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More Than Its Share

Texas

Great outbursts of the feuding spirit were part of the aftermath of the Civil War. Feeling against Union authorities and their local supporters touched off several explosions in the 1860s. An example of this type of disturbance was the Early-Hasley feud which occurred in Bell County from 1865 to 1869. John Early, a member of the Home Guard, abused an old man named Drew Hasley. When Hasley's son, Sam, came home after service in the Confederate Army, he took the matter up. Early had become a supporter of the Yankee officials, and they backed him. Hasley soon became the head of a party of friends and relatives, including, notably, Jim McRae, a fearless and possibly a desperate man. Early and his crowd accused the Hasley party of all sorts of thievery and depredation and brought in soldiers to clean them out. On July 30, 1869, McRae was ambushed and killed. The Hasley party broke up after that, though one of them pursued Dr. Calvin Clark, an Early supporter, into Arkansas and killed him shortly thereafter. The Lee-Peacock feud, which flourished from 1867 to 1871 in the contiguous corners of Fannin, Grayson, Collin, and Hunt counties, followed the same pattern. Bob Lee, a former Confederate officer, fell out with the Union authorities and aroused the enmity of Lewis Peacock, one of their supporters. There was killing on both sides, and Lee was waylaid and killed in 1869. A systematic hunt for his friends and supporters was then begun, and several were killed. Peacock himself was shot on June 13, 1871, bringing the feud to an end.

Cortina Troubles

The Cortina Troubles are the generic name for the First Cortina War (1859) and Second Cortina War (1861), in which the paramilitary Mexican forces led by the local leader Juan Nepomuceno Cortina confronted the U.S. Military, the Texas Rangers and the local militia of Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico, in the Rio Grande Valley area.

The First Cortina War started on 13 July 1859 when Brownsville Marshall Robert Shears was shot in the arm by Cortina for brutalizing his former employee, Tomás Cabrera, after ignoring Cortina's request to let him handle the situation. Tension increased between Cortina and the Brownsville authorities, and on 28 September he raided and occupied the town with a 40 to 80 man posse. His enemies, however, had fled, and during the occupation of Brownsville, he issued a famous proclamation to reveal his intentions to both communities.

... There is no need of fear. Orderly people and honest citizens are inviolable to us in their persons and interests. Our object, as you have seen, has been to chastise the villainy of our enemies, which heretofore has gone unpunished. These have connived with each other, and form, so to speak, a perfidious inquisitorial lodge to persecute and rob us, without any cause, and for no other crime on our part than that of being of Mexican origin, considering us, doubtless, destitute of those gifts which they themselves do not possess. ... Mexicans! Peace be with you! Good inhabitants of the State of Texas, look on them as brothers, and keep in mind that which the Holy Spirit saith: "Thou shalt not be the friend of the passionate man; nor join thyself to the madman, lest thou learn his mode of work and scandalize thy soul.

Cortina retained control over Brownsville until 30 September 1859, when he evacuated the town at the urging of influential residents of Matamoros. The following days, the townsfolk of Brownsville formed a 20 man group in order to fight Cortina, called "the Brownsville Tigers". In November, the Brownsville Tigers learned that Cortina was at his mother's ranch in the nearby town of Santa Rita, five miles west of Brownsville. They immediately launched an attack, only to be sent into retreat in disarray by Cortina's forces.

Later the same month, the Brownsville Tigers were joined by a group of Texas Rangers, and Cortina decided to attack them. The offensive was unsuccessful, and on December, a second group of Rangers led by Capt. John "Rip" Ford arrived, larger and better organized. Because of appeals from Brownsville citizens, the U.S. Army sent troops from San Antonio to the nearby Fort Brown, which had been abandoned a few years ago. The fort's new commander, Maj. Samuel Heintzelman, united and coordinated all armed groups to put an end to the Cortina threat. Cortina retreated up the Rio Grande, until on December 27, 1859 Heintzelman and Ford engaged him in the battle of Rio Grande City. Cortina's forces were decisively defeated, losing sixty men and all their equipment. Pursued and defeated by Ford again a few days later, Cortina retreated into the Burgos Mountains. The First Cortina War had finished, and with increasing pressure from both the United States and Mexican Government to cease all hostile activities, Cortina remained away from the scene for more than a year.

