Legends of the Old West - TEXAS RANGERS Ep. 3 | “Mason County War”

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

 In 1875, Major John B. Jones leads the gradual transition of the Texas Rangers from frontier fighters to law enforcement officers. As Texas becomes the heart of the cattle ranching industry in America, cattle rustling becomes a serious problem. In Mason County, two factions battle each other. And as the murder rate rises, Jones leads the Rangers to town to try to settle the affair.   SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY “The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821-1900” by Mike Cox “The Ranger Ideal, Vol. 1&2” by Darren L. Ivey “Lone Star Justice: The First Century of the Texas Rangers” by Robert M. Utley “The Texas Rangers” by Walter Prescott Webb “Captain L.H. McNelly: Texas Ranger” by Chuck Parsons & Marianne E. Hall Little “Taming the Nueces Strip” by George Durham “Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers” by Doug J. Swanson “Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman” by J. Evetts Haley “Comanches: A History of a People” by T.R. Fehrenbach “The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West” by Peter Cozzens   Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join   Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial.   On YouTube, subscribe to LEGENDS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage.   For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Lost Valley Fight on July 12, 1874 was the last significant action between Native American warriors and the Texas Rangers. That day, about 50 warriors, mostly Kiowa, attacked 35 Rangers in an area called Lost Valley, 18 miles west of the town of Jacksboro and the army outpost of Fort Richardson. The Rangers had been on a routine tour with the man who commanded the battalion, Major John B. Jones. As battalion commander, Jones did not directly command any of the six Ranger companies, but instead spent his time traveling up and down the frontier, checking on his men. He always traveled with an escort of 25 Rangers for safety,

and on that day, he added an extra 10 Rangers from Company B. The Ranger column had suffered just one fatality during the day-long standoff with the War Party, but that fatality had been brutal. The Warriors had captured, tortured, and killed Dave Bailey, and they had done it as a gruesome display for the other Rangers. The rest of the Rangers had escaped the standoff after dark and straggled to a ranch several miles away. A month later, the U.S. Army began its final, major coordinated campaign on the southern plains. It would result in a series of battles,

mostly in August and September 1874, that would be called the Red River War. By October, it was clear how the story would end. But the young Comanche chief, Quanah Parker, would still hold out for a year before he finally capitulated. By the summer of 1875, the Kiowa and Comanche would submit to life on a reservation in the southwest corner of Indian territory, the modern-day state of Oklahoma. In the late fall of 1874, while the fighting between the U.S. Army and the Warriors wound down,

Major Jones completed three tours of his ranger companies on the frontier. Now that there were fewer raids to worry about, the Rangers increasingly turned their attention to a problem that had been on the rise for more than a decade—cattle rustling. During the Civil War, the Comanche had been the most prominent cattle rustlers in Texas. Both armies—Union and Confederate—needed huge quantities of beef, when available, to feed their soldiers. When the Comanche learned that the Blue Coat soldiers had abandoned their forts along the Texas

frontier and their armies wanted cattle for beef, the Comanche were happy to oblige. It's estimated the Comanche stole 10,000 cattle from Texas between 1863 and 1864 and sold them to the Union Army. At the same time, trailblazer Jesse Chisholm of Scottish and Cherokee heritage blazed his soon-to-be-famous trail from Texas to Missouri. He used it to haul supplies like a typical freighter. But after the war, cattlemen from Texas used it and expanded it to drive herds north to railheads. The demand for beef remained high after the war, as beef became a staple of the American diet. Ranchers in Texas started building massive herds and massive operations to capitalize on the demand.

In 1866, just one year after the war and before the annual cattle drives from Texas to Kansas, Texas cattleman and scout Charlie Goodnight and his partner Oliver Loving drove the first herd of cattle west to Fort Sumner, New Mexico. That fall, Oliver Loving extended the trail to Denver, Colorado. That same year, Nelson Story became the first man to drive a herd of Texas cattle all the way to Montana. He took the Bozeman Trail and was lucky to largely avoid the warrior army that was building under Lakota war chief Red Cloud. One hundred years later, the adventures of Goodnight,, loving, and story would be used as inspiration for author Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove.

