Legends & Lore of the Texas Capitol

by Mike Cox

  Most Texas officials, unsure if they would be hanged as traitors by the Federals or merely told to go and sin no more, preferred not to find out and vacated their offices. Only the lieutenant governor and two financial officials, Comptroller Willis E. Robards and Treasurer Cyrus H. Randolph, opted to stay in Austin.

  “Confederate soldiers, without officers or order, are coming in every hour, and there is nothing but plunder and sack going on—and the citizens are as bad as the soldiers,” Amelia Barr wrote in her diary on May 25. Eight days later, she noted, “Everything in confusion…and there is no law.”

  Fred Sterzing helped thwart the raid on the state treasury. Author’s collection.

  But newly discharged Confederate cavalry captain George Freeman had taken it upon himself to organize a thirty-man home guard to help preserve the rule of law in the capital city.

  Shortly before nine o’clock on the night of June 11, Nathan Shelley, who had served as state attorney general before joining the Confederacy, received word that some forty armed men had broken into the unguarded two-story treasury, a free-standing building just northeast of the capitol. Shelley located Freeman to tell him something was afoot. Easing through the shadows toward the capitol, they soon heard the sound of metal striking metal coming from the nearby treasury. Fully grasping the situation, Freeman ran to spread the alarm.

  Confederate veteran Fred Sterzing heard hurried footsteps followed by someone knocking on the door and yelling that the treasury was being looted. He raced to the Dieterich Building, where the local armory occupied the second floor. Al Musgrove, who had served in the Confederate military with Freeman and Sterzing, heard the alarm, too. He and other members of Freeman’s company also rushed to the armory.

  Nineteen volunteers removed rifles from their stacks, fixed bayonets and formed up on Congress Avenue in front of the building. From there, Freeman led the small company to the Baptist church across from the capitol. At his command, the guardsmen charged toward the three-story limestone statehouse. Lookouts posted by the bandits fired at them before retreating into the capitol, but no one got hit.

  Freeman’s men entered the building without encountering further resistance, and from there, they sprinted to the adjacent treasury building. With the approach of the volunteers, the men inside the treasury bailed out the north door clutching hats, shirts and tied-off trousers filled with coins.

  Hearing all the commotion, Johanna Domschke, a German immigrant who lived across the street from the treasury, warily stepped outside. She saw bright flashes and heard the sharp reports of rifles and pistols. As she watched, wind raised her apron and a stray bullet punched a hole in the garment, barely missing her. Despite the danger, she stayed outside and observed the bandits as they fled on horseback.

  Engraving of the old capitol circa 1860. On June 11, 1865, bandits raided the treasury behind it and escaped with $17,000 in coins. Author’s collection.

  Freemen and three men started upstairs to the second floor. He and his brother took one set of stairs and Sterzing and Musgrove the other. The rest of the volunteers surrounded the building. But only one intruder remained inside. As the home guardsmen reached the top of the stairs, the man started firing at them.

  According to Musgrove, the bandit “came…into the hallway. In one hand was his hat filled with silver and his six-shooter in the other.” Musgrove and Sterzing both fired, one of the bullets hitting the robber in the stomach. The man retreated into the vault room, and Musgrove stuck his pistol through the door to fire again. But before he could pull the trigger, the man cried, “Don’t shoot.…I am mortally wounded.”

  Still covering the man, Musgrove watched as he “came out bent almost double and fell to the floor,” whiskey-smelling blood oozing from his wound. The man no longer posing a threat, Musgrove hurried to look out a window and saw the bandits galloping away. His men dismounted and outnumbered, Freeman decided not to give chase.

  Inside the vault room, scattered coins, negotiable bonds, worthless Confederate States of America cash and other financial instruments covered the floor. The robbers had used pickaxes to punch holes in the backs of two large safes so they could get to the money.

  Meanwhile, some of Freeman’s men carried the wounded man to the Swisher Hotel. Musgrove recognized the bandit as a drunk he had seen in town a few hours earlier. “As he passed me he said, ‘It’s about time for the boys to meet, isn’t it?’” but Musgrove had paid no attention to the remark.

