Tales with a Texas Twist

by Donna Ingham

  Haynie and Standifer, seeing one man mortally wounded and the other two incapacitated, ran for their horses—the ones that were still saddled—and mounted them. Wilbarger ran after them saying, “If you will not stay to fight, at least take us behind you on your horses.” But just about that time Wilbarger was struck from behind by a rifle ball that tore through his neck and came out under the left side of his chin. He fell, and Haynie and Standifer thought he was dead. As they galloped their horses in the direction of the Hornsby house, the two survivors saw the Indians surround Josiah Wilbarger, their scalping knives in hand.

  When the two young men from Missouri reached the Hornsbys’, they described the ambush. Sarah grieved for her friend Josiah and for his wife, Margaret. She would take food, of course, and offer what comfort she could, like a good neighbor. Meanwhile, she cared for her family and for the two men who had escaped. They all went to bed, but with heavy, heavy hearts.

  What they did not know, however, was that Josiah Wilbarger was not dead. The wound in his throat had served only to temporarily paralyze him. The Indians thought he was dead, that his neck was broken, so they did not cut his throat as they did with the other two. They did strip off his clothes—all except one sock—and scalp him. Although he felt no pain, Wilbarger was conscious, and he could hear the ripping sound like that of distant thunder as the Indians cut and tore pieces of his scalp from his head. The Indians left him, and he finally lost consciousness.

  That evening he awoke, badly sunburned, covered with blood, and intolerably thirsty. He dragged himself to a pool of spring water and lay in it until he was numb from the chill. He ate some snails. He covered his wounded head with that sock—the only article of clothing left to him by the Indians—for the blowflies and the maggots were already at work in his wounds.

  He began crawling toward the Hornsby land some six or seven miles away, but he made it no more than 600 yards until he sank, exhausted, against a large post oak tree. By now it was night, and he could hear the hooting of owls and the yipping of coyotes. And he said to himself, “This is as far as I can go.”

  About ready to give up entirely, we might suppose, Wilbarger looked up and saw a distinct figure—the figure of his sister, Margaret Clifton. Yet he knew, certainly, that her home was in Missouri, close to St. Louis. What was she doing here? Then she spoke.

  “Brother Josiah,” she said, “you are too weak to go on by yourself. Remain here, and friends will come to take care of you before the sun sets tomorrow.” She began to move away in the general direction of the Hornsby place. Wilbarger called out to her to stay, but she did not.

  Just past midnight Sarah Hornsby woke up with a start and shook her husband awake. “Wilbarger is alive!” she said. “I have seen him in a dream. He is naked; he is wounded and scalped; but he is alive.”

  “Oh, Sarah,” her husband replied, “you heard what Haynie and Standifer said. Josiah was shot down—and scalped. He cannot possibly be alive. It’s just a dream. Go back to sleep.”

  And she did. But just past three she awakened again, and this time she got up out of bed and insisted that Reuben do the same.

  “Wilbarger is alive,” she said. “I have seen him again in a dream. He is leaning against a tree, and you must go get him.” She woke up the rest of the household, made coffee, cooked breakfast, and had the men on their way by daybreak. She sent with them three of her most prized possessions: bed sheets she had brought with her from Mississippi.

  When the men reached the site of the ambush, they found the bodies of Strother and Christian and covered them with two of the sheets. They also found a dead Comanche wrapped in a buffalo robe. But they did not find Wilbarger. Finally, one of the men, ranging farther and farther out from the point of attack, came across a red man sitting against the trunk of a tree. He raised his rifle and called out, “Here they are, boys!”

  The sunburned and blood-caked man somehow struggled to his feet and said, “Don’t shoot. It’s Wilbarger.” The men wrapped that third sheet around Wilbarger and managed to get him up on a horse, with his friend Hornsby—or maybe it was one of Hornsby’s sons—riding behind him to steady him.

