Gunfights & Sites in Texas Ranger History

by Mike Cox

  Despite all the hardware toted around by both sides, the rangers spent most of their time posing for photographs and target shooting. The incident got international publicity and supposedly helped embolden Adolf Hitler by supporting his theory that internal strife had weakened the U.S.

  The bridge continued in use until 1995. The Texas Department of Transportation donated a segment of the old span to Colbert, Oklahoma, for its city park. A 1998 historical marker explains the unusual incident.

  Visit: The marker stands outside the Texas Travel Information Center on U.S. 69/75, 1 mile south of the Red River. Colbert, Oklahoma, is 8 miles northeast of Denison and 3.8 miles east of U.S. 69/77 on Oklahoma 91. The park is at North Timothy and Davidson Streets. Sherman Historical Museum, 301 South Walnut Street, Sherman.

  HARDEMAN COUNTY

  Quanah

  FINDING CYNTHIA ANN

  The rangers and cavalrymen rode into a cold north wind, following a trail their guides said would lead to a Comanche village. It was December 19, 1860.

  Captain Sul Ross and his rangers hoped to punish warriors who had been killing and stealing in the northwestern counties, but none expected to make history that day. When the armed men topped a rise along the Pease River in present Hardeman County near future Quanah, they saw a small collection of Indian huts and charged. Taken by surprise, the Indians tried to flee, but the rangers and soldiers rode them down and killed several. Someone—accounts vary—had aimed at an Indian wrapped in a buffalo robe when she turned, bared her breasts and held up a baby. “Americano!” she screamed.

  Nearly a quarter of a century had passed since that spring morning in 1836 when Indians overwhelmed Fort Parker, killing five settlers and taking one woman and three children captive. All but one of those taken had been accounted for—blonde-haired, blue-eyed Cynthia Ann Parker. Tragic as it had been, the East Texas massacre had virtually been forgotten and plenty of blood spilled since. Even the Parker family, though they had tried hard to find her, had given up hope.

  The rangers held their fire and rode closer. It was an Anglo woman, and she had blue eyes.

  Quanah Museum visitor and Parker descendant Beverly Waak sights down the barrel of Comanche chief Quanah Parker’s rifle. Cynthia Ann Parker was his mother. Photo by Mike Cox.

  Quanah Parker monument in front of the Hardeman County Courthouse in the town named in honor of the Comanche chief, son of Cynthia Ann Parker.

  Returning to Camp Cooper, a military post in what is now Throckmorton County, the rangers turned the woman and her young daughter over to the army. No one knew yet who she was, only that she belonged with her family. But it was too late. Cynthia Ann Parker had just lost the only family and culture that she knew.

  Visit: Two historical markers discuss the battle. A 1936 granite marker stands five miles east of Crowell on U.S. 70. The marker notes that the fight occurred four miles to the north. The battle site is on private property. A second marker stands in the Crowell city park.

  Captain Sul Ross and his rangers rescued Comanche captive Cynthia Ann Parker along the Pease River in 1860. Photo by Mike Cox.

  SHOOTOUT AT THE DEPOT

  Captain Bill McDonald relied more on bluster than bullets, but on December 9, 1893, the ranger got into a gunfight in downtown Quanah. His opponent? Childress County sheriff John P. Matthews.

  At first, just McDonald and Matthews fired at each other, but two of Matthews’s friends soon joined in. When one round tore into the ranger and temporarily paralyzed his right hand, he cocked his six-shooter with his teeth. After the shooting stopped, both officers had life-threatening wounds. Friends took Matthews back to his county, where he lingered until December 30 before dying. The sheriff would have died the day McDonald shot him, but a notebook and two plugs of tobacco stopped two bullets from tearing into his heart. McDonald had a long convalescence but finally recovered. Though tried for murder, a jury acquitted him.

  Visit: The shootout started in front of the old First National Bank building in the 100 block of Mercer Street at Third and continued a block to the Fort Worth and Denver Railroad Depot, since razed.

