Read an Excerpt
Winchester Warriors
Texas Rangers of Company D, 1874-1901
By Bob Alexander University of North Texas Press
Copyright © 2009 Bob Alexander
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-57441-268-0
Chapter One
"A carnival of crime and corruption"
Luke Gournay in Texas Boundaries: Evolution of the State's Counties writes that Lampasas is a Spanish translation for an English language word: Lilies. There is another truism about Lampasas. Despite the genteel sounding name, at nineteenth-century Lampasas, Texas, there were not many lily-livered folks tramping around town or scattered throughout the county of Lampasas. Cobardes (cowards) were in short supply. The town, sitting at an eastern entrance to the enchanting Texas Hill Country, southwest of Waco and northwest of Austin, was "wide open and the saloonkeepers and gamblers had things their own way." The sporting crowd was nervy, and growing more bold as each day folded into the next, that year of 1873. Legal statutes were but pesky inconveniences. Outside town limits the surrounding countryside was wonderfully productive cow country. The range country was unfenced. Fattening cattle could during good weather nonchalantly graze on gently rolling uplands, slaking daily thirst in dependable spring-fed creeks sheltered by towering post oaks shading the rich bottom lands. When the mercury plunged, which was not too often, and frost nipped the air, those samelimestone creek beds afforded warm and welcoming protection for Lampasas County cattlemen's walking assets. Problematically those same secretive geographical sanctuaries shielding mamma cows and their newborn calves from nature's indifference, were also screens for those bent toward a dab of cow stealing. Not so happily Lampasas County folks could boast of a nefarious distinction. It was home-base for quite a number of "shady characters" and incontestably to the honest ranchers' exasperation, "a good deal of stock was being run out of the county."
January was but two weeks old when, on the fourteenth, Lampasas County Sheriff Shadrach T. "Shade" Denson was involved in a frightening gunplay. Upon the orders of Judge W. A. Blackburn, Sheriff Denson attempted to arrest a drunk and disorderly Mark Short at a saloon in Lampasas. Certain details are yet hazy, like who the real triggerman was. Depending on the particular variation cited, either Mark or his brother George Washington "Wash" Short, jerked a six-shooter and furrowed a bullet into the sheriff's side. There is, however, no fuzziness about what happened next. The seriously wounded lawman fell to the saloon's dirty floor, and local toughs, the Horrell brothers, Sam, Martin "Mart," Tom, Ben, and Merritt, "who were raised to horses, cattle, whiskey and guns," with help from a few other area yahoos, backed down an intimidated posse of townsmen. The Short boys made good their getaway. Lawlessness had taken a foothold in Lampasas County. Local law enforcement was impotent, unable to gain traction. The state's gendarmes weren't faring much better; their toehold was but tenuous.
Lampasas was a tough town to be sure. There bigotry and bullets held sway. Radical Republicanism and the Texas State Police, with 40% of its ranks filled by freedmen, were not well-liked, nor well-accepted. A majority of southern bred and Texas raised folks had little respect for the involuntarily imposed Lone Star government's authority. That black men were legally wearing badges and carrying six-shooters was an anathema, at least in the minds of many unreconstructed citizens. The psychic makeup of young and impetuous Texans had no gear for submission, especially not to Yankee-sympathetic policeman, much less a black man. Those ill-mannered bastards, well, they could just strut the streets of Lampasas at their own peril, so voiced intolerance.
The following month, February, State Police Sergeant J. M. Redmon, posted at Lampasas, advised his supervisor at Austin, the Adjutant General and Chief of State Police, Frank L. Britton, that he had excusably released from duty five of his black policemen, because the probability of their being bushwhacked "any night" was just too great. Sergeant Redmon unhesitatingly advised his boss that to bring any semblance of stability to the ubiquitous disorderliness then underway at Lampasas would require that his forces be strengthened and the racial makeup fine-tuned: "I think we ought to have at least twenty five good men (all white)." As it turned out Sergeant Redmon wasn't too far off the mark. At Lampasas those arrogant State Police fellows could all be damned and sent to hell-black or white! And, those hardened Horrell brothers and their pals would stand tight and tall, more than thrilled to be the ones that bid them one and all the fatal farewell.
During the late morning of March 14, on the roadway between Lampasas and Austin, area freighter Telford "Snap" Bean met an eight-man platoon of mounted men. At the forefront rode Texas State Police Captain Thomas G. Williams, a Civil War veteran and stanch supporter of the state's radically installed Reconstruction Governor Edmund Jackson Davis. The policemen's mission was clearly defined. At Lampasas they were to enforce the state's statute regarding toting pistols in public and to aid with the "arrest of a party of twelve to fifteen armed men whose occupation was branding, killing, and skinning other people's cattle." Whether or not he was drunk is unknown, but according to an anecdotal allegation, Captain Williams had been drinking hard liquor and was overheard to confidently brag that he was going to Lampasas to "clean up those damned Horrell boys."
