Gunfights & Sites in Texas Ranger History

by Mike Cox

  Shouting, “Mueren los gringos! [death to the Americans!],” the riders started shooting as they drew closer.

  It was Christmas morning, 1917.

  Neill grabbed his Winchester and returned fire, dropping one of the attackers from his saddle. Hearing the gunfire, Neill’s son Van—ranch foreman—ran in with his rifle and joined in defending his house.

  The raiders grabbed a young Mexican ranch hand doing the morning milking and ordered him to go tell the Neills to surrender. The muchacho delivered the message, a demand father and son answered with bullets.

  Soon, the raiders turned their attention to the adjacent Busy Bee grocery and post office, looting both. About that time, the mail wagon rolled in, and the bandits promptly killed its two Mexican passengers. Driver Mikey Welch they hanged inside the store, cutting his throat to cease his cursing.

  While the fire from the Neills seemed to have lessened the raiders’ enthusiasm for storming the ranch house, the attackers knew that sooner or later the men inside would run out of ammunition. Fortunately for the Neills, one of several friends they had invited for a holiday dinner showed up, saw what was happening and hurried away to call for help. Seeing that, the raiders turned their horses south for Mexico.

  Big Bend rancher Kenny Matthews with a .30-40 rifle popular with rangers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Photo by Mike Cox.

  Rangers used this fortification at the Brite Ranch during the border violence associated with the Mexican Revolution before World War I. Photo courtesy Marfa Public Library.

  It was the tightest place I was ever in.

  –Sam Neill

  Visit: Still in the same family, the Brite Ranch in western Presidio County remains a working cattle and hunting operation. The old Busy Bee store still stands, with bullet holes from the long-ago raid still visible.

  Marfa

  JAMES BUCHANAN GILLETT (1856–1937)

  Though born in Austin and raised in Lampasas, it was the vast Big Bend country that called to Jim Gillett. Like many rangers, Gillett started out as a cowboy, but the ranger life appealed to him and he joined the Frontier Battalion in 1875.

  Gillett did not make a career of the Rangers, but he served longer than most, distinguishing himself first as an Indian fighter and then as a state lawman. He left the force in December 1881 to become assistant city marshal in El Paso. The following summer, city officials appointed him marshal.

  In 1885, he returned to cattle ranching, going to work for the Estado Land and Cattle Company before buying his own ranch in 1891. Elected sheriff of Brewster County in 1890 for one two-year term, he continued to ranch. He moved to nearby Jeff Davis County in 1907 and stayed there the rest of his life.

  Gillett gave more to the Rangers than his service. In 1921, he wrote and self-published his memoir, Six Years with the Texas Rangers, generally regarded as one of the most detailed and readable accounts of nineteenth-century rangering.

  A strict teetotaler, Gillett once boasted that “no man will ever kill me drunk.” No one ever killed him sober, either. He lived well into the twentieth century, dying of heart failure at Temple’s Scott and White Hospital in 1937.

  Oh, how I wish I had the power to describe the wonderful country as I saw it then! How happy I am now in my old age that I am a native Texan and saw the grand frontier before it was marred by the hand of man.

  –James B. Gillett, Six Years with the Texas Rangers

  The grave of Ranger-memoirist James B. Gillett, Marfa. Photo by Mike Cox.

  Visit: Marfa Cemetery, 210 West San Antonio Street (U.S. 90). Marfa and Presidio County Museum, 110 West San Antonio Street. Old Presidio County Jail (1886), 310 Highland Street.

  JACK HAYS: TRAIL BLAZER

  As a ranger captain, Jack Hays spent most of his time in Central Texas fighting Indians or invading Mexican soldiers. But after the Mexican War, the San Antonio business community commissioned him to map a route from the Alamo City to Chihuahua City, Mexico.

  Hays left San Antonio on August 27, 1848, for Enchanted Rock in Gillespie County, where Captain Samuel Highsmith and thirty-seven rangers joined him. They left on September 5, crossing the Devils River (which Hays named) and the Pecos. In the mountainous Big Bend, the trailblazers got lost and at one point went nearly two weeks without food.

  Fifty days out of San Antonio, Hays and the rangers reached Presidio, on the Rio Grande. From there, the road to Chihuahua City was better known, so they had essentially accomplished their mission. The men recuperated at the private fort of pioneer Big Bend settler Ben Leaton before returning to San Antonio. The old fort has been restored as Fort Leaton State Historic Site.

