Gunfights & Sites in Texas Ranger History

by Mike Cox

  CAMERON COUNTY

  Brownsville

  BATTLES OF PALO ALTO AND RESACA DE LA PALMA

  Following Texas statehood, when hostilities broke out between Mexico and the United States with the May 3, 1846 shelling of a U.S. fortification across from Matamoras, rangers under Jack Hays veteran Samuel Walker guided General Zachary Taylor’s regulars toward future Brownsville. On May 8, at a point called Palo Alto in present Cameron County, 2,300 U.S. troops and the small ranger company battled 4,000 Mexican soldiers.

  The next day, the two armies met again at Resaca de la Palma, and the Americans prevailed. During the fight, when a bullet killed his horse, Walker nearly escaped being impaled on a bladed pike by a Mexican lancer. While the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 is its own story, this is the conflict that would make the Texas Rangers internationally famous.

  Contemporary engraving depicting the battles of Resaca del Palma and Palo Alto at the outset of the Mexican War in 1846. Library of Congress.

  Visit: Palo Alto Battlefield National Historic Park is on the north side of Brownsville, at the northeast corner of Farm to Market Road 1847-Paredes Line Road and Farm to Market Road 511/550. Interpretive exhibits.

  THE CORTINA TROUBLES

  At times, both Texas and Mexico wanted to hang Juan Nepomuceno Cortina.

  On July 13, 1859, Cortina rode into Brownsville to break bread with amigos at Castel’s Saloon. As Cortina sat with his friends he heard a commotion outside. When he went to see what was going on, he found Marshal Robert Shears beating a Mexican man who had worked on his family’s ranch, Rancho del Carmen. Incensed, Cortina intervened and shot him. Then he galloped out of town with the beaten vaquero on the back of his horse.

  The lawman recovered, but Cortina soon faced charges. He tried to buy his way out of it, but when that didn’t work, he moved across the river to Mexico. The next time he crossed over to Brownsville, he did so at the head of a small army of seventy well-armed and mounted men.

  While the governments of Texas and the United States saw Cortina’s September 28 incursion as an invasion, Cortina had merely come to town with a mental list of personal grievances to settle. He and his Cortinistas didn’t get everyone he wanted, but by the time he rode out of town, two men lay dead and three others wounded. Some accounts report five deaths.

  When word of the raid reached San Antonio, former city marshal William Tobin decided to raise his own company of volunteers and ride to the aid of the terrified valley community. On his way south, Tobin sent a letter to Governor E.M. Pease offering his services as a ranger captain. The governor took him up on it and gave him an official commission.

  Not long after Tobin and his rangers arrived in Brownsville, the situation grew even worse. A party of vigilantes—historians today suspect Tobin’s men—lynched a Cortina officer who had been captured before the arrival of the rangers. That made Cortina so mad he threatened to burn the town. Brownsville survived, but it took another company of Rangers under the celebrated John “Rip” Ford plus elements of the U.S. Army to squelch Cortina’s mini-war on South Texas.

  Despite all the fighting, Cortina died of old age in Mexico in 1894.

  Juan Cortina’s invasion of Brownsville put rangers on his trail. Library of Congress.

  Visit: Neall House, 230 Neal Road (moved from original location, 625 East Fourteenth Street). Built in the 1850s, it is the city’s oldest frame residence and in poor repair. Its first residents were English-born Brownsville mayor William Neall (1807–1896) and his family. When Cortina staged his raid, his men torched a store Neal owned and fired on this house, killing his son. Donated by family descendants to the Brownsville Art League in 1950, the house is now owned by the City of Brownsville.

  PALO ALTO PRAIRIE FIGHT

  On June 12, 1875, rangers under Captain Leander H. McNelly had a running gun battle with Mexican cattle thieves near Brownsville.

  During the fight, a ranger bullet killed the horse of one of the outlaws. (Savvy rangers, as had knights of old, often tried to unhorse their enemy, a tactic to prevent their escape.) When the suddenly dismounted bandit hopped up behind one of his still-mounted colleagues, Ranger Lawrence Baker Wright fired at him. Though surely not planned, the single shot killed both outlaws.

