Legends of the Old West - TEXAS RANGERS Ep. 5 | “McNelly On The Border”

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

In South Texas, in an area known as the Nueces Strip, cattle rustling is a huge problem and it comes with an additional layer of complication: many of the rustlers are from Mexico. They ride across the border, steal Texas cattle, and drive the cattle to Mexico. In 1875, Captain Leander McNelly and his militia company are dispatched to the Rio Grande Valley to stop the rustlers from Mexico. Shortly after they arrive, they find themselves in a pivotal fight on the Palo Alto prairie.   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

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Please enjoy responsibly. Captain Leander McNelly's original company of the Washington County Volunteer Militia mustered out of service March 31st, 1875. The men who wanted to continue service were mustered back in the very next day. Little is known of McNally's time between November 1874, when he ended his work in DeWitt County during the Sutton-Taylor feud, and March 1875, when his company officially mustered out. But starting April 1st, 1875, his orders were to hurry to South Texas to bring some semblance of peace to the Rio Grande Valley.

And while he and his men were off on that mission, the sudden Taylor Feud resumed in DeWitt County. It was clearly winding down, but it wasn't done yet. In March 1874, after Jim Taylor and his cousin Bill Taylor murdered William Sutton, the former deputy sheriff of DeWitt County and one of the leaders of the Sutton faction, murder warrants were sworn out for the killers. Reuben Brown was the town marshal of Cuero in DeWitt County. He was a Sutton ally, and he caught Bill Taylor three weeks after the murders. He deposited Bill in jail in the town of Indianola on the Gulf Coast, where the murders had happened.

Indianola was a small community on Matagorda Bay, just a few miles from the current city of Port Lovaca. A year and a half after Bill was caught and sent to jail, the town of Indianola was essentially wiped off the map by a hurricane. It was reported that three-quarters of the buildings were destroyed and 176 people were killed. The town was never rebuilt and today there's just a historical marker where it once stood. During the storm, one of the people who survived was Bill Taylor.

He escaped the wreckage of the jail, and the storm, and the town. Two months later, Reuben Brown, who had quit his job as marshal, was shot and killed in a saloon in Cuero. He was one week shy of his 24th birthday. Reports of the killing differ, but it appears as though a small group of shooters entered the saloon and murdered Brown as he gambled at a table. No one was arrested for the crime. Then, two months later, Jim Taylor was shot and killed along with two of his friends. Jim was credited with several killings during the feud, and at least one in partnership

with his buddy John Wesley Harden. When Jim was killed on December 27, 1875, the feud was almost over, but not quite. The final set of murders would be credited to the Sutton faction, and those murders would signal the return of the Texas Rangers. Lieutenant Jesse Hall would lead a troop to DeWitt County, and then John Armstrong would help catch John Wesley Harden to finally close the book on the Sutton-Taylor feud. One of those Rangers would rise up through the ranks with Captain McNally's command during his campaign along the southern border, And the other would become McNally's second in command when the campaign was done.

From Black Barrel Media, this is Legends of the Old West. I'm your host Chris Wimmer, and 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 their beginnings as lawmen. This is Episode 5, McNelly on the Border. Ranshers in South Texas were shouting about the problem of cattle rustling just as loudly as those to the north and west. But in South Texas, the problem was more complex. In addition to the average, everyday gangs of cattle thieves, there were international political aspects to the problem.

Groups of thieves stormed over the border from Mexico, stole Texas cattle, and drove them back across the border. Once the thieves were in Mexico, they were virtually impossible to find, and the cattle were virtually impossible to recover. And ranchers in South Texas took it as gospel that Mexican generals, politicians, and ranchers all worked together to profit from the stolen cattle. The thieves drove the cattle to the ranches in Mexico. Generals and politicians controlled or at the very least protected the thieves and the ranchers. By one estimate, more than 100,000 cattle were stolen from Texas ranches and driven across the border to Mexican ranches between 1865 and 1873.