  Visit: Fort Leaton State Historic Site, 16951 Farm to Market Road 170, Presidio.

  Shafter

  The Presidio and Cibola Mining Company had three hundred men working its silver mine at Shafter during the last decade of the nineteenth century. With money being made one way, other capitalists—whiskey sellers, gamblers and prostitutes—came to town to make money another way.

  Twenty-two-year-old Ranger John R. Gravis and three other local and federal officers constituted the town’s ad hoc police force, and they kept busy. Gravis and a Presidio County deputy sheriff had the watch the night of August 4, 1890, when a group of drunk Mexican miners started shooting up the town. As the two officers approached, the pistol-packing drunks opened up on the ranger and his colleague. Gravis fell dead; the deputy went down with an arm wound.

  When word reached the Ranger camp at Marfa the next morning, Captain Frank Jones ordered his men to saddle up and made the forty-three-mile ride south to Shafter in less than six hours. The state lawmen rounded up numerous suspects and packed the young ranger’s body back to Marfa for shipment by train to his home community of Laredo for burial.

  Ruins at the old mining town of Shafter, a once tough town where two rangers died. Photo by Mike Cox.

  Visit: Production at the mine slowed in the early twentieth century. It closed for good in 1942, and Shafter quickly became a ghost town. While Ranger Gravis lies elsewhere, former ranger and longtime Presidio County lawman Robert Sneed is buried in the Brooks family section of the old Shafter cemetery, just east of town. Like Gravis a half century earlier, Sneed was shot to death in Shafter. A local package store owner was convicted of having killed the lawman on New Year’s Day 1940, but the jury saw fit to assess the shooter only a five-year suspended sentence. There’s a small museum at the Shafter Cemetery.

  Valentine

  EVEN THE MULES GOT SICK

  Former ranger Joe Sitters died hard in a hard country.

  The Medina County native joined Frontier Battalion Company D on August 1, 1893, just before he turned thirty and served until October 25, 1896. Later, he worked as a special ranger for the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association and after that rode as a U.S. Customs inspector.

  Sitters put a lot of men in jail and recovered many head of stolen cattle and horses, but he met his match with a Mexican bandit named Chico Cano, whose gang included his two brothers. The former ranger and other officers tried mightily to catch Cano, but the bandit had friends on both sides of the border and always managed to elude arrest, not to mention a bullet.

  Finally, Sitters heard that Cano and his two brothers would be in Texas to attend the wake of a relative who had died. Sitters and several other officers decided to drop by and pay their respects. They got Cano, but the others escaped.

  The next day, February 10, 1913, as Sitters and two other officers rode with their prisoner toward the Marfa jail, the rest of Cano’s band ambushed them. That left a fellow customs inspector dead and Sitters recovering from a bullet wound to his head. The third lawman also suffered a serious wound. Now it was personal.

  Back in the saddle again, figuratively and literally, on May 21, 1915, Sitters, Ranger Eugene Hulen and several other rangers and peace officers rode out of Valentine looking for stolen horses. They correctly figured that Cano would be the one leading the missing rem
uda toward Mexico.

  Three days later, following a trail Sitters should have realized was too easy, they saw horses in a box canyon. Sitters divided the posse, sending most of the men riding up the upper edge of the canyon while he and Hulen entered the canyon to check the horses. And for the second, and final, time, Sitters rode right into an ambush set by Cano.

  Bandits hidden in the rocks above opened fire on the exposed lawmen. Hulen got off only one shot before falling dead. But Sitters, good with a gun and a tough man, lasted about four hours, probably until he ran out of ammunition.

  The other lawmen, after trying unsuccessfully to reach their colleagues, rode to a ranch ten miles away to get help. When they returned, they found the mutilated bodies of Sitters and Hulen. Sitters had been shot eleven times, his head smashed with a large rock. The bodies were in such bad shape that the mules carrying them out of the canyon retched.

  A Presidio County grand jury indicted Cano for the two murders, but he was never arrested. He died of natural causes on August 28, 1943 at fifty-six. He is buried in Cedillos, Mexico, in a grave now unmarked.

  Retired Texas Ranger Joe Davis near where former ranger Joe Sitter and Ranger Eugene Hulen died in an ambush in 1915. Photo by Mike Cox.