  The battle resulted in twelve to fifteen dead bandits (accounts vary, but no matter the number, all the Mexicans were killed) and one slain ranger, sixteen-year-old Barry Smith. While some sources say he may have been seventeen or even eighteen, he was still the youngest Texas Ranger ever to die in the line of duty.

  They attacked me, when I overtook them. It was a running fight…[The rangers] killed the whole party. They fought desperately…My men are all trumps.

  –Leander McNelly, telegram to Austin, June 12, 1875

  Visit: The fight took place in the general vicinity of the 1846 Mexican War battle, now a National Historic Site.

  FORT BROWN

  Ranger captain Bill McDonald earned his subsequent description of “not being afraid to charge Hell with a bucket of water” in a standoff with U.S. troops following a racially inspired disturbance involving black troops at Fort Brown in 1906. One Brownsville citizen died in the mêlée. When he heard about it, McDonald got arrest warrants for thirteen soldiers and vowed that he intended to see the cases prosecuted in state court. But despite much posturing on the part of the captain, the military handled the matter, and McDonald got what amounted to a hands-off order from the governor. To forestall further trouble, the army shipped the black troops out of town. The fort remained active until 1946, when after a century, the army finally left the Rio Grande Valley.

  Brownsville at the time of the 1906 racial incident that led Captain Bill McDonald to take on the U.S. Army. Author’s collection.

  Visit: Campus of Texas Southmost College, Gorgas Street, Brownsville. Historic Brownsville Museum, 641 East Madison Street.

  J.T. CANALES HOUSE

  As a young man, J.T. Canales saw his father welcome rangers to his Nueces County ranch as they scouted in South Texas. Rangers like Captain John R. Hughes, he later wrote, were “some of the noblest men I know.” But during the Mexican Revolution, not all rangers distinguished themselves along the border. Abuses occurred, and numerous innocent Mexican Americans died at the hands of rangers.

  Well educated and with a law degree, Canales won a seat in the state legislature, serving from 1905 to 1910 and again from 1917 to 1920. During his second stint in Austin, he launched a legislative investigation that went a long way toward professionalizing the state law enforcement body.

  Canales married in 1910 and a year later purchased a lot in Brownsville. Two years after acquiring the property, he built at house on it in 1913 that still stands.

  Having received threats on his life, including one from then ranger sergeant Frank Hamer, Canales opted to leave government. But he spent the rest of his long life advocating for Mexican American rights. Having made history with his stand against Ranger excesses, he also wrote books and articles on the history of his part of Texas. He died on March 30, 1976, at ninety-nine.

  As a state legislator, Mexican American lawyer J.T. Canales investigated the rangers and endured death threats, but he lived a long life, much of it in this house he built in Brownsville. Photo courtesy George Cox.

  Visit: 505 East St. Charles Street, Brownsville. The house is privately owned, but a historical marker placed in 2009 stands in front of it.

  CALHOUN COUNTY

  Port Lavaca

  RANGER CEMETERY

  The old graveyard called Ranger Cemetery had been in use for a decade before it got its name. The first burial was that of Major H. Oram Watts, the Republic of Texas customs collector at Linnville killed by Comanches in what came to be called the Great Comanche Raid.

  In 1850, Texas Ranger James T. Lytle lost his wife, Margaret Peyton Lytle, and buried her here. She was known as the poet of the Rangers.

  Mrs. Lytle had another ranger connection, of sorts. Her mother was Angelina Eberly,
the feisty woman who fired a cannon at Texas Rangers sent by Republic of Texas President Sam Houston to remove the young nation’s governmental records from Austin. The scheme failed, in large measure to the resistance on the part of Mrs. Eberly and other incensed Austinites.

  After leaving Austin, Mrs. Eberly opened the first hotel in Indianola. She died on March 15, 1860, having outlived her daughter by a decade.

  Former ranger Lytle only survived his wife by four years, dying on February 6, 1854. For some reason, rather than being afforded the opportunity of rejoining his wife in eternal repose at the Ranger Cemetery, Lytle’s family buried him at the Port Lavaca Cemetery.

  Visit: Cemetery on Harbor Street. Calhoun County Museum, 301 South Ann Street, Port Lavaca.

