though he continued to advance in a leisurely walk, talking
persuasively meantime.
"Now you fellers better have some sense," he said. "You're going up
against the United States law, and even if you killed me it wouldn't
make any difference. I've got a posse coming that would be right down
on you anyhow. Besides you'd have the United States army after you, and
they'd take you and hang you for murder. I only want two out of your
bunch anyway, this time; that's all I got warrants for, and maybe none
of you are the right ones. You'd better come out and let me look you
over."
The men swore they would do nothing of the sort, and if he came a step
further they would kill him.
McDonald slackened his pace a bit--some nervous man's gun might go off
by accident. He could talk very well from where he was.
"Oh, pshaw!" he said. "You fellers wouldn't kill a kitten. Six of you
men behind breastworks to get away from one. Come out where I can look
at you. What kind of men are you, anyway?"
"Where's your partner?" called the outlaws.
"You see him, way up yonder, don't you?" Bill Jess said quaintly--"on
that hill. I haven't got a rope on him; I couldn't bring him along
unless he'd come. You-all are actin' mighty sorry the way you're doin'.
Come out of there now, and quit this foolishness."
The outlaws repeated their refusal and their warning that if he came
another step they would shoot him dead. McDonald took out his watch.
"Well, boys," he said, "if you want to make a fight you might as
well get at it. It's time for my men to be here. Your partner I got
yesterday said you'd likely try to start something, so I come fixed for
such fellows as you. Come, let's see what you can do."
McDonald waved his hand as if signaling to his companion half a mile in
the rear and made a start toward the log fort. Before he had taken two
steps, out of it piled the six outlaws and broke "lickety brindle" for
the creek bottom, like a bunch of frightened steers. McDonald ran after
them and saw them leap on their horses that they had tethered in the
bushes and go tearing down the creek, without stopping to look behind.
Evidently they did not doubt for a moment that the deputy had a posse,
waiting nearby, for they would not be likely to believe that he had
dared to face them alone unless assistance was close at hand. Deputy
Bill, on his part was not sorry to see them go, for they had him at a
serious disadvantage, and his only backing had weakened.
His companion was at the hack when he returned. The one man they had
taken in charge had disappeared. Bill Jess made a few choice remarks
and they set out for Kingfisher by way of Hennessey.
The following night as McDonald came out of a drug-store in Kingfisher,
several shots were fired at him from the darkness. He pulled his
six-shooter immediately and emptied it at the flash of the guns,
running toward them as he did so. He heard retreating footsteps, but
did not follow, as he discovered that he had left his cartridge belt in
the hotel.
He was satisfied that the attack had been made by some of the Turkey
Creek gang of the day before, trying to get rid of him, and resolved
to delay no further in putting them out of business. He enlisted a
man whom he knew, one Charley Meyers, and two other young men anxious
for adventure, and next morning struck the trail which led, as they
expected, in the direction of Turkey Creek. They followed it rapidly
and toward evening came upon their game. There was no parleying this
time. McDonald headed his force and they charged with a rush. Three of
the men threw down their arms and surrendered--the others fired some
scattering shots as they ran, and they must have kept on running, for
they troubled that country no more. The Turkey and Sand Creek gangs no
longer existed.[2]
It was while McDonald was at Kingfisher that he came in contact
with Bill Cook and one "Skeeter," both of whom were later to become
notorious in matters connected with the looting of banks and trains.
The deputy was making some purchases in a store one evening when Cook
attempted to ride his horse in the front door. McDonald grabbed the
animal's bridle and set him back on his haunches, and before Cook could
draw his gun--had him covered and under arrest. Immediately Cook's
"side-partner," Skeeter, came up swearing vengeance, and was also
suddenly disarmed and landed in jail. The incident closed there, but a
sort of sequel was to come along a good many years later, as we shall
see presently.
