A Texas Ranger never wounds a man; he shoots to KILL! Texas Rangers never fear a superior force. Outnumbered ten to one, they merely think the sport interesting. They’ve been brought up to that game!
—THE DAY BOOK, CHICAGO, MARCH 17, 1914
Jim Wells Jr., the powerful Democratic politician known as the “boss of South Texas,” had for several days ridden in a car along the old Brownsville Road. This was, by Wells’s reckoning, some time in 1915 or 1916. The narrow route ran straight as a rifle shot through lonely flatlands thick with mesquite and prickly pear. Wells, a lawyer, was on his way with others to court in the town of Edinburg. Each time the car chugged past a railroad depot known as Ebenezer, Wells noticed a wake of buzzards and a sickening smell. “I knew what that meant,” he said—probably an animal carcass bloating and rotting in the hot sun.
The car had mechanical problems one morning, and the owner stopped to fix it near the depot. Someone from the traveling party walked into the brush to investigate the stench. He returned looking “rather excited and perturbed,” Wells recalled, “saying there was a lot of dead men.”
Wells and others went to see for themselves. They found eleven bodies on the sandy ground, aligned in the formation of execution. “Mexicans,” Wells said, “lying there side by side with their clothes on and everything, and the buzzards had picked their eyes and faces.” Each man had a bullet hole “right above the eyes,” Wells said. “Great big holes you could stick your finger in. . . . It was a very gruesome sight.” Gruesome, certainly, but not all that unusual, for this was the time and place of the border troubles.
No one could prove that Texas Rangers had killed the Mexicans in the brush, but they were the most likely suspects. The Rangers of this era shot or lynched hundreds of Tejanos and Mexicans, and they did so without pause, deliberation, or explanation. Some of the dead were criminals who had preyed upon, and killed, Anglo farmers and ranchers. And some died solely because they had brown skin.
A journalist for a New York magazine who ventured along the border in 1916 depicted the Rangers as roving assassins. “Twenty-five or thirty years ago they were a fine body of men,” George Marvin wrote. “But in recent years the rangers have degenerated into common man-killers.” They performed their work, he said, with impunity. “There is no penalty for killing, for no jury along the border would ever convict a white man for shooting a Mexican.”
The terms “death squads” and “ethnic cleansing” would not enter common usage for another sixty years or so, but that was what the Rangers were and what they did. Their actions along the Rio Grande, however, were not those of lawless mercenaries or agitating rebels. With their summary executions and other measures—burning the houses, for example, of Tejanos who refused to vacate land the Anglos wanted—the Rangers did the bidding of powerful interests. They carried out government mandates, and they operated with unsparing effectiveness. The Rangers once more endeavored to make the land safe for the white man.
The lower Rio Grande Valley could not be considered a valley in the conventional topographic or aesthetic sense. Spare of natural splendor, it stretched one hundred featureless miles upriver from the Gulf of Mexico: a subtropical alluvial plain with a cover of inhospitable brush and cactus. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the overwhelming majority of the region’s residents were of Mexican heritage.
Though lightly populated and remote from any cities, the valley of this era saw continual tumult. It is hard to conjure any other time in American history when so many overwhelming political, racial, economic, and murderous forces converged in one relatively small place. Between 1910 and 1920, this ragged and riven swath of Texas seethed with war, espionage, pestilence, political intrigue, and random slaughter.
The Mexican Revolution was but one cause. It erupted in 1910, when young upstart Francisco Madero challenged Porfirio Díaz, who had begun his iron-fisted presidency of Mexico in 1876. Díaz thwarted Madero by having him arrested, but Díaz’s government soon collapsed. Madero was elected, then assassinated. General Victoriano Huerta seized power. His presidency, which was more properly described as a dictatorship, drew the opposition of the U.S. government. A rebellion by U.S.-backed Venustiano Carranza, the governor of Coahuila, drove Huerta from power in 1914. Instability reigned.
At about the same time, the Rangers’ fortunes hit a low point. The penny-pinching state legislature had, as usual, left the force underfunded. At one point it shrank to only thirteen men. Citizens from various Texas towns complained of drunken boorishness and unnecessary gunplay. A 1901 law had placed the Rangers under direct control of the governor; their opponents portrayed them as political tools for the chief executive. Running a successful campaign for governor in 1910, Oscar Colquitt wondered if the famous lawmen had rampaged too wildly or had outlived their purpose. “It was not intended when the Rangers were created,” he said, “that they should become the personal agents of the governor to be sent to different points to harass and shoot down inoffensive citizens.”
Colquitt’s view, and that of many others, changed when Mexico’s political and economic turmoil spilled across the narrow, shallow river and into Texas. The Rangers hastened to the border, and the state began a beefing up of the agency. Soon more than fifty of them would be in the region, as anachronistic malefactors became sought-after protectors. To call them bloodthirsty might be an overstatement. But low pay, relaxed standards, and harsh conditions attracted Rangers who confused derring-do with a license to lay waste. Many of them had killed men in the past, which in some circles was required for appointment to the border corps. It didn’t help that two respected Ranger captains of the period, John Rogers and John Brooks, had left the force. Another, John Hughes, would soon depart. Their replacements did not in general rise to their caliber.
Nonetheless, Anglo residents welcomed the new enforcers. “We look upon the Rangers as more or less a godsend to our Valley,” said William Morrison, a San Benito lawyer. The U.S. Army already patrolled the region, but many white Texans believed the Rangers possessed special qualities. “They are courageous,” San Benito resident Alba Heywood said. “They will fight buzzsaws.”
Of immediate concern was a manifesto known as the Plan of San Diego. The plan was not written in San Diego, a South Texas farm town, but it may have been signed there in January 1915. It called for a “Liberating Army for Races and Peoples” that would take the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California from U.S. control. Land that had belonged to the Indians would be returned to them, with the rest becoming an independent republic that could be annexed by Mexico. And every Anglo male over age sixteen was to be executed. The Waco Morning News summarized it with a front-page headline: “Plan of San Diego Calls for Wholesale Massacres.”
Local officials went on the alert for the infiltrators from the liberating army. District Attorney John A. Valls of Laredo wrote Ranger headquarters to report that he had “kept a vigilant watch” for suspicious activity and had sent spies to restaurants, saloons, and other establishments frequented by “mischief makers.” He found nothing, yet vowed not to falter. “I have no doubt there is a disturbing element in Laredo that is holding secret meetings,” the DA wrote. “Many automobiles from San Antonio loaded with strange Mexicans have arrived here.” The Rangers stood guard too, as Captain J. J. Sanders reported from San Benito: “The San Diego Revolutionists still continue to hold their meetings and are causing considerable uneasiness among the White people.”
Despite the watchfulness, raids kept coming. In 1915 alone, gunmen believed to be from Mexico killed more than twenty Anglos in the valley and wounded many more. Some Anglos fled their farms and ranches, while others huddled in fright. In the river town of Santa Maria, where an attack was rumored to be imminent, women and children barricaded themselves in a local hotel while men took up arms and patrolled the streets. Residents of Lyford, forty miles north of Brownsville, directed a plea to the governor. “For God’s sake,” they wrote, “do something!”
