The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  He did, however, act upon an inquiry of Sheriff Avant, of neighboring Atascos County, who was in search of a horse-thief described as a medium-sized Mexican wearing a red, broad-brimmed Mexican hat. Morris began checking on Mexicans, around Kenedy, Texas, who’d acquired horses in recent weeks.

  When he set out to question the Cortezes, he took two deputies with him—Boone Choate, as interpreter, and one John Trimmell. Morris and Trimmell were armed. Choate was not. The three rode out to the Cortez place in the sheriff’s surrey.

  Half a mile from the house Trimmell got out to espy the area while Morris and Choate went to the house.

  Gregorio was lying on the porch with his head in his wife’s lap, with a revolver stuck in his belt in front. When the surrey stopped, he slid the gun around until it was even with his hip pocket and out of sight. He said to Romuldo “See what they want.”

  Romuldo talked to Morris and Choate, then walked back to Gregorio and said, “Te quieren.”

  What Romuldo meant by this was only, “Somebody wants to speak to you.” But Choate understood it to mean, “You are wanted.” And assumed from this that Gregorio was already a man wanted by the law.

  Gregorio came up and stood near Romuldo at the fence, with Romuldo standing nearer to Choate. Gregorio kept a bit of distance between himself and the Americans. Romuldo was unarmed and Gregorio’s gun was not visible.

  Choate then asked Gregorio if he or his brother had recently acquired a horse. Gregorio said he had not. Because, to Gregorio, a horse and a mare are two different animals. Had Choate asked if he’d acquired a mare, he would no doubt have said yes. Choate had said caballo instead of yegua.

  Morris then dismounted from the surrey and approached the Cortezes, telling Choate to inform them that he was going to arrest them. Morris was to the right of the two men and about twelve feet away when Choate translated.

  Choate later testified, at Cortez’s trial, that Cortez had then said, “Ami no me arreste nada,” and had translated this as “No white man can arrest me.” Later Choate changed this wording to, “A mi no me arreste nadie.”

  What Cortez had actually said was, “You can’t arrest me for nothing.”

  Morris then drew his weapon; Romuldo rushed at him in a crouch, as though to grapple with him, and Morris shot him through the mouth. He then shot at Gregorio and missed, and Gregorio then shot Morris. The impact of his forty-four almost knocked Morris down. Morris fired two or three more times, but missed. Gregorio shot him again. Morris began to reel and stagger, going along the wire fence toward the gate. He fell before he reached the gate; and Gregorio shot him again as he lay on the ground.

  Choate ran into the chaparral and headed toward the gate where they’d left Trimmell, half a mile away. By the time Choate reached Trimmell, he fancied that he had been fleeing from a gang of armed Mexicans. This idea of Choate’s, that Cortez constituted a gang, became the premise upon which the pursuit of Cortez was conducted.

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Morris was still alive. He’d been shot three times—in the right arm, the right shoulder, and the lower intestine. The arm wound was the most serious because the shot had severed an artery. Cortez took Morris’ pistol and left the sheriff lying. He took Romuldo into the house, washed his face, loaded him into the sheriff’s surrey and drove off to Romuldo’s house. His son, Valeriano, brought the rest of the family to Romuldo’s, where Cortez loaded the family into a wagon and got them headed for the home of a friend in Kenedy. He saddled a sorrel mare for himself and a horse for Romuldo—his plan being to get Romuldo into Kenedy for medical treatment after dark.

  Morris got to his feet, staggered out of the gate, and bled to death in the brush some two hundred yards from where he’d been shot.

  It was ten miles in a straight line from the Cortez place to Kenedy. But the route that Gregorio was taking with Romuldo, through the bush, was longer and infinitely more difficult. Romuldo could no longer seat his horse. Gregorio had finally to lay him down under a tree. With Romuldo growing feverish, they lay in the brush, five miles from the Cortez place, from early afternoon until dark. By this time a posse of fifty men were searching for them.

  The posse, though it searched all that day and all that night, not only failed to discover the Cortezes five miles away, but failed to find the body of the sheriff, two hundred yards away. They assumed by now that they were fighting a bandit gang, who had spirited the sheriff away. Morris’ body was not discovered until the following morning.

