Gunfights & Sites in Texas Ranger History

by Mike Cox

  Burton and the other rangers quickly commandeered the boat. Leaving four men behind with the prisoners, Burton and the rest his men rowed to the schooner and easily seized it as a prize for the new Republic of Texas.

  Still at Copano, on June 17, the rangers spotted two more ships and commandeered them as well. Those vessels and the Watchman were laden with food, ammunition and muskets—all badly needed by the Texas army. Two days later, the rangers and their prisoners set sail for Velasco. Later, at Galveston, an admiralty court awarded the cargo of the ships to Texas but released the vessels—which had been leased to Mexico—to their American owners.

  Burton moved to Houston County in 1841 and died there in January 1843 at thirty-eight.

  On yesterday [news came] of the capture of three Mexican vessels by a troop of…“Horse Marines” I suppose.

  –Letter from Edward J. Wilson published in the Kentucky Gazette,

  July 26, 1836

  Historical marker at Copano Bay, near where rangers captured three ships shortly after the Texas Revolution. Photo by Mike Cox.

  Visit: The ruins of Copano, remnants of ten shellcrete structures and an old cistern, stand precariously on the edge of a bluff overlooking Copano Bay. The site is on private property, where archaeological work in 2005 indicated much of the old town had already fallen into the bay with the rest likely to follow unless mitigation is undertaken soon. Since the shoreline has already receded at least one hundred feet since the mid-1930s, where Burton camped in 1836 likely is already gone. A granite historical marker placed at the site in 1936 was moved to Driscoll Rooke Covenant Park in Bayside, five miles to the south, after it toppled into the water in 1978. Burton is buried at Glenwood Cemetery in Crockett. A granite historical marker placed in 1936 stands near his grave. Refugio County Museum, Heritage Park, Refugio.

  STARR COUNTY

  Rio Grande City

  RANGERS VS. CORTINISTAS

  In 1859, two days after Christmas, Rangers under John S. “Rip” Ford and U.S. Army troops commanded by Major S.B. Heintzelman fought some 450 partisans of Juan Cortina near the Rio Grande in what is now Rio Grande City. Cortina made it across the river into Mexico. Many of his men splashed across afoot, but he had been defeated and the so-called Cortina War effectively ended. A historical marker placed in 1970 marks the battle location.

  Visit: Old Cemetery Park, Second and West Streets, Rio Grande City. Fort Ringgold (occupied 1848–1944) visitor’s center, 1 South Ringgold Street off U.S. 83.

  UVALDE COUNTY

  Uvalde

  KING FISHER’S ROAD

  By all odds, a ranger should have killed John King Fisher, a young man who famously posted a sign in the South Texas brush country that read, “This is King Fisher’s Road, Take the Other One.”

  A cattle thief who claimed to have killed seven men “not counting Mexicans,” Fisher proved to be a mesquite thorn in ranger captain Leander McNelly’s figurative saddle. Rangers collected evidence resulting in twenty-one indictments against Fisher at various times and on various charges, including cattle rustling, horse stealing, assault and murder. But, primarily due to reluctance on the part of witnesses to testify against him, convictions always went wanting.

  Besides being one lucky felon, Fisher had the reputation of being something of a dandy, always a sharp dresser. That reportedly led the frustrated Captain McNelly to tell him, “You better be careful. You look good now, but you’ll look just as good dead.”

  Others agreed with that, and at Jack Harris’s Vaudeville Variety Theater in San Antonio on the night of March 11, 1884, someone shot Fisher to death along with another nefarious character, outlaw-turned-lawman Ben Thompson. No arrests were ever made, but the killer wasn’t Captain McNelly, who had died seven years earlier.

  Visit: Fisher’s grave is in Uvalde’s Pioneer Cemetery, 500 block of Park Street.

  VAL VERDE COUNTY

  Del Rio

  A WOLF POSING AS A SHEEP RANCHER

  The Wright brothers were flying planes, but Ed Putnam still operated like an Old West outlaw. Killing a sheep rancher in November 1906 near Box Springs in Val Verde County, Putnam drove off the man’s large flock. A few days later, posing as a livestock dealer, the killer conman approached B.M. Cauthron and said he knew where he could get some sheep at a bargain. That sounded interesting, so Cauthron accompanied Putnam to look at the stock. He liked what he saw and agreed to buy half interest in the animals.

