Gunfights & Sites in Texas Ranger History

by Mike Cox

  In 1869, Colonel Henry Jones, father of future Frontier Battalion commander Major John B. Jones, moved to 2,500 acres he owned in western Navarro County. The colonel raised horses on the land. That June, the elder Jones conveyed 500-plus acres and half his herd to his son. Though the younger Jones lived in Austin during his seven-plus years of state service and traveled widely across the state, he returned to Corsicana and his “rancho”—clearly a place of mental refuge for him—as often as he could. The property remained in Jones’s family after his death but was later sold.

  Jones was active in the Masonic order, eventually becoming the state’s grand master. While commanding the Frontier Battalion, he periodically attended lodge meetings in Corsicana. At the time, his lodge met upstairs in the S.B. Pace Building.

  Visit: The Jones ranch lay seven miles west of the old town of Dresden, or twenty miles west of Corsicana. A historical marker detailing Dresden’s history stands in the community cemetery, all that remains of the settlement. Take State Highway 55 south from Blooming Grove for five miles, then turn west onto Farm to Market Road 744 and drive a half mile to the cemetery. Built in 1875, the two-story brick Pace Building is located on the northeast corner of South Beaton Street and West Sixth Avenue.

  RANGER IRA ATEN REPORTS

  Corsicana wasn’t really a cow town, but following the invention and spread of barbed wire, Navarro County landowners using the new product to fence their land experienced serious resistance from those opposing the partitioning of range country by means of a flesh-ripping wire.

  Sergeant Ira Aten, Frontier Battalion Company D, got orders to spend time in the county working undercover to stop the fence cutting. Threatening to affix what he called “dynamite booms” designed to explode when someone snipped a strand of barbed wire, the ranger used a little psychology to end the problem. The only tangible evidence of the ranger’s efforts, his bravado-filled reports to headquarters, are filed away at the Texas State Library and Archives in Austin.

  Nothing will do any good here but a first class Killing [sic] & I am the little boy that will give it to them if they don’t let the fence alone.

  –Sergeant Aten to Captain Lamartine Sieker, August 31, 1888

  Visit: Vicinity of the Richland community, twelve miles south of Corsicana. Pioneer Village, 912 West Park Avenue; Pearce Museum, Navarro Junior College, 3100 West Collin Street, Coriscana.

  ORANGE COUNTY

  Orange

  NO CLOSE SHAVE FOR RANGER FULLER

  Oscar Poole, the county judge’s son, apparently never heard the old admonition against taking a knife to a gunfight. Struggling to arrest the knife-wielding Poole, Ranger T.L. Fuller shot him to death in Orange on December 21, 1899. City police arrested the ranger, but soon cut him loose, the shooting clearly a justified homicide.

  After Fuller moved on to another trouble spot in the state, he learned that he and fellow ranger A.L. Saxon had been indicted in Orange County for false imprisonment. Their captain, Bill McDonald, warned that was only an attempt to get Fuller back in Orange for retribution, but the adjutant general overruled McDonald and ordered recently promoted Lieutenant Fuller and Private Saxon to return to southeast Texas to deal with the legal issue.

  On October 15, 1900, during a break in his trial, Fuller and Saxon walked to a nearby barbershop for shaves. About 5:30 p.m., as Fuller leaned over a sink to wash his face, a man walked into the barbershop with a Winchester and shot the ranger in the head. The gunman ran to a butcher shop next door, where local officers arrested him. He turned out to be Thomas Poole, the brother of the man Fuller had killed the year before.

  A clearly partisan jury acquitted Poole in the murder of the ranger, but in March 1902, Poole lost a gunfight with Orange city marshal James A. Jett. Not willing to let bygones be bygones, less than two months later, George, Claude and Grover Poole shot and killed Marshal Jett.

  Visit: The last Frontier Battalion ranger killed in the line of duty before the service was formally renamed as the Texas Rangers, Fuller died inside Adam’s Barbershop, which occupied rental space on the ground floor of the two-story Custom House Saloon building on Front Avenue (contemporary newspapers did not give the numerical address) in downtown Orange. The building was destroyed by fire on December 22, 1911. Fuller is believed to be buried near Fulshear in Fort Bend County, but his grave has not been located.