In May 1861, the much shorter Second Cortina War took place. The American Civil War had just began, and Cortina, who had aligned himself with the Federal Government of the United States, invaded Zapata County. He was defeated by Confederate Capt. Santos Benavides at the battle of Carrizo and retreated back into Mexico, after losing eighteen men. No longer would Cortina conduct large scale military incursions within the territory of the United States, albeit accusations of promoting guerrilla actions against the richer Texan landowners in the area were numerous throughout the following years.

Horrell-Higgins Feud

Almost as bloody as the Sutton-Taylor feud was the Horrell-Higgins feud, which broke out in Central Texas in 1873. It started with cattle rustling near the frontier town of Lampasas, northwest of Austin. There the pastures were not yet fenced. Scrub oaks and cedars made it hard to discover prowlers. The Horrell ranchmen were suspected, and when the sheriff was killed trying to arrest one of them, a squad of state policemen was sent to Lampasas "to clean out the Horrell boys."

In the Gem Saloon on the public square the policemen found the suspected Horrells with some of their friends. The captain spoke to Bill Bowen: "I see you're wearing a pistol. I arrest you." Then the shooting began. When the smoke cleared, four of the eight policemen were dead or dying and Mart Horrell was wounded. He was jailed at Georgetown, until friends broke in and freed him. To avoid further difficulties, he and his brothers gathered their herds and trailed them to New Mexico, but they soon ran into trouble there and came back to Texas. Two of the Horrell faction were tried and cleared of killing the policemen; but the Higgins family, former neighbors and friends, accused them of tampering with their stock. Fiery Pink Higgins announced that, if this continued, he would kill every one of the Horrells. Soon afterward, in January, 1877, lie shot and killed Merritt Horrell in a back room of the Gem.

In June someone broke into the courthouse at night and stole all the records on pending criminal cases. Three days later the two factions fought a gun battle for several hours in the Lampasas streets. An innocent bystander was killed while trying to get out of the way, and one of Pink Higgins' friends was wounded.

Late in July the Texas Rangers began action. Sergeant N. O. Reynolds, with a small detachment, set out for the Horrell ranch and reached it during the night. Just before dawn, the Rangers tiptoed into the room where the Horrells and their friends were sleeping. They captured and disarmed them without a fight. Meanwhile other Rangers rounded up the Higgins clan. After long discussions with the Rangers, members of both factions signed a peace pact that, unlike most similar agreements, was strictly observed.

Mason County War

While the Horrell and Higgins factions were still shooting at each other, another cattle feud, known as the Mason County War, or the Hoocloo War, erupted in the rolling ranges two counties to the southwest. Thrifty Mason County settlers, many of them of German ancestry, complained about the stealing of their cattle and blamed outlaws from surrounding counties. Major John B. Jones, head of the Texas Rangers, visited the area in 1874. He found the people aroused over cattle rustling but was unable to make any arrests.

Early in 1875, Sheriff John Clark arrested five men on charges of cow theft and locked them in the jail at Mason. At night a crowd of masked men gathered in front of the jail and demanded that the prisoners be released to them. After the sheriff went for help, the crowd battered the jail door. "Keep away if you don't want to get shot," the leaders yelled at anyone who threatened to interfere.

When the door fell in, the band took out the alleged rustlers and headed south with them, toward Fredericksburg. The sheriff led a posse in pursuit but caught up with the vigilantes too late. One prisoner had escaped, one had been shot to death, and three were already strung up - though one of them was cut down in time to save his life.

Two months later, Tim Williamson, a reputable stockman, was arrested on a charge of cattle theft. He made bond, and when John Worley, deputy sheriff, was taking him to court, a party of masked, armed men approached. The deputy, instead of trying to protect his prisoner, shot Williamson's horse, leaving him unmounted as well as unarmed. In a few minutes the defendant lay dying.

This action incensed Williamson's many friends, especially Scott Cooley, a former Ranger, who had worked for Williamson. Before long, Cooley and his friends killed two of the men who had taken Williamson from the non-resisting deputy. They also killed John Worley and took his scalp.

In the next few months, rival armed bands roamed the county and the death toll mounted to fifteen. After the Texas Rangers were called in, some of the feudists were caught and later sent to prison. Others left the state, and Cooley went to another county, where friends protected him. After two years of turmoil, in which men slept with pistols under their pillows, Mason County again became a peaceful cattle range. On the night of January 21, 1877, the Mason County courthouse burned, destroying all records relating to the feud.

Jay Monaghan. Frontier Feuds. The Book of the American West. Simon & Schuster New York, NY 1969.

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The Men Who Wear the Star A portrait of the famed Texas lawmen traces the history of the law enforcement organization from the earliest battles with the Comanche to the present.

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