  After rounding up the money, on December 1, Cauthron rode with Putnam to gather up the sheep. But as soon as they were out of town, Putnam back-shot him and collected his cash. Unfortunately for the killer, someone with grit saw what had happened and, with pistol drawn, rode hard toward Putnam. Seeing the armed rider approaching fast, Putnam galloped toward town. At the first house he saw, which happened to belong to Glass Sharp and his family, Putnam dismounted and ran inside.

  Del Rio about the time young Ranger Frank Hamer took part in a wild shootout there. Author’s collection.

  The witness went to notify law enforcement, and soon Captain John H. Rogers and three of his rangers—rookie Frank Hamer, Marvin E. Bailey and R.M. “Duke” Hudson—had the place surrounded. Putnam graciously allowed the occupants to leave and then began firing at the rangers. The lawmen fired some three hundred rounds into the small frame house, but Putnam kept shooting. Finally catching a glimpse of Putnam through a window, Hamer quickly put a round into the outlaw’s head, instantly ending his career while establishing his own reputation as a dead shot.

  Visit: Glass T. Sharp owned Lot 1, Block 44 in Del Rio, now 309 West Sixth Street. The house, privately owned, still stands.

  GLENN-DOWE HOUSE

  Luke C. Dowe served as a Frontier Battalion ranger from 1890 to 1892, taking part in the joint U.S. Army–Texas Ranger search in South Texas for Catarino Garza, a newspaper publisher who led a force bent on starting a revolution in Mexico. One ranger was killed in the trouble, later called the Garza War. After leaving state law enforcement, aside from brief stints with the Maverick County sheriff’s office in Eagle Pass, Dowe spent most of his long border law enforcement career as a federal officer, first as a mounted customs inspector and later as deputy customs collector at Del Rio. The former ranger and his wife moved into the one-story brick house (built by Daniel Glenn in 1900–01) following their 1906 marriage and lived there for nearly fifty years. After retiring in 1935, Dowe settled into a quiet life, often going on fishing-camping trips on the Devils River. Dowe died in El Paso on June 25, 1956. A historical marker was placed at the house in 1985.

  Visit: 301 Garfield Avenue.

  JESS NEWTON CORRALLED AT THE RODEO

  Many Del Rio residents, including one visitor recently arrived from Illinois, were enjoying a Fourth of July rodeo in 1924 when former Texas Ranger Harrison Hamer, younger brother of Frank Hamer, showed up.

  Harrison Hamer appreciated cowboy competition as much as the next Texan, but on this hot afternoon, he had not come to the arena to take in the performance. Though no longer a ranger (he would serve as one again), he held a peace officer’s commission as an inspector for the Sheep and Goat Raisers Association. And he was about to make one of the most important arrests of his long career.

  On June 12, the Newton Gang—Uvalde-raised brothers Doc, Jess, Joe and Willis—had pulled the biggest train robbery in American history near Chicago. The Texas boys escaped with $3 million, and now Jess was living it up on what remained of his share of the money, just an easy bridge crossing from Mexico if necessary. But Hamer had gotten word that Newton was in Del Rio. Finding Newton at the rodeo, Hamer waited until he started to leave.

  “Don’t make a move,” Hamer said as he took hold of Newton’s right arm. “You’re under arrest.”

  “I ain’t going to do nothing,” the wanted Texan answered, and he didn’t—other than go to jail. He served a light sentence of one year and one day.

  Visit: The arrest likely took place at the Val Verde County Fairgrounds. The old arena is no l
onger there, but the fairgrounds are at 2006 North Main Street, Del Rio.

  OSCAR LATTA (1868–1954)

  Former Frontier Battalion ranger Oscar L. Latta played down his role in ridding the nation of the last of one of the most infamous outlaw gangs that ever rode the Owlhoot Trail—the Daltons.

  Born in Xenia, Kansas, on September 14, 1868, Latta came to Texas with his parents at six and grew up in West Texas. He married at twenty-two in 1890, and a year later, he had a son. But soon the marriage soured, and Mrs. Latta filed for divorce. What role her parents had in the breakup is not known, but any chance of reconciliation ended when Latta shot and killed his father-in-law. A jury agreed with Latta and his lawyer that the shooting had been justified and acquitted him of murder. After that, he turned to law enforcement, hiring on as a deputy sheriff in Kimble County.

