Ep. 04: Bloody Texas

Where did all those gunfighters popping up the Old West actually come? Join best-selling author Bryan Burrough as he explores the extraordinarily violent place that gave birth to a whole lot of them: Texas. Thank you to our sponsor, Tecovas tecovas.com. Follow now on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu?si=56a282df832a4bd2, iHeart, and YouTube https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O&si=TG3vGnVvFhznWz0g. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 1:34Speaker 03

  So when I ask people what they imagine the bloodiest feud in American history might have been, I've always, like, every single time, gotten the same answer. The Hatfield's and McCoys, right? Kentucky, West Virginia, killer hillbillies in the late 1800s, all that. I mean, it's pretty much the only blood feud most Americans have ever heard of. For my money, it's also among the most overrated. By my count, at least in terms of actual provable body count, the Hatfield's and McCoys might rank fifth on a list of deadliest American feuds. You know where most of the worst of them actually happened? Texas. That's right, Texans. Again, by my count. Of the 15 deadliest American feuds,

• 2:17Speaker 03

  nine played out in Texas between the 1840s and early 1900s, including the second and third deadliest of all. The extreme violence you see in these Texas feuds is much the same kind of violence that Texans would spread across the Old West frontier during the gunfighter era. Revenge killings, honor killings, every kind of killing. I mean, in the years after the Civil War, Texas men practically marinated in this kind of bloodshed. How that happened and how that spread is one of the great, underappreciated stories of American history. This is Gunfighters, brought to you by Tacovus, good boots for good times.

• 3:10Speaker 03

  Hey y'all, Brian here, and welcome to episode four of the Gunfighters. Thanks for coming by. This is an episode that is just jam-packed with stuff that I never knew before I began researching gunfighters. And almost all of it has to do with a mostly forgotten facet of Texas history. In these first episodes, we've talked a bit about the importance of Texans to the gunfighter era, how they popularized the Colt sidearms that made this all possible. But really, that's all just a prelude to their influence after the war, when Texas suffered through one of the most violent periods in American history. You can read some academic accounts asserting that in terms of violent periods among American civilians,

• 3:55Speaker 03

  it may have been the single most violent period of all. Me, I think it's one of the main reasons this whole gunfighter era happened. Because the violence born in Texas didn't stay in Texas. In fact, I've argued, it gave birth to a new kind of hyper-violent ethos that in time, spread across the Old Western frontier, transforming the way many young men initiated and handled their disputes. Texas cowboys, cattlemen, outlaws, and lawmen were some of the most important players of this era. And the cattlemen and cowboys especially helped to spread these behaviors.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Now, to understand how this all happened, I've got to tell you a story that can be, well, at times, I want to warn you, pretty rough. It's not just the violence, the sheer number of people who gets killed. It's who and how they get killed. I mean, it's not pretty. It's a story bound up in two distinct Texas impulses that emerged in the first years after the war, the period historians call Reconstruction. One is the violence that emanates from the state's post-war politics. The second is violence that arose from its preeminent post-war business, the cattle business. Let's take the political side first, because it really sets the scene. Texas actually made it through the Civil War in much better shape than the rest of the Old Confederacy.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  It never got seriously invaded. Its far-flung towns, ranches, and cotton plantations never got burned and pillaged. So once Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox and blue-coated Union soldiers began arriving at Texas ports and spreading across the state, let's just say Texans, who even then were a notoriously proud and touchy people, did not take this well, like at all. The arrival of federal troops in the summer of 65 coincided with the collapse of not just the state's government, but pretty much its entire economy. The Confederate governor and his top men fled to Mexico. Mobs rampaged through the streets,

