Inside the fort were the officers and soldiers, so new to Fort Brown they were still unpacking their gear; none of them witnessed what happened outside the fort. A few heard voices and shots and agreed with those townspeople who located the trouble as coming from inside the town. Unlike the townspeople, the voices heard by the soldiers inside Fort Brown were white, and they were cursing the soldiers. The soldiers believed the townspeople had it backward. It was civilians—not soldiers—shooting up Brownsville, and they might have been attacking the fort itself.
Other than that, the soldiers had nothing to say about the incident. Except for insisting that not one of them was a shooter.
IT WAS FOUR OR five shots that awoke Mayor Combe, and he thought they might have been from a pistol. These were followed immediately by several more shots, but these sounded like high-power rifles such as he remembered from the army. As he jumped out of his cot, there was a third volley of shots. All the firing seemed to be coming from the direction of Fort Brown. Pulling on his trousers, he yelled upstairs to his brother, Dr. Joe Combe, that he was going out to see what was happening.21 He grabbed his revolver, and with his brother he raced off down Elizabeth Street in the direction of Fort Brown.22
GEORGE AND ELIZABETH RENDALL lived in a second-floor apartment above the Western Union office at Elizabeth Street and Garrison Road, about five and a half blocks from the Combe house, across the street from Fort Brown and only thirty-five feet from the garrison wall.23 The seventy-two-year-old Mr. Rendall had been with Commodore Matthew C. Perry's voyage to Japan in 1853 that opened that country to the West.24 Now burdened by age and “imperfect” hearing, Mr. Rendall nevertheless heard and was awakened by shots fired close to his house, shots he too thought came from a pistol. This may have been the same volley that jarred Mayor Combe from his sleep.
Getting out of bed, the Rendalls went to the window. Since firing a revolver was a common method to signal an alarm in Brownsville, Mr. Rendall's first reaction was that there was a fire somewhere in the town or, since the shots seemed to come from the direction of Fort Brown, on the post. By going from window to window, they got a good view of the fort and the entire city but saw no sign of flames. At the window facing the fort, they observed men in the fort moving this way and that. Mr. Rendall saw them firing weapons, one of which he could see was a pistol. He could see it elevated into the sky as it fired.25 How well he could see this might be open to question; since 1866, he was blind in his right eye.26 Meanwhile, a shot struck their apartment, showering Mrs. Rendall with splinters and dust.27
Mrs. Rendall could hear voices but could not tell “whether they were colored people or white people.”28 Mr. Rendall had no such reservations. The men he saw scurrying about were “colored men.” He also saw them “vaulting the wall” and running into the street, but which way he could not say.29 Half a minute later, he heard the shooting start again. It came “from the direction of the Cowen Alley.”30
Inside the fort itself, Private Joseph Howard of Company D, a first-term enlistee in the army, was on sentry duty.31 His post was the four barracks of the enlisted men, just inside the garrison wall, and he paced counterclockwise completely around them. When Howard was behind the barracks, to his right was the waist-high wall (about fifty feet away) and the town.32 He heard two shots just as he reached the gap between Company B's and C's barracks. That put him almost directly across from Cowen Alley and not far from the Western Union office and the Rendall apartment above it. At first, Howard placed the shots “right outside the gate along the wall,” which would have put them “close by” the Rendalls. He quickly changed this to say the gunfire was closer to the Company A barracks, which were then empty.33 This would place the firing a block or so away from the Rendalls. While turning to look in the direction of the two shots, he immediately heard a fusillade of shots outside the fort and directly across from where he was standing. “The shooting seemed to be over in that little Valley” between Washington and Elizabeth Streets.34