  JAMES THOMAS BIRD (1838–1894)

  When former Frontier Battalion ranger J.T. Bird died in 1894, his widow assuaged her grief by immersing herself in her love of sculpting. A talented woman who wanted to devote her life to her art but never got a chance, Ella Edgar Bird transformed a large hunk of gypsum into an elegant tombstone for her late husband. When finished chiseling and smoothing, she and a family friend hauled the ornate piece from her home in Paducah and had it placed over Bird’s grave. A stone-framed church adorned with a solitary lily and fern wreaths, the monument impressed all who saw it. While Mrs. Bird came to accept that her husband had gone the way of all flesh, over the years, the sculpture she had labored over so arduously slowly melted away, too porous to withstand the elements. Once five feet high, only a few inches of the marker remain.

  Visit: Quanah Memorial Park Cemetery, Prairie Street of Farm Road 2640, just north of town.

  Grave of ranger captain Bill McDonald in Quanah. Photo courtesy Beverly Waak.

  CAPTAIN BILL MCDONALD’S GRAVE

  McDonald left the Rangers in 1907, but he never quit being Captain Bill McDonald. Never opposed to publicity, he clearly enjoyed his reputation and didn’t strain himself to correct exaggerations. Flamboyant (and generally effective in his work) as ever, he served as a state treasury agent, a bodyguard for President Woodrow Wilson and finally as a U.S. marshal. The widower married again in late 1914 but died of pneumonia on January 15, 1918. After a well-attended funeral in Fort Worth, he was returned to Quanah for burial.

  No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and keep[s] on a comin’.

  –McDonald’s oft-quoted motto, carved in his tombstone

  Visit: Quanah Memorial Park Cemetery. Quanah Museum, 105 Green Street. McDonald sometimes booked prisoners in the 1890-vintage Hardeman County, now a museum, 101 Green Street.

  JACK COUNTY

  LOST VALLEY FIGHT

  Major John B. Jones had been good at fighting Yankees but had much to learn about Indian warfare.

  His education began on July 11, 1875, when he and thirty-five rangers found themselves facing more than one hundred well-armed Kiowa warriors bent on revenge.

  Earlier that morning, two of Jones’s men discovered Indian signs. The rangers took up a trail that led to a rugged expanse in Jack County known as Lost Valley. Unknown to the rangers, in following the Indian’s pony tracks, they rode straight into a trap set by Chief Lone Wolf, a savvy headman eager to avenge his son’s death at the hands of cavalry troopers the year before.

  Suddenly, the warriors swept down on the surprised rangers. Overconfident, Jones rallied his men and ordered a charge. But as the rangers galloped toward the Indians, the Kiowas shot thirteen of their horses out from under them. While seeking cover, Ranger William A. “Billy” Glass collected five bullets and fell dead.

  Pulling back to a wooded draw, the rangers formed a line and began firing on their attackers. Bravely but foolishly, Jones stood exposed above his men, directing their aim as Indian bullets clipped tree branches just above his head.

  As the fight settled into a standoff, each side taking an occasional shot, the summer sun bore down. Thirst overpowering good sense, Ranger Dave Bailey collected everyone’s canteen and said he was going to fill them at a nearby water hole. Reluctantly, Jones let Bailey and another ranger go.

  That was another mistake on the major’s part. Some of the Indians swooped in on the two rangers. One escaped. Bailey did not.

  Major John B. Jones and more than thirty rangers came close to a Custer-like massacre at Lost Valley in the summer of 1875. Photo by Mike Cox.

  At about four o’clock, Lone Wolf decided he had extracted his pound of flesh and led his warriors away. Jones quickly dispatched a rider to nearby Fort Richardson, and soon, one hundred cavalrymen rode in pursuit of the Indians, but they got away. The rangers lo
st two men killed, two wounded and nearly half their horses, but it could have been much worse.

  After killing [Bailey,] they scalped him, carving him up like a beef steak and then taking the butt end of their guns and stamping his skull and brains in the ground in sight of the Major and the boys.

  –Ranger William Callicott

  Visit: A 1970 historical marker stands at a roadside park with a view of Lost Valley twelve miles north of Jacksboro on U.S. 281. Ranger Glass is buried in a private cemetery on the Mallard Ranch, west of Alvord in Wise County. Take U.S. 287 north of Alvord and turn left on County Road 1590. The cemetery is 0.7 miles west of the intersection of County Road 1590 and County Road 1591. The location of Ranger Bailey’s grave has not been determined.