  SABINE COUNTY

  Hemphill

  FOUR RANGERS DOWN

  Willis Conner didn’t start out as an outlaw. He was just a Georgia-born Confederate vet who believed in handling his own business. For instance, if a body stole some of the hogs that ran on his land, especially after being warned to tend his own stock, Conner saw no need in troubling the sheriff over the matter.

  When concerned friends found the missing Kit Smith and Eli Low shot to death in Holly Bottom on December 5, 1883, the Sabine County sheriff’s office started looking into Conner’s whereabouts on the day of the killings. Everyone knew bad blood existed between the Conners and the Smiths and the Lows, and now some of that blood had been spilled.

  On February 16, 1884, a grand jury indicted Conner and four of his five sons for the killings. For their safety, the sheriff transferred the Conners to the Nacogdoches County Jail pending trial. That proceeding took place in San Augustine County, where a jury found three of the boys guilty. Willis Conner would be tried separately, and charges against the other son had been dropped.

  In early 1885, an armed party sprang the Conners from jail, and they lit out for the tall pines they knew so well. Word spread, as one lawman recalled, that the Conners had made it plain they intended if necessary “to die right there with their shoes on, looking their enemies…in the face.” The truth is they crossed into Louisiana until things cooled off a bit.

  When local authorities got word that the Conners had finally slipped back into Sabine County, they requested assistance in getting the Conner clan back in jail and on their way to prison. Rangers under Captain William Scott arrived on March 29, 1887, and soon learned the Conners’ hiding place.

  At daybreak on April 1, the rangers moved in. Alerted by their hunting dogs, the Conners came out shooting. When the gun smoke dissipated, Ranger James H. Moore lay dead, a bullet in his head. The rangers had killed one of Conner’s sons—the only son they did not have a warrant for—but his innocence had ended when he started shooting at the lawmen. Captain Scott had been gravely wounded, and Rangers J.A. Brooks and John Rogers had significant though nonfatal wounds. But the elder Conner and the rest of his boys had escaped.

  The grave of Ranger James H. Moore, killed in a Sabine County shootout with the Conner family. Photo courtesy Weldon McDaniel.

  A posse found one of the convicted Conners the following October and killed him in a gunfight. In November, Willis Conner and his eight-year-old grandson died at the hands of another posse. Folks said they killed the young boy just to end the Conner bloodline.

  A terrible fight occurred [yesterday] morning, ten miles below Hemphill, in Sabine County Texas, between Captain Scott and his little company of State rangers on the one side and old Willis Conner and his sons on the other.

  –Salt Lake Herald, April 2, 1887

  Visit: Ranger Moore is buried in the Hemphill Cemetery, one-tenth of a mile south of the courthouse on South Texas Street. When word of the shootout reached Moore’s brother, Kerr County sheriff Frank M. Moore, he went to East Texas to bring his brother’s body home for burial. But by the time he got to Sabine County, Moore had been buried, and his brother decided to leave him be. He did claim the dead ranger’s horse, however. The two-story, redbrick jail the Conners escaped from, built in 1883 and used until 1919, still stands in San Augustine. Sabine County Historical Commission Museum and Library, 201 Main Street, Hemphill.

  SAN AUGUSTINE COUNTY

  San Augustine

  SAN AUGUSTINE CLEANUP

  Four days before Christmas in 1934, a fistfight escalated into a shootout in front of the W.R. Thomas hardware store in
downtown San Augustine. When it was over, two men lay dead and two others were mortally wounded. Responding to the county sheriff’s request for help, on January 5, 1935, the state dispatched a ranger captain and three privates to San Augustine. But they had no success in getting to the root of the problem, which had to do with two well-established criminal factions involved in everything from hog theft to robbery and murder. One thing both gangs had in common were their victims: black sharecroppers and their families.

  After newly elected Governor James Allred took office later that month, he appointed an old friend, former Wichita Falls police chief James W. McCormick as a ranger captain. In addition to his municipal law enforcement experience, McCormick had spent eight years in the Rangers. His specialty, well honed as an oil boomtown cop, was town taming.

