by Mike Cox
On capitol grounds, Texas Peace Officer Memorial, dedicated in 1999, lists all rangers and other law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty in Texas since August 5, 1823.
Visit: Congress Avenue at Eleventh Street, Austin. Bullock Texas History Museum, 1800 Congress.
CAMP MABRY
Established in 1892 as a training encampment for the state militia—predecessor of the Texas National Guard—the facility was named for Adjutant General W.H. Mabry, who died of illness in Cuba during the Spanish American War.
For most of the first three decades of the twentieth century, Ranger horses, wagons, weapons and other equipment were sometimes stored at the camp, though most state property on the force’s inventory stayed in the field with the various companies.
When the legislature removed the Rangers from the adjutant general’s department and merged the force with the highway patrol to create the Texas Department of Public Safety in 1935, that agency had its headquarters at the camp until a new complex was constructed on what was then the northern edge of Austin in 1953.
Visit: Thirty-fifth Street and MoPac Boulevard. The DPS and Ranger headquarters occupied Buildings 10 and 11, a pair of two-story stone structures built by the U.S. Army in 1918 during World War I. The Rangers also had a stable at the camp. Two historical markers inside the camp’s old main entrance honor important figures in Ranger history, John B. Jones and William Steele, and a third marker explains the role of the state adjutant general, a gubernatorially appointed officer who from 1874 to 1935 oversaw the Rangers. Texas Military Forces Museum sheds light on the long relationship between the state’s military and the Rangers. DPS Museum, 621 West St. Johns.
WILLIAMSON COUNTY
Georgetown
THE DEMISE OF MANUEL FLORES
When rangers cut a suspicious north-bound trail in Central Texas in May 1839, they surmised a party of Mexican or Indian raiders was probably up to no good.
On a bluff overlooking the San Gabriel River, in what is now Williamson County, the rangers caught up with riders, an armed body of Mexicans led by one Manuel Flores. He and two of his men died in the shooting that followed. The rest hit the brush, leaving their remuda and supply-laden pack animals behind.
The rangers found documents in Flores’s saddlebags that proved—at least to the satisfaction of the Texas government—that Mexico hoped to get its lost territory back by forming an alliance with Texas Indians, particularly the Cherokees. Flores, who had fought for Texas during the revolution, had become an agent for the Mexican government.
Visit: A state historical marker placed in 1936 eleven miles west of Georgetown and two miles east of Liberty Hill on County Road 260 just off State Highway 29 notes that the battle occurred “in this vicinity.” The Williamson Museum, 716 South Austin Avenue, Georgetown.
THREE-LEGGED WILLIE STATUE
He is not thought to have ever set foot in his namesake county, but early-day ranger Robert McAlpin (Three-Legged Willie) Williamson is now a permanent resident—in a manner of speaking. Commissioned by the Williamson Museum and sculpted by local artist Lucas Adams, a life-sized bronze statue of Williamson was dedicated in downtown Georgetown on November 29, 2013.
Visit: On sidewalk in front of the Williamson Museum.
Leander
TUMLINSON BLOCKHOUSE
Most of the log fortifications rangers constructed during the days of the Republic of Texas fell to ruin after their abandonment. But the blockhouse built by ranger captain John J. Tumlinson Jr. in 1836, the first government building in what would become Williamson County, was burned down by Indians in 1837. Destroying the empty fort, while doubtless satisfying for the Indians, had no impact on their ongoing displacement. A granite historical marker was placed at the site in 1936.
Visit: Off U.S. 183, one and a half miles south of Farm to Market Road 2243 in Leander.
Republic of Texas–era ranger captain Nelson Merrell built this impressive stone house in Round Rock in 1870, eight years before younger rangers would deal with outlaw Sam Bass only a short distance from here. Library of Congress.
Round Rock
CAPTAIN NELSON MERRELL HOUSE
As a ranger captain operating out of Bastrop, in 1839, Nelson Merrell (1810–1879) helped protect the new capital city of Austin from Indians. He later settled in Travis County but in 1870 built a two-story rock house on his plantation along Brushy Creek and lived there the rest of his life. The captain had a distinctive square cupola constructed atop the house, often keeping lookout with his brass telescope to make sure his laborers were not malingering. The house has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1970.
