by Texas
'But don't you think for one minute that the big owners who have fenced in public land get off scot-free, nosiree. They will be asked
politely to unfence land that contains traditional water supplies They have to provide gates if they've fenced across public roads. And they must not ignore the customary rights of ordinary citizens. But they don't have to do any of these things right away. Government allows them grace periods up to six months, and if they haven't made the alterations by then, they'll be given warnings. When they've ignored such warnings, maybe three years, they'll be severely rebuked in
writin'. Fines 7 jail? For the big owners? You must be jokin'!'
Inexorably the movements launched by Rusk to turn his village into a proper town continued, often in directions he had not anticipated. With the first four keystones in place—store, school, saloon, bank—he was free to turn his attention to the next three: churches, newspaper, railroad. With these he met both success and failure.
Banker Weatherby, also eager to see his town and his bank grow, was instrumental in solving the problem of the churches. 'Earnshaw,' he said one morning when Rusk came in to pay interest on his loan, 'a town does better if it has a core of strong churches.'
'How do we attract them?'
'We have several informal congregations in town right now. They'd be delighted to have free land. Then we'll ask the Fort Worth newspapers to announce that we'll give any recognized religion a free corner lot of its own choosing.'
Weatherby's advice was resoundingly apt, for when this news circulated through Texas eight different churches investigated and six selected their sites and started building. Baptists chose first and nabbed the best spot in the heart of town; Methodists came second; the Presbyterians chose a quiet spot; and the Episcopalians not only selected on the edge of town but also purchased an adjoining lot because they said they liked lots of space for a generous building. The Church of Christ would be satisfied for the first dozen years with a small wooden building, and a group that called themselves Saviors of the Bible erected only a tent.
This was one of the best trade-offs Rusk would make, because the churches brought stability; they encouraged settlers from older towns to move in; and they deposited their collections in the First National Bank of Fort Garner.
When the bank had been in existence for some time, an official arrived from Washington to inform Weatherby that the title he had invented for his establishment could not be so loosely applied: 'You can't go around calling just any old bank a National Bank.
Take that sign down.' While the official was in town he also listened to Rusk's complaint about the name of the place: 'Can thee please inform the government that we want a better name? Fort Garner existed only a few years. It's a silly, militaristic name. Much more appropriate would be Larkin.'
Earnshaw made no headway with his plea, but it did serve as further inspiration for a campaign he would continue for two decades. Whenever he posted a letter he asked the man in charge: 'When does the name-change take place?' And always the postmaster replied: 'That's in the lap of the gods.' The gods were either opposed to the change or forgetful, because the name stayed the same, and this so irritated Earnshaw that he finally wrote a letter to the President:
Mr. President:
1 have tried constantly to have the name of our post office changed from Fort Garner to Larkin, and have not even received the courtesy of a sensible reply. The state of Texas has so many post offices bearing the word fort, it seems more like a military establishment than a civilian state. Fort Worth, Fort Davis, Fort Griffin, Fort Stockton and Fort Garner to name only a few. We would appreciate if you would instruct your Postmaster General to rename our town Larkin.
Earnshaw Rusk
He received no reply, but quickly his attention was diverted to a matter of much graver significance than the choice of a name. A bright young man from Massachusetts with a Harvard degree, Charles Fordson, had for some time been moving through the West with two mules, a wagon and a cargo which had since the days of Gutenberg represented real progress. It was a hand-operated printing press with ten trays of movable type, and it was seeking a home.
As soon as Rusk learned of the young man's arrival he cornered him, showed him the five remaining empty buildings, and assured him: 'We need you, and you'll find no better prospect in all of Texas. Larkin! Sure to become a metropolis. Join us and grow!' And so this vital link was added to the tenuous chain of civilization: in 1868, the Larkin brothers had chosen this confluence for the site of their ranch, in 1869, the United States Army confirmed the wisdom of their choice; in 1879, Sutler Simpson thought that if he were to open a grocery here, he could make money, and before long Banker Weatherby thought the same. Now, in 1882, young Charles Fordson with his peripatetic press listens to Earnshaw's blandishments and decides that the newspaper just might
succeed, but he names it the Larkin County Defender, for he fears that the town alone might not provide enough activity to justify his venture.
During a quiet spell in the winter, Fordson attempted to distract attention from hard times by publishing a series of well-constructed articles combining news and editorial opinion. Random paragraphs indicate the thrust of his argument:
... In Larkin County during the past two years there have been four executions by gunfire on the streets of the county seat and ten in the outlying districts.
. . . Certainly, at least half the fourteen victims deserved to die, and we applaud the public-spirited citizens who took charge of their punishment. But it would be difficult to claim that the other half died in accordance with any known principles of justice. They were murdered, and they should not have been.
. . . The only solution to this problem is a stricter code of law enforcement, by our officers, by our juries and by our sentencing judges. This journal calls for an end to the lawlessness in Larkin County and in Texas generally.