Meanwhile the work of "delivery" by the erstwhile tree-man was not
delayed. Following the backward track he gathered up one undesirable
citizen after another, until by the end of the season he had
established official relations with no less than fifty of his former
customers, and the rest had concluded not to wait. The story of the
work of that year alone would fill a volume if fully told, but the
telling is not necessary. Having planned a campaign along special lines
it is only needful to give one or two examples of Bill McDonald's work
to see what the rest would be in that particular field. Each field of
labor was different and called for different treatment--requiring as
much genius to conceive the method as bravery and presence of mind to
carry it out. We have now seen what he accomplished in reclaiming a
land so lost that it was called No-man's Land, and in cleaning up a
strip of country infested by desperadoes supposed to be invincible.
We have seen that he could do these things with thoroughness and
despatch and with little bloodshed. The old manner of going in with a
big posse and engaging in a general fight in which men were killed on
both sides and nothing of value accomplished he had rendered obsolete.
Men politically and personally opposed to Bill McDonald have referred
to him in print and in spoken word as bloodthirsty, and a desperado.
Certainly the reader who has followed these chapters thus far will find
it hard to agree with such opinions. That he was fearless almost to the
point of rashness we may believe, but that he ever wantonly shed blood,
or, with all his opportunities, deliberately took human life will be
harder to demonstrate.
"I never was a killer," he said once. "Some fellows seem to want to
kill, every chance they get, and in a business like mine there's plenty
of chances. But I never did want to kill a man, and I never did it when
there was any other way to take care of his case."
It may not be out of place here to refer to the method of disarming
men which McDonald used. The author has been asked how this sudden and
efficient action was performed. His reply is that it is just about
as hard to explain as those sleight-of-hand tricks which depend on
deftness and exactness of motion--the result of a natural ability
combined with long practice. Bill McDonald was born "as quick as a
cat," and disarming became his special sleight-of-hand trick. He could
locate a man's weapon and could daze and disarm him with a sudden
movement that even he himself could not convey in words, and it was
this performance that saved the lives of many men, good and bad, and
often-times his own.
It was some six years after the Kingfisher incident that McDonald was
to renew relations with the "Cook-Skeeter" outfit. He had become Ranger
Captain meantime and was engaged in some work in North Texas when he
heard of a suspicious gang, heavily armed, camped in a vacant house
in the neighborhood of Bellvue, in Clay County. Unable to go himself,
he sent his sergeant, J.L. Sullivan, his nephew, W.J. McCauley and
another ranger named Bob McClure, to investigate. Before the Rangers
reached the house a picket discovered them and set out to give warning
to his associates. The Rangers overtook and captured him, but by this
time they had been discovered by the occupants of the shanty who began
firing through the cracks in the walls.
The Rangers promptly returned the fire and charged, shooting as they
came on. The fire became very hot, but McCauley, who had many of the
characteristics of his "Uncle Bill," kicked in the door, though the
bullets were coming through it from the other side. The outlaws now
took refuge in the loft and began shooting down through the floor, the
Rangers shooting straight up from below. The Rangers would seem to
have had the best luck in this blind warfare for one of the men above
was wounded; another had his gun shot from his hand, and a third had
his hat shot through. One of them came to the opening, presently, and
offered his six-shooter as a sign of surrender. Four were captured,
including the aforenamed "Skeeter," but Bill Cook, though a member of
the gang, was absent at the time, and escaped. The captured men were
taken to Wichita Falls and one of them, a young fellow named Turner,
turned State's evidence, through McDonald's persuasive probing, and
detailed their plan for robbing the Fort Worth and Denver, next day,
giving a list of their crimes. Skeeter and the others were taken to
the United States courts at Fort Smith for trial, and pleaded guilty.
Skeeter was given thirty years and upon hearing the verdict made his
now famous remark:
"Well, this is a hell of a court for a man to plead guilty in."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: Somewhat later when McDonald's work, as Ranger Captain,
was confined to Texas, another gang did rendezvous in this section--the
gang headed by the Dalton boys (formerly deputy marshals); and for a
period terrorized the surrounding country. Their crimes were daring and
bloody and their end was sudden and violent. They were shot, one after
another by a brave and accurate liveryman as they came out of a bank
they had been looting, in daylight, in Coffeyville, Kansas. According
to Bill Dalton two of the Daltons were United States deputy marshals
and lived near Hennessey at the time McDonald was selling trees in that
section.]