Visit: 1516 East Palm Valley Road. Privately owned office building and wedding venue.
SAM BASS
Sam Bass had no ties with the community that would become famous as the place his young life ended. What brought him to Round Rock was strictly business—armed robbery.
Originally from Indiana, Bass came to Denton County via Mississippi in 1870. He wanted to be a cowboy but at first had to settle for being a farmhand and teamster. Later, he bought a sorrel mare that gained him some nice horseracing purses. In 1875, he finally got a taste of the cowboy life, pushing a herd from San Antonio to Nebraska with friend (and future outlaw pal) Joel Collins. With the money they made from that, the two went to the Black Hills of North Dakota to prospect for gold. That left them broke, but as Bass later said, they “took to robbing stage coaches.”
Back in Nebraska, his biggest heist came on September 17, 1877, when he and five others held up a train, taking $60,000 in gold. Returning to Texas for obvious reasons, Bass and a new group of associates (Collins had been shot dead shortly after the robbery) started robbing trains in the Dallas area—four brazen holdups inside two months.
By this time, he had gained the attention of the Rangers, who already held a warrant for his arrest in the Big Springs, Nebraska train robbery. But Bass proved embarrassingly difficult to capture. Remaining on the lam, he outrode various posses in North Texas and had running gunfights with rangers under Captains Lee Hall and June Peak. What finally did him in was an informant, a criminal defendant who agreed to trade insight into Bass’s whereabouts and plans in exchange for immunity.
Bass had done fairly well for himself gambling on horseflesh back in Denton County, but when he decided to raise the ante and sit in on the higher-stakes game of bank robbery, his luck finally ran out. The Rangers had stacked the figurative deck.
With the informant riding along, in July 1878, Bass and his gang headed toward the relatively new railroad town of Round Rock. There they intended to make a six-shooter withdrawal at the community’s supposedly prosperous banking establishment.
THE SHOOTOUT
Learning of Bass’s plans, Major John B. Jones scrambled to get as many rangers to Round Rock as he could. He sent three men from Austin, Rangers Chris Connor, George Herold and Dick Ware, with instructions to keep a low profile. Before joining them, he dispatched another ranger on a Paul Revere–like ride to Lampasas with orders for Lieutenant N.O. Reynolds to bring his company to Round Rock as soon as possible.
About four o’clock on Friday afternoon, July 19, Bass, Seaborn Barnes and Frank Jackson walked along Main Street, headed toward Henry Koppel’s store to buy tobacco. As they did, Williamson County deputy sheriff A.W. Grimes and Maurice Moore, a former ranger then serving as a Travis County sheriff’s deputy who had joined Jones on the train to Round Rock, followed them at a discreet distance. Moore told Grimes he thought one of the strangers had a gun beneath his coat.
When the three men walked into the store, Grimes followed them since he had jurisdiction and asked if they were armed. They were. All of them drew their pistols and started shooting at Grimes, who fell dead just outside the store.
Moore opened up on the outlaws while they were still inside the gunsmoke-filled store, shooting off one of Bass’s fingers but causing no other harm. Seconds later, one of the outlaws put a bullet
through Moore’s chest as they burst from the building.
Hearing the shooting, Jones and his three rangers came running toward the store as the outlaws hurried toward the alley where they had hitched their horses.
Ranger Ware put a .44-40 Winchester round through Barnes’s head, ending his story. Bass caught a rifle bullet from Herold. Amazingly, considering all the lead in the air, Jackson escaped in perfect health. He helped the gravely wounded Bass get on his horse, and together they galloped out of town.
Reynolds’s company had not yet reached Round Rock, and all the other lawmen could find were jaded horses not up to a fast pursuit. Even so, they rode out after the two surviving outlaws but came back empty handed at nightfall.
The next day, a detachment led by Sergeant Charles Nevill found Bass sitting against a tree a short distance from town. Jackson, realizing his friend would die, had ridden on and was never seen again in Texas—at least under his real name.