  When they made it back to Hornsby’s Bend, Sarah was there to meet them. “I knew you’d find him!” she said. And she set about to nurse him with what she had at hand: bear oil for his wounded head and what she could concoct from roots and herbs to bring down his fever. In his delirium, Wilbarger talked about the vision of his sister; when he had sufficiently recovered, Sarah told him about her dreams. Together they determined that Margaret Clifton—or her spirit—had somehow made it to each of them and saved his life. They decided to write to her about the experience.

  Before they could do that, however, Wilbarger received a letter from Missouri. Margaret Clifton had died the day before the attack at Pecan Spring. So to save her brother, she must have come from the grave.

  The Legend of El Muerto

  From down around the south Texas towns of Alice and Ben Bolt all the way back up north and east to DeWitt County, folks still tell stories about the Texas headless horseman, El Muerto. More fearsome and more persistent than Washington Irving’s awful rider in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, this specter seems doomed to roam the prairies forever and never find his rest. The frame of the following story is pure fiction, but the legend within it is told as true by countless Texans who claim to know the history or who say that they have seen the ghost rider. In some versions, as in this one, Creed Taylor is a participant; in others he is only an early teller of the tale about Bigfoot Wallace and a man named John McPeters (who later was replaced in the tale by a Mexican rancher named Flores). And so it goes in the oral tradition.

  A young cowboy named Luke, new to the brush country range, stopped at a resaca, a south Texas watering hole, to refresh himself and his horse on their way back to the bunkhouse after a long day looking for strays. He was late starting back, and the sun was all but down. The willows standing thick around the resaca were outlined against the dying light of the sun.

  Luke pushed through the willows, squatted by the water’s edge, and washed the trail dust from his hands and face. Then he looked up.

  On the other side of the resaca he could see a horse and rider. He hailed them, but then, even in the gathering twilight, he could see that the rider didn’t have a head. Well, he had a head, with its sombrero still on it, but it was tied to the saddle horn with a long strip of rawhide so that the head would swing back and forth with the slightest motion of the horse.

  Overcome by the icy chill of abject fear, Luke jumped to his feet, reached for his revolver, and fired wildly at the apparition. The horse reared and spun, crashing through the willows in a frenzy to get away. The headless rider stayed upright in the saddle as the sombreroed head swung in strangely rhythmic arcs at the end of its string.

  Luke mounted up and galloped his horse into a lather across the rough pasture, through the mesquite thickets, on his way back to the bunkhouse. Once there he burst through the door and blurted out the story of what he had just seen.

  An old cowboy named Wilson—just Will for short—said, “Calm down, boy, calm down. Here, pull up a chair and set. You just saw the dead one.”

  “Well, he was sure enough dead all right,” Luke said. “He didn’t have a head.”

  “No, you’re right. He didn’t. And there’s a story about that.” The rest of the cowboys gathered around, and Will tilted his chair back against the wall and began.

  “This here Vidal, they say, was a lieutenant once in the Mexican army back during the time of the revolution here in Texas. Word is he deserted the Mexicans and come over to our side, bringing valuable information with him. So everybody was thinking he was quite a patriot back then.

  “But after that battle at San Jacinto pretty much settled the fight between Mexico and Texas, Vidal slipped into a bad habit of taking cattle and horses that didn’t belong to him. Naturally, t
hat didn’t set too well with the ranchers in these parts.

  “By the summer of 1850 Vidal had quite a reputation. When he and three other rustlers made a raid through south Texas, gathering up horses and heading them on down to the southwest toward Mexico, some of the ranchers decided to take the law into their own hands.

  “One of them was old Creed Taylor, and he and a Mexican rancher named Flores took out trailing Vidal and his bunch. Along about the Frio River, Taylor and Flores run onto Bigfoot Wallace, an ex–Texas Ranger like Creed Taylor was. Always spoiling for adventure, Bigfoot joined up and went with them.