Suspected sediciocos burned railroad trestles, looted stores, cut telephone wires, and fired into passing cars. A young woman in Harlingen reported that some men attempted to kidnap her, but she drove them away with a pistol. The night watchman at a cotton gin was gunned down as he made his rounds. “Marauding Mexicans,” as one Texas newspaper described them, descended on the village of Sebastian, where they confronted a father and son operating a corn-shelling station. They executed A. L. Austin, who was president of the local Law and Order League, a pro-Anglo vigilante group. Austin had a reputation for harsh treatment of Tejano employees. Nellie Francis Austin discovered her husband with four bullet holes in his back. Her son, Charles, lay dead nearby.
Walter Noble Burns, a noted western historian of the day, announced he had discovered the cause of the attacks: “the hatred for gringos that burns undyingly in the Mexican people.” Such animus, he declared, was “bred to the bone” in “almost every man, woman, and child in Mexico.” This was demonstrably absurd, but these thoughts reflected the runaway fear and mistrust. Some Valley Anglos proposed putting Tejanos in camps or deporting them to Mexico. Those who remained were to be killed. The death scheme was never adopted, though the Rangers acted at times as its ex officio agents.
On the sweltering evening of August 8, 1915, some sixty armed and mounted men rode onto the southern end of the great King Ranch. Some were Mexicans, some Tejanos. Luis de la Rosa, a Tejano supporter of the Plan of San Diego, led them. At a two-story ranch house, the headquarters of ranch foreman Caesar Kleberg, they opened fire. Kleberg was not there but had foreseen the attack. Army cavalrymen and a deputy sheriff awaited the raiders. A gunfight of nearly three hours left five of the attackers dead.
The Rangers missed it all, having been miles away in a search for these same raiders. But they arrived for the aftermath, and three of them lassoed four raiders’ corpses. A photo of this scene—the Rangers on horseback, the bodies on the ground, the lariats taut between them—appeared on postcards with the caption “Mexican Bandits Killed at Norias.” The cards were sold in drugstores and tobacco shops across South Texas and came to symbolize, for both sides, the essence of the Rangers in the border war.
As in the days of Leander McNelly, the Rangers maintained a close and mutually beneficial relationship with the King Ranch. Kleberg, manager of the Norias section, supplied the Rangers with horses and equipment in exchange for their protection. The four dead men at the end of the ropes were only the start. “Immediately following the Las Norias Raid,” Brownsville businessman Frank Pierce wrote, “the Rangers began a systematic manhunt, and killed, according to a verified list, 102 Mexicans.” That count was probably low. “It is claimed by citizens and Army officers who saw many of the bodies,” Pierce said, “that at least 300 Mexicans were so killed.”
The marauders struck again about two and a half months after the Norias shootout. Below a gibbous moon, they removed the railway spikes on a dark stretch of tracks north of Brownsville, then hid in the brush. As a southbound passenger train barreled toward them, they used a heavy wire to pull the rail away. The steam locomotive hit the gap, shot into the darkness, and overturned. Several other cars jumped the track. Masked men barged into the derailed cars, where they robbed and shot Anglo passengers. They left three dead and three wounded. It was, a newspaper said, “the most spectacular and bloodiest train robbery of many years in the Southwest.”
Captain Henry L. Ransom of the Rangers arrived on the scene the next day. Ransom, forty-one, had been appointed a Ranger captain only a few months before. He was short—an un-Rangerish five feet, eight inches—and had the gray hair of an old man but was not to be dismissed by those who opposed him. In 1910, as a special officer for the Houston police chief, he shot to death a prominent lawyer who was defending an accused cop killer. Ransom plugged the lawyer five times as the counselor stood on a Houston corner, awaiting a streetcar. A jury acquitted Ransom of murder. Before that he had served with the U.S. Army in the Philippines, fighting insurgents. W. W. Sterling, who would go on to become Texas adjutant general, recalled hearing Ransom’s stories of torture and murder. “The tales [he and others] told about executing Filipinos,” Sterling wrote, “made the Bandit War look like a minor purge.”
Now four Tejano men had been arrested on suspicion of derailing and robbing the Brownsville-bound train. Ransom had them in custody, said Cameron County sheriff W. T. Vann, and did not need a hearing to decide their fate. “Captain Ransom . . . walked over to me and says, ‘I am going out to kill these fellows. Are you going with me?’” Vann recalled. “I says, ‘No, and I don’t believe you are going [to].’ He says, ‘If you haven’t got the guts enough to do it, I will go myself.’ I says, ‘That takes a whole lot of guts, four fellows with their hands tied behind them.’” After he left, Vann said, Ransom and his Rangers took the four men into the brush and executed them.
The Rangers widened their sweep of the countryside in pursuit of bandits, or suspected bandits, or men who might possibly become bandits if allowed to keep breathing. One Tejano woman described an early-morning Ranger raid. “Three of them entered our home, yanked us out of bed and threw us on the floor,” she said. They seized her twenty-one-year-old cousin, whom they believed had joined some raiding parties. “They took him to a cemetery about a block away, placed him in front of a cross and shot him dead,” the woman said. “We were afraid to challenge them because they were like animals and had guns.”
R. B. Creager, a Brownsville lawyer and unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor, said the Rangers compiled a “black list” of Tejanos and Mexicans, and they “evaporated” as many as two hundred of them. “In my judgment 90 of those killed were as innocent as you or I of complicity in those bandit outrages,” Creager testified at a legislative hearing. He described Rangers on the border as “hot-blooded young fellows without much education” who roamed unchecked. “We would be infinitely better off without the Ranger force,” he said, “unless you have some restraint thrown around them that will protect the citizens of the state.”
The killing became almost casual at times. “Yesterday we caught a Mexican by name Tomas Aguilar, one of the 3 that robed the Depot at Combs and set the R.R. Bridge on fire,” Captain J. Monroe Fox reported to the adjutant general. “Of course he tried to make his Escape but we killed him.”
Roland Warnock, a South Texas cowboy, recalled the fate of two Tejano men who had treated the wounds of Mexican bandits. The Mexicans had been shot in a raid on a Valley ranch. If the Tejanos did not aid the Mexicans, Warnock said, “the bandits would have killed them.”
It was a death warrant either way. The next day, the two Tejanos rode near the Rangers’ encampment and were spotted by Captain Ransom. One was Jesús Bazán, sixty-seven. The other was Bazán’s son-in-law, Antonio Longoria, forty-nine. Both held U.S. citizenship. “The captain of the Rangers recognized them . . . and began to follow them,” Warnock said. “These two [Tejanos] pulled over to the side of the road to let them pass, and when they did, the Rangers just shot them off their horses, turned around and went back to the ranch and went back to sleep.”
Two days later, Warnock said, he retrieved the bodies and buried them. “It was some mighty dirty work going on then,” he said. “A man’s life just wasn’t worth much at all.” In many instances, he said, a Tejano or a Mexican simply seen with a herd of cattle could be marked for execution on the spot. “I knew of one time when they hung 18 men in a grove of trees. . . . There were so many innocent people killed in that mess that it just made you sick to your heart to see it happening.”
But many Anglos—especially ranchers—did not share in the heartsickness. They believed the Rangers were all that stood between them and obliteration. “I want to say this for the Rangers,” wrote Sam Householder, a state legislator from the valley. “I never yet saw one with a pair of wings . . . but when it came to putting the fear of God and respect for the law in the hearts of the cunning, reckless and murderous outlaws, they were in a class by themselves.” Householder acknowledged the Rangers often executed suspects without a trial, but “there seemed to be no possible way under the conditions prevailing of bringing those desperados to justice through the ordinary processes of the law.” C. B. Hudspeth, a congressman from West Texas, agreed that due process didn’t apply. “A Ranger cannot wait until a Mexican bandit behind a rock on the other side shoots at him three or four times, and put down this lawlessness,” said the man for whom Hudspeth County was named. “You have got to kill these Mexicans when you find them, or they will kill you.”
