by Mike Cox
The private life of Colonel Hays was pure; his honesty unimpeachable; he was charitable, and his personal courage and gallantry in battle are historical. His death is deeply lamented by all who knew him personally, and his friends, are thousands in this state and in Texas.
–Daily Alta California, April 23, 1883
Visit: Courthouse square, 111 East San Antonio Street.
Ranger captain Jack Hays in his prime. Library of Congress.
TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY
The Southwestern Writer’s Collection, part of the Witliff Collection at TSU’s Alkek Library, has a room dedicated to the now classic made-for-TV miniseries Lonesome Dove. Based on Larry McMurtry’s 1985 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, the 1988 series is an action-filled saga built around a cattle drive from Texas to Montana led by two ex–Texas Rangers, Captain Woodrow Call (Tommy Lee Jones) and Gus McCrae (Robert Duvall). Bill Witliff, who founded the writer’s collection, wrote the screenplay and later donated much material related to the series.
Visit: Seventh floor of the Alkek Library on the Texas State University campus in San Marcos. Visit thewitliffcollection.txstate.edu for specific on-campus directions and parking information.
Wimberley
WILLIAM WASHINGTON MOON (1814–1897)
Busy dodging arrows and shooting during a running fight with Comanches, Ranger William Moon nevertheless managed to get a glimpse of the large springs and inviting clear water at the head of the San Marcos River in what is now Hays County. After his service with Captain Jack Hays ended, Moon returned to the area in 1845 and built a cabin for his family—the first residence in future San Marcos. Soon a widower, he raised his four children and spent the rest of his life in and around the town he started. He fought in the Mexican War, later got elected as Hays County sheriff and briefly served in a ranger-like capacity early in the Civil War. After the war, before settling in as a San Marcos blacksmith, he rode as a cowboy on trail drives.
Visit: Wimberley Cemetery, Farm to Market Road 3237 and Old Kyle Road. A 1975 historical marker at the intersection of C.M. Allen Parkway and Hutchinson in San Marcos explains Moon’s significance in the history of Hays County.
KENDALL COUNTY
Boerne
TOMBSTONE POETRY
John Woodward “Wood” Saunders (1856–1913) served as a Frontier Battalion ranger off and on in the 1880s and 1890s, eventually making sergeant. Much of his service was under Company D captain John R. Hughes. While Saunders rode with the rangers, his wife, Mary, in 1884 wrote a poem lauding the state lawman.
At some point after his death, Saunders’s tombstone was lost or stolen. In 1989, his descendants, working with the National Association for Outlaw and Lawman History (now the Wild West History Association), placed a new marker on his grave. Carved in the marker are two verses from Mary Saunders’s poem:
He may not win the laurel
Nor trumpet tongue of fame
But beauty smiles upon him,
And ranchmen bless his name.
Then here’s to the Texas Ranger
Past, present and to come.
Our safety from the savage,
The guardian of our home.
Visit: Boerne Cemetery, 700–800 North School Street.
Sisterdale
BATTLE OF WALKER CREEK
Returning from a fruitless scout for Indians along the Pedernales River, Captain Jack Hays detailed one of his rangers to lag behind the rest of his command, alert to the possibility of their being backtracked.
On June 8, 1844, the rear guard rode into the ranger camp to report that he had found ten sets of Indian pony tracks following the rangers’ trail. Hays soon spotted several Indians in the distance, but they quickly faded into the brush. The captain ordered his men to mount and ride toward the trees. As the rangers advanced, a few warriors emerged and made a show of surprise at seeing the rangers. Then they ducked back into the cover on the east bank of a creek.
The captain had only fourteen men. But a potent equalizer rested in each of their holsters—the five-shot, .36-caliber Paterson Colt revolver.
Slowly, the rangers advanced. Having higher ground behind them, the Indians fell back, moving to a position of even more advantage over the approaching Texans. At the crown of the hill, the Comanches dismounted. Brandishing their crow feather–draped lances and raising and lowering their tough buffalo-hide shields, some knew enough English to taunt the rangers with cries of “Charge! Charge!”
