Gunfights & Sites in Texas Ranger History

by Mike Cox

  Visit: Lyons family plot, Schulenberg City Cemetery. From North Main Street, go north on Schultz Avenue. Cemetery is west of intersection of Schultz and Russek Streets. Fayette County Heritage Museum and Archives, 855 South Jefferson Street, La Grange.

  GUADALUPE COUNTY

  Seguin

  RANGER OAKS

  Seguin owes its existence to the rangers who, prior to and after the Texas Revolution, periodically camped under a stand of walnut, pecan and oak trees near the bank of Walnut Branch, a spring-fed creek running through what is now downtown Seguin. The large trees, still standing, came to be called the Ranger Oaks.

  Demonstrating that they had business sense as well as Indian fighting skills, in 1838 Matthew “Old Paint” Caldwell and two other rangers—James Campbell and Arthur Swift—formed a company to develop a town on half of a three-hundred-acre land grant belonging to Joseph Martin. That land included their former campsite. Thirty-three men—most, if not all, rangers—bought shares in the townsite venture, and Seguin soon grew into a thriving community.

  Republic of Texas rangers camped under these trees along Walnut Brand in what is now downtown Seguin. Photo by Mike Cox.

  The city’s mayor unveiled a locally funded metal historical marker at the site in 2011. According to the marker, near there in 1840, ranger captains Jack Hays and James Callahan forced captive “renegades and Indians” to dig their own mass grave before the rangers executed them. Ranger historians say this never happened, merely one of several legends concerning Hays.

  Visit: Southeast corner, Gonzales and Travis Streets, Seguin. The trees stand in the parking lot of the Seguin Chamber of Commerce. Seguin-Guadalupe County Heritage Museum, 114 North River Street.

  SEGUIN RANGER STATION

  Local tradition has it that rangers built an adobe structure near Walnut Branch and used it as a base when scouting in the vicinity. As a 1977 archaeological report put it, “There may be some truth to [that].” Certainly, an adobe and stone house dating from 1838 to 1839, later known as Seguin Ranger Station, stood at the site until bulldozed in the last third of the twentieth century. Though often described as the home of Ranger James Milford Day (1815–1894), the likely builder was M.P. Woodhouse. Day did live nearby, hence the confusion.

  Visit: The structure, with later frame additions, stood at the southeast corner of Court and Guadalupe Streets.

  JUAN NEPOMUNCEO SEGUIN (1806–1890)

  The son of one of San Antonio’s first settlers and leading citizens, Seguin likely would have died at the Alamo fighting for Texas independence, but Colonel William B. Travis dispatched him as a messenger and the garrison fell before he returned. He went on to take part in the Battle of San Jacinto and later was the only Tejano (Mexican Texan) to serve in the congress of the Republic of Texas. He also was mayor of San Antonio for a time. Far less known is that Seguin also served as a Texas Ranger in 1839, elected as captain of a company of roughly fifty-five Tejanos. In the 1860s, he left Texas for Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, where he remained until his death. Seguin’s remains were exhumed at Nuevo Laredo in 1974 and ceremoniously reburied in his namesake city on July 4, 1976.

  Visit: Seguin’s grave lies on the side of a hill beneath a flat granite tombstone at 789 South Saunders Street. A larger-than-life bronze statue depitcting Seguin astride a horse at the Battle of San Jacinto, his saber raised, was placed in the city’s Central Park in 2000. The park is bounded by Austin, Nolte, South River and Donegan Streets. A 1970-vintage historical marker outlining the high points of Seguin’s life stands outside city hall at 205 North River Street.

  BATTLEGROUND PRAIRIE

  Whether envisioning a handsome reward, or simply because he thought it the right thing to do, Vicente Cordova had been conspiring to help Mexico regain its former province of Texas. Because of that, the Republic of Texas government viewed the Nacogdoches man and his followers as traitors.

  When two Texas scouts saw signs that a large party of horsemen had moved through what later became Austin, they suspected Indians. Edward Burleson organized a company of volunteers and rangers and took up the trail to identify the riders.

  As it turned out, they were Cordova and some seventy-five of his followers—Mexicans, Cherokees and a few African Americans. (Slavery was illegal in Mexico, hence their interest in Cordova’s cause.) On March 29, 1839, along Mill Creek in present Guadalupe County, Burleson’s command encountered the band. Not losing a man, the Texans killed eighteen of the conspirators, who had been on their way to Matamoras, Mexico. Cordova escaped, but he would not die naturally of old age. Before Cordova left the area, he and his men skirmished with a smaller party of rangers. During that fight, Seguin settler James M. Day suffered a wound that permanently impaired his walking ability.