XVI
Texas Ranger Service and its Origin
THE MASSACRE OF FORT PARKER. CYNTHIA ANN PARKER'S CAPTURE. RANGERS, AND
WHAT THEY ARE FOR. THEIR CHARACTERISTICS AND THEIR REQUIREMENTS
The early history of Texas was written in blood and fire. Her counties
preserve the names of her martyrs. Parker, Coleman, Crockett, Fannin,
Travis, Bowie and a hundred others have the map for their monument;
their names are given daily utterance by those for whom their deeds
have little meaning.
In the beginning, after the Indian tribes--friendly at first--became
hostile, the warfare was almost solely with the savages. For a full
half century every settler who built his campfire on the frontier did
so at the risk of his property and his scalp. Those who established
homes and settlements must have been a daring race indeed, for raids
upon horses and herds were always imminent and massacres were as
regular as the seasons.
We have already mentioned in these chapters the name of Chief Quanah
Parker (still living) for whom the town of Quanah, Texas, was named.
Quanah Parker's mother was Cynthia Ann Parker, a little white girl
captured by the Tehaucano Indians, during a raid on what was known as
the Austin Colony, in 1836. A brief story of that raid will serve as
an example of a thousand others of a similar sort. The Austin Colony
settled in what is now Grimes County,[3] and consisted of something
more than a score of persons, including women and children. The Indians
who dwelt in the neighborhood seemed friendly enough until a small
party of unknown settlers came along and attempted to steal their
horses. Immediate trouble was the result and the loss of Tehaucano
friendship for the entire settlement. When the reader considers what
follows, I believe I shall be forgiven for hoping that those newcomers
who stirred up the first trouble received the sort of a reward which
only an Indian would know how to confer.
As the Austin Colony consisted chiefly of the Parker family, a rude
fortification which they erected was called Fort Parker, a name that
to-day still suggests something of shuddering horror to those who have
heard its history.
It was a fair May morning when that history was made. The early risers
noticed that a body of restless Indians had collected within about four
hundred yards of the fort. A white flag was hoisted by the savages
to signify their peaceable intentions, and a warrior approached as
if for conference. Benjamin Parker, commander of the fort, went out
to meet him. He came back presently with the word that he believed
the Indians intended to fight. He returned, however, to the hostile
camp, where he was at once set upon and literally chopped to pieces
by the savages, who then with wild yells and bloodcurdling war-whoops
charged on the fort. Some of the inmates had already left the stockade.
Others were trying to escape. John Parker and wife and a Mrs. Kellogg
were overtaken a mile away. Parker was killed and scalped, his wife
was speared and Mrs. Kellogg was made captive. Other members of the
colony were butchered right and left, and mutilated in the barbarous
fashion which seems to give an Indian joy. Silas Parker was brutally
killed and his two children, one of whom was the little girl, Cynthia
Ann, were carried away. A Mrs. Plummer--daughter of Rev. James W.
Parker--attempted to escape, carrying her little son in her arms. A
huge painted savage, begrimed with dust and blood overtook her, felled
her with a hoe, and seizing her by the hair dragged her, still clinging
to her child, back amid the butchery and torture of her friends. She
and the others who were living were beaten with clubs and lashed with
rawhide thongs. That night such of the captives as remained alive,
and these included three children, were flung face down in the dust,
their hands bound behind their backs while the Indians, waving bloody
scalps and shrieking, danced about them and beat them with their bows
until the prisoners were strangling with their own blood. Later, they
took the infant child of Mrs. Plummer and slowly choked it before her
eyes. When it was not quite dead they flung it again and again into
the air and let it fall on the stones and earth. Then they tied a rope
around its neck and threw its naked body into the hedges of prickly
pear, from which they would jerk it fiercely with demoniacal yells.
Finally they fastened the rope attached to its neck to the pommel of a
saddle and rode round and round in a circle until the body of the child
was literally in shreds. The poor fragments were then thrown into the
mother's lap. For some reason, the little girl, Cynthia Ann Parker,
received better treatment, and lived. She grew up an Indian, forgot her
own race and tongue, married a chief and became the mother of another
chief, Quanah, surnamed Parker, to-day a friend of the white race.
