Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  After heavy fighting in the north, between Republicans, French, Belgians, Austrians, and Imperialists, United States pressure—there were 52,000 Federal troops on the Mexican border in 1865—caused the French to withdraw from Mexico. Maximilian's empire soon collapsed in defeat and ruin. Despite international protests, Maximilian and his faithful general, Tomás Mejía, were condemned and shot to death at Querétaro in 1867. But this did not bring peace to Mexico. Two generations of internal disorder had fostered anarchy.

  The government of Mexico, whether federalist-liberal or centralist-conservative, was not deliberately hostile to the United States. In fact, there was a considerable amount of goodwill engendered by American diplomacy against the French. The problem was that the regimes in the City of Mexico had no real control over the distant marches. There was no infrastructure of citizenry in Mexico. There was a governmental clique, always holding power by some resort to arms, and under this a group of varyingly powerful great landholders, hacendados and rancheros, who stood between the official government and the mass of common people. These hacendados in reality were the local governments, whether they held the titles of state governors, or merely generals; they commanded their own local armies, usually raised upon their own lands. These local warlords engaged in local power struggles; they were uncontrollable from the capital in the 1860s and 1870s; and in the north, few of them naturally had any love for Texas.

  They permitted raiding, if they did not actually instigate it. Cortinas, who had become a powerful figure below the river, actually was the chief contractor supplying large amounts of beef to the Cuban market. This beef was all stolen from the American side. Significantly, on one occasion Cortinas entered a border town and hanged the alcalde and another man for interfering with the crossing of stolen cattle. This rustling was not a small business. The King Ranch alone lost thousands of head during this period.

  General J. J. Reynolds, who commanded the U.S. Army in Texas in 1871, made the following report, in part:

  The gradual but heavy loss of property is very discouraging to the people; they are becoming restless, not to say desperate, and seeing the apparent determination of Mexican officials to retain the Kickapoo Indians in Mexico, as a cloak for the evil deeds of the Mexican people, they talk now quite freely of organizing themselves into armed bands and crossing into Mexico to recover their stolen property.

  . . . The ranchmen live from ten to thirty miles apart, and incursions from the south side of the Rio Grande . . . cannot be prevented by a reasonable force in Texas, unaided by any force, civil or military, from the Mexican side.

  It is believed that these depredations can be effectually and permanently stopped by pursuing marauding bands into Mexico with troops accompanied by owners of the stock and records of the brands.

  In July 1871, the Daily State Journal at Austin reported:

  . . . The stock west of the Nueces is being driven over the Rio Grande by every available pass. At one crossing in Hidalgo County five thousand head of beeves have been driven since last June . . . for the merchants and traders in Mexico, who receive the stolen property and are the allies and sleeping partners of the thieves.

  It is also charged that General Cortina[s], commanding the Mexican forces on the Rio Grande, protects and shelters this organized robbery, so that no redress can be obtained from Mexican law. Unless something . . . is done . . . the stock interest between the Nueces and the Rio Grande will be ruined. The thieves ride in companies, well mounted and strongly armed. They defy the resistance of the scattered ranchmen, and in broad daylight harry the country . . .

  A federal commission made essentially the same report in 1873. It called strongly for "protection due citizens and residents whose members have been depleted by the arrow of the Indian and the knife and pistol of the Mexican assassin."

  The raids were bloody and brutal. In Encinal County two ranches were besieged by bands of forty raiders, and Live Oak County was harassed; these areas were more than a hundred miles from the river. There were literally dozens of small depredations and individual killings. At Howard's Well, a particularly hideous event occurred in April 1872: twenty Mexican bandits, accompanied by some Indians, captured a group of American teamsters and tortured them to death by fire. In this border warfare, there was very little to distinguish between Indian and Mexican cruelty. The principal difference was that the Mexicans came during the dark of the moon.

  The Texans responded to robbery and cruelty with characteristic brutality. Unfortunately, this fell primarily upon the ethnic Mexicans of south Texas; the white population was as little able to distinguish between a peaceable Mexican resident and a raider as it was between Cherokees and Comanches. The "minute" companies around Corpus Christi staged counterraids, not across the border, but against suspected ethnic Mexican allies of the bandits. On one of these excursions, eleven men were executed. The Mexican population seethed with unrest, but this was even less heard in the United States than the protests of the ranchers.

  The government did bring pressure on Mexico to remove the Kickapoo Indians, which both governments, by a sort of diplomatic fiction, decided were the main cause of the depredations. This did not relieve the lower valley. As one Texas editor, reflecting the viewpoint of all Anglo-Texans, wrote: "The State Department made a pretense of protesting and protesting and PROTESTING." The disgust for such protests, which received polite replies but accomplished little, was choleric and profound. But Washington believed the only solution had to be political, not military; Reynolds's and other officers' recommendations were not followed.

  The military itself was powerless to defend the border. Two hundred and sixty miles of almost unsettled ranch country extended along the river from Eagle Pass to Brownsville. On dark nights raiders could ford the river in hundreds of places. The U.S. garrisons were composed of Negro infantry, whose radius of operations against mounted bandits was pitifully small. Robert E. Lee had written that 20,000 soldiers were required to police this frontier; the Congress had no intention of stationing such a number or even the requisite but much more expensive cavalry.