And the next year, in 1867, the real fun began, when a true industrial pioneer, Joseph McCoy, traveled from Chicago to a sleepy hamlet called Abilene on the Kansas Prairie and turned it into the first real cow town on the southern plains. As railroads rushed westward after the Civil War, each new town on the line in Kansas became the new hot destination for Texas cattle herds. For 15 years after the war, great herds of Texas cattle tramped across the landscape of the American West. And down in Texas, where the herds originated, the long, sporadic war against the Comanche and Kiowa transformed into a series of localized wars between feuding families or ranchers or communities. The era of the cattle rustler had arrived in Texas as simultaneous feuds, or wars as

many people called them, exploded all over the state. And one of the first that drew in Major John B. Jones and the Texas Rangers was centered in the prime cattle ranching country of Mason County. From Black Barrel Media, this is Legends of the Old West. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. In this season, we're returning to the stories of the Texas Rangers. This series will follow the Rangers through the Civil War to their final years as frontier fighters and then to their beginnings as lawmen.

This is Episode 3, Mason County War. Problems started in Mason County with the vote to secede from the Union in March of 1861. The county is out in the scenic hill country of Texas. It's about two hours west of Austin, about an hour north of Fredericksburg, and for football fans, it's about an hour northeast of Junction, the site of the now legendary training camp conducted by coach Paul Bear Bryant in September 1954 during his first season at Texas A&M. Ninety years before that camp, things started going sideways in Mason County. The county was overwhelmingly populated by German immigrants who did not want Texas to secede.

When the votes were cast, Mason County was one of the few in the state that did not vote for secession. That stirred bad blood between the German population, which was three-quarters of the county, and the non-German population. During and immediately after the war, everyone in the county banded together to protect themselves from Comanche and Kiowa raids. But by the fall of 1874, the U.S. Army's campaign against the Comanche and the Panhandle, known as the Red River War, had stopped most of the raids. At the same time, cattle ranching was on the rise, and bigger and bigger herds marched north to the cow towns in Kansas. As cattle became currency in Texas, the problem of cattle rustling rose dramatically. became currency in Texas, the problem of cattle rustling rose dramatically. In February 1875, in Mason County, the problem pitted neighbor against neighbor. For a rustler, stealing cattle was just like stealing money from a bank. And in Mason County,

a group of suspected rustlers known as the Backus Gang worked the area. In February 1875, the newly elected sheriff of Mason County, John Clark, conducted a sweep of his territory with a posse of local citizens. Clark had been elected with the support of the German majority, and he was cracking down on the thieves who stole their cattle. Clark and the posse discovered nine men, some or all of whom were part of the so-called Bacchus gang. The group of nine had a bunch of cattle in their possession, all of which appeared to be stolen. The sheriff and the posse arrested the nine suspects

and took them to jail in the town of Mason, the county seat of Mason County. The word jail was a loose description of the lockup in Mason. The jail was actually a stockade, a square enclosure built with tall wooden posts that was open to the air. Sheriff Clark deposited his prisoners in the stockade jail to be held for trial. But long before a trial could be held, the situation in Mason County spiraled out of control. A short time later, a man named Adam Brayford guided his wagon along the road to Mason. As the mule that pulled the wagon trudged along, Brayford noticed something lying next to the road up ahead. When the mule pulled up beside it and stopped, Braford looked down in shock at the body of a dead man.

The dead man was a cowboy named Alan Bolt, and he had a note pinned to the back of his coat. It read, Here lies a noted cow thief. Alan Bolt was believed to be the first casualty in what would be called the Mason County War. It's suspected that he was killed by someone from the German population in retaliation for the rampant problem of cattle rustling that seemed to grow worse by the day. Certainly, feelings of anger and animosity grew worse by the day, and they exploded into more violence three days after Alan Bolt's body was found.

That day, Lieutenant Dan Roberts of Company D of the Frontier Battalion of Texas Rangers rode into Mason to buy grain for his company's horses. That simple errand dropped him squarely into the middle of a powder keg that was Mason County. keg that was Mason County. As a podcast network, our first priority has always been audio and the stories we're able to share with you. But we also sell merch, and organizing that was made both possible

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grabbed his Winchester rifle, and hurried out the door behind the sheriff. When Roberts and Clark reached the jail, Roberts saw that inside there were five suspected cattle thieves, and that was part of the problem. There should have been nine. Four of the nine prisoners had already escaped, and now there were 30 to 40 men outside the jail who wanted the remaining five suspects. The mob, which was said to be largely German, had no interest in waiting for the suspected thieves to stand trial. Sheriff Clark's deputy, Johan Worley, hurried up to the sheriff and the Texas Ranger,

but the three lawmen were still outnumbered and outgunned. Sheriff Clark ran to get more help, and then the mob turned on Roberts and Worley. A local woman, the wife of the county attorney, wrote in her diary that the mob choked Deputy Worley until he gave up the key to the stockade jail. choked Deputy Worley until he gave up the key to the stockade jail. Worley was German, like the mob, but the mob clearly wasn't going to take the chance that the other suspected rustlers would escape before justice could be done. The mob opened the jail, grabbed the prisoners, and started pushing them down the road that led to Fredericksburg. Worley and Roberts could do nothing to stop them, but soon Sheriff Clark hurried back to the scene with a small