  Gregorio was heading to Kenedy with Romuldo, swaying in the saddle before him. Romuldo was so much heavier than Gregorio that Gregorio could not hold him when he began to slip out of the saddle. He finally had to abandon his horse and carry his brother five miles into Kenedy. He got Romuldo into the house with his family.

  The pursuit of Gregorio Cortez had begun.

  No Mexican in flight had ever gone in any direction except toward the Mexican border. All the several posses struck south.

  “The trail of the Mexican leads toward the Rio Grande,” the newspapers reported. And posses waited at every possible crossing of the river. No Mexican in flight had ever fled in any other direction save that of the Mexican border before.

  Gregorio Cortez was heading due north. And he wasn’t riding. He was trying to get out of the Anglo lynching belt into territory where he could get a fair trial. If he could get north of the Colorado, he’d be out of the lynching belt.

  From Kenedy in Karnes County it is sixty-five miles in a straight line. He averaged two miles an hour for forty straight hours, through brush and the roughest kind of country, wearing a pair of shoes with narrow, pointed heels.

  He made the eight miles from Kenedy to Runge by eight the following morning and entered the town for breakfast at a Mexican restaurant on the outskirts of town. He was not aware that Runge was the hometown of the sheriff he had killed. Morris’ funeral was being held that day, to be followed by an indignation meeting. Cortez didn’t hang around town.

  Thirty-four hours after he had left Kenedy he was at Belmont, fifty-five miles away by direct route. There he ate at a friend’s and in the afternoon began walking again: toward Ottine and the house of Martin Robledo. He arrived there about sundown, ate, and then told Robledo of the killing of Morris. Robledo agreed that he should hide there a few days, as the Robledo place was so isolated and wooded.

  There were seven others at the Robledos: Martin, his wife, and their three sons—Bonifacio (18), Tomas (16), and Encarnación (13)—Ramon Rodriguez (a half-grown boy living with the Robledos), and a visitor, Martin Sandoval.

  Gonzalez County Sheriff Robert Glover had been a close friend of the Sheriff whom Cortez had shot down. He arrested Cortez’s women and pressured them—by what means is only to be surmised—until one of them informed him that Cortez was heading for the home of Martin Robledo.

  Robledo lived in a wooded and isolated house on the Schnabel Ranch in Gonzalez County, near Ottine, Texas. Schnabel was himself a constable.

  Glover’s posse, organized around Kenedy, consisted of fifty men, who were entrained for Ottine. It was established at Cortez’s trial, that the posse began drinking en route. By the time that Cortez had eaten at the Robledos and came out on the house’s gallery, barefooted, Glover had eight men concealed in the brush surrounding Robledo’s house.

  Glover’s plan of action was to have Deputy Swift approach from the rear. Glover and Crispin Alcantar—the only Mexican in the posse—were to approach from the east side, and the other five deputies from the west. All were dismounted except Glover.

  When the eight men rushed the house, the two Robledos and Sandoval escaped into the brush. Cortez was on the southeast side when Glover charged on his mount, firing as he came. Cortez shot him dead off the horse. Then ran, barefooted, into the brush and stepped into a patch of burrs. He removed his vest and bound his feet, now bleeding, with it. From the house he heard persistent gunfire.

  Refugia Robledo, Robledo’s wife, had been left in the house with t
he Rodriguez boy and her own two sons. Swift saw the Rodriguez boy running inside the house and shot him. He also shot Refugia Robledo; but, as she was standing in front of her sons, he did not shoot them.

  Hearing the firing inside the house, posse men outside assumed they were being attacked and began firing upon one another. Schnabel was shot dead by a blast so close that it left powdermarks on his skin.

  With two of its men dead, the posse men avenged themselves by hanging the thirteen-year-old Encamacion from a tree until his tongue protruded and he was close to death. Their purpose, they later explained, was to obtain information about the whereabouts of the mythical “Cortez Gang.”

  The posse took Martin and Mrs. Robledo, her two sons, and Sandoval prisoners, and Refugia was charged with the murder of Schnabel. Deputy Tom Harper testified that he saw the Robledo woman fire at Schnabel from the window and that he fired twice at her when he had seen Schnabel fall. Other members of the posse charged Harper with having killed Schnabel himself. Neither Mrs. Robledo nor Harper were ever brought to trial for the killing of Schnabel.