• 6:03Speaker 03

  looting stores and overrunning state commissaries and warehouses. In June 1865, one crowd ransacked the treasury in Austin and made off with more than half of the state's cash reserves. The end of slavery, meanwhile, ended the only economy white Texans had ever known. The cotton industry, by far the most serious business at the state to that point, withered. Savings were wiped out. Families lost everything. Chaos enveloped much of the state. At the same time, more than 200,000 black people freed from slavery were suddenly left to wander, unsure where to go. Federal troops herded many of them into refugee camps.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  And now those soldiers, many of them black men themselves, were suddenly everywhere. White Texans who saw a soldier on the street would glare and cross to the far side, or spit at him, or curse him under their breath. Then, in short order, Texans began picking up their guns. What erupted in Texas was a kind of American dirty war, an orgy of murder, rape, and lynching. It raged for a good four years, the worst of it in North and East Texas. The targets of this violence were black people at first, but it soon extended to anyone who would support them, especially federal troops and the newcomers, known as carpetbaggers, who moved into positions of power to help them.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  Ku Klux Klan and Klan-like groups sprouted like weeds, with night riders who'd string up and burn just about anyone on their hit lists. By one count, 39 Texas counties hosted some kind of terroristic organization focused on harassing and killing black people. But truly, the violence went well beyond these organized groups, and only a fraction of it was ever documented. The new federal authorities were overwhelmed. In 1869, a journalist from Ohio wrote, "You cannot pick up a paper in East Texas without reading of murder, assassinations, and robbery. And yet, not a fourth of the truth has been told. Not one act in 10 is reported.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  The civil authority is powerless." Close quote.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Even compared to other Southern states, scholars agree the violence in Texas was on a whole other level. Quote, "Texas literally ran with blood," is how one put it. I've already mentioned the massive influx of handguns into society after the war, either sold as surplus by the army or brought home by returning veterans. And many of those Confederate veterans, having been trained to use those guns, came home angry, vengeful, and scarred by battle. There were thousands of them across post-war Texas, armed and all too quick to take offense, especially from a person of color or a Union man.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  As awful as their aims, you can look at men like these as the first post-war gunfighters. And Texas really had more of them than anywhere in the South. As I've said, these folks are not a pretty bunch. While the most famous of the Reconstruction gunfighters, that would be Jesse James, up in Missouri, mostly confined himself to robbing banks and trains, his peers in Texas were stone-cold killers who murdered black people, blue-coated soldiers, and carpetbaggers, often without consequence. In 1868, the state's military commander offered big rewards for the three worst of these men, each operating in strife-torn North Texas.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Of the three, the most notorious was a man named Cullen Baker, sometimes called the Swamp Fox of the Sulphur, as in the Sulphur River, which flowed through Baker's haunts in the extreme northeast corner of Texas. Outside Texas, Baker is probably best known for the notion first advanced by the author Louis Lamour in a 1959 novel that he pioneered the fast draw duel with revolvers. There's no evidence he did, but it's a fun tale. Baker, alas, was not a fun guy. He was born in Tennessee, probably in 1835, and as a boy, moved to Cass County on the Arkansas border. As an adult, Baker was described as 5'9" and pale-skinned,

• 10:27Speaker 03

  with sandy hair and blue eyes. He grew up poor and mean, maybe suffering the effects of an early blow to the head. By the time he joined a cavalry outfit at the start of the war, he'd already killed at least two men in arguments. In 1863, he mustered out sick. Legend has him leading a marauding guerrilla band in Arkansas, killing and burning out anyone suspected of disloyalty to the Southern cause. You can find entire books packed with this stuff. Baker's modern biographers make clear, though, that there's not a shred of evidence to the legend.

• 11:04Speaker 03

  When he came home to Texas, we're told, he tried to establish a ferry business and failed. When his wife died, he sank into a depression that sent him on a downward spiral. We're told he proposed to his wife's sister, who instead married a schoolteacher named Thomas Orr. Baker and Orr fell into a nasty feud. In a letter that survives, Baker wrote, and here you get the sense of one seriously unhinged dude, quote, "If I could sink this whole country into hell by stamping upon the ground, I would stamp with all my power and send it and every living creature with myself into the infernal regions."