Ultimately, though, the Rangers’ excesses could not go unaddressed. In November 1915 Governor James Ferguson—responding to complaints not from Mexico but from a general in the U.S. Army—officially ordered the Rangers to cease the “summary execution of Mexicans.”
Adjutant General Henry Hutchings also admitted to a problem with the homicidal character of his men. “Considerable adverse criticism of the Ranger Force has recently reached the Governor and much of it from sources worthy of most serious consideration,” he wrote in a memo to commanding officers. Perhaps, Hutchings ventured, the answer could be found in recruiting. “Some of our friends believe that in enlisting Rangers too much stress is laid upon the record of the applicant as a man killer, and that such record is taken as proof of bravery.” Henceforth, he directed, “men will not be enlisted . . . who have been unfortunate enough to have had to kill their fellow men.” The rule was generally ignored.
Back on the border, the Rangers and their supporters scoffed at such administrative queasiness. To them this was war, and an especially nasty one at that. All they had to do was point to the treatment of army private Richard Johnson. In September 1915 guerrillas from Mexico attacked the river town of Progreso. They captured Johnson, a twenty-one-year-old New Yorker, and took him into Mexico. There they killed him, cut off his ears for keepsakes, and displayed his severed head on a pole as a trophy.
There was more. In January 1916, the Cusi Mining Company gathered American employees for transit to its silver mine in the Mexican town of Cusihuiriachi. The employees, who included top management and engineers, had fled the mine weeks before and crossed into Texas. Now, however, the Carranza government promised to protect them if they returned. Carranza had gained the recognition of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, but he also faced a troublesome rival—Francisco “Pancho” Villa.
The Americans boarded a Mexico North-Western Railroad train in Ciudad Chihuahua for a trip of some hundred miles across the desert. About halfway through the journey, near the village of Santa Ysabel, the train entered a canyon. Wreckage on the track ahead forced it to stop. Men armed with Mauser rifles burst into a Pullman car where the twenty or so Americans sat. The raiders were led by Pablo López, an officer in Villa’s rebel force.
López cursed the Americans—and President Wilson—and ordered them to remove their clothing and leave the train. They did so and gathered barefoot, in their underwear, alongside the tracks. Some ran toward a river.
“They started to run, and then our soldiers began to shoot,” López said afterward. “The smell of powder makes our blood hot.” Others were executed where they stood. Eighteen Americans in all were killed.
As they searched for suspected raiders in the valley, the Rangers also used pressure, vandalism, and beatings to crack down on critics. When the Brownsville Sentinel published an essay accusing the Rangers of a “campaign of extermination,” Captain Charles Stevens paid a personal visit to the editor. Stevens expressed his belief that such writings were the work of German propagandists—the Great War having commenced in Europe—and he threatened the arrest of those involved. The editor “then seemed to be very sorry that he had published this article,” Stevens reported to Ranger headquarters.
The small Laredo newspaper El Progreso published a story critical of American forces on the border in 1914, so the Rangers went to Laredo to shut down the paper. One of its writers, a slender twenty-nine-year-old woman named Jovita Idar, stood in the doorway to block them. As a crowd formed, the Rangers backed away. The idea of a free press prevailed until the next day, when the Rangers returned. With Idar absent this time, they forced their way into the office and smashed the printing press. They also tracked down the writer of the offending story, beat him severely, and arrested him. Only the actions of a local judge compelled his release from jail for medical treatment.
Thomas W. Hook, a crusading Kingsville lawyer, wrote to President Wilson in 1916 and enclosed a petition that protested the treatment of Tejanos and Mexicans by the Rangers. He specifically mentioned two men who were suspected of planning raids, and who had been turned over to Ranger Captain J. J. Sanders. As with many other suspects in the custody of Rangers, the two men then disappeared without explanation.
Sanders later saw Hook in a Falfurrias courtroom and asked, “Are you the son of a bitch that wrote that petition?” When Hook said yes, Sanders pulled his handgun and tried to club the lawyer. “I warded the pistol off with my left [hand] and he recovered himself and came down again,” Hook said, “and again I caught his pistol and warded it off.” Four times Sanders struck and four times Hook—who was not carrying a weapon—deflected the blows until a deputy sheriff intervened.
“I struck at him with my six-shooter,” Sanders said, and he acknowledged a breach of pistol-whip protocol. “I apologized about hitting him without first asking him whether he was armed or not. . . . A man can be worked up to doing a heap of things he ought not to do.”
Mexico had never really recovered from its mid-1800s war with the United States—at least in regard to the rural poor—and the turmoil of the revolution only made bad problems worse. Desperate refugees, in filth and rags, massed at the Texas border. Ranger captain K. F. Cunningham reported “bands of beggars” crossing the river at Eagle Pass, driven by hunger. “Those caught swimming . . . do not care what is done with them for they would rather be imprisoned than starve,” he wrote to headquarters in Austin. Disease spread through the shanty-towns along the Rio Grande. “Smallpox is quite prevalent on the both sides of the River now.”
Though Mexico suffered, the Texas side of the Rio Grande Valley enjoyed a protracted economic boom. The St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway had connected the region to Houston in 1904. Developers and farmers dug irrigation canals that spread water from the Rio Grande over thousands of acres. Stingy ranchland turned into fertile farmland.
Values soared. The taxable property in Cameron County alone increased from $3.2 million in 1903 to $10 million in 1909. “Lands which fifteen years ago were selling at from one to two dollars an acre are now selling, with an excess of buyers, at from $100 to $500 per acre,” businessman Pierce wrote at the time. “Thousands of home-seekers desiring a milder climate than that of the frozen north have settled within the territory.”
Locals derided the home-seekers as “home-suckers.” Real estate salesmen brought these potential buyers to the valley in special trains and enticed them with cornucopian visions of citrus and cantaloupes. In these spiels, the Rio Grande was poised to become the American Nile. “The home suckers succumb by the hundred,” journalist George Marvin wrote. “They have come down well heeled and, wanting to escape the rigors of a hard climate, expect onions and oranges with Mexican labor to make the paper profits dazzlingly brandished before them.”
Much if not most of the land the newcomers bought had been held by generations of Mexicans and Tejanos. When the original owners fled the “evaporations” of the Rangers and other lawmen, Anglo developers seized their property or bought it on the cheap. If they didn’t vacate their holdings, they were often forced off, said Emilio Forto, a former mayor and sheriff in Brownsville.
The typical “border Mexican,” Forto wrote, “is a peace loving, law abiding and pleasure seeking individual” who “seeks no one’s injury as a rule,” but Anglo newcomers to the region regarded Tejanos as “filthy, unsanitary and sickly makeshift.” The Anglos sometimes used the Rangers, Forto said, to banish or kill the occupants of the land they wanted. “A campaign of extermination seemed to have begun . . . when the cry was often heard, ‘We want to make this a white man’s country,’” he wrote. “Many well to do native Texans of Mexican origin were driven away by Rangers who in some cases told them, ‘If you are here within the next 5 days, you will be dead.’” The Rangers burned their homes, and the Tejanos—taking only what they could carry in their oxcarts—escaped across the river.
