The state of Texas now held prisoner almost every known member of the Cortez family; including Cortez’s mother and his three-year-old son, Crispin. Romuldo, the wives of Gregorio and Romuldo, and Gregorio’s children had been thrown into the Karnes City Jail the morning after authorities had discovered Romuldo at the house in Kenedy; to which Gregorio had carried him in his arms.
The adults were kept in separate cells, while Valeriano, his six-year-old brother and his ten-year-old sister were held in a single cell. The three-year-old was allowed to be with his mother. After the capture of Gregorio the three eldest children were released. But the other adults and the infant were kept in custody four months. Gregorio was sentenced to death in absentia, at Karnes City.
An older brother of Cortez, Tomas, was arrested during the pursuit of Gregorio and sentenced to five years in the penitentiary on a charge of horse-theft.
The first Mexican-American organization to appeal for funds for the defense of Gregorio Cortez was the Miguel Hidalgo Workers Society of San Antonio. Money was collected through workers’societies, individual donations, rancheros, professional men and benefit performances. His defense of himself held a powerful appeal to a minority long intimidated. And it was in this climate that some unknown guitarist composed “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez.”
In Mexico City Cortez was made to speak directly through a balladeer, directly to an audience in an appeal for funds. At street corners blind singers took up the ballad, while children collected the coins.
T.E. Mitchell of Laredo, Texas, advertised in The San Antonio Express:
FOR SALE: Gregorio Cortez, Sheriff Killer,
photographed as captured, send 24¢
Other Anglo-Texans came to Cortez’s defense. R.B. Abernathy of Gonzales, the county in which the Battle of Belmont had been fought, and where prejudice against Cortez was strongest, worked four years in defense of Cortez without financial reward and without hope of financial gain. Nor can he be considered to have been courting the Mexican vote: Mexicans were then barred from the primaries in Gonzalez as well as in neighboring counties.
The widespread passion to lynch Cortez without trial was cooled off after Cortez was taken to San Antonio instead of back to Karnes. Karnes City people were waiting for Cortez at the train which, they supposed, would deliver him to them. Instead, only three posse men got out: Cortez was being held in San Antonio. The Karnes people, who had hoped to lynch him, gradually compromised; with the hope and belief that he would be hanged anyhow.
Had he been tried for the killings of Morris and Glover, he may have been. Curiously enough, he was tried for the killing of Schnabel; whose death, it was already common knowledge, was caused by one of his fellow-deputies.
The Americans reneged on the promised reward of a thousand dollars. Gonzalez got two hundred and the rest of the grand was divided up among deputies; including one who’d taken no part in the capture of Cortez. Rogers, who’d made the capture, refused to take reward money.
The charge that Mrs. Robledo had fired at the deputies, in the Battle of Belmont, was refutable by the fact that none of the weapons in the Robledo house had been fired. Yet, the charge was not dropped until she agreed to state that she had seen Cortez kill Glover on one side of the house, then run around the other side and kill Schnabel. One Manuel Tom also perjured himself by testifying that Cortez had confessed to him that he’d been on the side of the house by the bam where Schnabel had been shot. Upon being asked the Spanish word that Cortez had used for “bam” in the purported confession, Tom said Casa: house.
The trial of Cortez for the shooting of Schnabel was a mere formality. Judge, sheriffs and jurors had reached the decision that Cortez was to be hanged—except one. One A.L. Sanders, believing Cortez innocent, hung the jury. He hung the jury until he received word that there was a serious illness in his family and that he was needed at home. He then compromised with the eleven who’d decided Cortez must die for a sentence of fifty years on a charge of second-degree murder.
The verdict outraged everybody. Cortez cursed court, judge and jury all the way from the courthouse to the jail.
A.L. Sanders wasn’t satisfied either. He went to the defense lawyers, informed them of why he had compromised on the verdict. The defense lawyers promptly filed for a new trial. The judge, as promptly, denied it; and fined Sanders a hundred dollars.