  For logical reasons, but reasons no Texan accepted, the raiding and bloodshed went on, keeping blood feuds and mutual hatred alive on both banks.

  In the spring of 1874, Captain Leander H. McNelly of the newly reconstituted Rangers had been diverted to DeWitt County, south of Gonzales, by an outbreak of the smoldering Sutton-Taylor feud. This, like all the countywide feuds that erupted during these years, was beyond the ability of local peace officers to control. Sheriffs were intimidated, juries suborned, and witnesses, more often than not, murdered outright. If parties were arrested, jail breaks were common. Terror ruled, and a continual, guerrilla warfare ensued, drawing in more and more men on either side. Bands of armed men congregated, who in some cases degenerated into rebellious mobs. Court writs were powerless, because they could rarely be served; local officials had to move warily in counties almost evenly divided between two armed camps. McNelly did not accomplish much toward ending the Sutton-Taylor affair; only time could end blood-feud hatreds, but he damped it. Armed Rangers could serve writs and guard prisoners and make arrests; they created a climate in which the law could gradually reassume its place.

  But the raiding situation further south was coming to a boil. In April 1875, Adjutant General Steele received the following wire from John McClure, the Nueces County sheriff: "Is Capt. McNelly coming. We are in trouble. Five ranches burned by disguised men near La Parra last week. Answer."

  Steele's answer was to send McNelly, with authority to form a Special Company of forty men, to the border region. Ranger captains, armed with the state's commission, recruited their own men, and like Ford, McNelly enlisted men on whom he could rely. They were young, horse-hardened youth; the youngest, Berry Smith, had had no experience; he was barely sixteen. Smith enlisted because his father was in the troop.

  McNelly was a great captain. He was the epitome of the Texan in action, and he set a record of courage, c
unning, and audacity that was never to be surpassed. McNelly himself was young, just thirty-one. He had been a partisan soldier for the Confederacy as a teenager in the Civil War, later served in Davis's State Police. Nothing was more revealing of his ability, honesty, and his reputation than the fact that he went from the State Police to the Rangers with equivalent rank. In Davis's service he had been blunt, outspoken, incorruptible, and had been seriously wounded in battle with outlaws.

  He was a "tallish man of quiet manner, and with the soft voice of a timid Methodist minister," Webb wrote. There was very little braggadocio when men still went armed on the Texas frontier. McNelly ruled by example and force of personality; he was never a formal disciplinarian, but as Callicott, one of his privates said, there was no man in the Special Force that would not have stepped between the captain and death. McNelly was superbly equipped for his time and place. He left a legend that other leaders could never quite live up to.

  McNelly rode into the triangle in May 1875. He found a veritable state of war. Iron-handed, he ordered both groups of armed Mexicans and Texans who were coalescing to disband, and very probably averted a civil war. McNelly was not fooled as to the true situation; he wrote the Adjutant General: "The acts committed by Americans are horrible to relate; many ranches have been plundered and, burned, and the people murdered or driven away." These orders were instantly obeyed. But McNelly also knew the source from whence trouble flowed. He rode on to the Rio Grande at Hidalgo, then to Brownsville.

  Here he found much alarm in the countryside, and Potter, the commandant at Fort Brown, with only 250 Negro soldiers, admitted he could not control. McNelly reported this situation, and added: "I think you will hear from us soon."

  McNelly believed in intelligence, and like most capable Rangers, he formed his own network. He learned that a ship stood three miles off Bagdad, awaiting beef for Cuba, and that a number of Cortinas's cronies were operating on the Texas side. He planned to ambush a raiding party, and he went about it coolly and efficiently. Everything that now happened did not enter his report, clear and concise as it was.

  McNelly's methods can only be judged in the anarchy and terror of his times. He was not a law-man, but a guerrilla soldier, in a land where there the established formal law was a fiction. He had been sent to stop the raids, and his verbal orders were quite clear: to deal with cattle thieves as the Frontier Battalion dealt with Indians. He was empowered to kill any rustler caught north of the river, and to take no prisoners. He understood partisan warfare, and the Rangers were considered a military force, not policemen.

  One of McNelly's Rangers was a Texas-Mexican cowman named Jesús Sandoval. The Anglo Rangers called this man "Casuse." Sandoval, along with an American, had some ten years before caught four Mexican bandits and hung them all to one tree, and thus began a blood feud with the Mexicans south of the Bravo. He could not live in his own house for fears of la venganza. He knew the country, and almost every inhabitant in it, and McNelly gladly enlisted him when he applied. Sandoval went on the rolls at $40 a month, the same as the Anglos, and he was issued a Colt .45 and a needle gun, or one of the new center-fire Springfield rifles with which the Rangers were armed. Sandoval was to prove invaluable.

  On June 5, 1875, McNelly heard news that a party of cow thieves had crossed the river below Brownsville to round up cattle out on the Palo Alto. He took 22 volunteers from his camp and rode out on patrol. One of the volunteers was young Berry Smith. Smith's father went to McNelly and asked that some other man go in young Berry's place, since he was an only child, and if anything happened to him his mother "would die of grief." The Captain offered to leave the sixteen-year-old behind, but Berry protested. He had been "out for some time and hadn't had a fight yet." McNelly merely said that was the way he liked to hear a fellow talk, and let him ride.

