Gunfights & Sites in Texas Ranger History

by Mike Cox

  Judge Roy Bean, figuring to greatly boost the sale of alcoholic beverages at his Jersey Lilly Saloon, where business had slowed considerably since the heady days of railroad construction that had brought him to Langtry, announced he would host the contest on a sandbar in the Rio Grande. That, technically, would allow the fight to take place in the absence of any state or nation’s laws. Just to make sure the match did not occur in the Lone Star State, numerous rangers rode the train carrying the fighters and their fans to Val Verde County.

  On February 22, with the rangers enjoying the fisticuffs as well as anyone, the much ballyhooed main event lasted all of ninety-five seconds before Fitzsimmons KO-ed Maher. A 2006 historical marker stands near the site.

  Visit: Flooding has long since washed away the sandbar where the international prizefight took place. The historical marker is on Torres Avenue and Texas 25 Loop, Langtry.

  NORTH TEXAS

  ARCHER COUNTY

  STONE HOUSE FIGHT OR BATTLE OF THE KNOBS?

  Archer and Wise Counties both claim the same Indian fight, one in which ten rangers died. Only the Alamo with its “Immortal 32” claimed more ranger lives.

  While confusion exists about where the fight occurred, the facts are not disputed:

  In November 1837, ranger lieutenant A.B. Von Benthuysen led fifteen men in pursuit of a raiding party that had stolen horses. When the rangers encountered the Indians on November 10, one ranger shot without orders and killed an Indian. At that, 150 or so enraged warriors charged the Texans near a geologic formation located either in Archer County (known as the Stone House) or in Wise County (known as the Knobs).

  The rangers battled the Indians for ninety minutes, losing four men. Finally, the Indians set fire to the prairie grass hoping to trap the remaining rangers. The lieutenant courageously led his men through the smoke and flames, but in the process, six more rangers died. Left afoot, Von Benthuysen and five other survivors made their escape.

  Ten rangers were killed by Indians in a fierce battle believed to have occurred near this geologic formation in Archer County called the Stone House. Photo by Mike Cox.

  Visit: A historical marker placed in 1970 claiming the fight for Archer County stands ten miles south of Windthorst on State Highway 16. The 1967 marker saying the battle happened in Wise County stands two miles northwest of Decatur on U.S. 287.

  ARCHER COUNTY COPPER MINES

  Rangers did more than scout for Indians. While trailing Comanches in future Archer County in 1860, ranger captain Sul Ross noticed what looked like copper ore and gathered samples. Analysis proved him correct, and during the Civil War, ore from the area went downstate for use in manufacturing firearm percussion caps. Copper mining continued intermittently in the county through the remainder of the nineteenth century, but no large deposits were ever found, and mining in the area eventually ceased.

  Visit: State Highway 25, four and a half miles northwest of Archer City. Archer County Historical Museum, 400 West Pecan Street, Archer City.

  ARMSTRONG COUNTY

  Goodnight

  CHARLES GOODNIGHT, TEXAS RANGER

  As a young man, Charles Goodnight rode as a ranger and also served as a scout. But he was much more than that. In fact, some historians credit him with practically inventing the Western cattle industry. While that’s a bit broad, he stands as one of Texas’s—and the West’s—most important historical figures.

  Born in Illinois in 1836, Goodnight came to Texas with his family when he was nine. He later rode with a volunteer ranger company in the upper Brazos River valley and at twenty-four worked as a ranger scout. Goodnight put Captain Sul Ross’s rangers on the trail that led to the Comanche village on the Pease River where they recaptured Cynthia Ann Parker in 1860. During the Civil War, he signed up with a ranger company operating out of Fort Belknap in Young County.

  Goodnight eventually settled in Palo Duro Canyon and soon helped build the famous JA Ranch. Earlier, he had pioneered the trail-driving era in developing the Goodnight-Loving trail with his friend Oliver Loving. Novelist Larry McMurtry used elements of Goodnight’s story, particularly his relationship with Loving, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Lonesome Dove.

  A trailblazer both literally and figuratively, Goodnight did everything from inventing the mobile cowboy kitchen known as the chuckwagon to producing a silent western film using real Indians. He also helped save the American bison from extinction. He died in 1929 at ninety-three.