A week later Romuldo Cortez died in the Karnes City jail. The official report was that he had died of his wound.
Morris’ shot had gone into his open mouth and through his left cheek, knocking out some teeth, and had lodged in his shoulder. Valeriano Cor-tez recalls that when he visited his uncle in the jail, Romuldo was well enough to walk around his cell, only a few days after he’d been arrested, and to joke with the jailer. He was then a two-hundred-pound man in the prime of life. Two months later he was dead.
An attempt to lynch Cortez in the Gonzalez County Jail was frustrated by Sheriff F.M. Fly. The attempt, the sheriff claimed, was by three hundred to three hundred fifty men from Karnes County.
A week after the lynching attempt, a deputy sheriff, A. A.Lyons, killed one Mexican and wounded another in Runge, Morris’ home town. He claimed that the Mexicans had “surrounded him”; but not that they were armed. One had struck at him with his coat. He therefore, he asserted, did not anticipate “any trouble whatsoever in clearing himself of any charge that might be made”; and he was right.
On January 15, 1902, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the Gonzalez verdict on Cortez on the basis of witness Tom’s unique translation of casa as “bam”. Cortez was not tried again for the murder of Schnabel.
Cortez was next taken to Karnes City to stand trial for the murder of Brack Morris. The families of Morris and Glover sat in the front row where they could be pointed out to the jurors. The jury took two ballots, one for the degree of murder and one for the penalty. First-degree murder was the verdict; and hanging the penalty. Eight months later the Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the verdict on the grounds of prejudice.
Cortez was next taken to Pleasanton, where he was sentenced to two years for the theft of the mare he had stolen while in flight. Although the conviction was reversed, the verdict was later used, when he was moved for retrial, at Goliad, for the shooting of Morris, to identify him as a convicted horse-thief; who had killed Morris when the latter had attempted to arrest him for that crime.
At the Goliad retrial seven jurors decided for first-degree murder and four for second-degree; and one for acquittal. The case went to Wharton County, where it was dismissed by the district judge for want of jurisdiction.
The case then went to Corpus Christi, where Cortez was again tried, April 25-30, 1904. There a jury of Anglo-American farmers found Cortez not guilty of the murder of Morris, claiming that Morris had attempted an unauthorized arrest; and that Cortez had shot him in self-defense.
Cortez, at the reading of this verdict, turned to the jury and, obviously deeply touched, bowed to the jury and said, “Gracias.”
Meanwhile, back in Columbus, Cortez had been found guilty of the murder of Glover and sentenced to life imprisonment. Cortez’s lawyers expected this verdict to be reversed because it had been based upon the assumption that Cortez had been a fugitive from justice rather than as a fugitive from lynch law. The defense had made the mistake of building its case on the contention that Cortez had not fired the shots that had killed Glover, which he had. The Court of Criminal Appeals therefore upheld the conviction and Cortez entered the Huntsville Penitentiary on January 1, 1905, to serve a life sentence.
Cortez had now been in eleven Texas jails, in eleven counties, over three and a half years. The fight for pardon began immediately.
A new light was now cast upon Cortez’s personality.
Leonor Cortez had been the chief witness at the Karnes trial in her husband’s defense. At the Corpus Christi trial she did not appear and the defense felt it necessary to explain that she was no longer married to Cortez and was “pr
ejudiced against her former husband.” Since so many defense witnesses had either fled or changed their stories, under pressure from the Karnes County leaders who wanted Cortez hanged, it might be assumed that Leonor Cortez had been pressured to abandon Gregorio.
Yet, Cortez, when he married again, was to refer to his new bride as the only woman who’d remained faithful to him in his ordeal. And at least once again Cortez was to refer to yet another woman as the only person who’d been faithful to him. Both women (and there may have been at least a third) made public statements that they had loved Gregorio for many years and that both had been engaged to marry him before the shooting of Morris. Although Cortez was only twenty-six when he was captured, he had had ten or eleven years of roaming the country unaccompanied by his family. It can then be reasonably surmised that Cortez’s wife did not divorce him because of local pressure; but because his trial revived the attention of women to whom he’d made love.