• 11:48Speaker 03

  Yikes, right? When all the neighbors sighted with Orr, Baker lashed out, riding to several farms and oddly, gunning down every dog in sight, eight or nine in all. Along the way, for good measure, for some reason, he shot a goose. Then he withdrew to the woods. He'd emerged mostly to shoplift provisions. When one merchant caught him in the act, Baker snarled,

• 12:12Speaker 04

  "Charge it to the Confederacy."

• 12:16Speaker 03

  Then in 1867, when Baker was accused of killing a black farmer, a federal agent named William G. Kirkman responded with a squad of troops. Baker, backed by a band of similarly alienated pals, ambushed the troops. Kirkman escaped, but Baker and his men followed him into the town of Boston, where a wild shootout ensued. Baker killed a soldier. Kirkman shot Baker in the arm. That's when Cullen Baker went on the warpath. Two months later, he led a gang that attacked four soldiers in the town of Jefferson, killing two of them. Then the gang ambushed three more soldiers, killing two more.

• 12:56Speaker 03

  On Christmas Day, 1867, Baker and his men crossed the state border and attacked an Arkansas farmhouse where a black family was living alongside the family's white daughters, which was an arrangement Baker could not tolerate. He and his gang opened fire on the house, killing two black people. Then they tried and failed to burn the place down. Before long, Baker was making quite a name for himself. Many in Texas, it has to be said, cheered him on. As one federal agent put it, quote, "There are many that admire and laud him as a brave man," as quote, "he only kills Yankees and," what I'll say, "black men."

• 13:38Speaker 03

  The agent used a slur that we won't repeat here. But to army officers and agents of the Freedmen's Bureau, this was the agency tasked with protecting black people, Baker was a racist multiple murderer. That's how his modern biographers describe him, too. Living in fear for their lives, William Kirkman and other federal agents in this area of East Texas pleaded for troops to come and subdue Baker. Rarely were their requests granted, never in numbers and never for long. Then in October, 1868, Agent Kirkman's fears were realized. He was working late one night in Boston when he heard a noise outside.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  As he stepped into the night, he was cut down by a fusillade of 16 bullets, dying instantly. Afterward, Baker told anyone who'd listen that he intended to wipe out every Union man in the area. For weeks after that, Cullen Baker was believed to be behind almost every act of violence in the entire region. This being 1868, there were many, including a massacre of seven black people at a farm in Cass County, followed by the triple murder across the Arkansas border of a federal agent, a sheriff, and a local planner. The Arkansas government responded by declaring martial law.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  Matters finally came to a head in January, 1869, when Baker and a pal began going farm to farm around the Arkansas town of Drawbars, looking for his romantic rival, you remember that guy, Thomas Orr. On January 6th, Baker turned up at his former father-in-law's farm. He was a walking arsenal that day, with a shotgun, four revolvers, three Derringers, and five or six pocket knives. Before Baker could find him, Orr slipped out the back and rounded up some neighbors for help. The group returned later that day, only to find Baker and his pal asleep in the yard, passed out drunk. They shot both men in the head.