  McNelly's plan of operations was simple. He put out pickets or outriders, called "spies," with orders to bring in any suspicious-looking Mexican they came across. Whenever such a person was brought in, he was interviewed by old "Casuse."

  Sandoval, who communicated through Tom Sullivan, a Brownsville boy, quickly identified the prisoners as citizens or "bandit spies." It was the practice of the bandit gangs to trail all American patrols, Ranger or military, with such scouts or spies, and up until this time bandit intelligence had been far superior.

  One of McNelly's men later described the action when a Mexican citizen or otherwise unidentifiable Mexican was caught:

  . . . If the Mexican proved to be a citizen [of the U.S.] we let him go at once; and if he proved to be a bandit spy one of us would take charge of him and march along until we saw a suitable tree. The Captain would take Tom, the bandit, and four or five of the boys to the tree. Old Casuse would put the rope over the bandit's neck, throw it over a limb, pull him up and let him down on the ground until he would consent to tell all he knew. As far as we knew this treatment always brought out the truth.

  After the Captain had all the information he wanted he would let Casuse have charge of the spy. Casuse would make a regular hangman's knot and place the hangman's loop over the bandit's head, throw the end of the rope over the limb, make the bandit get on Casuse's old paint horse, and stand up in the saddle. Casuse would then make the loose end of the rope fast, get behind his horse, hit him a hard lick and the horse would jump from under the spy . . . Captain McNelly didn't like this kind of killing, but Casuse did. He said if we turned a spy loose he would spread the news among the bandits and we would never catch them. We caught several spies on that scout before we overhauled the bandits with the cattle, and Casuse dealt with them alike, showing no partiality—he always made them a present of six feet of rope.

  McNelly hated hangings; "he could stand death better in any other form." But McNelly, even better than Jesús Sandoval, knew what he was doing. He found out where the bandits were, and what they were planning to do. A party of some dozen bandits were moving several hundred stolen cattle across the Palo Alto prairie near Loma Alta, a rise not far from Brownsville on the Point Isabel trail.

  McNelly formed his men in line, then rode out in front and addressed them:

  "Boys, . . . we are likely to overhaul them tonight, and when we do I will order you all in line of battle, and when I order you to charge them I want you to charge them in line. Do not get ahead of each other and get mixed up with the bandits for if you do you are apt to kill one another. . . . Don't pay any attention to the cattle. The spy tells me there are seventeen Mexicans and one white man and that they are Cortinas's picked men, and Cortinas says they can cope with any Rangers or regulars. If we can overhaul them in open country we will teach them a lesson they will never forget. If they should stampede, pick you out the one that is nearest to you and keep him in front of you and keep after him. Get as close to him as you can before you shoot. It makes no difference in what direction he goes, stay with him to a finish. That is all I have to say. Ready! Form in twos! Forward, march!

  McNelly did overhaul the bandits, driving a large herd, in open country after sunup. The cattle rustlers made an enormous mistake; they mistook the Rangers for U.S. soldiers and believed they could stand them off. Each one soon had a terrible nemesis riding on his tail. The fight broke into individual actions and swirled over six miles, through a mucky arm of the Laguna Madre, Spanish dagger clumps, and brush. The fleeing Mexicans were no match for the Texans' six-shooters; they left a scattered trail of bodies behind.

  The last of the fight ended in the brush, where some Mexicans took cover. McNelly followed one man, who had emptied his gun, into a thicket. The Captain had a single ball left in his pistol. He stood outside the thicket and called out for help, saying his six-shooter was empty. The Mexican immediately charged with his knife, grinning; McNelly coolly placed his last round into the bandit's teeth.

  This was young Berry Smith's first fight, and he was never to learn how. He dashed into the brush after a bandit, and was shot down and killed. He was the only Texan lost, against twelve Mexicans. The R
angers recovered twelve horses, guns, and gear, plus 216 head of cattle, many of which came from Santa Gertrudis, the King ranch. Thirty-three other brands were later identified, and the stock returned.

  McNelly rode back to Brownsville and told Sheriff Brown that he was placed in charge of the bandits' bodies. The resident U.S. Marshal, O'Schaughnessy, went out with a detachment of soldiers and gathered up the corpses. Meanwhile, McNelly saw to it that his dead Ranger was given a military funeral. He allowed none of them to "touch a drop of anything" until afterward, and had one wear a captured sombrero to the funeral. McNelly said it would be good advertising, and a "fair warning to all bandits not to cross to the Texas side."

  The Army trundled in the bandit bodies and dumped them in a single pile in the public square. McNelly passed the word for all to come and see how the Rangers handled cow thieves. This produced enormous indignation among the people of Matamoros, and much muttering among the canaille, as McNelly called it, in Brownsville. There were threats that Cortinas would gather his bravos and cross the border, killing ten Americans for every Mexican. The Rangers calmly agreed to "naturalize" all of them, if they showed up. None came.