  McCormick arrived with three rangers. Walking the streets with a pistol on each hip, a third in a shoulder holster and one tucked discretely in his boot just in case, the captain assured the townspeople they had nothing to fear in coming forward to testify before the grand jury. Statements rangers took and evidence they gathered led to one hundred indictments and forty prison sentences.

  Only two months after the rangers came, conditions had improved so much that grateful residents hosted a street dance in the rangers’ honor.

  Visit: Still a hardware store (but with a different name and owners), the building where the shootout occurred stands at 134 West Columbia. The grand jury testimony and court proceedings that broke up the criminal factions occurred in the 1927-vintage San Augustine County Courthouse, Main and Broadway. Prisoners arrested by the rangers were held in a two-story brick jail built in 1919 that continued in use until the first decade of this century. The San Augustine County Historical Commission and two other organizations were raising money in 2015 to restore the old lockup.

  SMITH COUNTY

  Tyler

  BRYAN MARSH (1833–1901)

  Bryan Marsh, an Alabamian who came to Tyler in 1854, lost his right arm fighting for the South during the Civil War, but that didn’t hamper a long career in law enforcement. He served as Smith County sheriff from June 25, 1866, to November 1, 1867, when ousted during the federal military occupation of Texas following the Civil War. Marsh later completed a second term as sheriff from 1876 to 1878.

  In 1880, he received command of Company A, Frontier Battalion, and served until his company disbanded due to budget constraints in 1881. During his captaincy, he successfully defused a racially charged situation in San Angelo and helped preserve some semblance of law and order in a succession of frenetic railroad towns as the Texas and Pacific Railroad laid the first tracks across West Texas.

  Back in the piney woods, Marsh served again as Smith County sheriff from 1886 to 1892. As a lawman, he never wore a gun. The story goes that whenever someone asked why he went unarmed, the former ranger would reply, “What would a one-armed man do with a gun anyway?” Marsh otherwise made a living as a planter and merchant.

  [H]e would drink right smart and scrap right smart. He was an old Confederate war colonel with one arm shot off at the shoulder, and the other hand almost gone. But he would fight his shadow; wa’n’t afraid of anything.

  –Former ranger Jeff Milton

  Visit: Marsh is buried in Tyler’s Oakwood Cemetery. Tyler’s first elementary school, opened in 1886 in the 700 block of North Bois d’Arc Street and rebuilt on the same site in 1917, bore the former ranger’s name. A historical marker commemorating Marsh was placed on the building in 1963. Seven years later, U.S. district judge William Wayne Justice ordered the old school closed as part of a school desegregation plan. Marsh spent time in the two-story brick, 1881 Smith County jail during his last three terms as sheriff. Various accused felons arrested by rangers cooled their heels in this lockup, which continued in use until 1916. A former jailer purchased the facility at 309 East Erwin Street and converted the old Cross Bar hotel into a real hotel, which flourished during the East Texas oil boom. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the former jail has been restored to its original appearance and now serves as a law office. Smith County Historical Museum, 125 South College Avenue.

  WALKER COUNTY

  Huntsville

  SAMUEL H. WALKER (1810–1847)

  In a quirky instance of place name selection, Walker County had been Walker County for seventeen years when the Texas legislature decided to “rename” it Walker County in honor of noted Republic of Texas–era ranger Samuel H. Walker. When created in 1846, the county was named for Robert James Walker (1801–1869), a Mississippian who had strongly supported the annexation of Texas into the United States. But in 1863, state lawmakers realized Walker County officials wouldn’t have to change any stationery or signage if they renamed the county for the former ranger who fell in the Battle of Monterrey during the Mexican War.

  Visit: A 1936 granite historical marker 1.4 miles northwest of Huntsville reveals the story behind the county’s name. Walker County Museum, 1228 Eleventh Street, Huntsville.

  THE WALLS

  The long, colorful history of the state prison system is entirely separate from that of the Texas Rangers, but beginning with the rangers’ transition from Indian fighters to state lawmen, the rangers have placed many a convict behind its bars.