• 15:46Speaker 03

  It's said that neither of them even moved a muscle. There's often a yawning gap between the number of men a gunfighter is said to have killed and those that can be proven. Baker's gap has to be among the largest. So many of the tales told about him amount to folklore, which is something you find a lot of in those first years after the war. East Texas was just so remote, and frankly, so backward, few of any of Baker's killings were examined, much less prosecuted by any kind of legal authority. And across the South, newspapers hadn't achieved the reach to even begin to cover all the killings. One biography attributes 76 killings to Baker, of which 54 were black men.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  Other sources estimate the number as low as 15. Me, I suspect the real number is somewhere in the middle, but that's, it's just a guess. Those who admired Cullen Baker would probably canonize the second of that wanted trio, his lesser-known but far more brazen contemporary, a guy named Ben Bickerstaff. Bickerstaff was a gang leader who not only survived multiple gun battles with federal troops, but once laid siege to an entire army garrison for weeks. He was on the small side, maybe 5'6", 135 pounds, born in Mississippi and raised in Titus County, Texas, the next county over from where Baker grew up. This is all in East Texas.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  The Bickerstaffs, though, were successful farmers, and Ben's farm sprawled over 700 acres. Bickerstaff returned from the war, determined, like a lot of Texas men, to keep fighting. It didn't take him long to rally supporters. Even if you set aside the more far-fetched bits of the Bickerstaff legend, his reign of terror in 1866 and 1867 across several counties in Northeast Texas easily surpasses Cullen Baker's. It's an exhausting letony of robbery, murder, lynching, and torture aimed at black people, Union sympathizers, and suspected traitors, far too involved a story to tell here.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  After this crime spree, Northeast Texas is soon swarming with soldiers. That's when Bickerstaff relocated to Central Texas, where he bought a farm outside the town of Waco and started raiding across a string of counties south of Dallas, murdering black people and demanding extortion money from businesses. The turning point came on March 29th, 1869, when his gang raided the courthouse in the town of Cleburne, dispersing a grand jury that was about to indict them. They had previously shot up the nearby town of Alvarado, this is south of Fort Worth. When Bickerstaff headed back there next, the people of Alvarado were ready.

• 18:36Speaker 03

  Just before sunset on April 5th, Bickerstaff and another rebel rode into town, apparently in need of flour. When he saw townspeople scurrying into their stores, Bickerstaff raised his hat and shouted, "Rats to your holes! Damn you all!" A moment later came the response. Bullets exploded from a shoe store, waves of buckshot followed from others. Bickerstaff shot in the face, fell from his horse, as did his colleague. Bickerstaff raised himself onto an elbow and managed to return fire, but people were pouring into the street, shooting. He gave up. He died two hours later, 26 bullet wounds in his body.

• 19:20Speaker 03

  His last words were, "You have killed as brave a man as any in the South."

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• 22:35Speaker 03

  I want to tell you next about the third member of that wanted trio. But first I want to mention the context of his violence because it's what you saw a lot across Texas. This was the old Southern standby, the blood feud. For years, historians portrayed these Texas feuds as conflicts pitting one family against another. And to an extent, that's true. But modern scholarship has recast many of them as essentially political fights, typically between Southern and federal sympathizers. Among the first and fairly typical was the early Haslee feud in central Texas, where a returning Confederate sought revenge on a Union man who roughed up his father during the war.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  Once families got involved, there were a few shootings and a killing or two. But the notable thing is how it ended. In 1870, two of the Union men, a judge and a doctor fled the state. One was tracked down and killed in Arkansas, the other in Missouri. This is the kind of determined retribution Texans got known for.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  One of the worst of these feuds though, by some ranks, the second deadliest in U.S. history was the Lee Peacock affair in far north Texas, mostly in the counties east of the town of Sherman, where one of Ben Bickerstaff's buddies, a passionate rebel named Bob Lee, went to war against federal troops and sympathizers. Sometimes called the man eater, Lee once claimed to have killed 42 men. He had gone off to war as a private and returned as Captain Lee, wearing a Cavalier's plumed hat, his pockets stuffed with gold. Military records suggest he was at best a sergeant, and it's likely he was also a