Gregorio Cortez married Estefana Garza in the Columbus, Texas, jail on December 23, 1904.
Sheriff Bridge not only made all arrangements for the marriage, but the pair were given the whole upper story of the jail as a bridal suite for the week between the ceremonies and the incarceration, for life, of Cortez in the penitentiary at Huntsville.
His prison certificate reads: Occupation—barber. Habits—temperate. Education—limited.
Largely through the persistent intercession of Colonel F.A. Chapa, publisher of El Imparcial of San Antonio, Cortez received a conditional pardon after he had served twelve years’ imprisonment; nine at Huntsville.
The Board of Pardons recommended a full pardon. Governor Col-quitta, also inclined toward a full pardon, may have been modified by a letter he’d received from Cortez two weeks before signing the pardon:
“Deep regret I have always felt for the sad occurrence; but no repentance I have felt, for I could never bring myself to the hypocritical state as to plead to gain an end that was my just due.’’
This tone indicates the area in which Cortez’s heroism lies: not in the speed and accuracy of his gunplay; nor his courage nor stamina in flight. But in the dignity he preserved, through more than a dozen trials, in rejecting all efforts to make him beg for his life. It was probably this attitude which so affected the men who held him in custody. The prison chaplain, the warden and the chief clerk at Huntsville were among those who petitioned the governor for full pardon for Cortez.
Three letters petitioning pardon appear to have been dictated in Spanish and typed by the same person. Two are signed by Cortez and one by “Senorita E. Martinez” with the explanation: “Represented by: Esther Martinez, his sweetheart.” The letter defining his lack of repentance is also signed by Miss Martinez, “to whom I was engaged to be married at the time this trouble arose. She alone has remained true, devoted and faithful to me during my long and terrible fourteen years of misfortune.” No mention is made of the fact that, “at the time this trouble arose” he was married to Leonor Diaz Cortez. Nor to the fact that he had married Estefana Garza at Columbus, Texas.
Miss Martinez’s letter reveals a curious conviction, among Spanish-American women, that a governor may release a prisoner if a woman claims him for marriage. Her letter repeats the request, “if you will give him to me,” several times.
Cortez did not marry Miss Martinez when he was pardoned. He went instead to Nuevo Laredo to establish residence in Mexico at a moment when that country was in the throes of revolution. Northern Mexico was up in arms against Huerta, who had succeeded Madero upon the latter’s assassination. Nuevo Laredo was still held by Huerta troops. Cortez’s son, Valeriano, says that Cortez went to Nuevo Laredo to join the Huerta forces at the request of Colonel Chapa. And joined the Huerta forces to satisfy his obligation to Colonel Chapa.
The Huertista mistook Cortez for a spy. He was in immediate danger of being shot; but papers, provided for him in San Antonio, prevented that. The Huertista then shaved his head and put him in the infantry as a private soldier.
Later Cortez was mounted and given a squad of rurales to command. He was wounded. One rumor has it that he was captured and escaped before being executed. He returned to Jones County, Texas, and remarried. Whom he married is not known as he died on the evening of the wedding. Valeriano Cortez believes his father was poisoned at the wedding.
He was buried, at the age of forty-one, in a little cemetery eight miles outside of Anson, Texas. A niece of Cortez says that as late as 1925 there was a headstone with the name of Gregorio Cortez marking his grave.
Thus lies Gregorio Cortez, five hundred miles from the border on which he was bom. And which he had once come within a few miles of crossing on a little sorrel mare.
THE HOUSE OF THE
HUNDRED GRASSFIRES
IT was during that rumorous dappled hour when evening spreads like the latest scandal, before the night’s true traffic starts. When such whore’s foliage as vermilion bras and chartreuse panties still hang, in the airless heat of backyard lines, between G-strings that once were silver. A joint-tog jungle festooned by garments of such bright shame as stay washable. Above a vegetation of contraceptives lying in puddles of gray decay.
