joseph W. Bailey of Texas. “Am about to uncover the whole thing,” McDonald said, “and some of the officers seem to be trying hard to shield the guilty parties.” He also made sure that newsmen on the scene had access to the correspondence—“wishing to explain fully,” he said, “all that I have done.”
Those charged with keeping the peace locally worried that the Ranger captain was headed for an armed confrontation with the army. Jim Wells Jr., Brownsville’s most powerful political figure, told McDonald to stop. “He said, ‘McDonald, I am a friend of yours, but you are only a Ranger captain, and if you keep going along the way you are doing you are going to precipitate us into trouble,’” recalled Mayor Frederick Combe. Officials also feared a race riot. “You think you are doing right,” Wells said to McDonald, “but if you attempt to interfere with those soldiers down there, this matter will break out anew, and we will lose a great many lives here. You must remember our wives and children.”
The judge who had issued the arrest warrants demanded that McDonald return them. With several dozen armed men, he confronted the Ranger—also armed—in the lobby of the Miller Hotel. McDonald regarded them with a sneer. “You all look like 15 cents in Mexican money,” he said, and refused to surrender the warrants. Another gunfight seemed to be brewing. But McDonald had to back down when he received a wire from the governor, instructing him to take his orders from the judge and the sheriff.
Captain Bill now found himself at a dead end. “Of course I could do no more,” he reported, “so I quietly left town the next day with my four rangers while champagne corks were popping and old McDonald was being denounced and compared to a sausage and the murderers went on their way rejoicing.”
The army put the soldiers on a train for Oklahoma. The Brownsville Herald was glad to see them go. Otherwise, the newspaper said, “if those black beasts had been left here in our jail it is more than likely that the people would have taken the law into their own hands.”
In late 1906, once passions had cooled a bit, a Brownsville grand jury considered the case against the soldiers and indicted no one.
The decision on the soldiers’ fate now lay with President Theodore Roosevelt. McDonald knew the president from a 1905 wolf-hunting trip they had taken in Oklahoma, and had served as a bodyguard for Roosevelt during a swing through Texas. Shortly after his Brownsville case fell apart, McDonald wrote the president personally and complained of army officers “trying to cover this outrageous murder up.” It’s impossible to know if Roosevelt was influenced by McDonald, but he certainly agreed with the captain. In November 1906 the president ordered that all 167 of the men who had been garrisoned at Fort Brown be discharged without honor. Not one of them stood trial.
“The townspeople were completely surprised by the unprovoked and murderous savagery of the attack,” Roosevelt wrote. He said he based his decision on findings by Major Augustus Blocksom, whose brief investigation determined that between nine and fifteen unidentified soldiers fired the shots. “The soldiers were aggressors from start to finish,” Roosevelt said, while “their comrades privy to the deed have combined to shelter the criminals from justice.” It was a “conspiracy of silence,” the president said. “They perverted the power put into their hands to sustain the law into the most deadly violation of the law.”
The president’s action notwithstanding, McDonald emerged from the affray with his image in tatters, at least in some quarters. The Brownsville Herald accused him of using the incident simply to promote himself: “He seeks by means of the press, or such members of it as will lend themselves to his rather apparent purpose, to aggrandize himself and add to the lustre of his reputation at the expense of an outraged, insulted, and misunderstood people.” In an unrelated matter, Judge Welch—the jurist who issued and repossessed the arrest warrants—was murdered in a nearby town two months after the Brownsville affair. Jim Wells wired the governor, beseeching him to send Rangers to investigate. But he asked for captains other than McDonald, who, apparently, had worn out his welcome in that part of the Rio Grande Valley.
William Kelly, chairman of the citizens committee that investigated the shootings, said at a 1907 congressional hearing he had urged local authorities to throw McDonald in the Brownsville jail. The Ranger captain’s tactics and overheated accusations could have started a bloody fight between townspeople and soldiers, he said. And seven months after the Brownsville incident, Fort Brown commander Penrose said of McDonald: “He is a thorough coward.”
Some years after the shootings, Brownsville lawyer and historian Harbert Davenport reflected on the Ranger. “To be accurate, the old-timers of Southwest Texas did not consider Bill McDonald a Ranger Captain at all,” Davenport said in a letter. “I have never found a Border man who had the slightest respect for Bill McDonald. He was, to them, a troublemaker, an advertiser, a dealer in false tales of which he was usually the hero, inclined to act—and act violently—on false information, vain and selfish.”