• 24:22Speaker 03

  war criminal who murdered hostages, rifled their bodies for valuables, hence the gold, and later deserted. So by this account, yeah, a really scary guy. When Bob Lee came home, he couldn't handle the changes the peace had brought, the sight of Union sympathizers helping and feeding free black people. He flat out refused to free some of those he had enslaved. But at least first, and this is weird, the feud began with the unsavory Bob Lee as the victim. Some local members of the Union League, a national pro-government organization, had heard about Lee's gold and were told tried to extort him.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Their leader was a big blonde wheelwright named Louis Peacock. Peacock and a few Union League members arrested Lee and robbed him. Then it said they forced him to sign a promissory note for even more money. At least that's what was said. The paperwork around all this is pretty spotty. But however it began, by mid 1866, Bob Lee, like Colin Baker, a few counties to the east, was more or less living underground. He gathered up a force of 20 or 30 men and hidden in a tangled woods noticed Wildcat Thicket. From time to time, Lee did come out to drink. It was during one such excursion to the town of Pilot Grove that Lee argued with a Union man.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  The two of them took the discussion outside and a gunfight ensued. Lee was wounded and taken to a doctor's home for treatment. When Louis Peacock's men showed up at the doctor's house, a second gunfight broke out during which one of Lee's sympathizers was killed. Soon after, Lee's men took revenge, killing the man who killed one of theirs. Then the Union men responded by killing the doctor. For the next two years, it went on like this, just this never ending series of tit for tat killings. As I say, Texans can take this kind of thing pretty seriously.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  Gradually, Bob Lee's rebels gained the upper hand. The death toll seems to have reached somewhere between 30 and 60 men, though that's pretty much a guess, and that's just counting the white people. The violence spread even further as Klansmen came to support Lee and his cause. Dozens of black people began showing up dead. Black women were gang raped in front of their families. One of Lee's men killed a black child because the boy, quote, "had his hands in his pockets and didn't stand at attention when the man rode past." A lot of that kind of thing. And Lee's pals bragged about it all. One of them was quoted saying, "Black people needed to be thinned out." When they weren't terrorizing black folk, Lee's men rode after Louis Peacock and his

• 27:13Speaker 03

  people. Peacock survived multiple assassination attempts, including ambushes in his fields, around his home, I mean everywhere. He was wounded at least twice. Finally, the army sent in a force of a thousand men who killed or arrested or scared off many of Lee's men. Lee himself withdrew back into the depths of Wildcat Thicket. He proved all but impossible to flush out. Then in May 1869, the Federals recruited a snitch to lead them into the thicket. They set up positions along the trail Lee would probably take to visit his home. The night before this all climaxed, Lee actually slept back at home with his family. They urged him to escape to Mexico. He wouldn't.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  Instead, at dawn, he took a rifle and four colts and rode down the trail toward the thicket with food for his men. Just then, a voice called out for him to surrender. Lee went for a gun. The woods exploded in gunfire. Bob Lee fell dead, shot at least eight times. We're told the Lee family proudly displayed his bloody death shirt well into the 20th century. The feud should have ended there. It didn't. Even as federal troops hounded the last of Lee's lieutenants across North Texas, a core group of his men targeted Louis Peacock one last time. On June 14th, 1871, at dawn, Peacock stepped out the back door of his house.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  He was reportedly dressed in red long johns, probably heading to the outhouse. In the yard, waiting to meet him there, stood three of Bob Lee's men with double barrel shotguns. Peacock fell dead from the first blast, which finally ended the deadliest feud in Texas history.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  It's hard to put a number on how many people died, but it was probably more than 200 or so.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  All of this gives you some sense of the darkness that enveloped much of Texas in those years. I mean, if Texas men of the day could be viewed as wildflowers, this was the kind of dirt they grew from. And it wasn't just the politics. As we've mentioned, it was also the state's deeply ingrained comfort with deadly violence, born of ongoing battles with Mexican raiders and especially the Comanche. Remember too, Texans were Southerners in every regard, very much beholden to a set of male honor codes that dictated that any insult of any kind be met with violence, even deadly violence. What you got from this was a stridently martial way of experiencing the world, heavily armed,