Hays then demonstrated the genius for fighting that established his reputation. He knew the Indians could not see him from where they were. Rather than charge uphill, clearly what the Comanches wanted, Hays spurred his horse and wheeled around the rocky ridge. The rangers followed, circling to the Comanche’s exposed flank.
Seeing the Texans galloping toward them on level ground, the Indians remounted. The shock of the charge broke their line but only for a moment. Regrouping, the warriors split and attacked the rangers from two sides.
When the last of the gun smoke blew away, twenty Comanches lay dead. Another thirty had been wounded. Ranger Peter Fohr took several arrows and later died. Three other rangers suffered wounds, including slim, redheaded Samuel Walker, pinned to the ground with a lance through his body. Incredibly, he survived to fight again.
The fight represented more than a clash of two proud cultures. It demonstrated the power of nineteenth-century technology over stone-age weaponry. With the Colt repeating pistols, the rangers had the frontier equivalent of nuclear bombs.
Back to back, the Texians received them and the close and deadly fire of their pistols emptied many a saddle. Thus, hand to hand the fight lasted fifteen minutes, the Indians using their spears and arrows, the Texians their repeating pistols. Scarcely a man…was not grazed.
–Clarksville Northern Standard
Visit: Historians have debated for years exactly where the fight occurred. It is believed to be on private property in Kendall County. Sisterdale Dance Hall and Opera House, 1210 Sisterdale Road. Historic nineteenth-century log and frame structures (with historical exhibits) amid 360-year-old oaks on the bank of Sister Creek.
KERR COUNTY
Center Point
RANGER CEMETERY
No one knows why the small Center Point Cemetery came to be the final resting place of so many Texas Rangers, but with thirty-five ranger tombstones, the cemetery has more ranger burials than anyplace in the state.
For years, the count stood at thirty-two, but the burial of three modern-day rangers, including noted Captain John M. Wood, who until his death in 2013 had been the state’s oldest living ranger, has raised the number to thirty-five.
The three best-known nineteenth-century rangers lying in the cemetery are Andrew Jackson Sowell Jr., Neal Coldwell and Nelson Orcelus Reynolds.
Modern rangers during the 1986 historical marker dedication at Center Point Cemetery, which has more ranger graves than anywhere else in Texas. Photo by Mike Cox.
A.J. SOWELL (1848–1921)
Like his father Asa Sowell, who had ridden with Jack Hays’s rangers, Andrew Jackson Sowell served Texas as a ranger as well. Born in Seguin in 1848, A.J. Sowell joined the Rangers in 1870. Soon after mustering in, he participated in the force’s 1870–71 campaign against the Wichita Indians. Unlike his father, A.J. proved as adroit with a pen as with horses and guns. After his ranger service, he wrote three classics of Texas history: Early Settlers of Southwest Texas (1880), Rangers and Pioneers of Texas (1884) and The Life of Big Foot Wallace (1899). Sowell died in Center Point in 1921 at seventy-three.
NEAL COLDWELL (1844–1925)
When the Frontier Battalion organized in the spring of 1874, Coldwell became captain of Company F. His seventy-five rangers took their oaths of office in Kerr County on July 4 that year. Coldwell continued as a company commander until 1879, when he was promoted to ranger quartermaster, a job he held until 1883. He spent the last years of his life at Center Point, dying there at eighty-one.
N.O. REYNOLDS
(1846–1922)
Reynolds joined the Rangers on May 25, 1874, serving first under Company D captain Rufe Perry and later as a lieutenant under Captain Coldwell in Company E. As a Frontier Battalion lawman, Reynolds was involved in mitigating the deadly Horrell-Higgins feud in Lampasas and the 1878 breakup of the Sam Bass gang in Round Rock. After rangers returned killer John Wesley Hardin to Texas, Reynolds guarded the notorious gunman during his trial and then escorted him to prison at Huntsville. The lieutenant resigned from the Rangers in 1879 and later settled in Center Point. He died there in 1922, at seventy-five.