Bass lingered until Sunday, July 21.
When the doctor arrived, he told Bass he couldn’t live more than a few hours. Bass ridiculed the idea.
–Sergeant Charles Nevill
Visit: The one-story limestone building where Grimes died and Moore took a bullet (the former ranger survived only to be killed in the line of duty in Travis County on November 10, 1887) still stands at the southeast corner of Main and Mays in Round Rock. Extensively remodeled, in 2015, it accommodated an upscale bar. A historical marker placed in 1981 at West Main and Round Rock Avenue stands at the approximate site of Bass’s death.
Old Round Rock Cemetery
Dating to 1851, Old Round Rock Cemetery has the graves of Bass, Barnes and the former ranger they killed. The young officer’s widow and other members of his family objected vehemently to the two outlaws being buried in the same cemetery with her husband.
AHIJAH W. GRIMES (1855–1878)
Born and raised in Bastrop, Grimes had served as a city marshal in his hometown, as a Bastrop County constable and finally as a ranger under Captain Neal Coldwell before hiring on with the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office as a deputy in Round Rock. At the time of his death, Grimes’s brother was serving as a ranger. The young deputy left behind a wife and three children. He has had three tombstones since he died in the line of duty—a Masonic monument placed soon after his death, one set in 1978 on the centennial of his murder and one erected by the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office in 2015. The grave also has a Ranger cross placed by the Former Texas Rangers Association. The city’s police headquarters at 615 East Palm Valley bears a plaque dedicating the building to Grimes’s memory.
SAM BASS (1851–1878)
The outlaw had no tombstone until his sister had one placed over his grave a few years after his death. Its epitaph read, “A brave man reposes in death here. Why was he not true?” Souvenir hunters chipped pieces from the stone until it practically disappeared, so another marker was placed on his grave in 1953. In 1978, a third marker with details of his demise was added.
“The notorious Sam Bass died Yesterday at 4:20 He made no request, Two minutes before his death he said, ‘This world is but a bubble,—trouble wherever you go.’”
–Ranger John R. Banister in a letter to his mother two days after the
rangers gunned down the outlaw.
WILLIAM JOHN L. SULLIVAN (1851–1911)
Six-foot-six, Sullivan joined the Rangers in 1888 and served in Company B until 1900. After promoting to sergeant, he reported to Captain Bill McDonald. The tall Mississippian was active in suppressing the so-called San Saba Mob in 1896–97. To guard against any escape attempt, Sullivan once spent the night in the jail cell of a disgraced preacher about to be hanged for poisoning his wife. They talked about religion and shared a quart bottle of whiskey until the preacher-gone-bad’s execution.
Clearly with some anonymous writer’s help, Sullivan self-published Twelve Years in the Saddle for Law and Order on the Frontier of Texas in 1909. He had been living with a relative in Round Rock when he died a couple years later. The location of his grave had been lost until the 1980s, when researchers finally located the spot.
Assuring a man he was trying to disarm and arrest that he would not “hurt a hair on his head for the world,” the ranger added, “If you do make a bad break…I will cut you off at your pockets.”
–Ranger Sullivan from his book.
Visit: The cemetery is off Sam Bass Road just east of Clark Street, Round Rock.
Taylor
BATTLE OF BRUSHY CREEK
In the fall of 1925, more than a decade before Texas celebrated a century of independence from Mexico by putting up hundreds of historical markers across the state, Taylor schoolchildren collected money for a stone marker commemorating a little-known fight between Comanche warriors and rangers—the Battle of Brushy Creek.
On January 26, 1839, seasoned Fayette County Indian fighter John H. Moore led sixty-three rangers and several Lipan Apache scouts on an expedition against a Comanche village on the upper San Gabriel River.
In retaliation, the following month, a Comanche war party three hundred strong rode down the Colorado River into Central Texas, killing Elizabeth Coleman and two of her children on February 24 in Bastrop County. The raiders also struck the nearby cabin of Dr. James W. Robertson, capturing seven slaves.