• 29:51Speaker 03

  hyper masculine, hyper violent and quick tempered. The author T.R. Fahrenbach has described what he calls this notorious Texas chauvinism as the product of a, quote, "armed society with its almost theatrical codes and courtesies, its incipient feudalism, its touchy independence and determined self-reliance, its individual self-importance and its tribal territoriality." I've argued that the Texas experience is the foundation of what's sometimes been called the code of the West, a set of unwritten expectations for the way men were expected to behave on the old frontier.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  I want to tell you about the code here, but I should say first off, you can find all sorts of people who don't believe there was anything like it, that this is all totally overblown. Me, I disagree, in part because some of the best authors who've ever written about the old West disagree. Those who believe in this code define it in all sorts of ways, but its most common elements revolve around pride, courage, defending one's honor, never backing down from a fight, and yes, avenging every insult, no matter how small. It could be called the gunfighter's code. If you remember discussing Southern honor codes back in previous episodes, you can see how similar these are. Here's how the great Western historian, Robert M. Utley, defines his version of the code.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  He writes, quote, "Among the young bravos who flocked to the frontier, the code governed male relationships, demanding personal courage and pride and reckless disregard of life. It commanded practitioners to avenge all insult and wrong, real or imagined, never to retreat before an aggressor and to respond with any degree of violence, even death."

• 31:44Speaker 03

  Utley drew on the work of the great Texas historian C.L. Sonnixon, who in the mid-20th century actually interviewed aging veterans of the Old West and their children. Sonnixon sums up the Texans' code by referencing an old story that says, "You can tell where a man is from by the way he acts when you call him a liar. If he's up from around Ohio, he waves his fists and shouts, 'You're another.' If he's from New England, he spits on a grasshopper and remarks calmly, 'Well, you can't prove it.' If he's from Texas, he shoots you." The final and crucial ingredient of this code of the West, I think,

• 32:24Speaker 03

  was the rules and experiences brought to the frontier by Texas cowboys and cattlemen. In those years, Texas and its hardy longhorn cattle dominated the American beef business. This was before the invention of barbed wire, so longhorns roamed free on the open range. You identified which were yours by your brand. The problem, of course, was this approach left vast herds of valuable animals vulnerable to thieves. For this very reason, herding societies going back as far as sheep herders in Ireland to yak herders in Mongolia have gone down in history as legendarily violent. The better to punish, intimidate, and deter livestock thieves, known in Texas as cattle rustlers.

• 33:10Speaker 03

  As a people deeply versed in the effective uses of firearms and ropes, Texans took up this violent tradition with gusto. Cattle-related violence hadn't been that unusual before the war, but in the years after the war, as the industry underwent rapid growth and spread north from the coastal plains around San Antonio, violence against rustlers real and imagined just exploded. Lynching skyrocketed as cattle ranching spread into central Texas, where folks hadn't yet learned not to mess with a cattlemen. Usually, this kind of thing was done quietly. A body found swinging from a tree limb on a Sunday morning. But sometimes, cattlemen wanted to send a louder message.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  In 1877, masked men grabbed four suspected rustlers during a dance in the town of McDade, east of Austin, and hanged them from a single limb. Up in Shackleford County, west of Fort Worth, night riders went on an epic killing spree, lynching more than 20 men, seven of them at once. Newspapers outside Texas were aghast. In Cincinnati, one noted, "The trees in Texas sometimes bear other fruit than horse thieves." An early poster boy of tetchy Texas cattlemen was Isom Prentice Prent Olive, a small, slender guy originally from Mississippi with what appears to be a monster comb-over in a bushy, black goatee.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  Olive was a Confederate veteran who, along with his three brothers, ran a large cattle operation in Williamson County, north of Austin. They posted signs that read, "All cattle and horse thieves, pay attention. Anyone riding an olive horse or driving an olive cow will be shot on sight." Maybe they weren't clear, because animals soon began disappearing, replaced by dead bodies. Prent and his brothers had been accused of murdering rustlers a time or two before the cases had been dismissed. But now, in 1876, at least 12 bodies were found on or around the Olive spread, including two men killed in an unusually gruesome way,