  A 1936 historical marker commemorates the fight.

  Visit: Five miles east of Seguin on U.S. 90A.

  MAGNOLIA HOTEL

  DeWitt colonist James Campbell (circa 1806-1840) built a log dogtrot cabin—two rooms separated by a breezeway—in the new settlement circa 1838–1840. While serving under Ranger Captain Caldwell as a lieutenant, Campbell was waylaid, killed and scalped on June 18, 1840 by two Comanches one mile east of San Antonio. Buried on the spot, his grave site is unknown.

  But the cabin he built in Seguin still stands, the architectural anchor of one of Texas’s more historic buildings. After Campbell’s death, his cabin became a stagecoach stop. With additions, by 1844, it was the two-story frame Magnolia Hotel. On April 29, 1847, Captain Jack Hays got married there to Susan Calvert, daughter of the hostelry’s owner. Expanded in 1853 with some use of the limecrete first produced in Seguin, the building continued as a hotel into the 1930s. Listed as one of the state’s most threatened historic structures in 2012, it was purchased and underwent extensive restoration in 2015. Included in the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1934, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.

  Visit: 203 South Crockett Street.

  One of Seguin’s oldest structures, the now-restored Magnolia Hotel hosted Captain Jack Hays’s wedding in 1847. Photo by Mike Cox.

  ROBERT HALL HOUSE

  Ranger Robert Hall (1814–1899) built this frame house for his family shortly after Seguin’s founding. He served as a ranger under fellow Seguin resident Ben McCulloch and in 1840 participated in the Battle of Plum Creek. One of the oldest houses in Seguin, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

  The old ranger spent the last years of his life living in Cotulla with one of his thirteen children. In 1898, with help from Robert Miller, Hall published a gripping memoir, Life of Robert Hall: Indian Fighter and Veteran of Three Great Wars.

  Visit: Northwest corner of Travis and Nolte Streets. Privately owned.

  HENRY EUSTACE MCCULLOCH (1816–1895)

  Brother often rode with brother in the Texas Rangers. Henry McCulloch’s older brother Benjamin (1811–1862) served in the Rangers under Captain Jack Hays from 1839 to 1842 and as a federalized ranger captain from 1847 to 1848 during the Mexican-American War. Afterward, he was elected to the legislature, where he held a House seat from 1853 to 1859. Next he served as a deputy U.S. marshal. When the Civil War began, he fought for the South along with his brother, who died in the Battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas. Later, Henry McCulloch was superintendent of the Texas State School for the Deaf in Austin. A historical marker was placed near his grave in 1962.

  Visit: Geronimo Cemetery, one and a half miles east of Seguin on U.S. 90A. The marker is at the cemetery’s fourth entrance, on the east side of the pavement. Los Nogales, 415 North River Street, is a stuccoed adobe structure with a cypress roof built in 1849. A historical marker placed in 1989 erroneously says that Ben McCulloch briefly owned the property in 1870. Since Ben had been dead for eight years by then, either the 1870 date is incorrect or brother Henry was the short-term landowner.

  MCCULLOCH HOUSE

  Rangers Ben and Henry McCulloch built a stone house near Mill Creek in 1841 and lived there off an
d on through the early 1850s. After they left, Nathaniel Benton (1814–1872), who served as a ranger in 1858, made the house his family’s residence. A final famous occupant, Elijah V. Dale, rode as a ranger in 1871. All four men fought in the Texas Revolution. Restored in 1972, the old house went on the National Register of Historic Places in 2011. It is one of twenty-three surviving structures in and around Seguin containing limecrete, an early concrete-like building material first developed in Seguin around 1850.

  Visit: The old house is eight miles from Seguin. Take U.S. 90 three miles west from Seguin, turn left on Tschoppe Road and continue two miles to 1936 historical marker at 1806 Tschoppe Road. Private property. Benton is buried in Vaughan Cemetery, Seguin. From U.S. 90A, go north on Prexy Drive about half a mile to cemetery.