Yelling to the sergeant of the guard, Howard ran through the gap between the two barracks and onto the parade ground. Elevating his rifle in the direction away from the town, he fired three times as an alarm to the post. He would have been standing in Mr. Rendall's line of sight about the time Mr. Rendall saw a soldier elevate what he thought was a pistol and fire. Howard said he saw no shooters and no soldiers on the fort's grounds.35
On sentry duty that night along with Private Howard was Private Charley Hairston of Company B, in the army only fourteen months. He was in the officers’ quarters along a lagoon on the other side of the parade ground from the enlisted barracks. He also heard six shots at 11:50 p.m. coming from Garrison Road and Cowen Alley, the spot pinpointed by the Rendalls and Private Howard. When these six shots rang out, Hairston was standing next to Major Penrose's quarters. Seeing that the commanding officer had not yet gone to bed, Hairston rushed to Penrose's door, only to have it open just as he approached. The major and his wife had heard the same shots. “What is the matter?” Penrose asked, and later remembered Hairston answering, “They are shooting us up.”36 Penrose, wary from his meeting earlier in the evening with Mayor Combe, ordered Hairston to sound the “Call to Arms.” In 1906 soldiers and Marines communicated with loud bugle calls that could be heard clearly over long distances and above the din of combat. The melody unique to each call and what it meant had to be memorized. “Call to Arms” told the troops to assemble with their weapons at a predesignated location without delay. Rushing across the parade deck, Hairston called out, “Trumpeter of the Guard, sound Call to Arms!”37
ASLEEP WAS COMPANY B'S First Sergeant Mingo Sanders, with more than twenty-five years’ service, the most experienced and longest serving noncommissioned officer in the battalion. Because of his senior rank, he and his wife lived in quarters away from the enlisted barracks. Each of these quarters had three separate living units, which Sanders shared with the families of Sergeants Darby W. O. Brawner and Jacob Frazier of Companies C and D. It was Mrs. Brawner who first heard the shooting, and she slipped out of her bed to knock on the Sanders’ front door. Like so many others, Mrs. Brawner thought the shots were nothing more serious than a fire alarm. She called through the door, “There is a fire out here or something.” That got Sanders's attention, and he leaped from bed, getting to the door just in time to hear the bugler sounding the “Call to Arms.” Sanders knew what this meant. “Why, that is not any fire,” he said to his wife and Mrs. Brawner. Pulling on his uniform as he ran, Sanders raced to form up with his company at its barracks.38
Off post, Private Edward Johnson lived with his wife and baby at the intersection of Garrison Road and Jefferson Street, about three and a half blocks from the post's Elizabeth Street gate. Not a noncommissioned officer entitled to post housing for his family, he had permission to live in the town. Halfway through his fourth enlistment, with more than ten years in the army, all with Company C, Johnson was described as a neat man with character, a soldier who had exhibited good behavior. That is why he was picked to be the commanding officer's orderly and given privileges few other privates would have, such as permission to live off base.39 Johnson's instinct was to get himself and his family out of bed immediately and down on the floor to wait for the shooting to end. It seemed to him it had come from “down toward the gate…right down in that part of town…where [Cowen] Alley is.” He saw no shooters. Entering the fort the next day he saw no bullet holes or other marks in its walls or buildings.40
IN THAT ALLEY REFERRED to by the Rendalls, the two sentries, and Private Johnson, Mr. and Mrs. Louis Cowen and five of their children lived in a small frame house one block from the fort. The family had just returned from a visit to San Antonio and on the evening of the shooting threw a party for the older children and their friends. Around 10:30 p.m., as the party was breaking up, Mr. Cowen left for a restaurant to buy a sandwich for himself and a beer for his wife. The house was quiet. The only light came from the lamp above the dining room table where Mrs. Anna Cow
en sat to await her husband's return.