In the eyes of many, the Rangers had been crucial to bringing peace to the Valley. “There are only a few men around Brownsville who are against these Rangers,” Captain Stevens said about some of his men accused of murder, “and they are men who stand for nothing that is good for the interest of the country.”
But there were those—respected figures and law enforcement officers among them—who believed that the Rangers had ridden into a terrible situation and made it worse. From the vantage of several years, Sheriff Vann of Cameron County was so disgusted that he proposed abolition of the agency. “We do not need the Rangers anymore,” he wrote to a colleague. They weren’t merely unnecessary, he said; they were destructive. “The Rangers make more trouble than peace,” Vann said, “and they do it at the expense of the state.”
Brownsville lawyer Creager said the Rangers’ tactics—and those of other Anglo lawmen—transformed placid Mexican-Texans into ferocious enemies. The Rangers and others “would go out and hang them to trees until practically dead, or would shoot and leave dead on the ground some Mexican who was as innocent as you,” Creager said. “The result of that was you would make that man’s brothers and relatives for two or three generations bandits or potential bandits.” And on it rolled.
No one could say when the cycle of vengeance would end. All they knew was that blood demanded blood. On a bitter winter night in 1918, eight Ranger horsemen, accompanied by army cavalry, rode across the West Texas desert. Their destination: the tiny, poor doomed settlement of Porvenir. Weeks before, Mexican raiders had crossed the river and attacked a Texan’s ranch, murdering three innocent men. Now someone had to pay, so the riders spurred their mounts toward the dark village. Rangers carried Winchesters and had liquor on their breath. Some wore masks. Soon the killing would start—a cold-blooded slaughter—and the cover-up could begin.
This occurred along the Rio Grande but far from the lower valley—some seven hundred miles upriver. Here was a place of stark beauty and hard settlement: the Big Bend region of the Texas borderland, in the far southwestern corner of the state. The name derived from the great sinuous loop, southeast to northeast, of the upper Rio Grande. The river ran placid in stretches and in others rushed through deep canyons. Early Spanish explorers called the region el despoblado—the uninhabited.
The Chihuahuan Desert sprawled for hundreds of miles, across two nations, broken by rugged mountains. Hot springs boiled into rocky pools, and ragged arroyos cut the flats. Much of the vegetation was stunted, spare, and menacing. “Each plant in this land is a porcupine,” one nineteenth-century traveler wrote. “It is nature armed to the teeth.” In the 1800s, some U.S. Army units found the Big Bend to be best traversed on camels. Robert Keil was only fifteen when he ran away from his father’s Pennsylvania farm and—lying about his age—joined the U.S. Cavalry. In 1913, the army posted him in the Big Bend. “The land is dry and barren, wild and spooky,” he wrote. “It is a wild, strange country.”
Though it was territory of mean bounty, men had been fighting over it for hundreds of years. The Apaches and Comanches warred with each other, with the Spaniards, and later with the Texan settlers. The Indians were driven out in the late nineteenth century, but the region still had its perils. Outlaws, banished from other Texas criminal Edens, found refuge and opportunity there. Robert T. Hill of the U.S. Geological Survey explored the Big Bend in 1899 and noted that some called it the “Bloody Bend,” where “civilization finds it difficult to gain a foothold.”
That may have been an exaggeration; railroad towns such as Marfa and Alpine were well established by then. But in the early twentieth century the general situation along the border in the Big Bend might best be described—like the lower Rio Grande—as a state of shifting, amorphous, and undeclared war. In May 1916, for instance, Mexican raiders overran the town of Glenn Springs, Texas, killing three American soldiers and a seven-year-old boy before burning the place down.
In such a climate, a Mexican crossing the Rio Grande on horseback, especially a man who was armed, was assumed to have malicious intent. Rangers and others hid in the riverbank brush and, armed with high-powered rifles, shot such men with impunity. An untold number of Mexican and Tejanos fell victim to ambushes. The Rangers’ twist on an old cowboy folk song expressed their outlook:
O bury me not on the lone praire-ee
where the wild coyotes will howl o’er me!
In a narrow grave just six by three
where all the Mexkins ought to be-ee!
It wasn’t only the Rangers who felt this way. “They are killing and plundering,” an editorial in the El Paso Herald said of Mexicans. “There is some satisfaction in killing them afterward, but death of half a hundred of the worthless brutes does not compensate for the murder of a single American.”
Ranger Company B patrolled the Big Bend, with its fifteen or so men under the command of Captain J. Monroe Fox, who had worn out his welcome in the valley. A former county constable given to self-promotion, the fifty-one-year-old Fox did not own a sterling reputation among some peers. Captain Sanders, for instance, objected when his son, also a Ranger, was assigned to Fox. In a letter to the adjutant general, Sanders cited the “lack of discipline and unpleasantness with men” under Fox. Fox’s company also failed to impress General Frederick “Fighting Fred” Funston, who commanded army forces along the border. The number of Rangers in the Big Bend was “entirely inadequate,” the general said. What’s more: “These men are stationed at Marfa, and as far as can be ascertained they visit the border only when they hear of some impending trouble and by the time they reach the district where the trouble occurs, the outlaws have disappeared.”
Fox wrote periodic reports to Austin headquarters that either sugarcoated his company’s actions or offered little detail. He routinely concluded his brief messages with “Everything quite.” Fox meant quiet, though a Ranger’s life in the Big Bend was rarely that. In January 1916, the governor’s office received a letter from Ysleta, an old mission town near El Paso. Three dozen citizens asked for a detachment of Rangers “for our protection against Horse and Cattle Thieves.” Several Rangers were sent in response.
Nine months later another letter from Ysleta hit the governor’s desk. “Please,” wrote Mrs. A. Alderete, the proprietor of an ice cream parlor, “have the Ranger camp entirely removed.” She penned a roster of complaints: “Thuggery and murder is a past time with them. . . . They are in the street most of time appearantly doing nothing but going from one dance hall to another, and loud and boisterous and occasionaly beating some one on the head with their guns.” One Ranger in particular drew Mrs. Alderete’s ire: John Dudley White. He was, she wrote, “a deliberate fiend and bloodthirsty villain.” Mrs. Alderete believed that Ranger White itched to shoot her husband, who was active in local political circles. “Nightly White with a gang lurks outside of my place cursing and threatening, waiting for Mr. Alderete to come out to say a word so he can pick a fight with him, or kill him.”
Captain Fox went to Ysleta, asked around, and crafted a response to Mrs. Alderete’s accusations. As usual, he found no problems. “I have been here all day and have went to all the business end of the town,” he reported to the adjutant general, “and all of the citizens say that her statement is faulse and without foundation.” Nonetheless, the Ysleta detachment was reassigned.
The Big Bend Rangers had bigger concerns than one woman with an ice cream parlor. Perhaps their most persistent nemesis was a complicated figure named Chico Cano, a Mexican revolutionary of shifting allegiances. Long, lean, and mustachioed, Cano was a crack shot and a canny opportunist. Some saw him as a rapacious bandit, while others envisioned a champion of the poor. Few doubted that he worked both sides of the border with consummate skill. A Federal Bureau of Investigation memorandum claimed that Cano was selling cattle to Texas ranchers—cattle that was in all likelihood stolen from other Texas ranchers—and using the proceeds to buy ammunition “with which Cano and his gang seem to be always plentifully supplied.” The bureau also believed that many in Cano’s band of guerrillas were Tejanos who had left the United States to avoid the draft.