  A.J. SOWELL (1815–1883)

  A Tennessean who came via Missouri to Gonzales in 1829, Andrew Jackson Sowell farmed until the beginning of the war for independence, when he took up arms for Texas. He participated in the Battles of Gonzales and Concepción and the Grass Fight. When the Alamo siege began, Sowell stood as one of the defenders, but he left with several others with orders to acquire more supplies. While buying cattle in Gonzales, he learned the mission had fallen. After the war, Sowell rode as a ranger and fought in the Mexican War and in the Civil War.

  Sowell’s grave was lost for generations, but 130 years after his death, the noted Texan’s great-great-great-grandson Gary Humphreys of Del Rio started looking for it. After finding an old newspaper article mentioning that a cedar had been planted at the head of Sowell’s grave in Mofield-Sowell Cemetery soon after his burial, Humphrey searched the cemetery from above using Google Earth. To his amazement, he saw that the cedar still stood. Going to that spot, he located the grave and has since placed two granite stones to permanently mark the pioneer ranger’s final resting place.

  Visit: Mofield-Sowell Cemetery is nine miles east of Seguin off Cross Road on private property. A historical marker is at the Geronimo Cemetery (directions in previous section).

  “STAGECOACH ROAD” MURAL

  Flanked by Frontier Battalion rangers Captain John R. Hughes and Private Joe Sitters, a formally dressed Captain Jack Hays stands larger than life at the center of “Stagecoach Road,” a ninety- by twenty-six-foot acrylic mural by artist Brent McCarthy. The large work of public art, painted on the south side of a brick building, was dedicated in 2008.

  Visit: 114 South Austin Street, southwest corner of Donegan and Austin Streets.

  GILLESPIE COUNTY

  Fredericksburg

  BATTLE OF ENCHANTED ROCK

  Thousands of hikers make their way to the top of Enchanted Rock annually, but in the nineteenth century, the climb offered more than an impressive view. In the fall of 1841, ranger captain Jack Hays left his men in their camp on Crabapple Creek in present Gillespie County intending to scale the giant granite uplift to look for Indians.

  Before he got there, Hays ran into three Comanches. The young captain kicked his horse into a gallop and easily outdistanced the Indians, but more warriors joined the chase. His horse tiring, Hays made it to the rock, picked a defensible spot and prepared to hold off his pursuers until his men heard the shooting and came to his assistance. Firing only when he had a dead shot, the captain kept the Comanches at bay for several hours.

  Ranger Joaquin Jackson atop Enchanted Rock, a landmark where one of his famous predecessors held off a party of Comanches wanting his scalp. Photo by Mike Cox.

  Finally, his ammunition running low and the number of Indians increasing, Hays heard yelling and gunfire as his men rode to his rescue and the Comanches fled.

  Two men who had known Hays, writer Samuel Reid and former ranger John Caperton, later penned accounts of this incident, but no official record of it or any contemporary newspaper coverage has ever been found. Whether the standoff ever occurred may never be known.

  Visit: Enchanted Rock State Natural Area is eighteen miles north of Fredericksburg on Farm to Market Road 965.

  BRAEUTIGAM MURDER

  In 1876, pioneer Fredericksburg resident John Wolfgang Braeutigam and nearly eighty other Gillespie and Blanco County citizens signed a petition requesting rangers to protect the area from Indians. The adjutant general’s department had too much pressing business for its rangers elsewhere and did not act on the plea, but eight years later, rangers would come to Fredericksburg to help local authorities track down the men who murdered Braeutigam.

  On September 3, 1884, four strangers entered the biergarten on the San Antonio Road a couple miles out of town that Braeutigam and his family operated at the site of old Fort Martin Scott, east of Fredericksburg. After knocking down the beers they’d ordered, one of the men pulled a six-shooter and told the proprietor they would also have his cash. Instead of handing over what little money lay in the till, Braeutigam reached for a rifle. That proved a fatal mistake, and the gunman killed the fifty-year-old man.

  Rangers followed the killers’ tracks and soon rounded up three of the four, placing them in San Antonio’s new, supposedly escape-proof jail to prevent mob action in Fredericksburg. But to the embarrassment of Bexar County officials, the four suspects dug their way out and hit the brush.

  Again, rangers took up the trail. This time they booked the first suspect they caught into the Gillespie County jail, a place thought to be sturdy enough to prevent another escape. But the facility wasn’t fireproof. Just the killer’s luck, that very night, the jail happened to burn down with him the only occupant. The late Mr. Braeutigam had been very well thought of, and the county needed a new lockup anyway. Rangers recaptured the second suspect and lodged him in the Mason County jail. When cornered in a ranch house six miles east of the small community of Leander on May 26, 1886, the third accused murderer died suddenly of circulatory failure from Ranger Ira Aten’s bullet in his heart. The fourth suspect, a man known only as Fannin, never was heard from again.