  OLDHAM COUNTY

  Tascosa

  A BULLET SPOILS THE MOOD

  Ed King had been a ranger, sort of. He and eight other men under Pat Garrett, the man who killed Billy the Kid, for a time held ranger commissions even though their pay came from the big LS Ranch, not the state treasury. Basically, they rode as hired guns working to prevent cattle rustling.

  Regular rangers under Captain G.W. Arrington and the captain himself periodically spent time in the Panhandle town of Tascosa, but with only one small company for the whole top of Texas, they never stayed long.

  Garrett left the LS Rangers in 1885, less than a year after their formation, and they were disbanded. King and most of his colleagues stayed in the Panhandle, just plain cowboys except for drinking and carousing excessively. But they were not bulletproof. When King stole another fellow’s girl, a bullet in the face (and another in the neck) ended the romance—and him.

  While little known today, the March 21, 1886 Tascosa gunfight involving King, some of his pals, a saloon owner and gun-toting cowboys was for a time more famous than Arizona’s O.K. Corral shootout. At the conclusion of the “ball,” as rangers and cowboys sometimes euphemized gunplay, four men would soon occupy Tascosa’s Boot Hill cemetery: King, Jesse Sheets (killed by accident), Frederick Douglas Chilton and Frank Valley. In addition, two participants suffered serious wounds. Three men eventually stood trial for murder, but juries acquitted them.

  When the railroad bypassed Tascosa, the once busy community declined and eventually became a ghost town. Amarillo businessman and former pro wrestler Cal Farley purchased the site in 1939 and built it into the nationally known Cal Farley’s Boy’s Ranch. All that remains of Tascosa is the stone two-story 1884 Oldham County Courthouse and Boot Hill Cemetery.

  Visit: Twenty-two miles north of Vega off U.S. 385 at 134 Dodge City Trail. Old Tascosa Courthouse-Julian Bivins Museum, Boy’s Ranch.

  PARKER COUNTY

  Weatherford

  ISAAC PARKER (1793–1883)

  Isaac Parker never gave up trying to find his niece Cynthia Ann.

  One of elder John Parker’s sons, Isaac Parker fought in the Texas Revolution, riding as a ranger under Elisha Clapp. After the war, he became a senator in the Republic of Texas Congress and, following statehood, won election to the state senate. As a member of the legislature, in 1855 he passed the bill creating the county named in his honor.

  After rangers recaptured his niece from the Comanches in 1860, Parker took her and her young daughter to his home and did all he could to help her readjust, even sponsoring legislation granting her a pension and land. He moved from Tarrant County to Parker County in 1872 and remained there the rest of his long life. A granite historical marker in his honor was placed in 1936, with a more detailed marker erected in 1986 near his grave.

  Visit: From Weatherford, take Farm to Market Road 730 northeast 5 miles, turn south on Ragle Road (at Cedar Fork Church) and continue 1.4 miles to Turner Cemetery, on the east side of the road through a cattle guard. Doss Heritage and Culture Center, 1400 Texas Drive, Weatherford.

  SHACKELFORD COUNTY

  OLD FORT GRIFFIN

  Fort Griffin (garrisoned 1867–81) gave rise to a nearby town of the same name, though it became more notoriously known as “The Flat.” Full of buffalo hunters, gunfighters, gamblers and prostitutes, for a time it was one of the wildest, wooliest places in the Old West. Federal troops lacking civilian law enforcement authority, rangers under Captain George Washington Arrington established a camp there in July 1878. The captain and his men remained about a year before moving farther northwest to bring law and order to the Panhandle.

  With the soldiers gone, the buffalo hunted out and the railroad having bypassed the town, the community of Fort Griffin became a ghost town, a collection of crumbling ruins surrounded by large ranches.

  During this period street duels between the officers and lawless men, especially in the Flat around the fort, was almost a daily occurrence. But the local authorities, aided by Captain Arrington and a company of Texas Rangers, made it a losing game for the vicious characters.

  –Edgar Rye, The Quirt and the Spur (1909)

  Visit: Fort Griffin State Historic Site, fifteen miles north of Albany at 1701 North U.S. 283.

  SOMERVELL COUNTY

  Glen Rose

  MOONSHINE AND MURDER

  Illegal production and sale of alcoholic beverages ranked as Somervell County’s top “cash crop” during Prohibition.