It was the massacre of Fort Parker and events of a similar nature
that resulted in the organization of the Texas Rangers. The Rangers
were at first a semi-official body, locally enlisted and commanded,
with regulations and duties not very clearly defined. Their purpose,
however, was not in doubt. It was to defend life and property, and
their chief qualifications were to be able to ride and shoot and stand
up against the warfare of bloodthirsty savages.
"Exterminate the Indians" became a watchword in those days, and the
warfare that ensued and continued for forty years, can be compared
with nothing in history unless it be with the fierce feuds of the
ancient Scottish clans.
Early in 1836 Texas fought for and gained her independence, the only
State in the Union to achieve such a triumph. On the following year the
Texas congress recognized the Ranger movement and authorized several
persons to raise Ranger companies to scour the country and annihilate
marauding bands. Indians and low class Mexicans ("greasers") often
consorted, and the work, desperate and bloody, continued along the ever
widening and westering frontier up to within a period easily remembered
to-day by men not beyond middle age. Many names of those early Rangers
have been preserved in Texas annals and in local song and traditions,
and it would take many volumes to recount their deeds. Jack Hays, James
and Resin Bowie, "Big-foot" Wallace, Kit Ackland, Tom Green "Mustang"
Grey, of whom the song says:
"At the age of sixteen
He joined that jolly band
And marched from San Antonio
Out to the Rio Grand,"----
these and a hundred others are names that thrilled the Texan of that
elder day and they are still repeated and linked with tales of wild
warfare and endurance that are hardly surpassed in the world's history
of battle. A.J. Sowell, himself a Ranger in the early seventies, when
Indian outbreaks were still frequent and disastrous, speaking of the
Ranger equipment says:
"We had to furnish our own horses, clothing and six-shooters. The State
furnished us carbines, cartridges, provisions, etc., and we got fifty
dollars a month."[4]
It will be seen from the foregoing how different the Ranger service
and regulations were from those of either the federal or state troops.
Unlike the army they wore no uniform, and they provided, for the
most part, their own equipment. They differed from State and county
officials in that they were confined to no county or portion of the
State, but could "range" wherever their service was needed and with
little or no direction from headquarters until their mission was
accomplished. It will be clearly seen that men constituting such a band
must be not only brave, and quick and accurate with fire-arms, but
must be men of good character and high, firm principle as well. It is
the moral qualification more than any other that has given the Ranger
organization its efficiency and power. A force, however small, composed
of men who can shoot straight and are brave, and who believe in the
right, is well-nigh invincible. The Rangers, originally organized for a
great and sacred purpose, the defense of homes, went forth like knights
inspired by lofty motives and high resolves, and during whatever change
that has come in the aspect of their duties the tradition of honor
seems to have been preserved. Indeed they have been from the beginning
not unlike the knights of old who rode forth without fear and without
reproach to destroy evil and to redress wrong.
Speaking further of Ranger equipment Sowell says:
"In the first place he wants a good horse; strong saddle,
double-girted; a good carbine (this was before the day of Winchesters);
pistol and plenty of ammunition. He generally wears rough clothing,
either of buckskin or strong durable cloth and a broad-brimmed hat
of the Mexican style; thick over-shirt, top boots[5] and spurs, and
a jacket or short coat so that he can use himself with ease in the
saddle."
And the author adds:
"A genuine Texas Ranger will endure cold, hunger and fatigue, almost
without a murmur, and will stand by a friend and comrade in the hour of
danger and divide anything he has got from a blanket to his last crumb
of tobacco."