  “They trailed the stolen horses up the Nueces River and finally caught up with Vidal—surprised him in his sleep and administered frontier justice right there on the spot. It was Bigfoot’s idea, they say, to make an example of Vidal and give other rustlers fair warning that the ranchers weren’t putting up with any more horse thieving.

  “So they decapitated Vidal—cut his head clean off—and made sure the sombrero was tight-fitted, with the chin strap pulled up snug. Then, using buckskin laces, they managed somehow to tie that sombreroed head to the big old wide, flat horn of Vidal’s Mexican saddle. They’d already cinched that saddle on a wild black mustang stallion pulled out of Vidal’s rustled herd.

  “They dressed Vidal’s headless body in full regalia—leggings, spurs, serape—and tied it in the saddle. They tied his hands to the saddle horn and his feet in the stirrups and tied the stirrups to each other under the mustang’s belly so they wouldn’t fly up.

  “All this time, of course, they had that wild mustang roped and tied and blindfolded with a red bandana, but he was still a-shaking and a-shivering all over from the smell of foreign blood. When they finally took the blindfold off and turned him loose—without so much as a bridle or halter—that horse pitched and bucked and snorted and squealed and pawed the air and did everything he knowed how to do to get that awful thing off his back. But the men had done a good job of tying, and Vidal stayed put. Finally, the mustang just took off.”

  “Well, I guess that’s what I saw then,” Luke said.

  “No,” Will said, “not exactly. That mustang did wander around for quite a little while all right, keeping to the fringes of the country. Wild as he was and spooked by being around men too much already, he was even more skittish with that awful load on his back. And when some outriding cowboy or trail rider like you did happen on him, that feller would naturally try to shoot the specter off his back and kill Vidal all over again. But he wouldn’t fall off, and those men would ride back to their camp or their bunkhouse or the saloon and tell about seeing El Muerto, the headless one who would not die.

  “Finally some men captured that pony at a watering hole, with the dried-up corpse of Vidal still lashed in the saddle and his head still swinging from the saddle horn. The body was all riddled with bullet holes, having been shot at so many times. The men cut the body loose and the head, too, and buried them in an unmarked grave close to Ben Bolt. And that should have been the end of El Muerto.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Luke. “If he’s done been buried, then how come I saw him?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, son,” Will continued, pushing forward in his chair. “Vidal has just refused to lie dead. Or maybe he can’t. Some folks say he keeps coming back—looking for a bag of gold he stashed somewhere maybe. Others say he’s just restless and trying to find peace.

  “In any case, you’re sure not the first that’s seen Vidal since he got buried a way long time ago. Folks say he still shows up at the resacas, or they see him—especially on moonlit nights—riding across the country, standing out all black against the moon. When he’s on the run, they say, you’ll know him because lightning flashes from the hooves of that mustang and flames burst out from the eyes of that severed head.

  “So I reckon I know one thing, and you do, too, now. It does seem like old El Muerto sure enough will not die.”

  The Lobo-Girl of Devil’s River

  From even farther to the south and west comes this story about the girl child of Millie Pertul Dent and her husband, John. At least, folks speculated it was a girl child when they connected the tragic tale of the Dents to a strange creature reportedly seen running with a pack of wolves. The story begins in 1835.

  In the remote southwest Texas brush country where the Devil’s River flows, there once stood a stick-and-rock jacal—a poor enough shack for John Dent to bring his wife, whose name was Millie.

  She was young and fair and willing to come with her husband to this wild, wild place where the trapping was good. For it was John’s desire for the wealth of beaver pelts that had brought them to this remote land where every evening they could hear the howling of the lobos, the wolves. John raced the change of seasons, for winter was coming on. And he raced the end of his wife’s confinement, for she would soon bear their first child.

  “Just a little longer,” he’d say. “Just a little longer. Then we’ll load the wagons and go back home to become wealthy and to be a family.”

  But winter came on before his trapping was done, and he’d waited too long. One evening as dark thunderclouds hung gathered in the west, Millie told him it was time. It was time for the baby to come.