  Freeman’s company kept the treasury under guard that night. Leaving some of his men behind, shortly after daylight he led a posse in pursuit of the bandits. They soon discovered that the raiders had split into two parties to make following them harder. One trail led northwest and another ran north. Riding each, all the volunteers found were a few dropped coins.

  Alex Campbell, the gut-shot robber, died hard. While refusing to name his colleagues, to his last breath he profanely upbraided his fellow bandits as cowards.

  One night shortly after the raid, someone broke into Sterzing’s room. Awakening to see a man standing over him with a knife, he struggled with the intruder before he escaped. Sterzing snapped off a shot but missed. The same night, someone found Comptroller Robards bound and gagged. Sterzing recalled years later that the city had feared another attempt on the treasury, but nothing else happened.

  Not only did Austin lack sufficient law enforcement to keep the peace, but it also had no newspaper to report the crime. Later, the Galveston News ran an item noting, “It is the universal belief of the citizens that the robbers…had been waiting to lay blame on Shelby’s men when they arrived there.”

  Freeman wrote U.S. Army major F.W. Emory in Galveston a letter summarizing the raid. He said his men had saved about $30,000 in specie and U.S. coupons and hundreds of thousands of dollars in liabilities to the state. “This service was voluntary and without expectations of reward,” he declared.

  A final audit showed the treasury held $1,753,000 in railroad bonds, $475,000 in U.S. Treasury bonds, $384,000 in (worthless) Confederate notes, $90,000 in comptroller’s certificates, $25,000 in state warrants and $27,525 in specie. It is generally believed $17,000 in coin had been taken, which in modern dollars would be worth $2.7 million.

  Until occupying Federal troops reached Austin in July, Freeman’s men continued to guard what remained of the state’s public funds. They also tried to identify the bandits, but no arrests were ever made, the robbers apparently keeping their secret the rest of their lives.

  Some thought it suspicious that Governor Pendleton Murrah left town with General Shelby soon after the raid, but it seems more likely that he fled in fear of Federal prosecution.

  Shelby vigorously denied that he or any of his men had any involvement in the break-in. Perhaps protesting too much, he threatened to torch the town if residents persisted in spreading that rumor. Another possibility is that some of Shelby’s men undertook the treasury robbery on their own, but former treasury defender Joe Owens insisted years later that “such was not the case.” He said Shelby’s command had not even reached Austin until the day after the robbery.

  Circumstantial evidence points to John Rapp, a rebel soldier originally from Missouri who had been living in Austin, as being the mastermind of the raid. In 1861, Rapp joined the Confederate army and took part in two bloody battles in New Mexico before returning to Texas in the summer of 1862. Rapp’s final discharge came in May 1865, just days prior to the treasury raid. Having been wounded and captured earlier in the war, it’s plausible that he felt such a strong sense of entitlement that he and his comrades decided to help themselves to some hard currency.

  Thirty years passed before Rapp’s name surfaced in the press as a likely suspect. The revelation came in 1897 when General Shelby’s death prompted some newspapers to publish excerpts from a sensational and largely inaccurate account of his career written by his adjutant, John N. Edwards. In the book, Edwards claimed Shelby’s men had mitigated the treasury raid, not Freeman’s volunt
eers. That falsehood riled Freeman and others who had risked their lives that night. Freeman wrote to the Galveston newspaper to blast Edwards and so did Joe Owens.

  Owens indirectly suggested the raid had been led by Rapp, and Edwards had mentioned him in his book: “Operating about the city was a company of notorious guerrillas led by Captain Rapp.” Longtime Austin lawyer W.M. “Buck” Walton called Rapp a hot-tempered heavy drinker.

  No one came right out to say Rapp had been the ringleader, but one of Freeman’s men reported that a raider had called out to Rapp by name during the mêlée following their discovery in the treasury. And the woman who nearly got shot during the raid said she recognized Rapp among the bandits.