  Visit: Goodnight’s 1877 house has been restored, now part of the Charles Goodnight Historical Center and J. Evetts Haley Visitors Center at 4901 County Road 25. Goodnight and wife Mary Ann are buried in the Goodnight Cemetery, still surrounded by prairie. Years ago, some cowboy tied his bandana to the fence around the grave to show his respect, and the tradition has continued. Armstrong County Museum, 120 North Trice Street, Claude. Panhandle Plains Historical Museum, 2503 Fourth Street, Canyon.

  COLLIN COUNTY

  McKinney

  SAM BASS TRAIN ROBBERY SITE

  Bandit Sam Bass and gang members Seaborn Barnes, Frank Jackson, “Arkansas” Johnson and Henry Underwood robbed a Texas and Pacific train at McKinney on April 10, 1878. They netted $152 but missed a hidden shipment of $30,000.

  Earlier that year, on February 22, at the nearby Allen depot, Bass and his cohorts pulled the first train robbery in Texas history. The gang held up two other trains and a couple stagecoaches—all near Dallas—before heading south to hit a bank in Round Rock. With the rangers on their trail, that proved very bad planning.

  Visit: A historical marker placed in 1968 at Heritage Plaza, 200 block of West Main, McKinney, details the McKinney holdup. Allen Heritage Depot Museum, 100 Main Street, Allen. The museum shows a nicely done video documenting Bass’s North Texas capers.

  COOKE COUNTY

  Gainesville

  TOM HICKMAN (1886–1962)

  Tom Hickman had a big smile, but he frowned on crime. Well, most crime. Like a lot of rangers of his time, he thought state lawmen were better suited for investigating armed robbery and murder than lesser offenses like gambling.

  A native of Marysville, a small Cooke County community, Hickman joined the Rangers in 1919. Having risen to captain, in 1926, he and former ranger Stewart Stanley confronted and killed two robbers leaving the Red River National Bank in Clarksville. A year later, the captain coordinated the manhunt for three of the four men who pulled off one of the most famous holdups in Texas history, the Santa Claus bank robbery in Cisco.

  Never shy around cameras or in making public appearances, in 1929, the affable lawman agreed to take on a theatrical role in a play produced by the Gainesville Little Theater, The Bad Man. Not having to study hard for his role, he portrayed a ranger.

  Ranger captain Tom Hickman’s grave in Gainesville’s Fairview Cemetery. Photo by Mike Cox.

  Hickman left the Rangers under a cloud of scandal in 1935, shortly after the creation of the Texas Department of Public Safety. He had been dispatched to Fort Worth to raid a well-known gambling joint, but someone tipped off the operators. Who dropped the dime was never determined, but Hickman got forced out as head of the Rangers. However, in 1956, Governor Allan Shivers vindicated his name by appointing him to the state’s Public Safety Commission, the then three-member policy-setting body for the DPS.

  Visit: Hickman is buried in Fairview Cemetery, 710 Fair Avenue. Morton Museum, 210 South Dixon Street, Gainesville.

  DALLAS COUNTY

  Dallas

  JOHN RILEY DUNCAN (1850–1911)

  A Dallas police officer before joining the Rangers as an undercover operative, Duncan posed as an itinerant farm hand in Gonzales County and learned that wanted killer John Wesley Hardin had split for Alabama, where he lived under an assumed name. While Ranger John B. Armstrong nabbed Hardin in Florida, the outlaw might have dodged the law even longer, or possibly forever, had it not been for Duncan. In 1990, the National Association for Outlaw and Lawman History (now the Wild West History Association) placed
a new marker on Duncan’s grave noting that he “Got Wes Hardin.” A horseback ranger, Duncan died in a decidedly modern way—an automobile accident.

  Visit: Greenwood Cemetery, 3020 Oak Grove Avenue.

  STATE FAIR PARK RANGER CABIN

  Built at Fair Park as part of the 1936 Texas Centennial, a log replica of a ranger cabin used initially as the headquarters for Company B later became a Department of Public Safety driver’s license office. The DPS vacated the building in May 1963, and it was torn down that August.

  Visit: Fair Park, 1300 Robert B. Cullum Boulevard.