So much for the Ranger and his origin. As the years went by and the
Indian was conquered or driven away, the Ranger's work changed, but
his personality remained the same. The Ranger of seventy years ago
is the Ranger of to-day--only, his duties have altered. Long before
the conquest of the savages a new element of disorder had entered the
field. The desperado who had stirred up the first Indian troubles had
survived and increased, to plunder his own race. The new and sparsely
settled land invited every element of lawlessness and every refugee of
crime. Local authorities would not or could not contend with them. It
was for the Rangers, now much reduced in numbers, to solve the problem
of destroying the disturber in their midst as they had driven the
savage enemy from their frontiers. They were made peace officers, and
became a mounted constabulary, their duties being to quell disorders,
to prevent crime and to bring criminals to justice. It was new
work--less romantic than the wild Indian warfare of the frontier; work
full of new dangers and what was still worse it was work which instead
of inviting the encouragement and enthusiasm of a community, was of a
sort to incur its displeasure, for the desperadoes of a neighborhood
were either the heroes or the terrors of it, and in either case to
molest them was likely to prove unpopular. So it was, during this new
order of things, that the Ranger service had to contend not only with
the offenders but sometimes with the very people whom they were hoping
to protect. This made the work hard and discouraging, as work always
is hard and discouraging when it is done amid enemies who wear the
guise of friends. How well they have succeeded is told in the official
reports. W.H. Mabry, Adjutant General of Texas in 1896, says in his
report for that year, referring to the Rangers:
"This branch of the service has been very active and has done
incalculable good in policing the sparsely settled sections of the
State where the local officers, from the very nature of the conditions,
could not afford adequate protection. Including the meanderings of the
Rio Grande we have about 3,000 miles of frontier line. Part of this
borders on a foreign country, with different customs, law and language.
Only a river fordable at most any point intervenes. But for the Ranger
force, specially equipped for continued rapid movements, this border
line would be the rendezvous for criminals of nearly every description
and class."
General Mabry then sets down the fact that the Ranger service has
increased the State revenues by something like four hundred thousand
dollars for the year through the protection of leased frontier State
lands which otherwise could not be inhabited and would yield no return
in either rental or taxes.
In concluding he adds: "It is true that the frontier force does not
and could not cover all this territory, but the fact that they exist
and are scouting over every foot they can travel prevents organized
bands from being established along this border line.... They are
circumscribed by no county limits; can easily and rapidly move from
one section to another and criminals do not care to invite their
pursuit. Specially equipped for continued rapid motion, they take up
the trail and follow it with a persistency of the sleuth hound, until
the criminal is either run out of the country, captured or killed.
"In every train robbery which has occurred in Texas, the robbers have
been either captured or killed, whenever it was possible to carry
the Rangers to the scene, so they could take the trail. The broad
expanse of sparsely settled territory in this State would offer easy
opportunity for such crimes, if it were not for the protection given by
our mobile and active Ranger force."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: The scene of the Parker Massacre is located by some
authorities, in Limestone County, somewhat further north. Accounts
of the event itself also differ. The details here given are from
"Texas Rangers" by A.J. Sowell, and are said to have been supplied by
eye-witnesses.]
[Footnote 4: "Texas Rangers," by A.J. Sowell, of Seguin, Tex., 1884.]
[Footnote 5: The Ranger's boots like those of the cowboy are made with
high heels to prevent his foot from slipping through the stirrup. Both
the Ranger and the cowboy ride with the stirrup in the middle of the
foot, it being safer and also less fatiguing on a long ride, sometimes
a distance of a hundred miles between daylight and dark.]
XVII
"Captain of Company B, Ranger Force"
CAPTURE OF DAN AND BOB CAMPBELL. RECOMMENDATIONS FOR A RANGER CAPTAIN.
GOVERNOR "JIM" HOGG APPOINTS HIS OLD FRIEND ON THE STRENGTH OF THEM
It will be seen from the foregoing, and from the chapters already
published of these memoirs, that a man like Bill McDonald would be
well qualified for Ranger service. Already he had been appointed a
special Ranger in Company B., commanded by Captain S.A. McMurray, but
his duties as U.S. Deputy Marshal, in No-man's Land and in the Cherokee
Strip, had been his chief work. Nevertheless, he had, on occasion,
engaged in bandit-hunting in his own State, during this period, either
alone or in company with other officials, usually with good results.
An instance of this kind was the capture of Dan and Bob Campbell which
occurred about the time of his concluding the Cherokee Strip campaign.