Cano had a long-standing feud with Joe Sitter, a customs inspector and former Ranger. Sitter arrested Cano in 1913 for livestock smuggling, but Cano’s gang freed him in a gunfight that wounded Sitter. In 1915, Sitter—after the punitive interrogation of a prisoner—learned that Cano might be hiding near Pilares, a Big Bend river town. With three Rangers, two of whom had scant experience, Sitter walked into an ambush. He died, as did Ranger Eugene Hulen, who had been on the force less than two months. Sitter “had been shot about ten times and his head beaten with rocks,” Captain Fox said in a report that, for once, included details. Hulen was found about ten feet way. “He had been shot about eight times and his head beaten in a pulp with rocks.” Cano and his band were suspected of killing the two men, but this was never proved.
Mistrust and dread prevailed, as shown by Sam Neill, sixty, whose career in the Texas borderland included stints as a customs inspector and a Ranger. “We knew what we were up against when we seen a bunch of Comanches. There were two things to do, fight or run,” he said. “You meet a bunch of Mexicans and you don’t know what you are going up against, whether they are civilized or not. That’s the way I look at it.”
On Christmas Day 1917, Neill was staying at the headquarters of the Brite Ranch, at the foot of Capote Peak in Presidio County, some twenty-five miles from the border. The 125,000-acre spread, one of the largest in the region, had a well-stocked general store and a post office. At dawn, Neill peered from the window of a ranch house and saw men—apparently Mexicans—approaching on horseback. Neill grabbed his guns. The men may have been supporters of Pancho Villa, or of Mexican president Carranza, or simply bandits. Whoever they were, Neill did not have to guess their intentions, because one of them “hollered at his men to kill all the Americans,” Neill recalled. “And as he said it, I shot, and he didn’t, of course, holler no more.”
Neill was wounded in the ensuing gunfight; one bullet grazed his nose and a second struck his leg. The raiders ransacked and looted the general store and seized about twenty horses. When a mail coach approached, they shot and killed two passengers who were, as it turned out, Mexicans. They hanged the Anglo coach driver, Mickey Welch, from the ranch store’s rafters and slit his throat. The body fell to the floor, and they left him dead in a pool of his own blood.
News of the raid reached the army cavalry, who gave chase—this being the dawn of the modern era—in borrowed automobiles. They gained ground as the raiders’ horses began to flag. Among those in the pursuit was Robert Keil, the Pennsylvanian who had headed west for adventure and joined the army. “I have never seen such whipping and spurring,” he said of the fleeing men, who were making for the Rio Grande. The soldiers fired their rifles at the raiders, and there were “thirteen bandits killed down in the Rim Rock foothills,” Keil said. Cavalrymen on horseback pursued those who escaped into more rugged country. The American troops killed ten more raiders and recovered some of the stolen goods.
Despite the lure of plunder, one mortally wounded Mexican told army officers the Brite Ranch raid had primarily been intended as revenge. The raiders, he said, were atoning for Texans’ ambushes of Mexicans along the river. As Keil wrote: “They were only the words of a bandit, but from one who was dying, and whatever the case, it added up to the pattern that followed: kill, kill, ambush, ambush, then more raids. . . . Oh, it was a lousy, rotten, ghoulish business.”
No one expected the chain of retributions to break. The only questions were when and how the killings would begin anew. “After the Brite raid, a deathly quiet settled over the Big Bend,” Keil said. “No one had a name for it, but it was like the stillness that precedes a cyclone.”
Ranger captain Fox also had the sense that something big was about to take place, though his forecast contained more cheer than Keil’s. Four days after the Brite raid, Fox wrote his quartermaster in Austin with a request for additional rifles and ammunition because “it looks like business is going to pick up.” And he invited the quartermaster to “come out and see the circus show when we do get started.”
So it happened that in late January 1918, about a month after the Brite raid, a handful of Rangers and four ranchmen rode their horses into the army’s Camp Evetts, a lonely, Spartan outpost near the border. This group of Rangers was not, on the whole, a seasoned crew. One was Bud Weaver, a forty-three-year-old widower who had been a Ranger for only a few months. Allen Cole, thirty-eight, previously a clerk in Wisconsin, had been a Ranger for less than five months. W. K. Duncan, twenty, was a cowboy with four months as a Ranger. Max Newman, thirty-one, had been on the force a few months. Howell McCampbell, twenty-two, had joined the Rangers only three weeks before. The three veterans were Clint Holden, thirty-eight, a former druggist; Andy Barker, twenty-six, a farmer before signing on; and Boone Oliphant, twenty-nine, who had almost two years’ experience.
The army did not readily welcome them to the camp. Cavalry rank and file distrusted them, in part because Rangers sometimes extorted money from off-duty soldiers in Marfa. They would arrest the army men for offenses such as drinking or whoring and offer to set them free for a fine of $20, which the Rangers would pocket. On this day the Rangers presented a letter from Colonel George Langhorne, army commander in the Big Bend, to the troop’s captain. It ordered army assistance for a night mission to Porvenir. The Rangers said they believed that Chico Cano might be hiding in the village. This puzzled Keil, who had been to Porvenir with other cavalrymen that afternoon to buy eggs. “Not once had any of them caused us any trouble whatever,” he said of the men and women there. “They were all good Mexicans. . . . These people were our friends.”
The sky was clear, the night cold. Some of the Rangers at Camp Evetts gathered close to a campfire and passed around a bottle. “I suppose they were drinking to give themselves courage,” Keil said, “because each one acted like the very Devil was chasing him.” Soon the Rangers, the ranchers, and about forty cavalrymen mounted their horses and rode across the desert. A full moon, a local man wrote, “was shining nearly as bright as day.” They reached Porvenir around midnight.
The village, on the Texas side less than a mile from the Rio Grande, was home to poor Mexican American farmers and laborers. They lived in jacales of mud and sticks, with no running water or electricity. The nearest store was a day’s horseback ride away. Each family had a garden and some raised goats or cows. At this hour no one was awake.
“We surrounded the small village before a single dog barked,” Keil said. Soldiers or masked Rangers—accounts vary—rousted several dozen men, women, and children from their homes. The families huddled around a fire, shivering. “We told them they should not be alarmed,” Keil wrote. “It was only a check by some Rangers who were after a bandit.” Though the words were meant to comfort, they didn’t. “The word ‘Rangers’ inspired terror,” Keil said.
A search of the jacales produced only a single-barreled shotgun with no shells and a few knives. But the Rangers, Keil said, insisted on questioning some of the villagers without cavalrymen present. Fifteen men and boys, ages sixteen to seventy-two, were marched from the village along the river road, out of sight. Near a rocky bluff, perhaps a quarter mile away, they were bound together with rope.
“Then we heard shots, rapid shots,” Keil said, “echoing and blending in the dark.”
The Rangers took to their horses and, with whoops and yells, vanished into the dark. Children cried as women wailed and keened. Some pointed toward the bluff. “We had a few flashlights, so we threw beams toward the place they were pointing,” Keil said. “At the foot of the bluff we could see a mass of bodies, but not a single movement. . . . As soon as we were close, we smelled the nauseating sweetish smell of blood, and when we could see, we saw the most hellish sight that any of us had ever witnessed. It reminded me of a slaughterhouse.” All fifteen villagers, still bound by rope, were dead. “The professionals,” Keil said, “had done their work well.”