  Another person who might have been involved in the robbery became one of the Wild West’s most noted characters: gambler, gunman and gadabout Ben Thompson. Near the end of the Civil War, Thompson had recruited a company of men to protect the Texas settlements from hostile Indians. Rapp became captain and Thompson his lieutenant.

  Thompson disappeared from Austin right after the raid. Returning in July, he soon got arrested for another offense but escaped and fled to Mexico. A final piece of circumstantial evidence against both Thompson and Rapp concerns Alex Campbell, the raider killed in the robbery. Records show he also had been a member of the Rapp-Thompson company, an outfit that had about as bad a reputation as its leader.

  Even though the historical record is quite clear that the bandits made off with much of the state’s money, the raid is likely what inspired the later legend that a treasure in gold lies buried under the oldest tree on the capitol grounds. But anyone who paid attention in their Texas civics class understands that state lawmakers—ever eager to cut government spending and hold down taxes—would have had the whole twenty-five acres dug up if they believed there was really treasure to be found in the vicinity of the capitol.

  As for the nineteen heroes who interrupted the looting of the state’s coffers, in 1909, the Texas House adopted a resolution extending the legislature’s thanks to the defenders of the state treasury that summer night forty-three years earlier. However, no monetary award for the surviving volunteers would be forthcoming. And the State of Texas is still short $17,000—plus more than a century and a half of compounded interest.

  4

  CAPITOL WHODUNITS REAL AND FICTIONAL

  Members of the Thirteenth Legislature worked through a routine day on February 19, 1873, meeting in the then twenty-year-old limestone statehouse at the head of Congress Avenue. Most of the debate in the House of Representatives that day had centered on a proposed state finance bill, which the members eventually tabled by a fifty to thirty-one vote. That done, lawmakers in the lower chamber accepted a couple written communications, gave permission to a special railroad committee to submit three different reports, referred a bunch of memorials to committee and adjourned for the day.

  Representative Louis Franke of La Grange, whose District 7 included Fayette and Bastrop Counties, looked forward to supper and a beer before a committee meeting he would be chairing later that evening. Though hungry, after the Speaker’s gavel ended the day’s proceedings, he stayed at his desk for a while to take care of some writing. Then he went to the House sergeant-at-arms’ office to collect his per diem. With $260 worth of $5 bills in his pocket, he walked out the south door of the capitol to finally get something to eat. After his meal at an establishment on Congress Avenue, he pulled the wad of money from his pocket and peeled off a $5 greenback to cover his bill. He didn’t notice that someone was watching the transaction with unusual interest.

  About 7:30 p.m., a clerk who worked for the department of education ran into the statehouse and asked if anyone knew a Mr. Franke, saying he had been hurt. Assistant sergeant-at-arms N.C. Reeves hurried outside, as did several House members and a senator. They found Franke sitting at the foot of the steep steps descending from the building’s entrance. He was bleeding from two head wounds and appeared to have a broken leg.

  Representative Louis Franke posed for this portrait shortly before he was robbed and murdered at the capitol. Author’s collection.

  “He said he had been knocked down and robbed,” Reeves later said.

  Not fully rational, Franke at first said that one of his legislative colleagues had attacked him with a stick. But his money was missing, and two suspicious-looking heavyset men had been seen hanging around the entrance to the capitol shortly before the incident. Now they were nowhere around.

  Two House members carried the semiconscious legislator to the rented room he shared with fellow House member Gustav Hoffman from New Braunfels and summoned Dr. B.E. Hadra. The doctor found Franke in a lot of pain. He noted several cuts and bruises, a significant wound above his eye and an even nastier wound to his temple that had “produced a depression of the skin.” In other words, the lawmaker’s skull had been crushed by a blunt object.

  The doctor and an associate could do little more than inject morphine to relieve the moribund man’s pain. At 4:30 a.m. on February 20, Franke died. Before he did, he came to long enough to say he had been attacked and robbed by two men he did not know.