  On February 6, 1897, riding in a posse led by Sheriff John L. Jones, they encountered three suspected cattle rustlers on a ranch near the Kimble-Menard County line. The outlaws opted to take their chances on gunplay, which proved a bad idea. After the final hammer fell that winter day, Jourd Nite and Jim Crane had been lastingly rehabilitated of their criminal ways. The wounded survivor, Jim Nite (Jourd’s brother) turned out to be one of the last members of Bill Dalton’s gang, wanted for the violent robbery of the First National Bank of Longview on May 23, 1894.

  Not long after arresting Nite, Latta became a Ranger, serving with Company F in Duval County in South Texas. After leaving the state force, he worked for a time in Brady as a deputy city marshal. In 1932, after Rangers had evolved from horseback lawman to state cops with cars, Latta again pinned on a Ranger badge for a time. He died on August 2, 1954, in Del Rio.

  Visit: Westlawn Cemetery, 1200 West Second Street. Whitehead Memorial Museum, 1308 South Main Street.

  WEBB COUNTY

  Laredo

  LOS OJUELOS (THE SPRINGS)

  A stopping place on the El Camino Real, the old Spanish road across Texas to Mexico, the springs had been a camping place since before recorded history by the time ranger captain John S. “Rip” Ford and his men pitched their tents there in 1850. Most Ranger camps saw only temporary use, but rangers continued to periodically occupy the site through the Prohibition era.

  Captain Will Wright’s company in South Texas during the Prohibition era. Author’s collection.

  The town of Los Ojuelos grew near the springs, but when the Texas-Mexican Railroad bypassed the community, it began to fade. Despite an oil boom at nearby Miranda City in the 1920s, it became a ghost town. The site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.

  Visit: Forty miles east of Laredo, two and a half miles south of Mirand City on Farm to Market 649. Private property.

  RANGERS FIGHT SMALL POX—AND GUNMEN

  Rangers more used to dealing with killers and cattle rustlers faced a new enemy on the streets of Laredo in the spring of 1899—smallpox.

  With an outbreak of the dreaded disease known along the Rio Grande as la viruela rapidly spreading in the border city, Captain J.H. Rogers and one of his men came to town to assist state health authorities in preventative measures, including a quarantine. Largely due to lack of education and a general distrust of outside authority (particularly the Rangers), some residents decided to forcibly resist.

  As rumors to that effect began circulating, Rogers wired for more rangers. When a local hardware store notified the sheriff’s office that a former city policeman had placed an order for two thousand rounds of buckshot shells, officers raided his residence. Captain Rogers and his rangers were there as well, and the situation soon deteriorated into a shooting that mutated into a riot.

  The captain caught a rifle bullet that nearly took his arm off, but he and another ranger killed the gunman. Then, using a favorite Ranger line, as Rogers later reported, “shooting…became general.” Numerous residents suffered wounds of varying severity in a riot that continued through the night, but no one else died. Cavalrymen from Laredo’s Fort McIntosh finally restored order.

  Visit: The riot spread from a southeast Laredo residential neighborhood to the combination city hall and public market now known as El Mercado, an 1884-vintage brick structure still standing at 500 Flores Avenue. Rangers carried their badly wounded captain to the newly opened Hamilton Hotel at 815 Salinas Street. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the old hotel is now an apartment building.

  Villa Antigua Border Heritage Museum, 810 Zaragosa Street and Republic of the Rio Grande Museum, 1005 Zaragosa Street.

  WILLACY COUNTY

  Raymondville

  GEORGE PRESTON DURHAM (1856–1940)

  George Durham’s father fought with Leander McNelly during what Southerners tended to call the “War of Northern Aggression.” Listening to his father talk about McNelly convinced young Durham to come to Texas. Only nineteen, Durham found McNelly at the post office in Burton and said he wanted to join the ranger company he had heard McNelly was organizing. Durham seemed solid, and McNelly added the Georgian to his roster.

  After riding with the Rangers for two action-filled years, during which time he took part in the so-called Las Cuevas Affaira Ranger invasion of Mexico in pursuit of cattle thieves, Durham went to work for cattleman Richard King. He later married Caroline H. Chamberlain, the niece of King’s wife, and eventually rose to foreman of the King Ranch’s El Sauz Division. Late in Durham’s life, newspaperman Clyde Wantland interviewed him for a series of western magazine articles. Following his death in 1940, each of Durham’s sons, in turn, served as El Sauz manager. (It is now a separate ranch, no longer part of the King Ranch.) In 1962, Wantland’s work was compiled into Taming the Nueces Strip, an essential read for anyone interested in the story of McNelly’s rangers.