The terrified women and children fled across the river to Mexico. There, hours after the shootings, a woman gave birth to the daughter of one of the dead men. The next morning, an old woman returned to Porvenir with a horse-drawn wagon. The remaining soldiers loaded the fifteen corpses onto the wagon, and she took the bodies back across the river, where they were buried. Among the dead: Román Nieves, who had seven children; Manuel Morales, who had seven, including the one born the night of his death; and Eutímio Gonzáles, who had nine. All told, forty-two children were left fatherless.
When the bodies were gone, a detail of soldiers burned the huts of Porvenir to the ground.
Now it was time for the Rangers to cover their tracks. Two days after the massacre, Fox sent a handwritten message from Marfa to Adjutant General James A. Harley in Austin. “I beg to make a report of a fight with Mexicans on the night of the 28th,” Fox wrote. He said eight Rangers and four ranchmen were “scouting on the River and found several Mexicans.” The Rangers “gathered several of them together,” Fox said, and “were fired upon by other Mexicans.” A gunfight followed, and “next morning 15 dead Mexicans were found.” Fox added accusations of the Mexicans’ complicity in the Brite Ranch raid. “Several artakles were found in there posesion belonging to Mr. Bright taken when Raid was made Dec 25th.”
None of this was true, of course, except the part about fifteen dead. The captain either was badly misinformed about his men’s actions or was lying to protect them. A gruesome side note: killing that many people apparently depleted stocks of ammunition. Three days after Porvenir, Fox wrote to the Ranger quartermaster, seeking additional Winchester cartridges. His men, Fox reported, “have ben using a good many lately” and “might run out.”
The Rangers weren’t the only government agency filing false reports. In a memo, army colonel Langhorne, relaying information from his men, said Porvenir had served as a point of rendezvous for “bandits and generally bad characters.” On the night in question, the colonel said, “the Rangers had been fired on while making some arrests” and “a fight had occurred in which several Mexicans had been killed.”
John Pool, one of the ranchers with the Rangers at Porvenir, backed these accounts in a sworn statement. Tejanos along the Rio Grande may have lived on the American side, Pool said, but their loyalties lay elsewhere. “It is a well known fact they act as spies and informers for the thieves and bandits from the Mexico side of the river,” he said, and “they furnish the information to the desperate characters along the river in Mexico and lead them to our ranches.” At Porvenir, Pool said, he and the Rangers were “fired upon by unknown parties” while searching the men of the village. “We returned the fire and when the firing ceased we retired to safety. . . . I don’t know whether we killed anyone or not, but it was reported that there were about fifteen dead Mexicans the next morning.”
The truth was being buried, and it might have stayed that way but for a man named Harry Warren. Born in Mississippi, Warren earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy before coming to Texas. In 1918 he was Porvenir’s schoolmaster and lived about a mile from the village. The day after the massacre, Warren went to Porvenir and walked the killing field in grief and horror. “There was not a single bandit in the 15 men slain,” he wrote. “These men were all farmers—2 of them were boys about 16 or 17 years old.” All had been shot in the head, and the faces of some had been mutilated with knives. One of them was Warren’s father-in-law. Warren wrote of what he found to Governor William P. Hobby. “The object of this appeal,” he said to Hobby, “is to call to your attention this unprovoked and wholesale murder by Texas Rangers.”
Army colonel Langhorne, for one, dismissed Warren as a desert-rat crank. “He married a Mexican woman and divorced her, took another woman, and then employed the divorced wife as a nurse for the child,” Langhorne wrote in a memorandum. “What I have heard of this man is that he was well educated but lost his position of trust through drink. . . . He is one of three white men in this county that has failed to work with the others for preservation of order.” The colonel added, disapprovingly, that Warren “lived like the Mexicans.”
The true story began to emerge, in pieces, from other sources. A Mexican court of inquiry in Ojinaga brought forth sworn statements from survivors. In early February the Mexican ambassador in Washington filed a formal protest with the U.S. State Department, which ordered an investigation. The news hit the papers right away. Some of the coverage, in a departure from previous patterns, did not cast the Rangers as heroes. An Associated Press account called the incident a “wholesale killing” and added, “Every effort apparently was made in the Big Bend district to suppress the story.”
The Rangers’ first response, from their top officer, was one of denial. Adjutant General Harley told Texas newspapers that the Rangers at Porvenir “were fired upon in the dark and returned the fire in self defence.” However, he felt pressure from Washington to commission an investigation. It was a sham from the start, for Harley sent Captain W. M. Hanson to the Big Bend.
Hanson’s previous life had been that of a gringo jefe, operating large citrus farms over the border, making money in the oil business there, and immersing himself in Mexican political affairs. He was forced from the country under suspicion of operating a spy ring during the revolution. Back in Texas, holding the title of “special investigator” for the Rangers, Hanson spent time searching for Germans. Other Rangers did the same. With the U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, Americans suspected that Germany used Mexico as a base for propaganda and espionage. The Texas Legislature created a new branch known as Loyalty Rangers, whose job was to work secretly to find domestic traitors.
Hanson was put in charge. At one point he mailed to Austin a long list of suspected German sympathizers in the Mexican government, information he said he received from a “disgruntled secret service man” in Mexico City. Hanson also said he was watching in Texas a “German Professor . . . who need[s] working over.” The Ranger agent proposed locking the professor away. “I think the Professor should be interned on general principals [sic],” Hanson said. “He is a dangerous man just now and smart as a whip.” Hanson also proposed that all telephone connections between the United States and Mexico be severed because Mexican phone operators “at heart are Anti-Americans.”
When he wasn’t hunting Germans, Hanson functioned primarily as a political operative. His mission: make sure the Rangers did all they could to ensure the election of Governor William P. Hobby. A former lieutenant governor, Hobby had ascended to the state’s highest office with the 1917 impeachment of Governor Jim Ferguson. Now Hobby was facing Ferguson in the coming Democratic primary.
Via his dispatches to Adjutant General Harley—who had been appointed by Hobby—Hanson destroyed any illusion that the Rangers operated independent of state politics. He reported his visit to a saloon in St. Hedwig, a small town of German and Polish immigrants near San Antonio. The establishment’s owner had made public his dislike of the Rangers and the governor. “I suggested to him that the saloons of St. Hedwig should be closed as a public nuisance,” Hanson reported, “and from that moment he was strictly for the Rangers and Hobby.”
Hanson also worked the network of Special Rangers, whose ranks swelled under Hobby. In the original intent, such a title—and badge—would go to cattle inspectors and the like whose roles could complement the regular Rangers, especially as it involved catching rustlers. But in acts of political patronage, special commissions also were granted to bankers, lawyers, doctors, merchants, and others who could sway votes. Hanson proposed that Hobby’s campaign headquarters receive a list of names of all Special Rangers. “I will further suggest that each one,” Hanson said, “be given a bunch of Hobby literature for distribution.” With the election approaching, Hanson told the adjutant general, “There is nothing like keeping these men actively in the harness for the next thirty days.”
The Porvenir affair loomed as a potential liability to the governor’s election. Hanson took the Southern Pacific train to Marfa in early February 1918. After talking to Captain Fox and some local businessmen, including one of the ranchers who had been with the Rangers at Porvenir, Hanson had nothing but scorn for those who claimed a massacre of innocents. The Big Bend crawled with Mexican thieves and killers, he noted in a report to the adjutant general. “Every time a bunch of these same bandits get over here on a marauding tour, and our boys has to deal with them,” Hanson said, “they are no doubt reported as being a bunch of the leading citizens of Mexico, and murdered in cold blood by our officers and Citizens.”