  Old Company B ranger headquarters on the State Fair of Texas grounds in Dallas, since torn down. Author’s collection.

  “One Riot, One Ranger” statue on its way to Dallas’s Love Field in 1961. Photo courtesy Dallas Public Library, History and Archives Division.

  “ONE RIOT, ONE RANGER”

  The watchful, twelve-foot-tall bronze ranger statue standing at busy Love Field since 1961 reflects the force’s mythology in its simple inscription, “One Riot, One Ranger.” The Dallas Historical Commission paid San Antonio sculptress Waldine Tauch $15,683 for the public art piece. Impressive though they are, the four famous words carved beneath the ranger are not based on reality. The apocryphal story is that a worried city mayor (pick a town or occasion) wired the governor for a company of rangers to quell a riot. When the official met the train from Austin, only one lanky state lawman stepped down from a passenger car. “Where are the other rangers?” the startled mayor asked. “You ain’t got but one riot, do you?” the ranger supposedly drawled.

  Visit: Main terminal, Love Field, 8008 Herb Kelleher Way.

  WHERE’S LONE WOLF GONZAULLAS?

  One of the state’s most-noted ranger captains is missing.

  When longtime lawman Manuel T. “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas died in 1977, a huge crowd of retired and current rangers attended his funeral in Dallas. His remains were cremated and supposedly placed in Big D’s sprawling Sparkman-Hillcrest Memorial Park Cemetery, but the cemetery has no record of him.

  Born in Spain on July 4, 1891, to a Canadian mother and Spanish father, Gonzaullas lost his parents to the catastrophic 1900 Galveston hurricane. Joining the Rangers in 1920, he served until fired in 1933 by Governor Miriam Ferguson, who wanted her own rangers. Two years later, the newly organized DPS hired Gonzaullas to set up its new crime lab. In 1940, he opted to return to the Rangers. He retired in 1951 as Company B captain.

  The best theory on the missing remains is that before the ranger’s widow joined him in death on August 15, 1978, she scattered his ashes—somewhere. The couple had no children.

  In my opinion, Gonzaullas will go down in history as one of the great Rangers of all time.

  –DPS director Colonel Homer Garrison, 1963

  Captain Manuel “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas’s ashes are missing. Author’s collection.

  Visit: Unknown. The cemetery where he is supposed to be buried is at 7405 W. Northwest Highway.

  DONLEY COUNTY

  Clarendon

  CALVIN ATEN (1868–1939)

  What happened on Christmas Day 1889 defined Cal Aten’s career as a Frontier Battalion ranger and may have been what caused him to leave the force.

  Rangers Aten, John R. Hughes and Bazz Outlaw, along with civilian posse members, tracked two gun-happy outlaws wanted for murder and cattle theft—Will and Alvin Odle—to a cabin near Bull Head Mountain in Edwards County. The brief official report had the pair resisting arrest, but as Aten later wrote to brother (and former ranger) Ira, the killing was nothing but a “plain legal assassination.”

  Alvin Odle died in Aten’s arms.

  Whatever impact the killings had on his decision, Aten left the rangers on August 31, 1890. He served for a time as a deputy constable in Round Rock, where he met the woman he would marry. From Central Texas the couple moved to the Panhandle, where he hired on with the Escarbada Division of the XIT Ranch. Later, Aten ranched in Oldham County and then moved to a ranch near Lelia Lake in Donley County. His final law enforcement job came during World War I, when he served as a Loyalty Ranger. He died in 1939.

  There would have been someone else assassinated if we hadn’t got in the first shots.

  –Cal Aten to Ira Aten, December 12, 1936

  Visit: Citizens Cemetery, one mile south of Clarendon on State Highway 70. Saint’s Roost Museum, 610 East Harrington Street.

  DENTON COUNTY

  Denton

  JOHN B. DENTON (1806–1841)

  After the shooting stopped and the Indians had fled, Edward Tarrant’s order passed from ranger to ranger—gather for roll call. To the elected general’s surprise and relief, every man answered. A dozen or so had been unhorsed, and some stood bareheaded, their hats shot off or otherwise lost, but despite the ferocious fighting, no one had died.