  Visit: Raymondville Memorial Park Cemetery.

  WILSON COUNTY

  Floresville

  RANGER BREEDING GROUND

  Maude T. Gilliland, whose grandfather, father and husband all had served as rangers, loved history. In researching one and then a second now highly collectible book on ranger activities in South Texas, she noticed something unusual about Wilson County: all its rangers.

  Though sparsely populated, over the years, the county produced forty-four rangers, including Will Wright, Frank Hamer and three other captains. Nearly half the rangers came from the near-ghost town of Fairview. Admittedly, several families had contributed multiple rangers, and to be fair, some had not been born in Wilson County. But Mrs. Gilliland knew of no other small county with so many rangers who had called it home. That discovery led in 1977 to her third and long out of print final work, Wilson County Texas Rangers.

  WILLIAM LEE WRIGHT (1868–1942)

  Born in Lockhart and reared in DeWitt County, Captain Will Wright served as a Wilson County sheriff’s deputy (1898–1902), as county sheriff (1902–17), and variously in the Rangers from 1918 to 1939. A historical marker placed in 1967 outside the 1887 jail where he once lived calls him a “fearless, colorful, cultured man whose honesty and diplomacy often prevented bloodshed.”

  Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you.

  –Sheriff and future ranger Wright to a convicted murderer

  he was about to hang

  Visit: As sheriff, Wright lived in the two-story brick 1887 county jail, 1143 C Street. Remodeled in 1936, the facility continued in use until 1974. Wright is buried in Floresville City Cemetery, 2012 Third Street.

  ZAVALLA COUNTY

  Whoever buried former Ranger James W. King disliked him so much they planted him facing west, a strong insult.

  A fair hand with a fiddle, King enlisted in the Frontier Battalion in 1882. He served under various officers in two different companies before joining Captain Frank Jones’s Company D in 1887.

  In 1888, Jones ordered King to sparsely populated Zavalla County. Posing as a dishonorably discharged ranger, King tried to make cases against cattle thieves. Fiddling his way to acceptance, he made some inroads with the locals, but no criminal cases. Returning to
his company and other duties, three days after reenlisting on September 1, 1889, he got fired for drunkenness—this time for real.

  For some reason, King decided to go back to Zavalla County. Maybe he figured on hiring on as a sheriff’s deputy or cowboying. Again, King told folks he had been let go by the Rangers. But he’d said that before.

  Someone killed the former ranger on the W.L. Gates ranch near Loma Vista on February 11, 1890. Less than two months later, three men were charged with King’s murder, but a Frio County jury found them not guilty.

  For years, only a mesquite stump marked the former ranger’s lonesome burial spot. A modern marker makes no mention of the ranger’s violent demise, merely recording for posterity these words: “James W. King/ Feb. 11, 1890/ Texas Ranger/ Co. D.”

  Visit: Loma Vista Cemetery. Take Farm to Market 1867 fifteen miles north from intersection with State Highway 385 in Big Wells.

  WEST TEXAS

  BREWSTER COUNTY

  Alpine

  THE STEER (OR BULL) BRANDED M-U-R-D-E-R

  A ranger and two former rangers had a hand in one of the Old West’s more bizarre tales.

  Fine Gilliland, representing several ranchers at the annual winter roundup on January 21, 1891, got into a dispute over an unbranded steer (some sources say a young bull) with rancher Henry Harrison Powe, a one-armed Civil War veteran. Words led to gunplay. Gilliland killed Powe and galloped away.

  Having watched his father die, Powe’s son raced his horse to Alpine and notified Sheriff James B. Gillett. The former ranger saddled up and headed to the crime scene. Meanwhile, in a gesture of solidarity with Powe, some of the cowboys who witnessed the shooting had taken a running iron and branded the letters M-U-R-D-E-R on the side of the critter that led to the fatal dispute.

  Seventy-two hours later, Ranger Jim Putnam and former ranger Thalis Cook, then a Brewster County deputy sheriff, encountered Gilliland in the Glass Mountains. The fugitive cowboy immediately “went to shooting,” his first round shattering Cook’s knee. When Putnam shot Gilliland’s horse as he tried to ride off, the wanted man used the dead animal as cover until the ranger put a bullet between Gilliland’s eyes.