That settled, Hanson turned to frontier-style ward heeling. “I finally suggested to Capt Fox that I was of the opinion that it would be very much appreciated if Marfa had a strong ‘Hobby Club,’ but of course he could not have anything to do with it,” Hanson wrote. Fox “caught the cue,” Hanson said, and offered to find a friend to handle it. “Within two hours, his friend showed up with a list of fifteen signatures of the best men in Presidio County, who are now forming the club.” Hanson added: “I believe Capt Fox is loyal to the core and that he is doing his full duty.”
Political matters seemed to be progressing smoothly in the Big Bend. For broader concerns, though, those on the border might have consulted schoolmaster Warren’s letter to the governor. “This unlawful deed,” Warren said of Porvenir, “has enraged the Mexicans on the other side to such an extent that we may hear soon of their retaliating on the whites on this side. It will be productive of the most evil consequences.” He was proved right within two months.
Ed Nevill’s cattle ranch, a relatively modest operation, stretched for eighteen miles along the Rio Grande. His cabin of cottonwood and adobe stood six miles upriver from Porvenir, and he had no close neighbors. Through the years, Nevill had enjoyed a good relationship with Mexicans and Tejanos, some of whom worked for him, and he had never lost any cattle to raiders. But on March 25, 1918, Nevill was in Van Horn, about thirty-five miles north, to pay bills. He talked to some soldiers there who warned him of rumors about an impending raid from Mexico. Nevill rode his horse back to his ranch, where all was quiet. With his son, Glenn, he ate supper prepared by his maid, Rosa Castillo. At dusk Nevill heard “the tramp of feet” outside. He opened his front door and saw men who appeared to be Mexicans approaching on horseback. “There was something like 50 of them,” he said.
They dismounted, and some “went to shooting at the house,” Nevill said, while others stood with their guns in their hands. “They were waiting for us to come out [the] door so they could kill us.” As soon as he could make his way to it, “I picked up my Winchester,” Nevill said, and “my boy picked up his.”
The men outside kept firing. “Those bullets came in through the walls just like paper,” Nevill said. His best hope, he believed, was to hide in a ditch about three hundred yards from the house. “I called to my son to come on.” As the two ran for cover, the raiders fired away. “They shot my hat off, and shot my rifle out of my hand three times.”
He lost track of his son—“I supposed he got away and ran down in the hills”—but made it to the ditch. There, Nevill hid in the dark while the raiders ransacked his house. When they were gone, he found Glenn near the front door. “[He] had been shot all to pieces,” Nevill said. “You could drop a hen egg through this hole in his forehead. . . . He had been beat with rifles and a stick, and he was black and blue all over.” Glenn Nevill died a few hours later. In the kitchen, Rosa Castillo lay dead. The maid had been raped with a stick of firewood, mutilated—her breasts severed and left on the floor beside her—and shot in the head.
The next day, U.S. Army cavalrymen trailed the raiders across the river into Mexico and found them in Pilares. In a gunfight the soldiers—armed with Browning automatic rifles—killed more than thirty of the Mexicans. Only one cavalryman died. The American soldiers found horses and guns from the Nevill Ranch, and one dead Mexican wore Glenn Nevill’s cowboy boots. The cavalrymen burned Pilares.
Several of the raiders who were killed, the army determined, had been residents of Porvenir or had family who had been executed there. Again, Keil said, reprisal had run its course. “We learned later,” he wrote, “that the raid on Nevill’s ranch was planned in revenge during the burials at Porvenir.”
As pressure built, the Porvenir cover-up began to unravel, and officials in Austin conspired to control the damage. Among them was special investigator Hanson, who realized that a special army investigation, then under way, could be catastrophic. “I think some action must be taken to keep our Department from getting the worst of it from the U.S. Government,” Hanson wrote to the assistant adjutant general in May. “If this was possible it would ruin the Ranger force and the [Adjutant] General if he does not take action. Call his attention to it.” About the same time, a Hobby ally in Marfa, lawyer C. E. Mead, wrote the governor’s campaign manager to advise that Captain Fox “was a snake in the grass” who “had been secretly working for Ferguson all the time.”
The election was less than two months away. In early June, Governor Hobby disbanded Company B and fired five of the Rangers who had been at Porvenir. Three others had already quit. Fox resigned too, but he didn’t go quietly. “I don’t feel that I am getting a fair deal,” he said.
On June 11, 1918, Fox penned an angry letter of resignation to Hobby. The captain insisted that his men should not have been discharged. They were following orders, he said, and “unfortunately had to kill any number of Mexican bandits.” He directly impugned the governor’s motives. “There is no use in trying to have me believe that this action was brought about by anything other than your political reasons,” Fox said. “Why do you not come clean and say that this is purely politics just to gain some Mexican votes?” Fox added a personal parting shot at Hobby, a big-city newspaper publisher not known as a rugged outdoorsman: “We have stood guard to prevent Mexican bandits from murdering the ranchmen, the women and children along this border while you slept on your feather bed of ease.”
Adjutant General Harley drafted a heated response. The “trouble maker and lawless Ranger has no place on the border,” he told Fox. “Every man whether he be white or black, yellow or brown has the Constitutional right to a trial by Jury.” Fox’s resignation, Harley said, “came in the interest of humanity, decency, law and order.” Harley circulated his letter to Texas newspapers. Few if any Rangers had ever been condemned in such a public manner.
The sheriff of Pecos County, D. S. Barker, leapt to the defense of Fox and his Rangers, who, after all, had killed only Mexicans. “For those sort of greasers you have seen fit to fire the rangers,” the sheriff wrote. “I do not deem it a crime to kill those kind of sneaking thieves, especially when they are resisting an arrest.”
If there had been any doubt that Rangers top command had reversed itself on Porvenir, Harley’s reply to the sheriff dispelled it. After a “thorough investigation,” he said, “the fact is established that these Mexicans were killed without any authority in law, civilization or reason.” The adjutant general laid the problem at the feet of “incompetent and disobedient Rangers.” And, of course, Fox: “While he did not admit the facts in the beginning, [he] now says that he ordered the wholesale slaughter of these men.”
Hobby’s response to Porvenir, however belated, may have been deft. He defeated Ferguson with ease in the Democratic primary. In Presidio County, the heart of the Big Bend, Hobby outpolled his opponent by a 3–1 margin.
One year—almost to the day—after the Porvenir massacre, the Rangers were compelled to, in essence, stand trial.
State Representative J. T. Canales, scion of a Rio Grande Valley ranching family, introduced a bill aimed at reforming the force. “There are now, and there have been for some time, in the state Ranger force men of desperate character, notoriously known as gunmen, their only qualification being that they can kill a man first and then investigate him afterward,” Canales said. By appointing such men, Canales charged, the adjutant general was “either negligent . . . or else it is his policy to have such characters in the Ranger force to terrorize and intimidate the citizens of this state.”
Canales lodged a number of specific charges against the Rangers. They had unjustly killed Tejanos and Mexicans in the Rio Grande Valley, he said, and had covered up their crimes. Of Porvenir, Canales wrote: “I charge on or about January 28, 1918, fifteen Mexicans, after they had been arrested and disarmed by State Rangers under Captain J. M. Fox’s command . . . were murdered by said Rangers without any justification or excuse and without giving said Mexicans an opportunity to prove themselves innocent of the offenses charged against them.”