Captain Williams and his detachment reined into Lampasas about one o'clock in the afternoon, hitching weary horses to handy live oak trees shading the town's square. Arrival of the visiting lawmen was no secret. The buzz passed from pillar to post. Nor was it a hush-hush that Bill Bowen, a Horrell brother-in-law, was openly wearing a six-shooter, legally an infraction but seldom enforced. The swaggering Bowen, right in front of God and the State Police, shamelessly walked from the street into Jerry Scott's saloon on the northwest corner of the courthouse square. Unbeknownst to lawman Williams, Jerry Scott's drinking emporium was the preferred hangout for many of the county's evildoers and hard-cases, including the untamed Horrell boys. Preparing for action Captain Williams posted his men, detailing the lone black police officer among them, Samuel Wicks, to stand guard over their horses. After stationing policemen Ferdinand Marschal, W. W. Wren, and Henry Eddy outside Scott's saloon, Captain Williams, accompanied by James Monroe Daniels, Wesley Cherry, and Andrew Melville, stepped up to the doorway, sucked up his guts, and audaciously marched inside. Dutifully his three cohorts followed. Perhaps they pondered if their $60 per month salary evened out with the risk taking. The dynamic entry was foolish. Captain Williams knew not just who, nor just how many ne'er-do-wells were nesting within. As it turned out the joint was full, near standing room only. There wasn't a friendly face among the loafing crowd of cowmen, not one among the baker's dozen.
Flawlessly reconciling the numerous versions as to what happened next is perplexing. It is so very typical of how eyewitnesses can be at the same place and time, yet their interpretations vary. Was it premeditated murder or primal madness? The following narrative is but one account. Notwithstanding those maddeningly bothersome discrepancies, it comes down to the same inflexible outcome. When Captain Williams broached Bill Bowen and told him he was under arrest for wearing a six-shooter, twenty-six-year-old Mart Horrell interjected: "Bill, you have done nothing and need not be arrested if you don't want to." This imprudence was simply too much for Captain Williams whose nerves were already ajar. Shrewdly reading the tea leaves, and fully knowing that in a gunfight there were no second-place winners, Captain Williams jumped. He jerked his Colt's revolver and fired, severely wounding but not dropping the glib Mr. Horrell. Captain Williams had opened the ball, but he would dance no more.
Certainly the next step hadn't been choreographed, but those hard-hitting Texans needed not any rehearsals-they knew what to do be it a calculated murder or just reactive mayhem. Effective synchronization played its ugly hand. Quicker than a lightning bolt those Lampasas County boys unlimbered six-shooters. In unison they cut down on the outgunned and horror-stricken policemen. Capping bullets into their breastbones or into their backbones was neither here nor there to Horrell's lineup. The light was dim. The range was but spitting distance. The muzzle flashes were scorching. The Colt's hammers fell-time after time. For the State Police it was a catastrophe. When the blinding blue smoke dissipated and the deafening roars stopped, officers Tom Williams, James Daniels, and Wesley Cherry were dead on the barroom's blood-splattered floor. Policeman Melville, not as fortunate, would linger and suffer nearly a month before he, too, gave up the ghost. Outside, on Lampasas' streets the fireworks kept detonating. Reportedly policemen Henry Eddy punched a bullet through Tom Horrell's shoulder-a flesh wound-and he, or one of the other surviving officers, also clipped Mart Horrell's neck, but not too critically-his second wound during the blistering encounter. There was no need to call for a mathematician to calculate the odds. The four state policemen yet standing chose to live to tell the tale another day. Not imprudently they sprang into saddles and galloped out of town.
Little did they know it then, but that zipping quartet of officers hightailing for Austin, aside from their actual taking part in a spine-chilling gunplay, had also witnessed a bit of genuine Lone Star history. The killing at Lampasas was the last Texas State Police enforcement action that claimed an officer's life. Tallying those policemen wounded in the line of duty while drawing a paycheck from the Texas State Police is unworkable; enumerating those policemen making the ultimate sacrifice isn't. From the get-go it had proved dangerous business. Before the gunplay at Lampasas ten had fallen. Those hard-riding policemen making the mad dash for safety at Austin could feel their bone-weary horses' legs began to tremble beneath them. They may have also had an inkling that the Texas State Police, as an institution, was standing on wobbly legs, too. It was not a time for crutches-an amputation was in the offing.