citizen posse. The three lawmen and the posse rushed down the road after the mob and caught up to the group half a mile south of town. By that time, three of the five suspected rustlers hung from the branch of a big oak tree with ropes around their necks. The fourth man was dead on the ground with a bullet hole in the back of his head, and the fifth man had a noose around his neck and was ready to be strung up. The lawman and the posse dispersed the lynch mob and quickly cut down the three men who were hanging from the tree. Lieutenant Roberts was able to revive one of the three by splashing water on his face, but the other two were already gone. Those two were Elijah and Peter Backus, two of the supposed ringleaders of the Backus gang. The fifth man, who had pulled the noose

off his neck, ran away into the night. But the damage was done. Three men were dead, two by lynching and one by gunshot. Counting the cowboy Alan Bolt, that made four dead and two nearly dead in the space of four days. And the killing in Mason County was just getting started. Shortly after the night of the lynching, suspected rustler William Wages was killed. And then in May 1875, three months into the Mason County War, the situation turned into an old-fashioned revenge movie when a former ranger named Scott Cooley learned that the man who had been his closest friend, a father figure, was the latest victim. had been his closest friend, a father figure, was the latest victim.

Scott Cooley was 20 years old in 1875, and he had done a brief stint with Company D of the Rangers the previous year. He was a mixed bag. He was known as fearless, but he was also a bit of a loose cannon. Five years earlier, when Cooley was a 15-year-old kid, his father was shot and killed in Jack County. Afterward, as many young men did in Texas, he signed on with cattle drives up to Kansas. He made two trips to Kansas, and an older cowboy named Tim Williamson became his closest friend and mentor. Toward the end of one of the trips, Cooley caught typhoid fever, and Williamson's wife Mary nursed Cooley back to health in the Williamson home. After those experiences, it's not hard to see why Scott Cooley had such affection for Tim Williamson and his wife. When Cooley's short time with the Rangers was finished,

he set up a small farm in Menard County, right next to Mason County. And then, on May 13, 1875, Tim Williamson was murdered, and Scott Cooley went on the proverbial warpath. Tim Williamson was the foreman for a German rancher in Mason County, and Williamson had been arrested a year earlier for selling a calf that didn't come from the ranch. At the time, he had posted a bond to stay out of jail.

Now, a year later, his case still hadn't gone to trial, and Mason County Deputy Sheriff Johan Worley rode out to the ranch to tell Williamson he had to post a new bond to remain free from jail. The ranch owner said he would put up the bond right there on the spot, but Worley insisted that he needed to take Williamson into town to do some paperwork. As the deputy and the foreman rode to town, 12 masked men galloped up to them. Williamson begged Worley to allow him to make a run for it, but Worley refused. One of the gunmen shot and killed Tim Williamson, and that was how the rumors started about the

allegiance of Deputy Worley. Some accounts stay vague and simply say that Worley didn't do enough to help Williamson, and therefore Worley was passively working with the gunmen. Other accounts say Worley shot Williamson's horse so that Williamson couldn't escape. Either way, Tim Williamson was dead, presumably because of his legal trouble relating to the sale of the calf. Worley survived unharmed, and no one was arrested for the killing. During the next three months, Johan Worley left his job as deputy sheriff, and Scott Cooley learned of the murder of possibly his only friend on earth. Cooley immediately rode to the Williamson home and talked to Tim's wife, Mary.

Cooley started to piece together the events of the murder, and he honed in on two men he believed were most responsible, Johan Worley and Pete Bader, whom Cooley thought was the trigger man. Cooley found Worley on August 10th and reportedly shot him six times and stabbed him four times and, according to one newspaper, scalped him for good measure. After that piece of bloody revenge, Scott Cooley recruited a gang who were eager to help with his mission. He started with George Gladden, then added brothers John and Moses Baird,

then rounded out the crew with a soon-to-be-famous and infamous killer named Johnny Ringo. The legend of Johnny Ringo began with the Mason County War, which was known locally as the Hoodoo War. At the time, Hoodoo, like voodoo, was a common name for bad luck, or an event that causes bad luck. There was a lot of bad luck to go around in Mason County in the mid-1870s, and more was on the way. Johnny Ringo was 25 years old, like Scott Cooley. Ringo was from Indiana, but his family had moved to Liberty, Missouri in the 1850s, the town that would become a hotspot for the James Younger gang. Ringo was loosely related to the Younger family. His aunt married Coleman