  During the days of the Republic of Texas, individual counties took care of housing convicted felons, but after statehood in 1845, the legislature established a state prison in 1848. Governor George T. Wood appointed a three-member committee to select a location, and the group picked Huntsville. Exactly why the small town on the edge of the piney woods got selected has never been determined, but one of the decision makers hailed from Walker County, and Sam Houston lived in Huntsville. To be fair, the community had agreed to donate construction material to the state to lower costs.

  The committee soon purchased 4.8 acres (total cost: $22) for the prison, plus an additional 94.0 acres ($470) to give room for future use.

  In 1849, with construction of a brick facility under way, a temporary lockup built of heavy logs went up to house any prisoners who arrived before completion of the more secure facility. That October, the man who got the dubious honor of being the first state prison inmate was a convicted horse thief from Fayette County.

  The Rangers were our best customer.

  –James Estell, Texas Department of Criminal Justice director, 1972–82

  Visit: The Texas Prison Museum, 491 Highway 75 North.

  SAM HOUSTON (1793–1863)

  Sam Houston had many ties to the Texas Rangers, beginning with his use of rangers during the Texas Revolution and continuing during his two nonconsecutive terms as president of the Republic of Texas. As a U.S. senator, he fought for federal funding for the Rangers and once again commanded them as state governor, his last public office. While governor, he ran the Rangers like they were his private army. In fact, he briefly fantasized about using the rangers to conquer Mexico, a scenario in which he envisioned himself as leader. Some historians have speculated Houston was only trying to divert secessionists from joining the Confederacy.

  The general spent the last years of his life in Huntsville, where he died on July 26, 1863, during the Civil War he had warned strongly against.

  Give me a few Rangers and I will get it done.

  –Sam Houston

  Visit: Houston Monument. Dedicated on October 22, 1994, a towering sixty-seven-foot statue of Houston standing on a ten-foot base. Take exit 109 or 112 off Interstate 45 to 7600 State Highway 75 South in Huntsville. Visitor’s center. Houston is buried in Oakwood Cemetery, Nineth Street and Avenue J. Sam Houston Memorial Museum, 1836 Sam Houston Memorial Drive, Huntsville.

  WASHINGTON COUNTY

  Burton

  LEANDER HARVEY MCNELLY (1844–1877)

  A slight, tubercular southerner whose appearance belied the stereotypical image of the tall, brawny state lawman, Leander H. McNelly helped forge the Ranger reputation.

  Born on March 12, 1844, in Virginia, he lived briefly
with his brother Peter’s family in Missouri, eventually returning to the Old Dominion. When Peter McNelly moved to Texas, buying land in Washington County, his younger brother came along. As a teenager already afflicted with debilitating lung disease, McNelly herded sheep for Travis J. Burton, namesake of the Burton community.

  No matter his undependable health, when the Civil War began, McNelly enlisted as a private in the Fifth Texas Cavalry. Having seen action in New Mexico and Louisiana as well as in Galveston, McNelly had risen to captain by war’s end.

  In 1865, McNelly returned to Washington County and took up farming. But McNelly liked the feel of horseflesh between his legs and evidently did not mind the smell of gunpowder. When the legislature created a uniformed state police force in 1870, McNelly gained a commission as one of its four captains. Wounded once in the line of duty, he served until the legislature abolished the agency in 1873.

  When the legislature formed the Washington County Volunteers in 1874, McNelly became its captain. The Special Force, as it was more commonly known, was distinct from the newly created Frontier Battalion of rangers—but only in nomenclature. In form and function, McNelly and the men he recruited were rangers.

  The grave of Captain Leander McNelly at Burton lies beneath an ornate monument placed by the owner of the King Ranch. Photo by Mike Cox.

  McNelly’s Rangers, as they tended to call themselves, worked to suppress violence in the bloody Sutton-Taylor feud and in the Nueces Strip, a virtual no-man’s land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. McNelly did not always abide by the rules, but he helped build the Rangers’ reputation for effective, no-nonsense law enforcement.

  The captain and his men faced feudists, outlaws and Mexican raiders, but McNelly’s most dangerous foe was the persistent bacterium that continued to flourish in his lungs. Forced to resign due to his health, he died on September 4, 1877.