  But rangers descended on the county on August 25, 1923. By sundown, twenty-seven locals languished in county jail, including the sheriff and county attorney. Twenty-three destroyed stills stood on display outside the courthouse along with stacks of confiscated booze. The cleanup continued most of the week, one bootlegger forever put out of business when he fired on the rangers.

  While rangers had definitely disrupted the making and selling of moonshine, adjudication proved more difficult. The state’s key witness would be twenty-eight-year-old World War I veteran James Watson, who had collected information as an undercover agent. Of course, for convictions to result, he had to be able to testify. Realizing the married father of two could be in danger, the rangers stashed him at a boardinghouse for safekeeping.

  The former county attorney’s trial began on February 20, 1924. That night, someone fired a twelve-gauge shotgun through the window of the boardinghouse where the star witness had been staying and forevermore disqualified his testimony. Rangers quickly rounded up fifteen suspects, including the likely triggerman, but justice proved not only blind, she couldn’t hear or talk. Officers charged six men in the undercover lawman’s murder, but no witnesses could be found and no convictions would be forthcoming. And as soon as things settled down, moonshining and bootlegging resumed until the so-called Noble Experiment ended.

  Visit: Built in 1893 on Bernard Street between Elm and Walnut in Glen Rose, the two-story limestone county courthouse where rangers and the soon-tobe-dead Watson appeared in court for only one day remains in use. The 1884 rock jail where the rangers booked their prisoners was demolished in the early 1930s to make room for a new lockup. Somervell County Museum, Elm and Vernon Streets, Glen Rose.

  TARRANT COUNTY

  Arlington

  MIDDLETON TATE JOHNSON (1810–1866)

  Johnson got a county named after himself and is considered the father of Tarrant County, but he proved an embarrassment to his friend, Governor Sam Houston. In 1860, the governor counted on Johnson to deal a heavy blow to the Indians who had been terrorizing northwestern Texas, but his efforts proved futile.

  Houston commissioned Johnson to lead a large force of Rangers—a small army compared with usual Ranger numbers—to take on the Indians. Johnson assembled more than seven hundred rangers, but they never found any hostile Indians.

  Not that Johnson hadn’t proven himself in the past. The fifty-year-old South Carolinian had been in Texas since 1839. He was among the Republic of Texas troops involved in quelling a civil disturbance in Shelby County called the Regular-Moderator War, had ridden with Jack Hays during the Mexican War and later commanded a ranger company in Tarrant County. But when Houston called on him to bring safety to settlers in Jack, Parker, Palo Pinto and Young Counties, Johnson�
�s force did little more than drill and sit around camp awaiting decisive orders that never came.

  Part of the problem was that Johnson had fallen in love with Houston’s niece. Rather than devoting his full energy to pursuing Indians, Johnson spent a lot of time away from camp wooing the younger woman, his mind definitely not on rangering.

  Middleton Tate Johnson let his love life get in the way of rangering. Engraving courtesy Tarrant County Junior College.

  Houston finally gave up and disbanded the unit. Johnson’s courtship led to marriage, but he only got six years with his new wife. He died on May 15, 1866, in Austin and was buried in the State Cemetery, but three years later, his body was returned to Tarrant County for reburial in his plantation cemetery. A 1936 granite historical marker stands near his final resting place along with another marker placed in 1986.

  Visit: Johnson Plantation Cemetery, 1100 block of West Mayfield Street and South Cooper (Farm to Marker Road 157), Arlington.

  TOP O’ HILL TERRACE

  A once flourishing casino midway between Fort Worth and Dallas ended the career of one well-known ranger captain while furthering the reputation of another.

  When Beulah Adams Marshall bought land along the Bankhead Highway in the early 1920s, she opened a tearoom popular with socialites. But when Fred and Mary Browning purchased the property in 1926 during Prohibition, they soon offered stronger libations—beer and liquor. They also opened an illegal casino, complete with a secret room for hiding gambling paraphernalia during raids and an escape tunnel for the convenience of staff and prominent Fort Worth–Dallas residents who might find public exposure embarrassing. As if an invisible dome of exclusion from the law covered the place (it was surrounded by a fence with an alarm system and guarded gate), the Top O’ Hill also featured a brothel. And only a short distance away, the Arlington Downs racetrack guaranteed a steady customer base.