  The posse also informed the newspapers that they had found ten Winchester rifles and a lard bucket full of cartridges on the Robledo premises. Later they reduced the number to eight. Even later, at Cortez’s trial, this number was reduced to one Winchester and a single-barreled shotgun. Deputy Swift then testified that neither weapon had been fired the night of the shootings.

  After the posse men had left the Robledo place with their prisoners, Cortez returned to the house, got his shoes, and began walking again.

  This time he walked south, ten miles, to the house of Ceferino Flores on the banks of the Guadalupe River. Flores took Morris’ pistol and hid it, giving Cortez his own revolver. He saddled his own horse, another sorrel mare, for Cortez. Cortez left, pursued by bloodhounds, across the Guadalupe River. The posse paused to hang Flores in the manner they had hung Encamación Robledo—until his tongue protruded. Flores later got two years in the penitentiary for aiding Cortez’s escape.

  It is fifty miles from the Guadalupe to the San Antonio River. Cortez rode many times that many miles in the next two days and one night. He often doubled back, stopped to shoot at his pursuers, then rode on, circling about, leaving false leads.

  On Sunday noon, as he crossed the Cibolo Creek near Stockdale, his trail was picked up by a fresh posse and his mare began giving out. Yet he galloped her for six more hours, running in circles and zigzags between Stockdale and Floresville, sometimes with the posse less than five hundred yards behind him. At six in the afternoon the sorrel mare fell dead.

  Cortez slipped off her saddle and bridle and hid in the brush until dark. Then he made his way out of the net and found, in a pasture, a Spanish mare about thirteen hands high. He rode this mare from Flores-ville to Cotulla, three hundred miles through brush and rough country, through rivers and over barbed-wire fences, in three days. The pursuing posse lost six horses trying to catch the Spanish mare.

  By this time special trains were moving on the Corpus Christi-Laredo Railroad, bearing horses, dogs, and men in their hundreds, keeping in touch by telegraph. Wherever Cortez was sighted, fresh posses would be placed in pursuit.

  “The only hope,” The San Antonio Express reported in a page-one story, “is to fill up the whole country with men and search every avenue of escape. Business has been practically suspended as all the men are out searching the country. New men are joining the hunt every day. The woods are full of searching parties.”

  From Floresville Cortez rode twenty-five miles along the San Antonio looking for a fording place. When he heard the dogs coming, he cut off his shirt-tails and blindfolded the mare, forcing her into the river. When stopped by a barbed-wire fence, he filed off the top so that the mare could jump the lower strand. Several times he rounded up cattle and used them to cover his trail. Once, desperate with thirst, he drove a bunch of cattle to a waterhole guarded by armed men, deceiving them into thinking he was a vaquero.

  When the Spanish mare went lame, after cutting herself on leaping a wire, he rode her into thicket near Cotulla, took off her saddle, which he hung to a Coma tree, and went into a thicket with a posse right behind him.

  By ten o’clock on Thursday, June twentieth, the mare had been found and the thicket surrounded.

  Gregorio Cortez was trapped.

  While the posse men sat around the thicket waiting for him to come out, he slipped out and, in full daylight, got into Cotulla, the town from which the posse had come. He figured, again rightly, that most of the men were in the brush and he’d be safer in town.

  Cortez, again on foot, walked into Cotulla at noon, with his pistols in a morral—a feed-bag of woven ixtle that border rancheros use as a catchall—over his shoulder. He stopped at the home of a Mexican woman, who gave him food and water; then he walked right through the heart of town.

  Below Cotulla the Nueces River cuts the Cotulla-Laredo Road. The bridge across the Nueces was guarded by posse men. Cortez went under the bridge, bathed in the river, crossed to the other side and rested. He then followed railroad tracks to the town of Twohig. He arrived there just as a posse had left, going east. He went to the outskirts of the town, lay down by a watertank and slept all night the night of the twentieth: all day of the twenty-first; and all the next night while the posses were still waiting for him to come out of the thicket at Cotulla. It was 2:30 p.m. of the twenty-first before the posse men figured out there was nobody in the thicket. And had not been for some time.