The purpose of his bill was not to abolish the Rangers, he said, but to cultivate a better class of lawmen. The current force “was honeycombed with undesirable characters,” including “cut-throats and murderers,” Canales said. He proposed raising the Rangers’ pay and putting each Ranger under bond.
A Senate-House committee then was formed for “the investigation of the Texas State Ranger Force.” On January 31, 1919, it convened on the second floor of the capitol building and held twelve days of hearings. Eighty witnesses testified, and the official transcript exceeded sixteen hundred pages.
Many of the witnesses expressed support for the Rangers, but many others testified to the bloody search-and-destroy border missions. Front-page headlines told the story to the nation. “Texas Rangers Called Menace,” said one. And “Texas Rangers Murdered More People Than Outlaws.” A United Press report cast a hard eye on the scene: “Stripped of the mantle of romance which for half a century has made the picturesque ‘border police’ legendary heroes of epic and song, the Rangers today were being grilled . . . in a probe of charges of murder, lawlessness and cruelty.”
Complicating matters, during the hearings one Ranger shot and killed another only a few miles from the capitol. The two had argued after an all-day whiskey binge.
In the end, though, the Rangers generally prevailed. Anglo legislators weren’t about to side with a Mexican American colleague, no matter how distinguished, against a storied group of lawmen, no matter how troubled. The committee report faulted some “unnecessary taking of life” and other lawlessness but spared top agency officials from censure. Special investigator Hanson exulted in the findings. “Committee report all we could ask for,” he said in a telegram to allies. “Vindication complete.”
The bill to reform the Rangers was rewritten and gutted. New legislation raised the Rangers’ pay and scaled back the agency’s size, but it introduced no significant strictures or reforms. “I do not recognize my own child,” Canales lamented on the House floor.
Though the Rangers’ actions at Porvenir had broken nastily into public view, no Ranger was prosecuted for his role. The ground may as well have been salted at the village itself. Surviving residents never returned, and the gardens and fields were given back to the desert.
For his part, Ed Nevill could not keep living on the ranch where his son had been killed. “We had to abandon it,” he said. He sold the land and moved to Marfa, where he ran a café for many years. It wasn’t long before Nevill received an appointment as a Special Ranger, and that was about the time he began to seek his own form of recompense.
As his daughter, Kelley, told it, every night when he came home from his restaurant, Nevill would put away the bag containing the day’s proceeds. Then, she said, he “picked up his cartridge belt, buckled it up, examined his gun, stuck it back into its holster, put on his jacket and went out into the night.”
Sometimes he went alone. Other times, his daughter said, he was accompanied by a friend, Texas Ranger Jefferson Eagle Vaughan. Nevill kept a black book in which he had written about sixty names. They were some of the men he believed had made the raid on his ranch, and he was out to kill them all, night by night, one by one. “Without let-up for years each night he went into each Mexican house in Marfa searching each for the bandits,” she said. Ranger Vaughan “once got his throat cut when he stepped into a Mexican hut on one of those nightly searches.”
When Nevill met with success, he marked through the man’s name in the book. “From time to time,” his daughter said, “I would find it and see more names crossed through.” Once, when Nevill believed the local sheriff was concealing one of the raiders, “I remember Mama arguing Papa out of killing [the sheriff] for hiding the bandit.” The quest ended only when Nevill died in 1952—thirty-four years after the raid.
Nevill wasn’t the only one intent on retribution. Ranger Bud Weaver, one of those fired after Porvenir, forged a long career in law enforcement as a mounted customs inspector. In his seventies, retired from Big Bend duties, he sat under the oak trees outside his Kimble County home and told a nephew the story of the Nevill Ranch raid. The sight of the dead and dismembered maid, Rosa Castillo, had enraged him, Weaver said. “I just couldn’t take that.” Eventually, “I found out who did it.” The man was hiding in Mexico, so the Ranger crossed the river. “I found him,” Weaver said, “and I hung that son-of-a-bitch.”
Even the defrocked Monroe Fox found a path to vindication. In 1925, with Porvenir forgotten and Hobby out of office, he rejoined the Rangers as a senior captain. He remained on the force for two more years. Less than ten years after that, Fox had a chance to recast history on his own terms. Wearing a Stetson and drinking beer in an Austin café, he talked with journalist C. L. Douglas for the book The Gentlemen in the White Hats: Dramatic Episodes in the History of the Texas Rangers. Fox’s account of “Parvenier,” as Douglas called it, placed himself at the scene and upped the death toll by one. He, his men, and some ranchers encountered a “raiding party” there, Fox said. “We got them where they couldn’t get away, and then we just lay behind a few little knolls and played a waiting game. We’d wait for a bandit to reveal his position and then we’d let him have it. Only a few of the gang escaped . . . for when the scrap was over we found sixteen bodies in the brush.”
It was, in Douglas’s 1934 rendition, a story of “Ranger justice, swift and sure,” though he did acknowledge the international political consequences. “Over the killing of those sixteen a great cry went up from the Mexican population,” Douglas wrote, an apparent reference to the Canales hearings. As Fox recalled it, “there was an investigation, but it ended in justification for the Rangers and the ranchers.”
Some forty years after Porvenir, an aging Robert Keil—still haunted by what he had seen as a farm boy turned army cavalryman—began to put his memories to paper. “I have waited all these years for the story to be told,” he wrote, “and now I will tell it myself. I am going to do my damnedest.” Night after night in his Tucson home, Keil pecked with two fingers on an old manual typewriter. His daughter, Linda Davis, said her father would cry as he recalled the Porvenir victims. “He loved all those people,” she said. “He couldn’t stand what happened down there. He told me it was the biggest atrocity in the world. He witnessed it, and he felt so horrible about it.”
Keil completed his writing sometime around 1963 and put the manuscript in a cardboard box. He died in 1972 with his story still packed away. “It was his last wish that maybe someday he could get the story out,” Davis said. She brought it to Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas, which published Keil’s Bosque Bonito in 2002.
This version of events—the Rangers executing villagers while the unknowing cavalry stood at a distance—might have served as the final word on Porvenir. But in 2015 a group led by historian Glenn Justice, former Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, and an archaeologist went to the ruins of the village. At the site of the massacre, they collected cartridge casings and bullet fragments that, ninety-seven years later, still lay in the desert sand. Some of the slugs were embedded with tiny pieces of shattered bone.
A forensic ballistics analysis led to a stunning conclusion. While some slugs came from .45-caliber Colt revolvers, which the Rangers used, many of the other bullets had been fired from .30-06-caliber rifles. In 1918, that weapon was commonly carried by cavalrymen.
That meant the Rangers did some killing that terrible night at Porvenir, but the U.S. Army—with its own thirst for vengeance—did too.
Up and down the river, perhaps the only fact that has never been disputed is that many people died unjustly. The last word may rightly belong to J. J. Kilpatrick, a Big Bend justice of the peace and contemporary chronicler of the bloody era. “The waters of the Rio Grande . . . as they flow to the sea, are ever murmuring the funeral dirge of innocent human beings cruelly slain,” he wrote. “Oh God of mercy, how they groaned and writhed while dying, their staring eyes fixed on those who were killing them.”