The articles evoked a response which Editor Fordson had not anticipated, for although a few citizens, like the Baptist minister and three widows who had lost their husbands to gunfire, applauded the common sense of his arguments, the general consensus was that 'if some popinjay from Massychusetts is afeered of a little gunfire, he should skedaddle back to where he come from.' The serious consequence of the articles came when the governor directed a fiery blast at the would-be reformer. His defense of Texas was reprinted throughout the state, bringing scorn upon Larkin County:
Weak-willed, frightened newcomers to our Great State have offered comment in the public press to the effect that Texas is a lawless place. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our lawmen are famed throughout the nation, our judges are models of propriety, and our citizens are noted for their willing obedience to whatever just laws our legislature passes . . .
The governor's theories received a test in the case of the Parmenteer brothers, sons of a law-abiding farmer. The boys, as so often happened in families, followed two radically different courses. The elder son, Daniel, did well in school, read for law in an Austin office, passed his bar examination before the local judge, and be-
came one of the leading lights in Larkin County, where he married the daughter of a clergyman and was in the process of raising four fine children.
His younger brother, Cletus, disliked school, hated teachers, and despised law officials. By the age of eighteen he had been widely known as 'a bad 'un,' a reputation that grew as years passed. At first he merely terrorized people his own age, until boys and girls he had known would have nothing to do with him. Then he started stealing things, which his parents replaced, but finally he launched into the perilous business of stealing horses and cattle, and that put him beyond the pale. As an outlaw he participated in two killings, and following a raid into New Mexico, a price was placed on his head in that territory, but as usual, this was ignored in Texas. He became a shifty, quick-triggered idler who brought considerable ignominy to his otherwise respectable family, and he could find no woman willing to risk marriage with him. He con
sorted only with other petty outlaws, and it was widely predicted throughout the county that sooner or later young Clete would have to be hanged by one sheriff's posse or another.
Things were in this condition one bright spring day in 1883 when the growing town of Fort Garner heard the familiar sound of gunfire, and then the shout: 'Parmenteer has killed Judge Bates!' People rushed into the streets to find the alarm correct. At high noon, on the main thoroughfare, a respectable judge—well, not too respectable—had been callously shot in the presence of not less than twenty witnesses, all of whom identified Parmenteer as the killer. But it was not Cletus, the outlaw, who had done the killing; it was Daniel, the law-abiding lawyer.
The judge was dead, of that there could not be the slightest doubt, because four quick bullets had ripped his abdomen apart and he lay bleeding in the middle of the street. Lawyer Parmenteer walked steadily and without emotion to the sheriff's office, where he turned in his gun with the words 'A good deed done on a good day,' a verdict in which the town concurred.
Most towns in Texas had known such incidents, but this particular crime posed extraordinary problems for the editor of the Larkin County Defender.
'Jackson,' the young man said to his assistant as they discussed how to handle this case, 'we have a problem.'
'I don't think so. Let me talk with the two dozen people who saw the shooting.'
The facts? We have no problem with them. The question is, how do we deal with them?'
'We just say "Lawyer Daniel Parmenteer—"
'Did what?'
'Killed Judge Bates.'
'We dare not say boldly "Lawyer Parmenteer killed judge Bates." Sounds too blunt, too accusatory.'
'The truth is: "Lawyer Parmenteer, brother of the noted outlaw—" '
'Stop. No mention of the brother. We'd have both of them gunning for us.'
'You may be right. So it's "Lawyer Parmenteer murders—" '
'Impossible to say that, Jackson. Murder implies guilt.'
'How about "Lawyer Parmenteer shoots—" '
'I'm afraid of that on two counts. If we stress that he was a lawyer, it might be interpreted as our prejudicing the case. And we cannot use the word shoot. Sounds as if he intended to do it.'
'My God! He walked up to him, if what I hear is true, spoke to him once, and pumped him full of lead. If that isn't shooting .
'You don't understand, Jackson. We must not print a single word that in any way impugns either the motives or the actions of two of our leading citizens.'
So Fordson and Jackson agonized over how to handle the biggest story of the year, and they decided that there was almost nothing they could say which would not infuriate either Lawyer Parmenteer on the one hand, or the relatives of Judge Bates on the other. They could not point out that the lawyer had acted because a court case had gone against him, nor could they state what everybody in two counties knew, that Judge Bates was a drunken reprobate who took bribes on the side, as he had flagrantly done in the case which Parmenteer had lost.
In fact, there was almost nothing that the Defender could say about this case except that it had happened, and even that simple statement posed the most delicate problems, and when it came time to draft the headline, young Fordson found himself right back at the beginning, regrettable killing on main street had to be discarded for three reasons: to stress Main Street would imply that the sheriff had been delinquent; to use the word killing was simply too harsh, for as the governor himself had argued in his now-famous letter 'Texans do not go around killing people,' and regrettable might prove most troublesome of all, because it implied that the killing was unjustified, and to say this could well bring Lawyer Parmenteer storming into the editorial offices bent on another killing that would be justified.
One by one the two newspapermen discarded the traditional headline words: deplorable, bridal, savage. They all had to go, until
young Jackson wailed: 'What can we say?' and Fordson remembered: 'There was this case in East Texas last year. They got away with calling it a fuss. '
'You mean that Copperthwaite case? Three men dead on Main Street, within five feet of one another? They called that a fuss?'