Visit: Center Point is on State Highway 27 between Kerrville and Comfort. The cemetery is off Farm to Market Road 480, half a mile from town. A historical marker placed in 1986 lists the ranger burials. At 318 San Antonio Stree is one of the community’s oldest buildings, the two-story Woolls Building. Built in 1873-1875, it served as the meeting place of the local Rising Star Masonic Lodge. Many of the former rangers buried at Center Point had belonged to this lodge. A native limestone house former ranger Reynolds lived in from 1918 to 1922 is across from the cemetery at Farm to Market Road 480 and Elm Pass Road. A 2001 historical marker stands outside the house.
Kerrville
JOSEPH A. TIVY (1818–1892)
With his two sisters, Joseph Tivy immigrated to the Republic of Texas from his native Canada by way of New York in 1837. He served four enlistments under ranger captain Jack Hays for various periods from 1844 to 1846. After the discovery of gold in California in 1849, he and his sisters joined the westward rush. Back in Texas in 1858, he settled in Karnes County for a time. When the Civil War began, he spent two years in Confederate military service. After the war, Tivy worked as a surveyor for the Texas General Land Office and eventually began ranching. In 1872, he moved to Kerr County. He served in the legislature and in 1889 as mayor of Kerrville. While mayor, he donated land for the city’s schools. Tivy; his wife, Ella (along with her pet cat); and his sister Susan were buried on the mountain overlooking town.
Visit: A historical marker commemorating the former ranger and his family stands two miles east of Kerrville on Farm to Market Road 1341, just south of Loop 534. A dirt road off nearby Cypress Creek Road leads to the summit of the mountain, but the grave site is not open to the public.
CAPTAIN CHARLES SCHREINER (1838–1927)
Born in Alsace-Lorraine, France, to a family of nobility, Charles Schreiner came to San Antonio with his parents in September 1852. Two years later, only sixteen, Schreiner enlisted as a Texas Ranger. He served under Captain John W. Sansom until 1857, when he resigned to take up ranching in newly organized Kerr County.
In 1861, Schreiner joined the Confederate army and saw action throughout most of the war. Back in Texas, he returned to ranching in Kerr County. In 1869, Schreiner opened a general mercantile store. The store did well, and Schreiner expanded his business interests to banking and the sale of wool and mohair.
While Schreiner learned how to keep accounts, price his goods sharply and judge livestock, his ability to ride and shoot did not atrophy. That proved useful in 1870 when Kerr County organized a ranger-like company that elected Schreiner its captain, a title he held the rest of his long life.
Y.O. RANCH
In 1880, Captain Schreiner bought the former Taylor-Clements Ranch and its Y.O. brand in western Kerr County. Once covering 600,000 acres, by the late twentieth century, the Y.O. had been reduced to 65,000 acres. The Schreiner family still owns 27,000 acres, both a working ranch and hunting resort. When Schreiner’s grandson Charles Schreiner III inherited the Y.O. in 1954, he began building a large collection of Texas Ranger firearms and other memorabilia he kept at the ranch. Retired and current rangers were frequent guests. Following his death at seventy-four in 2001, his collection sold at auction.
Visit: A historical marker erected in 1986 stands at the ranch entrance, sixteen miles west of Mountain Home on State Highway 41.
SCHREINER MANSION
Noted San Antonio architect Alfred Giles designed a two-story, six-bedroom house for Captain Schreiner in 1879 that was the first native limestone structure in Kerr County. Sixteen years later, Schreiner paid Giles to add an elaborate porch. Pink granite columns shipped from Italy enhanced the addition. Schreiner lived in the mansion until his death, after which his heirs sold it to the local Masonic lodge. Since 2009, it has been owned by Schreiner University, a Kerrville liberal arts college endowed by the captain in 1923. The mansion was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.
Visit: 216 Earl Garrett, Kerrville.
LAMPASAS COUNTY
Lampasas
HORRELL-HIGGINS FEUD
Most customers walking into Terry the Barber’s in downtown Lampasas don’t pay much attention to the shop’s front door. They’re wanting a haircut, not studying architecture. Occasionally, however, someone with an eye for detail may notice what look like worm marks in the old wood around the door’s lock. But insects didn’t make those small holes—shotgun pellets punched them during a wild shootout on the courthouse square in the summer of 1877, the climax of one of Texas’s bloodiest feuds.