Younger, the uncle of the Younger brothers. During the Civil War, the Ringo family moved to California, and sadly, Ringo's father died during the journey when he mishandled his shotgun and accidentally killed himself. Five years later, Ringo left California and ended up in Mason County, Texas. Ringo met Cooley somewhere along the way, and in 1875, Cooley recruited Ringo and the three others to help with his revenge plan. and the three others to help with his revenge plan. Nine days after Cooley killed Johan Worley, he, along with his gang, shot and killed Carl Bader, the brother of Pete Bader. Unfortunately for Carl, it was a case of mistaken identity. Carl was working his field when Cooley mistook him for his brother. Three weeks later, one retaliatory strike was entered with another. This time, Mason County Sheriff John Clark set a trap for Scott Cooley's gang. In early September 1875,

Sheriff Clark assembled a posse of 50 men and stationed them east of the town of Mason, near a store that was owned by a man named Charles Keller. One of the sheriff's posse, a guy named James Chaney, lured two members of the Cooley gang to town. On September 7th, Moses Baird and George Gladden rode toward Mason. As they approached Keller's store, a gunfight erupted. It's not clear if the posse just opened fire or if they tried to arrest Baird and Gladden first. Regardless, the outlaws returned fire, but they were outnumbered, outgunned, and had been taken by surprise. Moses Baird died during the fight. George Gladden was seriously wounded, though he managed to escape the ambush and reunite

with the gang. Two and a half weeks later, the cycle continued. Johnny Ringo and another member of the gang rode toward the farm of James Chaney, who had lured Baird and Gladden into the ambush. Ringo and his partner shot Chaney dead. The situation in Mason County was out of control. The San Antonio Daily Herald newspaper reported, Hell has broke loose up here. Seven men had been killed in the seven months since Cowboy Allen Bolt's body had been found by the side of the road. The county attorney, whose wife had been keeping a diary of the events,

wrote a second letter to the governor begging for help. He had written the first letter four months earlier, and the governor had not answered. Now the attorney said the county was on the verge of civil war, and the governor finally took it seriously. The governor ordered Major Jones to take a troop of Rangers to Mason County. Three days after Johnny Ringo killed James Chaney, Jones approached the edge of town with 20 Rangers from Companies A and D. They rode up to Keller's Store, the site of Sheriff Clark's ambush of Baird and Gladden. The sheriff and some of his posse were still manning the checkpoint. and Gladden. The sheriff and some of his posse were still manning the checkpoint. They rose up from behind a stone fence and fired at the rangers before they recognized the men as state officers.

When the shooting stopped, Sheriff Clark informed Major Jones that he had heard that Scott Cooley was headed for the village of Loyal Valley to burn the citizens out. Loyal Valley earned its name because it was a community of mostly German settlers who remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War. The community was 15 miles down the road toward Fredericksburg. If the rangers hurried, they could make it while there was still some daylight left. They galloped down the road and reached Loyal Valley late in the day, only to discover it was a dry hole. There was no coolie gang and no fires

and nothing wrong at all. The rangers camped for the night, and when they rode back into the town of Mason the next day, they learned that they had just missed the coolie gang and another man was dead. While the rangers had been down in Loyal Valley, Scott Cooley, John Baird, and George Gladden were in Mason. The gang had spotted a German man named Dan Horster riding through town, and one of them blasted Horster with a shotgun. Horster took a load of buckshot to the neck and fell dead in

the street in a mangled mess. Next, Cooley, Baird, and Gladden turned their guns on two men near the town square. The five men exchanged fire in a brief gunfight, but no one was killed, and Cooley and his men escaped town before the Rangers arrived. A couple hours later, Jones and the Rangers rode in and learned about the murder and the shootout. Sheriff Clark filed murder charges against Scott Cooley, and the Rangers went in pursuit of their former comrade. They couldn't find Cooley, and after a while, Major Jones started to think he might have a problem. Cooley, and after a while, Major Jones started to think he might have a problem. Half of his detachment was from Company D, Scott Cooley's old company when he had been a Ranger. Several of the Rangers in the current detachment had ridden with Cooley, and Jones began to believe that they might

not want to find him, even though Cooley was charged with one murder and suspected in many others. Cooley's cause may have felt righteous and justified by many when he was avenging the murder of Tim Williamson, the man who had been a father figure to him. But now, Cooley's mission seemed to have gone beyond that. Jones called a meeting of his rangers and said that if any man believed he couldn't give a genuine effort, that was fine.