'In Texas you do,' Fordson said, and then in a stroke of genius he dashed off a headline that might work: unfortunate rencontre IN FORT GARNER.
'What in hell is a rencontre?' Jackson asked, pronouncing the word in three syllables.
'It's a polite French way of saying that someone got shot in the gut. But I'm not too happy about the word unfortunate. The Parmenteer people might take unkindly to that. We don't want to launch a feud.' Fordson sighed, then said resignedly: 'No big headlines at all. No talks with any of the witnesses. Just something that happened on Main Street?' And when that week's edition of the Defender appeared, readers scanned the front page in vain for any big handling of the story; on page three, buried among notices of meetings and offerings of new goods in the store, appeared the inconspicuous story: rencontre in fort garner, with no adjectives, no gory details, and certainly no aspersions cast on either side.
The editor was applauded for his good taste and Daniel Parmenteer actually bowed to him as they passed. The lawyer was not apprehended for the killing because no one could be found in Fort Garner who had seen it, and the incoming judge, pleased to have had worthless Judge Bates removed from the bench so he could occupy it, held that because the killing occurred before he assumed jurisdiction, he could ignore it.
Indeed, the Parmenteer-Bates affair would have subsided like a hundred other murders in these frontier areas had not the younger Parmenteer, Cletus the outlaw, suddenly roared back into town, shot the place up, and stolen a horse. The gunfire could be forgiven as an act of high spirits, but the stealing of a horse went so against the grain of Texas morality that a posse had to be organized immediately: 'Men, we can't stand horse theft in this county!' and sixteen amateur lawmen were sworn in prior to setting out to run down the criminal.
By a stroke of poor luck, the leader of the posse—not designated by law but by noisy acclaim—turned out to be the younger brother of dead Judge Bates, and he prosecuted the chase with such a vengeance that by nightfall they had come upon the renegade struggling along with the stolen horse, which had gone lame. It was quite clear from the stories which circulated afterward that Cletus
Parmenteer had remained astride his incapable horse and had tried to surrender, thinking no doubt that his brother could somehow defend him against the charge of theft, but Anson Bates as leader of the posse would have none of that.
'What Anson done,' one of the posse members explained to Daniel Parmenteer later, 'was, he rode up to your brother and said "We don't want none of your kind in jail," and he blasted him six times, right through the chest, him standin' no further away than I am from you.'
When Lawyer Parmenteer heard this, he knew there was no possible response but for him to go shoot Anson Bates, which he did as the latter came out of the barbershop. 'Unarmed, without a call so he could defend hisse'f,' a Bates man explained to his clan, 'this proud son-of-a-bitch kilt our second brother,' and with that a general warfare erupted.
The Bates gang killed four Parmenteers, but were never able to get Lawyer Daniel, who moved quietly about the county always armed. His people, fatal phrase, gunned down five Bates partisans, and before long the feud had spread, as such feuds always did, to the surrounding counties. For a while Bateses and Parmenteers fell like leaves, but most of the dead did not bear these names; the typical victim was some unimportant man like an Ashton farming in jack County or a Lawson in Young who happened for some obscure reason to side with one party or the other By the close of 1881 seventeen people were dead in the Bates-Parmenteer feud, and the former side vowed that the fighting would never stop 'until that sinful bastard Daniel Parmenteer lies punctured from head to toe eatin' dust.'
In November word of the Larkin County feud had reached the Eastern newspapers, one of which pointed out that more white men had already died than had been lost in m
ost of the Indian attacks in the area during the preceding decade. At that point even the governor conceded that he must do something, and what he did was so alien to what an Eastern governor might do that it, too, attracted considerable national attention.
He summoned to his office in Austin a short, wiry sixty-one-year-old man and told him: 'Otto, this could well be the last assignment I'll ever ask you to take. You've earned retirement, but you're the best lawman we have. Go up there and slow those damned fools down.'
So Ranger Otto Macnab returned to his ranch at Fredericksburg, saddled up his best horse, loaded his mule with a tent, rations of food and one small case of ammunition, and prepared to head north toward Larkin County. His wife, Franziska, now fifty-four
years old, had often watched him make such preparations, always with apprehension, for she and Otto had attended many funerals of Rangers who had lost their lives on similar lone-wolf missions, but she did not try to dissuade him. Take care, Otto, do take care.' He accepted the white linen duster she handed him, the fifth she had made during his years as a Ranger, then kissed her goodbye: Take care of the ranch. Be sure the boys watch things.'
He did not follow main roads, but used back trails through the lonely wastes of Llano, San Saba, Comanche and Palo Pinto counties into Jack County, where he made quiet inquiries as to developments in the Larkin County feud. In an eating house where he was not known, a farmer said at table: 'Gonna get worse over there,' but another contradicted him: 'It'll probably settle down. Friend told me the governor's sendin' in some Ranger to stop the killin',' and the first man replied: 'Well, the Bateses is callin' in some reinforcements of their own.'
'What do you mean?' the optimistic man asked, and the farmer explained: 'I'm told that one of the Bates cousins, Vidal, went to New Mexico to hire Rattlesnake Peavine to come east and get Lawyer Parmenteer.'