Mrs. Cowen heard the gunfire and was sure it came “from the direction of the post.” Then “the firing came right on us” and she knew “they were shooting at our house.” Gathering her children, who were scattered throughout the house, she quickly herded them under the bed, just as Private Johnson did with his family, and they hugged the floor waiting for the shooting to end. She heard bullets whizzing through the house and smelled the gunfire. Bullets came into the dining room, the younger children's room, and her older son's room. When it was over, they counted twenty-three bullet holes altogether. No one in the house was hurt.41
HERBERT ELKINS WAS SEVENTEEN years old and had been in Brownsville only a couple of weeks longer than the men of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry. He came from Sutherland Spring, Texas, a speck on the map about two hundred sixty miles north, and he got a job in Brownsville working at a confectionary store. He boarded at the Leahy Hotel, across Fourteenth Street from the Cowen house. The same age as one of the Cowen daughters, he was at their party until it broke up around 10:30 p.m., when he walked some of the younger guests to their homes. By 11:30 p.m. he was back in his room on the second floor of Mrs. Leahy's hotel and in bed. The room's window looked straight down on the Cowen house across the street, and from it he could see the roof of one of the enlisted barracks at Fort Brown. The first shots seemed to come from “right there about the [garrison] wall and the barracks.” Like others, Elkins thought there might be a fire, and he went to the window but saw no flames. Then he saw “two negro soldiers.” They were coming onto Fourteenth Street just to the left of the Cowen house. Both men had rifles and were wearing parts of army uniforms. He “could see them plainly,” and “they were colored soldiers.” They “emptied their guns at the Cowen house.” Once. Twice. Reloading their weapons, they walked back to the corner of Fourteenth Street and Cowen Alley, where another ten or fifteen soldiers joined them. After momentary confusion, a soldier hollered, “This way,” and they turned “back up the alley toward the Miller Hotel.”42
ABOUT HALFWAY ALONG ON Cowen Alley, between the Cowen house and the Miller Hotel, was the backyard of a house that fronted on Elizabeth Street and extended back almost to the alley. Dr. Charles H. Thorn lived and had his dental practice there. A fifty-year-old bachelor who lived with his mother, Thorn had gotten home late after a meeting at the Masonic Lodge. Reclining in bed but not asleep, he had a clear view through the open doorway into the adjacent kitchen. Because the evening was warm and the kitchen window was open, he could hear outside to the alley. Thorn was just about to fall asleep when he was jolted by the sound of gunfire—two or three shots. They came from the direction of the fort, possibly by the Leahy Hotel half a block away from the Thorn home. He remembered a policeman had been shot at that very spot a few years earlier. Fumbling for his slippers so he could get out of bed, he could hear the firing continue and get closer to him. It sounded like army weapons; he was sure it was not Winchesters or six-shooters. Just as he found his slippers, he heard men speaking outside in the alley: “There he goes” or “There they go,” the voices were saying. He said the voices sounded like they were Negro. They continued, “Give them hell, God damn them.”43 Thorn never saw the shooters; he only heard them out on Cowen Alley as they came from the direction of the fort, passed his house, and continued in the direction that would take them to the Miller Hotel.
The raiders were now almost two blocks from the fort and working their way more deeply into the town.44
MANAGING THE MILLER HOTEL were S. C. and Helen Moore, a couple who had lived in Brownsville fewer than three years. Photos of the hotel show a three-story brick structure facing Elizabeth Street, with the rear of the building on Cowen Alley and its northern side running along Thirteenth Street. Mr. and Mrs. Moore lived in a second-floor room at the corner of the building, where one window faced toward Fort Brown and the other looked onto Cowen Alley. From their room they could hear the shooters advance along the alley, pass their window, and turn onto Thirteenth Street.
Earlier that evening, Mr. Moore had been initiated as a first-degree Mason at the Masonic Lodge meeting attended by Dr. Thorn. Hearing the shots around 11:50 p.m., Mr. Moore's first thought, as that of so many others, was there must be a fire, which he believed from where the shots were coming had to be on the fort's grounds. Mrs. Moore disagreed. “No, it is trouble with the Negroes on account of Evans's wife.”45 She was familiar with the sound of gunfire from her own shooting experience, and the shots she heard suggested military weapons. Not sure she was correct, Mr. Moore sat at the window, watching for the flames that would prove him right, when he heard the shots that convinced him he was wrong. They seemed to be coming from the Leahy Hotel down on Fourteenth Street and close to Fort Brown. Keeping low, the Moores stayed in the hotel as the shooting outside came and went. They never saw the shooters themselves, but they could hear them. Mr. Moore remembered their voices as coarse and rough, and from his familiarity with the sound of black voices, he thought they were spoken by black men. His wife would not commit herself. But they both heard a shooter say, as the band came down the alley and approached Thirteenth Street, “There goes the son of a bitch on a horse; get him.”46 And then they heard more shooting as the shooters made their way up the alley and turned down “Thirteenth street toward Washington Street and toward Elizabeth street—both ways.”47
Staying in the Miller Hotel in a large corner room on the second floor, one side facing Cowen Alley and the other Thirteenth Street, were Hale and Ethel Odin and their five children. Mr. Odin, an alumnus of the University of Michigan (“Graduated at Ann Arbor in the class of ’72,” he volunteered without being asked), had moved from Detroit to Dallas as a young boy.48 Now living in San Antonio, his work in “land and immigration” took him on extended trips to many parts of the country, and on this visit to Brownsville he took his entire family with him. On the night of the shooting, they had been there six weeks.