This is the early-buyers’ hour when women dust their navels for afternoon bugs who can’t wait till evening to fly: all those hurrying from loneliness in order to preserve their solitude later. The city was full of lonesome monsters who couldn’t get drunk any more.
At The Hundred Grassfires the night’s first girl stood in the night’s first door; feeling sweat molding her pink pajama to her thighs.
The whole street felt molded, thigh to thigh. Perdido Street was a basement valet shop with both irons working. In the round of her armpits the girl felt sweat creeping in the down.
She did not solicit; it was too hot for that. She had lived fifteen years in Chicago without once feeling warm; now she had lived almost ten in New Orleans without once feeling cool.
It was so hot that at the sight of a man she could feel both of their watery navels stick. So she merely crooked her small finger now and then and let it go at that.
The courts were against these cork-heeled puppets, the police were against them as well. Politicians used them; editors mocked them. Doctors disdained them. Judges and ministers were sustained by them. Daughters, sisters and wives were perpetually outraged by them. So mothers organized against them. Their own pimps conspired regularly against them.
Now a man wearing a shadow for a cap marched up and down, across the street, below a curious sign—
BEWARE THE WRATH TO COME
The missions were dispatching mercenaries announcing that Christ Himself had decided against them.
The man under the sign cut slantwise across the street to give the girl full benefit of his warning. She turned her hip to give him a bit of her backside; simply to show how little she needed him. Like all the women who kept the doors, Chicago Kitty knew that, like the police, the columnists, the courts, the doctors, the preachers and the pimps, he wanted to save her only to have her. For all the indignation these women provoked, no one ever wanted them to be anything but whores.
The prostitute never sent for anyone’s husband. Husbands came to her. She never sent for a brother or son; sons and brothers came to her.
In the parlor behind Kitty sat other outlaws, eight nine ten, who had died of uselessness one by one. Yet now they lived on, behind veritable prairie-fires of wishes, while prying salt-water taffy from between their teeth. Envy and ennui divided each.
“A light drizzle wound be good for trade,” Kitty heard a man’s voice say behind her, “but a heavy fall would rain it.”
That would be that appleknocker, an apprentice pimp calling himself Big Stingaree, recently arrived from nowhere in a red shirt and high-heeled Spanish boots; who’d be gone once more before the heels ran down.
The juke began complaining about everybody—
It isn’t fair for you to taunt me
You only want me for today
A small man wearing a clerical collar, under a face favoring a raccoon’s, skipped up—he was built like a bag of sand and somewhat favored a badger, too. As Kitty stepped aside to let him pass, she caught a whiff of violet talc. The juke went on complaining—
It isn’t fair for you to want me
You only want me for today.
A moment later she followed him inside just to see what he really wanted.
He was pulling off his collar—then flinging it across the room, then challenging the house:
“Bring on your beasts of the wild!”
“Are you sure you’re in the right place, mister?” the appleknocker pimp, standing a full head higher, inquired.
“Oh, I know what you people do here,” Bag-of-Sand lowered his voice confidentially—“I know what you do.”
“What we do best,” a girl holding a poodle dyed pink remarked, “is pitch people out on their skulls.”
Bag-of-Sand laughed into the palm of his hand.
“Exactly what do you think you’re geared to, mister?” the apprentice pimp wanted to know, stepping closer.
“Exactly what am I geared to?” Bag-of-Sand glanced up. “My dear young man, I’m exactly geared to the girlies; exactly. Otherwise why would I be here exactly? Or is this a hardware store?” And turning his back on the slow-witted macker, he began an explanation of the Immaculate Conception that not even Mama, the mulatto madam of The Hundred Grassfires, had ever heard before.
“Parthenogenesis is scientifically possible,” he explained as though the question had been troubling him for some time, “but it can only occur in the haploid chromosomes. As these are only half the size of the somatic chromosomes, they result in dwarfism. That was what happened to Mary.”
“The hell with all that,” the apprentice pimp decided. “How about some action?”
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