• 35:17Speaker 03

  an old Spanish method of torture called "death of the skins." They had been wrapped in fresh cowhide while alive and left out in the sun where the hides shrank, squeezing them to death. The local rustling chapter was not amused. A gang of 15 or so of them attacked the Olive Ranch, riddling Prent's brother Jay with 22 bullets, burning the main house, and leaving at least one other man dead. Prent was eventually put on trial for murder and acquitted. As the Olive Incident shows, once rustlers got organized, a full-blown feud could break out.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  During the 1870s, as many as a half dozen of these nasty spats flared across central Texas at any given time. To give you the flavor, the first in Lampassas, 80 miles north of Austin, home to the Horrell clan. This is five blond brothers. Their names were Sam, Mart, Tom, Ben, and Merritt, who proved unusually volatile, even by Texas standards. The Horrells were small-town ranchers, not averse to sampling their neighbors' beef. The trouble began in January 1873, when one of their pals killed the sheriff and the Horrells got in the way of a posse that went after the killers.

• 36:39Speaker 03

  On March 14th, a squad of eight state policemen rode into Lampassas to restore order. The officer in charge, Thomas Williams, noticed a cowboy wearing a pistol outside a saloon. A dozen cowboys were lounging inside, including the Horrells. When Williams attempted to disarm this gentleman, all hell broke loose. When the smoke cleared, three policemen were dead. Mart Horrell was wounded, and with others was arrested and taken to the jail in Georgetown, from which he promptly escaped. Rather than face more arrests, the entire Horrell clan led out for New Mexico, where they triggered a conflict known as the Horrell War, leading to the death of one brother and a dozen Latinos.

• 37:22Speaker 03

  By 1877, they were back in Lampassas, where their penchant for rustling got them into still more trouble, this time with the wrong man, a long, lean rancher named John Pinkney Calhoun Pink Higgins. It may be apocryphal, but there's this great story they tell of Pink Higgins, how after stumbling upon a rustler butchering one of his steers, he shot and killed the rustler, stuffed his body into the disemboweled animal, then rode into town to tell the sheriff he should come see a miracle, a cow giving birth to a man. He probably had to be there. Somehow, Pink Higgins became irked with Merritt Horrell.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  Some said Merritt had been paying too much attention to Pink's wife, but most agreed this was about rustling. On a frigid Saturday, January 20th, 1877, Pink Higgins walked into a downtown Lampassas saloon, where Horrell was standing by a fire. Pink spoke Horrell's name, and without another word, raised his Winchester and fired a bullet into his chest. And then Higgins walked out. The Horrells formed posses to find him, but couldn't. Instead, Mart and Tom Horrell rode him to an ambush, and both were badly wounded. Higgins ended up surrendering to the Texas Rangers, posted bond, and got himself released.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  The Rangers managed to keep the peace for a time, at least until June 7th. That morning, the last three of the Horrell brothers and several pals were standing in the Lampassas Square when they spotted Higgins and three friends riding in. Everyone involved, it turns out, had business at the courthouse. The Horrell group rushed to cover and opened fire. Higgins and one of his men wheeled away and left to get reinforcement, leaving Pink's beefy wingman, Bill Renn, and a cowboy named Bob Mitchell to face the Horrells alone. Renn was hit in the hip. Mitchell helped him into a store, where they were joined by Mitchell's brother Frank, who stepped out to see what was what.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  When Mart Horrell and a man named Jim Buck Miller raced around an alley trying to out-fank him, Frank shot Miller in the chest. He was dead the next day. Return fire struck Mitchell, who staggered back into the store and died. When Higgins and a dozen gunmen returned, the Horrells forded up inside a stone building. After that, it was pretty much over. The Rangers rode in a few days later, surrounded the Horrell Ranch, took everyone into custody, and by August had forced both sides to sign a peace treaty in which they proclaimed the feud to be, in a nice turn of phrase, "a bygone thing." Probably the strangest cattle feud of Texas, though,

• 40:14Speaker 03

  was Mason County's hoodoo war, named after the local slang for masked vigilantes. By 1874, rustling there was so out of control, the county judge appealed in vain to the governor for troops. The serious trouble began in February 1875, when a mob stormed the jail, removed five accused rustlers, and then badly botched their hanging. Seriously, these guys should have been sent back to vigilante school. Two of the prisoners died, one survived, one ran off, and the last, they lost patience with and just up in shot. The tipping point in the whole thing, though, was the arrest of a suspected wrestler named Tim Williamson.