Mr. Odin heard the first shots at 11:55 p.m. (“I noted the time,” he said with some precision; “It was about 12 o'clock,” Mrs. Odin more casually recalled).49 She was in bed with their sick baby; her husband was sitting at a window on the alley side of the room. To him, the firing was down the alley in the direction of the fort. He called his wife over to the window. She left the baby and along with their young son came to the window. Looking out, Mr. Odin counted six soldiers (“3 abreast in two columns”), then a seventh (a “large negro soldier”) running alongside, then an eighth who joined them. The large soldier gave the order to halt, then, “There he goes; shoot!” Because earlier Mr. Odin had noticed a stray black dog loping along the alley, he figured the dog was mad and still loose, and the soldiers were chasing it to kill it. Meanwhile four more soldiers came up the alley from the direction of the fort and joined the first group. The observant Mr. Odin counted seven soldiers wearing “their usual dark brown uniforms…four were without jackets and one was bareheaded.” At least two volleys followed. Suddenly, a “large negro with freckled face fired point blank” at the three Odins. A bullet smashed through the lower sash of the open window, entered the room (its steel jacket later was found on the floor) and continued into the ceiling. The Odin boy fell back, and Mrs. Odin feared he was hit. Her coolheaded husband saw no blood and calmly remarked, “I reckon not.”
Mr. Odin identified the shooters as black not only because he saw them looking directly up at the room's window; he also heard them. “They spoke in the manner and vernacular of the negroes.”50 Mrs. Odin heard soldiers hollering, “Shoot him; there he goes,” as soon as she reached the window. She could see the soldiers were shooting at a man on a horse, whom she recognized as a policeman. Mr. Odin's chronology is slightly different. “There he goes; shoot!” was not yelled until the soldiers reached the corner of Thirteenth Street, then came the shot into the room, their son falling back, and after that, “We heard a heavy fall of a horse…and the groan of a dying horse…[and] the scream from a man.” Both heard, “We got that
son of bitch,” after the shot that felled the horse.
The soldiers then ran south down Thirteenth Street in the direction of Elizabeth Street. There was a volley to the soldiers’ right, into the King Building across Thirteenth Street from the hotel, then, crossing to that side of Thirteenth Street, the soldiers turned back and fired into the Miller Hotel. From there, according to both Mr. and Mrs. Odin, the soldiers went north (away from the fort) along the alley. This means they did not see the shooters divide into two groups and go in opposite directions on Thirteenth Street.
A few minutes later, the soldiers, now reversing their direction, were “running back toward the fort.” That was the last the Odins saw of them. The next morning they took the train out of town.51
ALSO STAYING THAT NIGHT at the Miller Hotel were Charles Canada, a newspaperman, on the third floor facing Thirteenth Street and one room away from Cowen Alley, and Charles Chace, a locomotive engineer on a layover in Brownsville between shifts, also on the third floor facing Thirteenth Street. Canada saw five to ten men, a smaller group than the Odins saw on the alley, suggesting the shooters already might have split and Canada saw only those going to Elizabeth Street. He saw them when he heard the stricken horse fall to the ground, and he ran to the window to see what it meant. He heard the voices of “colored men,” and he heard one of them say, “We have got him.” He could see that they were wearing uniforms, “not citizens’ clothes,” but could not see their faces distinctly. He said nothing about the shooters splitting into two groups and moving in opposite directions on Thirteenth Street.
Taking on Theodore Roosevelt Page 4