  DIMMITT COUNTY

  ESPANTOSA LAKE

  So long ago that no one remembered why, the small natural waterhole on the old Spanish road from San Antonio to Mexico had come to be called Espantosa Lake. In Spanish, espantosa means “fearful” or “horrid.” Cleary, something bad had happened there in the distant past, and something bad—at least from the perspective of four outlaws—would happen again.

  Near midnight on September 30, 1876, four rangers under John B. Armstrong rode quietly through the brush toward the lake, hoping the prisoner they had in tow had been telling the truth about a party of horse thieves and cattle rustlers being camped near the lake.

  The lawmen had made it within seventy yards of the lake when they saw orange flashes and bullets began flying their way. The prisoner hadn’t been lying. In the shootout that followed, the rangers added three more dead men whose spirits some believe joined the other ghosts haunting the lake. The fourth outlaw had been badly wounded but survived. Meanwhile, according to Armstrong’s report, the cooperative prisoner tried to escape and was shot to death. They had four dead bodies to deal with, but rangers recovered fifty stolen horses and all the weaponry the outlaws had been carrying.

  A granite historical marker was placed at the lake in 1936 but has been badly defaced.

  We responded promptly [to the gunfire] and a lively little fight ensued, resulting in the death of three of them and the wounding of another in five places.

  –Ranger John B. Armstrong’s report to headquarters

  Visit: Off Farm to Market Road 1433, twenty-six miles northeast of Carrizo Springs, at the dam on the south end of the lake. Brush Country Museum, 201 South Stewart Street, Cotulla.

  DUVAL COUNTY

  Politics South Texas Style

  Following their Ranger service under Captain Leander McNelly, Linton Lafayette Wright and brother Lawrence Baker Wright settled in Duval County—L.L. serving a decade (1880–90) as sheriff and L.B., having become a physician, practicing medicine.

  As sheriff, former ranger Wright became a pioneer practitioner of the sort of shady politics that later made Duval County world famous when future president Lyndon B. Johnson magically came up with just enough votes in that county’s infamous Box 13 to gain election to the U.S. Senate in 1948.

  When Canadian-born John Buckley, a Duval County sheep rancher and grandfather of future pundit William F. Buckley Jr., ran for sheriff against L.L. Wright in 1888, the incumbent won. Buckley challenged the results in court, claiming election officials supporting Wright had failed to count ballots in his favor and that Wright had imported voters from Nueces and Starr Counties. The Texas Supreme Court agreed and ordered Buckley sworn in as sheriff in 1890, ending Wright’s law enforcement career.

  The former ranger moved to New Mexico Territory but returned to the county seat of San Diego in 1892 when his brother died during an epidemic. L.L. got sick while there and soon died also.

  John Buckley, who served as sheriff until 1896, lived until 1903. Forty-five years later, when officials recounted Box 13 they discovered that Buckley had apparently continued his support of the Democratic Party even in death, having cast his vote for LBJ.

  Visit: Duval County Museum, 208 East St. Joseph Avenue, San Diego.

  FRIO COUNTY

  WILLIAM ALEXANDER ANDERSON “BIGFOOT” WALLACE (1817–1899)

  His name ran long, just like his six-foot, two-inch, 240-pound body. Far better known as Bigfoot Wallace, his friends called him Foot.

  Wallace came to the Republic of Texas at twenty. Unlike other new arrivals, he did not seek land or adventure. He wanted revenge. His elder brother Sam had been one of 330 Texans executed at Goliad by the Mexican army in March 1836 during the revolution. By 1839, after farming for a while near La Grange, Wallace was living in newly established Austin, the republic’s log cabin capital city. That’s where he earned his nickname by killing in self-defense an Indian with unusually large feet.

  When General Adrian Woll invaded Texas in 1842 in yet another attempt by Mexico to reclaim its lost territory, Wallace enlisted under ranger Captain Jack Hays and finally got his chance to avenge his brother’s death. He later joined the Somervell and Mier expeditions. Captured and imprisoned, he survived the infamous lottery of death at Perote Prison by drawing a white bean.

  Back in Texas, Wallace served on and off as a ranger under Hays—steadily building a reputation as a hard fighter—until the Mexican War, when he joined Hays’s federalized regiment under R.A. Gillespie for duty in Mexico. Wallace’s last ranger service came in the spring of 1851, but as a stagecoach driver along the San Antonio–El Paso Road, he would do more Indian fighting.