• 40:57Speaker 03

  En route to the jail, 12 masked men materialized, shoot off the sheriff, and shot Williamson dead. That's when things got weird. One of Williamson's friends, a one-time Texas Ranger named Scott Cooley, arrived in town, vowing to avenge his death. Cooley is one of the Old West's scarier figures. Raised on the Comanche frontier at its worst, he had grown up devoting as much time and energy to fighting, killing, and scalping Native Americans as my kids did to Nintendo. In Mason County, he gathered a rough crew, including the future Tombstone Rowdy Johnny Ringo, assembled a hit list, and in August 1875 commenced to killing people.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  His first victim, a deputy sheriff named John Worley, he found working down a well. They talked for several minutes about something, the weather maybe. As Worley climbed out, according to a newspaper account, Cooley suddenly asked, "Why did you kill Williamson?" Worley replied calmly, "Because I had to." Cooley then said, quote, "For the same reason I am killing you," at which point he shot Worley in the head. He then proceeded to shoot the corpse six times, stab it four more times, and scalp it. I'm just spitballing here, but I think it's possible Scott Cooley had issues. A month later, he followed up, shooting and killing a man named Jim Chaney in his kitchen.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  At breakfast in town afterwards, he told the man to inform the restaurant's owner, quote, "There's some fresh meat up the creek." Four days later, they ambushed three more of these guys in town in broad daylight, killing one. After a wild gunfight, everyone rode off, leaving the town shocked. The Rangers were sent in, but they never found Cooley, possibly because several of them were his friends. The bodies, meanwhile, kept piling up, nine or 10 in the next few months. The killings only ended, most of them anyway, with Scott Cooley's mysterious death outside Fredericksburg in June 1876. He had eaten a meal and bought a bottle of whiskey, ridden out of town and stopped at

• 43:11Speaker 03

  a farmer's house, where he dismounted, lay down, and just died. Some papers said it was brain fever, others suggested poison. To this day, no one really knows. I'm telling you all this to give you a flavor of not only post-war Texas, but the kind of volatile personalities such violence created. All of it, all the feuding, both the political kind and the kind involving cattle, all this killing, just the incredible level of mayhem that sank into Texas. It sank into young Texas men. All of it, you might dismiss as just interesting local history, except, as we'll see, the violence in Texas didn't stay in Texas.

• 43:52Speaker 03

  Like a bubbling pot that finally boils over, in the years to come, we'll see, it would erupt into any number of neighboring states, and eventually, to a degree, across all the western frontier. We'll begin talking about how that happened in a later episode. But first, in the next episode, I want to introduce you to the man who was pretty much the embodiment of this homicidal Texas way of life. He's gone down as the first great Old West gunfighter, maybe the greatest of all, and was a direct product of both the political and the cattle feuds that plagued Texas in those years. He was one of Bob Lee's kinsmen, and maybe one of his followers. A troubled kid who some think may have been among those who killed Louis Peacock that

• 44:36Speaker 03

  morning he went out to his outhouse. His name was John Wesley Harden. I'm Brian Burrow. This has been episode four of The Gunfighters. Thanks for coming by, y'all. Next time, I'll tell you about Wes Harden, who gets my vote as maybe the single most homicidal man who ever walked the Old West frontier.

• 45:06Speaker 01

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• 46:15Speaker 01

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• 46:52Speaker 00

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