  Valentine, Texas grave of Joe Sitter, a former ranger who died hard in a hard country. Photo by Mike Cox.

  The portable jail at Candelaria in Presidio County held many a ranger’s prisoner. Photo by Mike Cox.

  Visit: The ambush occurred on the present Coal Mine Ranch in Presidio County. The ranch accommodates paid hunters during hunting season but is not open to the public. Sitters is buried in the Valentine Cemetery in Jeff Davis County. Hulen (1876–1915) is buried in Fairview Cemetery, 710 Fair Avenue, Gainesville.

  REEVES COUNTY

  Toyah

  NOT-SO-PEACEFUL PEACE OFFICERS

  Sixty-year-old John Morris had already killed two men as a deputy sheriff in Erath County before his election in 1883 as Reeves County’s first sheriff.

  Sheriffs and Frontier Battalion rangers usually cooperated in the pursuit of law and order, but sometimes county peace officers comported themselves unlawfully and downright disorderly. Morris, for one, drank too much and had an attitude. He didn’t much care for ranger captain J.T. Gillespie and his men, stationed at Toyah, and the feeling ran mutual.

  On August 18, 1885, Morris took the train from Pecos to Toyah. Alighting drunk from one of the passenger cars, he headed to the Favorite Saloon and proceeded to get drunker. Gillespie sent a sergeant and three rangers to disarm and detain the sheriff until he sobered up, but when the ranger sergeant asked Morris for his gun, the county lawman pulled it and started shooting.

  Ranger Thomas P. Nigh fell dead with Morris’s second shot (the first missed), and the surviving three state lawmen put five rounds in the sheriff, irrevocably removing him from office.

  Visit: Once a bustling division point on the Texas and Pacific Railroad, Toyah today is practically a ghost town. With movie set–like vacant buildings, the town is twenty-two miles southwest of Pecos off Interstate 20. Ranger Nigh reportedly was buried at Toyah, but his grave location is unknown. His only memorial is in cyberspace, where he is listed on the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Memorial page at txdps.state.tx.us.

  West of the Pecos Museum, 120 East Dot Stafford Street, Pecos. The museum occupies the old Orient Hotel (1904) and the former Number 11 Saloon (1896). Bullet holes from a gunfight in the saloon are still visible. The hotel accommodated many a ranger over the years.

  SAN SABA COUNTY

  San Saba

  “NOTHING LESS THAN A MURDER SOCIETY”

  The violence that gripped San Saba County in the 1890s led to more murders than any other of Texas’s many bloody feuds. Forty-three homicides have been credited to a wave of vigilantism attributed to what came to be called the San Saba “Mob.” One early-day writer called it “nothing less than a murder society.”

  Four rangers under Sergeant W. John L. Sullivan arrived in San Saba in June 1896 to deal with the trouble. Despite two hung juries, with the help of a fearless prosecutor and a gutsy local newspaper editor, the rangers succeeded in getting the worst member of the lawless crowd prosecuted and sent to prison for life. It took the rangers (others would take part in addition to the original five) and local authorities fourteen months to break up the mob, mostly just by their menacing presence.

  The final assertion of Ranger control came when a drunk Mob member with a rifle confronted Ranger Dudley Barker outside the courthouse. Barker pulled his revolver and put five bullets in him. It likely would have been six bullets, but for safety’s sake, the ranger always kept the chamber under the hammer empty.

  In the history of the Frontier Battalion since 1874, it has yet to be shown that the Rangers have ever been routed, or withdrawn from their post of duty, and I expect that before very long a different feeling will exist in San Saba and adjoining counties.

  –Adjutant General W.H. Mabry to District Attorney W.C. Linden,

  May 17, 1897

  Visit: The courthouse outside of which Ranger Barker killed one Mob member was razed in 1910. A historical marker summarizing the violent period stands outside the “new” 1911 courthouse, East Commerce and South Water Streets. The only surviving building directly connected to the Mob days is the 1884 county jail that held Ranger prisoners at times. The two-story stone lockup continues in use. A 1969 historical marker tells about the structure. San Saba Historical Museum, Mill Pond Park, U.S. 190, half a mile east of courthouse.