  Captain John B. Denton believed the Indians had not gone far and requested permission to take ten men on a scout. What came to be called the Battle of Village Creek had ended, but the day had not. Tarrant gave his assent, warning Denton to be careful.

  The captain, a Methodist minister when not rangering, rode out with his men to reconnoiter, soon followed by another ten men and their captain. Riding up Village Creek, the rangers suddenly began taking fire from Indians concealed in the trees along its banks. Denton fell dead from his horse, and two other rangers suffered wounds.

  The following day, May 25, 1841, the rangers buried Denton under a tree near a creek about twenty-five miles from the battle site. There he lay for the next fifteen years before some boys discovered an unmarked grave on Olive Creek. Rancher John Chishum recalled hearing about Denton’s burial from his father and exhumed the remains. Chishum found someone who had been in the fight, and he identified the remnants of the blanket that Denton had been wrapped in. The rancher put the bones in a box, hoping he could find someone related to Denton so the slain ranger could have a more proper final resting place. Unsuccessful, he reburied the bones on his property. At the turn of the twentieth century, Denton’s bones made one more trip—the county Old Settler’s Association had him reinterred on the courthouse square.

  Visit: The 1896 Denton County Courthouse stands at 110 West Hickory Street. Denton’s grave, the only courthouse burial in Texas, lies in an enclosure with a 1901-vintage marker as well as one placed in 1936. Courthouse-onthe-Square Museum, in the courthouse.

  ERATH COUNTY

  Thurber

  CORPORATE PEACEKEEPERS HIT TOWN

  The growing labor movement in the late nineteenth century periodically diverted rangers from their more traditional law enforcement duties.

  When miners struck the Texas and Pacific Coal Company at Thurber in September 1888, company officials did not seek state help until winter. Captain S.A. McMurry arrived on December 12 and stayed through July 8, 1889. On July 5, 1890, the T&P again requested rangers, and McMurry returned on July 10.

  In June 1894, the third time the company asked for rangers, they got Captain Bill McDonald, still recuperating from serious wounds he suffered six months earlier in his shootout with Childress County sheriff John Matthews. The captain met with both labor and management and made it plain he would brook no disorder, and things stayed peaceful.

  With the discovery of oil in West Texas, coal mining had played out by 1926, but Thurber continued as a brick-making town until its abandonment in 1937.

  Visit: Thurber is seventy miles west of Fort Worth on Interstate 20. Take exit 367. W.K Gordon Center for Industrial History of Texas, 65258 Interstate 20, Mingus.

  GRAYSON COUNTY

  Sherman

  A BAD DAY IN SHERMAN

  Rangers did not always succeed in getting their man, quelling a riot or protecting a prisoner.

  One of the darker moments in Ranger history took place in Sherman on May 8, 1930. In a case reminiscent of the situation in To Kill a Mockingbird, a black man had been arrested for sexually assaulting a white woman in Grayson County.

  Fearing a lynching, coun
ty officials requested help from the Rangers. When the case came to trial, ranger captain Frank Hamer and some of his men were there. Testimony had just begun when a mob stormed the courthouse. To protect the defendant, the rangers locked him in the county treasurer’s vault. But then the townspeople torched the courthouse and the rangers fled for their lives, leaving the prisoner behind. As flames consumed the fifty-four-year-old building, the defendant asphyxiated in the vault.

  Not content with having burned down their courthouse and killed the accused rapist, the mob removed his body from the safe, attached a chain around its neck and strung it from a nearby tree. For good measure, they started a fire beneath his corpse.

  A Sherman lynch mob burned down the Grayson County courthouse in 1930 despite the presence of rangers. Author’s collection.

  Grayson County has many historical markers, but none address the riot and lynching. A 2001 marker describing the county’s various courthouses notes only that the “majestic” 1876 courthouse “served the county until it burned in 1930.”

  Visit: The present courthouse is at 100 West Houston Street. The historical marker titled “Courthouses of Grayson County” stands at 300 Houston Street.

  RED RIVER STANDOFF

  In 1931, Oklahoma and Texas had a short-lived armed standoff over a toll bridge spanning the Red River north of Denison. The controversy got settled in court, but when it began, Texas sent a few rangers under Captain Tom Hickman, and Oklahoma dispatched National Guard troops.