They were harsh words. But, as with Rangers past and future, they could not blunt the inevitable propaganda to come. The remaking of McDonald’s image started early and spanned decades. It began when Albert Bigelow Paine, one of the preeminent chroniclers of his era, published Captain Bill McDonald, Texas Ranger, a 396-page biography, in 1909. The publication was arranged by Edward M. House, a wealthy Texan with deep political connections.
Paine depicted Captain Bill as a lawman-superman who “faced death almost daily” and who had single-handedly transformed wild and woolly Texas into “a condition of such proper behavior that nowhere in this country is life and property safer.” The biographer admired many of McDonald’s qualities but especially his nose. It was “of that stately Roman architecture which goes with conquest, because it signifies courage, resolution and the peerless gift of command.” Captain Bill did encounter a setback in Brownsville, Paine acknowledged, but that only enhanced his stature. “After all, it requires defeat to reveal true greatness.”
In 1914, McDonald recounted his Brownsville tale to a correspondent for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle who had ventured to Austin. This version featured an enhanced retelling of McDonald’s initial entrance into Fort Brown: “He walked into the very muzzles of their rifles and took command by no other authority than that which exists through a recognition of courage and natural dominance.” And the mission was no failure, the Eagle concluded, as Captain Bill “overrode all the authority of the army and its red tape and got results as usual.”
McDonald died in 1918, but the hagiography continued. Walter Prescott Webb, in his landmark 1935 history of the Rangers, said McDonald conducted a “courageous investigation” of black soldiers in Brownsville who had begun to “drink and conduct themselves in an obnoxious manner.” Webb used the Paine biography as his primary source material. He did quote Harbert Davenport’s letters, but with judicious editing omitted any of his criticism of McDonald.
Another book, Riding for Texas: The True Adventures of Captain Bill McDonald, was published in 1936. This, too, was done under the auspices of Edward House. It told of Brownsville residents joyously exclaiming, “Here’s Captain Bill!” when McDonald arrived. “The cry soared from a hundred throats,” the narrative continued. “Women who had scarcely dared to walk out, crowded after the ranger; men began to take on again their pre-raid swagger. Brownsville laid off its stupor of fear.” The book also described how McDonald held the black troops at gunpoint to keep them from leaving town and escaping punishment—a complete fabrication.
In 1959, a former Texas adjutant general declared McDonald “the most spectacular Ranger commander of his era” and Brownsville his signature case. “Captain McDonald could see but one point in the whole matter,” W. W. Sterling wrote. “A breach of the peace, which included murder, had been committed on Texas soil.” Sterling, who spent two years as commander of the Rangers, added this justification for McDonald’s zealous pursuit of the black soldiers: “The personnel of the Twenty-fifth Infantry was made up of the most ignorant class of Negroes from the old Southern states, most of them signing their enlistment papers with an ‘X.’ These illiterates were easily agitated into violence, and when plied with busthead whiskey, they could be led into any sort of deviltry.”
Sixty-six years after the Brownsville incident, at the urging of Congress, the Pentagon reinvestigated the case. As a result, the secretary of the army determined a gross injustice had occurred and awarded all the soldiers honorable discharges. Only one of the 167 black infantrymen, Dorsie Willis, eighty-six, was known to be alive. “We didn’t do those people any harm,” he said of Brownsville. “And this thing has hung over my head my entire life.”
Rare is the account of McDonald in Brownsville that doesn’t feature the words of army major Blocksom, who said Captain Bill was “so brave he would charge hell with a bucket of water.” It’s a stirring encomium, a colorful vision that typifies the institutional ideal. No wonder it’s been repeated hundreds of times and cited as a Ranger touchstone. It’s even part of McDonald’s Texas Ranger Hall of Fame credentials.
But when Blocksom said it, he wasn’t speaking out of admiration. “It is possible,” the major said in prefacing the remark, “McDonald might have fought the entire battalion with his four or five rangers were their obedience as blind as his obstinancy.” This was not a pure tribute to the Ranger captain’s indomitable valor. Blocksom was describing McDonald’s arrogance, monomania, and blatant disregard for legal procedure. The Hall of Fame citation doesn’t mention that part. Nor does it note the congressional exoneration of the Brownsville infantrymen—those soldiers memorably described by Captain Bill in his official report to the governor as “the coons who were committing murder.”