  There was nothing but wilderness to the east and south, so John had to ride into that storm to the west. The closest help was forty miles away, and it was only a Mexican shepherds’ camp in the Pecos Valley. While the thunder rumbled and lightning bolts flashed from the sky, he rode through the rain and wind until he reached the camp.

  “Si,” they said. Yes, they would bring a woman to help. “Si,” they said. Yes, of course, right away.

  But as they threw saddles on horses and prepared to ride, they were knocked to the ground by a lightning bolt that struck poor John dead. Stunned as they were, the shepherds mounted and rode, but it was the next morning—or maybe even the morning after that—before they found John Dent’s camp. And what they found there shocked and saddened them even more. It was Millie, John’s wife, obviously delivered of her child, but dead and lying under the brush arbor.

  What, they wondered, what could have lured her out of the relative protection of her cabin and into the storm? And then they saw, all around her, the tracks of the lobo. Oh, Millie herself was untouched, but the baby—the baby was gone. Could it be that the wolves, hearing the cries of Millie’s newborn, had somehow pushed their way into that cabin and snatched the child away? Did Millie give chase only to fall and die under the brush arbor? And what of the child? Devoured, they supposed, by the wolf pack. Or could it be that the child lived?

  Years passed, and the shepherds told their story of the lost Dent child. More years passed, and the tales grew and spread. Finally travelers said, yes, they had seen what appeared to be a girl—a half-grown girl—crouched low and running with a wolf pack. Seminole scouts ranging out from Fort Clark and Camp Hudson there on the Devil’s River said, yes, they read wolf sign and, yes, in the tracks they saw clearly the prints of human hands and human feet.

  Those stories grew and those stories spread until a band of frontiersmen scouted out the wolf pack, trapped it in a canyon, closed in, and captured their quarry. What they saw was human-like in form and face but wild, growling and howling the chilling cry of the lobo. It stood almost erect and then dropped to all fours, cowering and wary. They locked it in a shed.

  The thing began to howl, and its cries were answered from all sides as the lobos began to move in—encircling the shed, the corrals, and the house in which the women had taken refuge against the fear that hung in the night. The livestock began to snort and paw the air in fright; the men fired at gray streaking blurs in the darkness. And then they were gone; the lobos were gone. And there was no more howling from the shed.

  When the men investigated, they saw that part of the shed wall had been ripped away. The wolf-girl was gone.

  The lobos have all but dis
appeared from that part of Texas, but some travelers continue to claim that they have seen a creature near the waters of the river—a creature that runs like a wolf but watches with a human face. And still, at night at some of the river crossings, you can hear it: the long, cold cry of a wolf. A ghost howl from the lobo-girl of Devil’s River.

  The Ghost Light on Bailey’s Prairie

  Texas has a number of ghost lights, which scientists and military people have been trying to explain for years and years, without much success. The most famous of these lights are near Marfa, but my favorite is the one down on Bailey’s Prairie in Brazoria County, south of Houston, near Angleton. I guess that’s my favorite because it’s about all there is left of old Brit Bailey.

  Old Brit Bailey was a real pioneer. He got to Texas even before Stephen F. Austin brought his colonists in to settle. Brit got a claim to some kind of Spanish land grant and built him a sturdy saw-lumber house and painted it barn red.

  Some folks said he came from Tennessee, and some said he came from Kentucky or the Carolinas. Some said he was running from the law, and others said, no, he was a lawman himself and just got restless and kept moving west. Well, whichever way it was, what we do know is that he was your typical old frontiersman—more than a little eccentric by today’s standards; something of a brawler; and a great lover of corn whiskey. Old Brit did get himself domesticated, though. He had a wife and a whole passel of children.

  In 1832 Brit came down with the fevers and died. And so far there’s nothing all that remarkable about his story; but this is where it gets kind of interesting. You see, Brit knew he was on his deathbed, so before he died he called his wife in and told her how it was he wanted to be buried.