  In locating the man he had been forced to kill, Aten had help from Williamson County rancher John R. Hughes. The two men became friends, and in 1887, at Aten’s urging, Hughes enlisted in the rangers. That began the law enforcement career of one of the most famous captains in Ranger history.

  Visit: The Braeutigam house stood just south of the old guardhouse on the northern side of the old fort, two miles east of Fredericksburg on U.S. 290. The biergarten, long since razed, stood between what is now U.S. 290 and a well on the fort site about sixty feet off the roadway. Pioneer Museum, 325 West Main Street, Fredericksburg.

  FORMER TEXAS RANGERS ASSOCIATION HERITAGE CENTER

  In 1897, aging former Texas Ranger John S. “Rip” Ford, who, as a newspaper editor, Indian fighter, soldier and politician made his share of Texas history, began to realize that if a society is to learn from the past, it must know what that past involved. In addition to writing a memoir and helping organize the Texas State Historical Association, he formed the forerunner of the Former Texas Rangers Association. (They named Bigfoot Wallace as their secretary, but he could hardly write due to palsy.)

  More than a century later, under the leadership of then newly retired ranger Joe B. Davis, the nonprofit Former Texas Rangers Foundation began raising funds to build a heritage center dedicated not only to Ranger history and all the many rangers who have died in the line of duty since 1823 but also as a place where the character traits that helped the lawmen build their legend could be instilled in young people.

  Following a groundbreaking ceremony in September 2013, the $3.8 million first phase of the Texas Ranger Heritage Center opened in the summer of 2015. Situated on twelve acres adjacent to old Fort Martin Scott, the complex includes a 50-foot limestone campanili bathed in blue light at night, a Ranger Ring of Honor built around a twenty-ton, five-point concrete replica of a Ranger badge thirty feet in diameter, an outdoor pavilion, an amphitheater and a historical reenactment area. The heritage center’s second phase will include a 7,600-square-foot building with five galleries for interactive museum displays, a Ranger librar
y and archive, a gift shop and administrative offices.

  A fifty-foot bell tower at Texas Ranger Heritage Center in Fredericksburg. Photo by Mike Cox.

  An artist’s sketch of a large Ranger statue planned for the Texas Ranger Heritage Center. Photo by Mike Cox.

  A bronze statue (two-thirds size) by artist Richard O. Cook of a ranger leading a pack mule, dedicated on May 1, 1983, in front of the old Pioneer Memorial Hall (opened in 1936 as part of San Antonio’s historic Witte Museum) was refurbished by the FTRA and moved to the Buckhorn in 2011. In 2015, the statue was moved a final time to the heritage center, outside the pavilion.

  Also standing near the pavilion is a two-thirds-size bronze of an 1850s ranger holding a Sharps rifle. Done by Boerne artist Erik Christianson, the statue was underwritten by John Starkie of Houston and donated to the heritage center.

  The Ranger Ring of Honor features plaques listing the names of all known ranger line-of-duty deaths. Carved along the circumference of the badge are five ranger-defining character traits: Courage, Determination, Dedication, Respect and Integrity.

  Visit: Just east of the Fort Martin Scott site on U.S. 290. The facility is open during daylight hours, and the pavilion is available for private events such as weddings and family reunions. The FTRA offices are located at 103 Industrial Loop, Suite 700, in Fredericksburg. For a list of 650-plus ranger graves marked by the association with metal Ranger crosses, see formertexasrangers.org.

  HAYS COUNTY

  San Marcos

  JACK HAYS RIDES FOREVER

  Astride a rearing horse, his unholstered revolver pointing upward, Captain Jack Hays stands cast in bronze, perpetually ready for action.

  When the Texas legislature took land from southwestern Travis County to create a new political subdivision in 1848, they named it for Hays (1817–1883). A larger-than-life bronze statue for this larger-than-life ranger was dedicated on the courthouse square in San Marcos 153 years later. Authorized by the San Marcos Arts Commission and designed by artist Jason Skull, the 2001 statue stands fourteen feet high on a limestone base. A plaque on the base gives a brief summary of Hay’s life.