He should step forward and he would have an honorable discharge. In the end, three men accepted the offer. With that, the rangers went back on the hunt. They swept through the county, but they still couldn't find Cooley or his followers. It was now mid-October 1875, and there were reports that Scott Cooley and his merry band had ridden east. The state adjutant general, William Steele, who supervised the Frontier Battalion, sent a letter to Major Jones that informed the Major that Cooley had been spotted in Austin. According to the note, Cooley was saying that the next name on his kill list was John Clark, the sheriff of Mason County.

When Sheriff Clark heard the rumor, he quit his job and lit out for Missouri, where he died in 1888. He may also have had some legal trouble in and around Mason County, but it seems like Scott Cooley's threat was the thing that finally sent him packing. With Clark gone and Cooley staying east of Mason County, the Hoodoo War started to die down. The Rangers swept through the county and arrested 22 people, though none of them were convicted of crimes. Scott Cooley and Johnny Ringo didn't cause any more trouble in Mason County. Two months later, at the end of December 1875, they were arrested in Burnett County. They were transferred to jail in Austin and then to Lampasas County. They sat in jail for five months until May 1876 when they were busted out by some friends. Five weeks later,

on July 10, 1876, Scott Cooley died of a mysterious condition that was labeled brain fever, which might have been poison. Three years later, Johnny Ringo traveled to southern Arizona where he fell in with a loose-knit group of outlaws called the Cochise County Cowboys, or simply, the Cowboys. In Mason County, the worst of the anarchy was done by the end of October 1875, though it was said that one of Cooley's followers, John Baird, finally found and killed Pete Bader in January 1876, just a couple weeks after Cooley and Johnny Ringo were arrested. Major Jones believed Mason County was quiet enough for him to move on to other business. And at that point, the people of Mason County certainly hoped so. The numbers vary, but it's safe to say that at least 11 people died during

the outbreak of violence. At the end of 1875 and throughout 1876, Major John B. Jones had to deal with the age-old problems of budget cuts, which forced him to reduce the size of his ranger battalion. But that was also part of a three-year period of transition for the Rangers. In June 1875, during the middle of the Mason County War, Quanah Parker had led the last free band of Comanche to the reservation in southwestern Indian Territory. Comanche and Kiowa raids down into Texas still happened, but they declined in number and ferocity every year, such that by March of 1877, Major Jones issued Special Order No. 15, which gave the Rangers a new mandate. The primary mission of the Rangers was no longer to continuously patrol the hundreds of miles of

frontier in search of Native American raiding parties. If the Rangers found signs of a raiding party, they should follow them, of course. But from now on, Jones wanted the Rangers to concentrate on, quote, suppression of lawlessness and crime. And the first item on the new agenda for Jones was the cleanup of Kimball County. Kimball County was a new county that had been organized right next to Mason County. Its county seat was the small town of Junction City, which would drop the word city from its name in 1894. Just 10 days after Jones issued his new crime-fighting mandate, he started receiving letters from the judge in Junction City. The judge was becoming increasingly worried about the number of armed outlaw types who were

invading his town. He said he was afraid to convene his court until the Rangers did something about the problem. In April of 1877, Jones organized a military campaign against Kimball County. He brought companies of rangers to the area, divided them into five detachments, and sent them charging into the county. The element of surprise worked perfectly. Virtually no one knew they were coming. They rounded up anyone who was even remotely suspicious. They burst into homes and dragged out men for interrogation.

During the first three days of the sweep, they rounded up 23 men and locked them in a holding pen in Junction City. The mission was going well, though there was one slight problem. The Rangers' tactics weren't exactly legal. Instead of being presumed innocent, almost everyone was presumed guilty. They were only allowed to leave if they could convince the Rangers that they were good, law-abiding citizens, however they were supposed to do that. The Rangers didn't have search warrants, but they barged into homes anyway, which caused Jones to note in his report that many of his men were on the receiving end

of some very fiery words from the women of the households. Before long, the number of incarcerated men in the holding pen had nearly doubled, and at that point, the Ranger force considered its work done, and the judge could get to work sorting out the cases. The sweep would be called the Kimball County Cleanup, and it was certainly effective in ridding the county of its lawless element, though it wasn't entirely legal. The events in Kimball County were a bloodless interlude between the Range War in Mason County and the family feuds in Central Texas, and the stories of two of those feuds will be next up in the series.

Next time on Legends of the Old West, Major Jones goes straight from the Kimball County cleanup to the Horrell-Higgins feud in Lampasas County. And then we'll go back in time to introduce Captain Leander McNally before he becomes involved in another bloody affair called the Sutton-Taylor feud. That's next week on Legends of the Old West. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week to receive new episodes. They receive the

entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships are just $5 per month. Original music by Rob Valliere. I'm your writer, host, and producer, Chris Wimmer. Thanks for listening.