  TOM GREEN COUNTY

  San Angelo

  ONE-ARMED RANGER V. THE TENTH CAVALRY

  Like all towns adjacent to frontier military installations, Saint Angela offered Fort Concho’s soldiers all the whiskey and women they could pay for.

  No matter the town’s economic dependence on the post, the citizenry and soldiers had a shaky relationship. In 1881, the garrison served as headquarters of the Tenth Cavalry, a regiment of African American soldiers commanded by white officers. Indians called the black troopers Buffalo Soldiers.

  Trouble came in the wee hours of January 31, 1881, when New York–born Tom McCarty, brother of an area sheep rancher, shot and killed Private William Watkins outside one of the town’s several saloons. McCarty fled toward the fort, where sentries arrested him. The army kept him overnight in the guardhouse, but in the morning, the sentries turned the prisoner over to Tom Green County sheriff James D. Spears, a former ranger.

  This being the second time inside two weeks that an African American soldier had been killed in not-so-saintly Saint Angela, some of the fort’s black soldiers began making threats. A handbill circulated that read, in part, “If we do not receive justice and fair play…someone will suffer…It has gone too far, justice or death.”

  When McCarty’s look-alike brother showed up in town, rumor spread that the murder suspect had been released from jail. That night, forty armed troopers charged across the river into town, firing 150 rounds into the Nimitz Hotel and several adjacent businesses. Miraculously, only one person suffered a minor wound. Even so, a mutinous contingent of black soldiers had attacked a Texas town.

  An urgent plea went out for rangers. As soon as horseflesh could get them there, twenty-one rangers under Captain Bryan Marsh galloped into town from Colorado City. A hard-drinking ex-rebel, Marsh met with post commander Colonel Benjamin Grierson and threatened to shoot any armed soldiers who tried to cross the Concho into town. When Grierson reminded the ranger that he had more men with guns than Marsh, the captain allowed that he still had enough rangers to shoot anyone who did not follow his orders.

  The incident made national headlines, but no further violence occurred. On a change of venue, McCarty later stood trial in Austin for murder, but a jury acquitted him. He later commited suicide in Detroit, Michigan.

  Visit: The Nimitz Hotel, at the southeast corner of Concho and Chadbourne Streets, was destroyed by fire in 1893. The killing of Private Watkins occurred outside Char
lie Wilson’s saloon, located adjacent to the Nimitz. The vacant six-story Town House Hotel (originally the Naylor Hotel) now covers both sites. Fort Concho, abandoned in 1889, is one of the best-preserved former cavalry posts in the West with twenty-three original and restored buildings. Fort Concho National Historic Landmark, 630 South Oaks Street.

  VAL VERDE COUNTY

  Langtry

  JERSEY LILLY SALOON

  Judge Roy Bean, the flamboyant so-called Law West of the Pecos, got his title because he served as justice of the peace for the Val Verde County precinct that included Langtry, a rowdy railroad town originally known as Eagle’s Nest. With a makeshift office, law library (one book of Texas statutes) and courtroom in his Jersey Lilly Saloon, Bean handled the paperwork when rangers filed criminal charges against those arrested in and around Langtry. The judge famously once fined a dead man for carrying a pistol, the amount due the court being identical to the coin and cash found on the deceased. Seldom sober as a judge, Bean died in 1906.

  There is the worst collection of roughs, gamblers, robbers and pickpockets…here [Eagle’s Nest] that I have ever saw, and without the immediate presence of the state [Rangers] this class would prove a great detriment towards the completion of the [rail] road.

  –Ranger report to headquarters, 1882

  Visit: Judge Roy Bean Visitor Center, Langtry. The restored Jersey Lilly stands adjacent to the visitors’ center operated by the Texas Department of Transportation. Bean’s grave is on the grounds of the Whitehead Memorial Museum, 1308 South Main Street, Del Rio.

  FITZIMMONS-MAHER PRIZEFIGHT

  Highly hyping the proposed bout, in 1896, a promoter began touting a boxing match in El Paso pitting Robert James Fitzsimmons against heavyweight champion James J. Corbett. Unfortunately for its promoter, prizefighting was illegal in Texas, and the governor sent a trainload of rangers to the City of the Pass to make sure no fists swung there for money. Then Corbett decided to hang up his figurative gloves (fighting was bare knuckle back then) and designated pugilist Peter Maher as his successor. But where to have the fight remained a problem.