  Born to a prominent family in Germany in 1818, Franke (he had Anglicized his name from Ludwig Carl Ferdinand Francke) immigrated to Texas in 1845, arriving in Galveston in January 1846. He settled in Washington County and stayed there until shortly after the Mexican War broke out. In October 1846, he joined the Texas Volunteers under Captain Shapley P. Ross and served for a year. As the war wound down, he left federal service and enlisted in the Texas Rangers under Captain Henry E. McCulloch. His company operated from a camp on Hamilton Creek near what is now Burnet, west of Austin. After his term of enlistment with the Rangers ended, the adventurous German went to California at some point following the discovery of gold there in 1849. By early 1854, he was back in Texas, where he married a young woman in Fayette County. As his family grew, he made a living as a farmer and music teacher. After serving two years as a Fayette County commissioner, in November 1872, he ran for a seat in the House of Representatives and gained election.

  “The deceased was much respected and beloved for his kindly and generous qualities, both of head and heart,” the Dallas Herald noted. “He had no enemies. Upright in all his dealings, genial in deportment, a good friend, a loving husband, a kind father and an exemplary Christian, he has passed away without a stain on his record, to that higher House.”

  Later on the morning of Franke’s death, his shocked legislative colleagues listened to the House chaplain pray for their slain colleague’s family and then quickly passed a resolution calling for appointment of a joint committee to “make a thorough and searching investigation into the tragedy.”

  Meanwhile, local law enforcement officers had briefly detained a man who had suspicious dark spots on his shirt. But the spots turned out to be paint, not blood, and he was released. One newspaper reported he was “a very innocent inoffensive fellow.” The newspaper continued, “There is no clue to the scoundrel who committed this hellish deed.”

  Calling the killing a “hellish deed” was not journalistic hyperbole. One of the thugs who accosted the lawmaker had apparently used a large rock to hit him on the head. When Franke fell, judging by the blood found on the limestone steps leading up to the capitol, he had tumbled down them. In the process, he broke his thigh.

  Reeves said in a written statement that he had seen two men outside the capitol about fifteen minutes prior to the attack. Two others also noticed the men. “The description of the men seen by them leads me to believe them the same I saw sitting on the steps as I passed up at a quarter past seven o’clock,” the assistant sergeant-at-arms said. “I could not identify the men, as there was not light sufficient to distinguish their features.”

  Following a memorial service in the House chamber on February 21, a long entourage of state and local officials escorted a carriage bearing the metal coffin holding the representative’s body down Congress Avenue to the train station for the sixty-
five-mile trip to La Grange. From the depot there, his remains were taken to the Franke family cemetery on his farm near the small community of Black Jack Springs.6

  “The murderers of Mr. Frankee [the number of Es in the victim’s name varied in the written accounts of the crime, but he and his family used only one],” the Austin Daily Statesman speculated, “intended to kill and rob Mr. Rhodes, Sergeant-at-Arms of the House. Mr. Rhodes had drawn the money of a large number of members on that day, and even after dark had several thousand dollars left upon his person not delivered.”

  Engraving from Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly showing the legislature in action in the old limestone capitol. Author’s collection.

  The remains of the murdered House member rest in this private family cemetery in Fayette County. Courtesy of Gary McKee.

  Another newspaper reported that Rhodes had $28,000 in cash that day, a huge sum for that era. By the time Franke received his share, Rhodes had dispersed all but about $4,000.

  Austin law enforcement did not distinguish itself in the Franke case. In addition to the hapless painter they rousted, at least two other men were questioned as potential suspects, but they were released. As the Dallas Herald reported: “So far [the]…assassins have not been discovered, nor is there any good reason to believe they will be, from the bungling manner the authorities have adopted to ferret out the perpetrators. The cool deliberation and audacity displayed stamp the murderers as professionals; yet, men are arrested who neither have the motive nor the nerve to commit the deed, while doubtless the guilty ones are coolly looking on and enjoying the farcical examinations.” Despite a $5,000 reward offered by the state, the robbery-murder remained unsolved.