Fourteen Bastrop County men under Captain John J. Grumbles pursued the raiders. They overtook the war party but pulled back when they realized the Indians outnumbered them. Following the arrival of an additional fifty-two men, the volunteers resumed the pursuit under the command of Jacob Burleson.
Twenty-five miles from the scene of the Coleman massacre, Burleson’s men caught up with the Comanches on the prairie near Brushy Creek in present Williamson County. As the Indians tried to reach timber for better cover, Burleson ordered his men to gallop between the Indians and the trees. Fourteen-year-old Winslow Turner and veteran Indian-fighter Samuel Highsmith did as told, dismounting to face the Indians. But the other men, having counted the warriors, turned their horses to flee.
Knowing he could not face the Comanches with only one man and a boy, Burleson shouted to retreat. Just as Burleson started to spur his horse, he saw the teenager having trouble getting back on his nervous mount. Burleson jumped down to lend a hand and caught an Indian bullet in the back of his head.
Jacob’s elder brother Edward Burleson, soldier-ranger and future vice-president of the Republic of Texas, soon arrived with reinforcements. Assuming overall command, Burleson rode after the Indians who had killed his brother. In several skirmishes and one heated fight, he lost three other men, but by some estimates, the force killed as many as thirty Indians.
[T]he loss of the Indians is not known; it, however, must have been considerable, as most of the men under Burleson were excellent marksmen, and had often been engaged in Indian warfare.
–Houston Telegraph
Visit: Off Circle G Ranch Road just to the west of State Highway 195, four miles south of Taylor. Private property. In addition to the 1925 monument, a state historical marker detailing the battle was erected in 1993.
SOUTH TEXAS
BEXAR COUNTY
San Antonio
THE ALAMO
Thirty-two Texas Rangers died here on March 6, 1836, after answering Colonel William B. Travis’s call for volunteers. The Daughters of the Republic of Texas maintained the old mission, the shrine of Texas liberty, until 2015, when the state General Land Office assumed full operational control. For more information on the most-visited landmark in Texas, see thealamo.org.
Thirty-two rangers died in the Alamo on March 6, 1836. Author’s collection.
Visit: 300 Alamo Plaza in downtown San Antonio.
HENRY KARNES MONUMENT
Tennessean Henry Karnes (1812–1840) fought for the Republic of Texas as a soldier and ranger, but when he died of yellow fever in San Antonio, he could not be buried in the town’s Campo Santos (Camp of Saints) because he was a Protestant. They laid him to rest just
outside the Catholic cemetery, and there he remained until Santa Rosa Hospital was constructed on the site in 1875 and the graves were either moved or lost. His final resting place proved to be one of the latter.
In 1932, a three-foot red granite state monument with a bronze plaque was placed in Milam Park in honor of the former ranger. Just across the street from the old cemetery, that was as close to Karnes’s remains as possible.
Visit: West Houston Street and North San Saba Streets, northwest corner of park.
SALADO CREEK BATTLE
Six years after Santa Anna’s defeat at San Jacinto, Mexico still had not recognized the Republic of Texas. As far as Mexico City was concerned, Texas belonged to Mexico.
In September 1842, 1,500 troops under General Adrian Woll crossed the Rio Grande and marched toward San Antonio. On the morning of the eleventh, hidden by a thick fog, Woll’s force quietly surrounded the town and took control.
But Captain Jack Hays and his rangers were not there. While the Mexican force had adroitly avoided Hays and taken San Antonio by surprise, the captain wisely rode to Seguin to spread word of the invasion and gather reinforcements.
A week later, on September 18, no more than 250 Texans, a mixed force of rangers, regular soldiers and volunteers under the command of Matthew Caldwell and Hays, fought roughly 950 Mexican army regulars along Salado Creek.
During the fight, fifty-three men under Captain Nicholas Dawson, responding to Hays’s call for assistance, rode up on the battle in progress. An overwhelming number of Mexican cavalrymen encircled the new arrivals, who took cover in a mesquite thicket. Mexican artillery raked their position, and then the cavalry charged. Only seventeen men survived—fifteen were captured and two escaped. What came to be called the Dawson Massacre had claimed thirty-seven lives, but in the main battle, only one Texan fell.