Sixty-seven miles northwest of Austin, in the 1870s, Lampasas lay on the rough edge of Texas’s western frontier. The county had a duly elected sheriff, but he could not hope to keep the peace all the time in a community full of men with guns generally inclined to settle things their way.
In 1876, cattleman John Pinckney Calhoun Higgins, better known as Pink, began losing calves, and he rightly suspected the brothers Horrell—Martin, Merritt, Sam and Thomas. Particularly Merritt. Higgins tried it the legal way first, filing charges against Merritt for cattle theft. But a jury acquitted him.
On January 22, 1877, Higgins confronted Horrell in the Gem Saloon. “Mr. Horrell,” he said almost politely, “this is to settle some cattle business.” And then Higgins proceeded to “Winchester” him, permanently breaking him from rustling. While that shooting had to do with one man righting a wrong the way he saw fit, when someone kills someone else, it tends to create resentment among the family and friends of the dearly departed. In this case, violence soon spread like pooling blood.
Two months later, on March 26, 1877, someone ambushed Tom and Mart Horrell on a branch of Sulphur Creek as they rode toward town. They shot back and survived, though one got wounded. Rangers rode in pursuit of the attackers, presumed to be Higgins and some of his men, but they did not find them. Soon, however, Higgins and his brother-in-law Bob Mitchell had been named in arrest warrants. Higgins and Mitchell eventually turned themselves in and were freed on $10,000 bail each. On June 4, someone broke into the county courthouse and destroyed all the district court records having to do with their case.
Holes punched by shotgun pellets are still visible in the door of this old building on the courthouse square in Lampasas. Photos courtesy Jane McMillan.
Three days later, when the two men rode into town with some of their friends to make new bonds, the Horrells and their supporters stood waiting. Soon, right on the courthouse square, lead started flying. The June 7 gunfight lasted an incredible two hours with scores of rounds fired—mostly from Winchester rifles but also from handguns and shotguns. Higgins and Mitchell and the Horrells all survived, but one man from each faction died, with a third man wounded. Likely more would have ended up in the cemetery had it not been for the armed intervention of local officers and three deputized citizens.
A week later, Frontier Battalion commander Major John B. Jones led fifteen rangers into town. He stayed until tensions eased and then left Lieutenant N.O. Reynolds and a small detachment behind to keep things quiet. Back in late July after Reynolds and his men had rounded up the Horrells, Jones got each faction to sign letters that amounted to a peace treaty, one of the more unorthodox (if successful) feud mitigations in the history of the Old West.
[W]e believe the troubles are over, and once more it can be said that Lampasas county is free from local broils and her population quiet and law-abiding.
–Lampasas Dispatch, August 9, 1877
Visit: The barbershop with the shotgun-sprayed door is at 413 East Fourth Street in the Alex Northington Building, one of Lampasas’s oldest structures. The door originally hung on the front of the building, facing the square.
A historical marker summarizing the feud stands on the west side of the courthouse.
Another historical marker was placed in 2002 at the site of the March 26, 1877 battle, near a stream that came to be called Battle Branch. That marker is 3.8 miles east of Lampasas on U.S. 190.
The rangers camped near Hancock Springs on Sulphur Creek in Lampasas, the exact spot lost and unmarked.
Lieutenant Reynolds, after resigning from the Rangers, later became sheriff of Lampasas County. After leaving law enforcement, he ran a saloon there for a time.
Lampasas County Museum, 303 South Western Avenue, Lampasas.
MASON COUNTY
THE HOO-DOO WAR
One of the Frontier Battalion’s less-than-inspiring performances came during the Hoo-Doo, or Mason County, War. The near anarchy that gripped the county from 1874 to 1877 resulted from a volatile mix of lingering post–Civil War grudges, cultural differences (“Americans” versus settlers of German heritage) and ranchers bent on exterminating cattle thieves. Overzealous law enforcement at the county level and indifference on the part of some rangers didn’t help.
The trouble started when a posse under newly elected Sheriff John Clark jailed a number of Llano County residents for rustling. After their release, escorted by a delegation of partisans on their way back to Llano County, a Methodist church mysteriously burned down about the time they rode by.