  Wallace settled on Chicon Creek in Frio County in the 1870s and remained in the county the rest of his life.

  Here is a soldier whom Napoleon would have made a marshal of France.

  He has demonstrated that there are men who love a battle better than a ball.

  –Captain Jack Hays on Wallace following the Battle of Salado

  Noted Ranger Bigfoot Wallace and a reunion ribbon and badge he once wore. Photo by L.A. Wilke.

  Visit: Opened in 1954 in a replica of the log cabin in which Wallace lived, the Bigfoot Wallace Museum has a large collection of material related to the old ranger. A historical marker placed in 1936 stands across from the museum at the intersection of Farm to Market 472 and Farm to Market 462 in Bigfoot.

  LONGVIEW CEMETERY

  When Bigfoot Wallace died on January 7, 1899, his friends and neighbors buried him in Longview Cemetery, a small graveyard near the community that bears his name. A substantial white marble monument in the cemetery honors the old ranger. “Here Lies He Who Spent His Manhood Defending The Homes Of Texas,” the monument asserts, adding, “Brave, Honest and Faithful.” That may be a fair description of Wallace, but the first line is not at all honest. Forty-eight days after his burial, the Ex–Texas Rangers Association had the old ranger disinterred and shipped to Austin for reburial in the State Cemetery. To be fair, the unusual tombstone—placed in 1960—does note that fact and even records the date of Wallace’s second departure: February 24, 1899.

  Visit: One mile west of Bigfoot off Farm to Market Road 462.

  OLD FRIO COUNTY JAIL

  Built in 1884, the Frio County Jail remained in use until 1967. From 1892 to 1896, the two-story brick structure, the oldest in Frio County, served as the residence of sheriff and former Company D ranger J. Walter Durbin (1860–1916). Durbin was in the Rangers from 1884 to 1889.

  In the summer of 1893, Sheriff Durbin traveled by train to Arizona to fetch a Texas man who, as the Arizona Republic phrased it, faced charges of “irregular cattle transactions” in Frio County. Displaying the get-with-it-ness that had made him an effective ranger, when Durbin got to Maricopa and learned he would have to wait for another train to get to Tempe, he decided to just walk. He finally got a ride, but not before hoofing it most of the way.

  The rangers will attend to all killing done in this locality for the present.

  –Corporal J. Walter Durbin, writing to a newspaper from a trouble spot

  in South Texas in the fall of 1888

  Visit: Frio County Pioneer Jail Museum, 4l0 East Pecan Street, Pearsall.

  GONZALES COUNTY<
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  Gonzales

  THE “IMMORTAL 32”

  When news reached Gonzales on March 13, 1836, that the Alamo had fallen with all its defenders slain, General Sam Houston ordered the town torched. As flames lit the night sky, the Texas army, the grieving widows and children of the thirty-two rangers who had made the sixty-five-mile ride to San Antonio and all other Anglo inhabitants fled eastward. That marked the beginning of a mass exodus that came to be known as the Runaway Scrape.

  The townspeople did their work well. No house or building in Gonzales dating from this period is known to have survived to the modern era. But there remains a very tangible reminder of the sacrifice made by the men of the Gonzales Ranging Company: an eight-foot, ten-inch pink granite cenotaph placed atop a three-foot base in front of the Gonzales Memorial Museum during the 1936 Texas Centennial.

  A sculpted bronze plaque on the monument lists the names of the Gonzales men who died at the Alamo, but permanence should not be confused with accuracy. Historians later learned that two of the men named on the marker, John G. King and John McGee, were not among the “Immortal 32.” The names that should be on the marker instead of King (it was actually his fifteen-year-old son who died) and McGee (who had already been in the Alamo) are rangers Andrew Duvalt and Marcus Sewell. For a list of the thirty-two rangers, visit tamu.edu.

  This museum and monument built in Gonzales during the Texas Centennial honors thirty-two rangers who rode to the Alamo and never returned. Photo courtesy Valerie Reddell.

  Visit: 414 Smith Street.

  MATTHEW “OLD PAINT” CALDWELL (1798–1842)

  They called him “Old Paint” because of white splotches on his facial hair and chest some thought made him look like a paint horse.