The Texas State Police had been in existence but three years, legislatively created during April of 1870. Though criminality and lawlessness throughout post Civil War Texas was real, for most Texans this policing outfit was but an ugly stepchild, the prodigy of a damn Unionist, that Radical Republican Governor, Edmund J. Davis. The state's Chief Executive, perhaps rightly, had recognized the necessity of creating a highly mobile law enforcing unit not hampered by county lines, nor the influences of abject laxity or the bitter loyalties to a cause that had already been lost. The Davis supporters, Republicans, had seen the measure of creating the Texas State Police as but a means of reestablishing law and order. Detractors, Democrats, had looked on such a move as but usurpation of authority from the hands of local civil authorities: the creation of "military despotism." Resting too much muscle power in the hands of the governor, crowning him as some sort of a supreme dictator, was intolerable to conservative minded Democrats. Stooping to a shameful shenanigan the panicky Republican legislators had "several conservative senators placed under arrest and excluded from the chamber while the vote was being taken." That done, at the end of the day, the State of Texas had both an authorized militia and a state police. Both were placed under direct management of none other than Governor Davis, a man that would be marked as leading the least popular gubernatorial administration during Texas' formative years.
Unquestionably the Texas State Police, during their short existence, did some good work. In 1872, the year before the Lampasas killings, they collectively had scooped up 1,204 badmen-or alleged badmen-which netted them an average of 7.25 arrests per man that year. During the first quarter of 1873 their enforcement actions had netted 403 prisoners, and according to Republican-leaning newspapers "hundreds" of badmen were fleeing before them. There was, however, a downside. The thorn in the side of many Democrats who harangued anti-Texas State Police sentiment was not clandestine, though one of their complaints was by today's standard racially insensitive:
(Last night) considerable excitement prevailed and white citizens came to me [A. A. Parsons, Lt. Colonel, Texas State Militia, for Bell, Coryell, and Lampasas counties] blaming the "nigger police" with it all. They have given me to understand several times that they want the colored police to be sent away from Belton.... Every democrat I have seen thus far condems [sic], denounces and blames the colored police. The mayor of the town has urged upon me to dispense with colored police. Everything here indicates the most violent hostility and prejudice against the colored police.
Adding perceived insult to injury for Democrats was another very real fact. The vast majority of patronage appointments building the Texas State Police's roster, not at all surprisingly, were being filled by known Republicans, or those fellows that avowed to be Republican. 21 There were exceptions, but not many. Understanding the times regarding racial attitudes is patently insightful, but not defensible. Acknowledging that Democrats and Republicans were ruthlessly partisan and on the lookout for political advantage, no matter how outrageous, was certainly not a new phenomena then, nor is it a dead one today. Governor Edmund J. Davis did, however, manage-with a little help-to shoot himself in the foot with mismanagement and a few faux pas. Governor Davis' administration and oversight of the Texas State Police was rife with glitches. The missteps played right into the hands of Democrats waiting to pounce.
Governor Davis' Adjutant General (preceding Britton) and first Chief of the Texas State Police, an ex-Union Army Officer, James Davidson, embezzled $37,434.67 from the state's coffers, boarded a ship and skipped to Belgium, avoiding prosecution altogether. One of the governor's very first appointed Captains of the Texas State Police, John Marshall "Jack" Helm, the "most noted brigand since the days of Quantrell," a full-fledged terrorist and killer, was kicked off the police force for summarily executing prisoners under the guise that they were "escaping," an alibi wholly refuted by evidence. Martial Law had been declared in several counties, in Democrats' eyes unnecessarily, or at a minimum, prematurely. On occasion state policemen acted in a highhanded and arbitrary manner, shelving habeas corpus, illegally searching homes and making arrest absent probable cause. Too, often policemen themselves were discharged for "inefficiency and general worthlessness." Despite any good work by the Texas State Police, the conservative Democrats had a lengthy laundry list, and the radical Republicans did, indeed, own a clothesline full of dirty duds.
Democrats had little trouble sustaining to their party affiliates a charge that Edmund J. Davis was presiding over an administration that literally bordered on being "a carnival of crime and corruption." Those same Democrats, however, would meet an obstinate and entrenched adversary when it came time to oust Governor Davis from office. Coming to power in 1873 Democrats gained control of both houses of the Texas Legislature. One of their first legislative concerns was to repeal the act which had established the Texas State Police. On April 15, 1873, the bill was sent to Governor Davis for a signature. Appealing for some sort of reconciliation but receiving no consideration whatsoever, Governor Davis promptly vetoed the legislation. On April 22, 1873, his veto was overridden by an overwhelmingly lopsided vote; 58 to 7.24 The Texas State Police was no more:
The people of Texas are today delivered from an infernal engine of oppression as ever crushed any people beneath the heel of God's sunlight. The damnable police bill is ground beneath the heel of an indignant legislature.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Winchester Warriors by Bob Alexander Copyright © 2009 by Bob Alexander. Excerpted by permission.
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