  Again the tracking began. This time somewhat facilitated because Cortez’s broken shoes left easily recognizable prints. Despite this advantage, Cortez made so many circuitous routes to wipe out his tracks that the posse began to lose heart. They convinced themselves that he had been furnished with another horse by “The Cortez Gang” and had crossed the Rio Grande. The posse men began returning to their homes.

  Cortez woke from his three-day sleep on his twenty-sixth birthday, June 21, 1901. He walked into the little ranch village of El Suaz, bought a new pair of trousers and a shirt and converted the dollar and a half of American money he had left into Mexican currency. He threw away his old shirt, wrapped his pistols in his old trousers, put them in his morral and began walking toward the Rio Grande, thirty miles distant. He had to avoid not only American guards, but Mexican as well; because of an extradition agreement between the U.S. and Mexico.

  He left the railroad tracks and turned south toward the old Spanish settlement of Dolores, just above Laredo. At noon he arrived at the sheep camp of a man named Abran de la Garza. He was now, at least, out of the lynching belt. Local detachments, made up largely of Mexican-Americans, now constituted the posses.

  While this protected him against lynching without trial, which any of the East Texas posses would have conducted, it also made his capture more likely; because his movements were known to the Mexican community. His movements among the Mexicans were now not so likely to be closely kept secrets.

  Also, a thousand American dollars had now been offered in reward. Which reward appears to have been what one Jesus Gonzalez, also known as “El Teco,” had in mind when he recognized Cortez at the sheep camp.

  El Teco had been a friend of Cortez. Cortez trusted him sufficiently to give him his guns to clean. El Teco did not have to go far to earn the reward. There was a posse only two hundred yards away. El Teco brought back two rangers: Rogers and Merrem. Rogers opened the door of the hut where Cortez was sleeping and unarmed, drew down on him and took him prisoner.

  The casualties inflicted by the Texas Rangers, and by various posses throughout Texas, before this simple capture, included:

  In the Guadalupe Bottoms: One Mexican killed, one wounded, four arrested as members of “The Cortez Gang.”

  At Ottine: Two Mexicans killed and one arrested as members of “The Cortez Gang.”

  At Belmont: One Mexican hanged to death, another shot dead, one wounded by rifle fire; a fourth suffered a skull fracture when hit by a rifle barrel: all f
or denying membership in “The Cortez Gang.” The hanged man was hanged many times. With three hundred Texans watching, he was repeatedly, when on the verge of death, brought back to consciousness and hanged again for refusing to give information about “The Cortez Gang.”

  At Benavides: One Mexican killed as a member of “The Cortez Gang.”

  At Willow Springs: One Mexican killed as a suspected member of “The Cortez Gang.”

  At San Diego: One Mexican killed, one seriously wounded, a third captured as members of “The Cortez Gang.” When it became established that the Mexicans killed at San Diego by Texas Rangers had nothing to do with Cortez, the press comment was simply: “They were probably all horse-thieves anyhow.”

  At Kenedy: Posse man Robert Benton was seriously wounded while moving around in the dark, by friends mistaking him for a member of “The Cortez Gang.” Cortez was thirty miles away when this shooting occurred.

  Sheriff Jackman of Hays County dispatched the “cheering news” that he was hot on the trail of Gregorio Cortez. Cortez was riding a roan horse, the sheriff reported, and was armed with three six-shooters; that he was heading toward Austin and cutting all telephone and telegraph wires on the way. Posses from Austin and San Antonio and other points converged on the rider of the roan; who wasn’t armed and wasn’t Cortez.

  The posses from Runge, Sheriff Morris’ home town, gave up the chase of Cortez because “the fugitive had all the advantage, being supplied with fresh horses all the time.” In short, a posse could not be expected to apprehend a man unless his horse died under him.

  Actually, this was the posse which Cortez evaded simply by walking past them.

  Eight hundred “thoroughly armed” posse men were assembled in Gonzalez County to combat “The Cortez Gang”; reported to be numerous and armed with the “latest 30 x 30 Marlin Winchester rifles.”

  Sheriff Moss of Refugio County assured reporters that he shot a horse from under Cortez in a desperate encounter several years before. This statement is refuted by evidence that Cortez had never been in any trouble with the law before the death of Brack Morris.