Virtually all the ranches between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande River fell victim to thieves. The Nueces Strip, as that region was called, needed help. And as Major John B. Jones and most of the Texas Rangers had their hands full on the frontier in 1875, Leander McNelly reorganized his Washington County militia for service in South Texas. A recent raid by bandits from Mexico had resulted in robbing, killing, and burning, and proved to be the breaking point for people in south Texas. Some time in mid-March 1875, cattle thieves from Mexico slipped across the border. They went to cross in small groups and then united into larger groups in Texas. By one account, there were 150 bandits in total, and the crossing point

was listed as Eagle Pass. If so, they would end up storming 200 miles of territory on the way to their goal of Corpus Christi. They attacked travelers, burned and looted stores and homes, and killed five people. The raid, which would be called the Nueces County Raid, was supposed to be about stealing cattle but turned into a marauding expedition. According to one source, three of the four groups of bandits were caught by the U.S. Army near the small town of San Diego, 50 miles outside Corpus Christi. But the final group slipped through the net. On March 26th, the group of about 30 Raiders struck the tiny community of Nueces Town about 13 miles outside Corpus Christi. Nueces Town developed into

the neighborhood of Annaville next to Cal-Alan on the northwest edge of Corpus Christi. The Raiders did their damage and then turned back toward Mexico, but one of their number was injured and left behind. Townspeople lynched the bandit, and then Texans all over the Nueces Strip used the raid as pretense to settle old scores, take down genuine bad guys, and, sadly, strike innocent Tejano ranchers. It was a bloody spring in 1875, as the gang of bandits from Mexico

gave way to mobs of vigilantes from Texas. Officials of every stripe sent letters to the governor, and newspapers printed dozens of articles about the problem. The Adjutant General, William Steele, had authorized a Minuteman Militia Company the previous year to try to stop raids from Mexico, but the effort backfired. The militiamen succeeded in reducing the raids, but they terrorized Mexican citizens so ruthlessly in the process that some of the volunteers were

charged with murder and robbery afterward. Steele was forced to disband the unit after just four months. Now, Steel wanted to send six companies of Rangers to South Texas. That was the equivalent of the entire Frontier Battalion, and Texas didn't have enough funding for that kind of response. So, five days after the Nueces County raid, Steel sent McNelly. racist county raid, Steele sent McNelly. 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 and easy with Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell and grow at every stage of your business. From the launch your online shop stage, all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage. Whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits, Shopify helps you sell everywhere.

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10 days later, roughly 40 young men with broad brimmed hats, bowie knives, and a variety of firearms started riding for South Texas. Two weeks after that, they arrived in Corpus Christi and interviewed locals about the troubles. They learned that killings from bandit raids had continued all through South Texas. Then the men stocked up on food and ammunition for their Sharps rifles and continued south. The company stopped at Richard King's sprawling cattle ranch about 40 miles southwest of Corpus Christi.

King was already a cattle baron and possibly the richest man in the state, and he lavished some of that wealth on McNelly's company. In addition to the basics, food and shelter, he gave the company fresh horses and brand new Winchester 1873 rifles. The Winchester repeating rifles were far more suited to the type of combat the Rangers would see while chasing bandits than the old single-shot Sharps rifles. And that was another thing. The company called themselves Rangers, and they looked and acted like Rangers, but they

were not technically Rangers. Technically, the Texas Rangers were comprised of the six companies of the Frontier Battalion. McNelly's company was not one of those six, and as such, he did not report to Major John B. Jones. He reported directly to Adjutant General William Steele, who supervised both the Frontier Battalion and the militia companies. Steele's orders to McNally were, in part, To get as early information as possible of such gatherings of Mexican bandits and to

destroy any and every such band of freebooters. At the same time, be careful not to disturb innocent people who speak the same language as the robbers. In addition, McNelly should break up the mobs of vigilantes who were doing almost as much damage as the bandits. McNelly got to work on all three goals, even as he continued to ride south toward the border. Three days after McNelly and his command arrived in Corpus Christi, he published a statement in the local newspaper that notified all bands of armed men who were acting without legal authority to stop their actions and disperse immediately, or he would arrest them. In short, if you're part of a vigilante mob, go home or you'll be arrested.

As McNelly moved south from Corpus Christi, he steadily and bloodlessly broke up the vigilante groups. Goal number one was accomplished. He had no intention of harming innocent Mexican ranchers, and he didn't, so goal number three was also accomplished. That left goal number two, which would be trickier but doable. One of the six companies of the Frontier Battalion had been down in South Texas on this exact mission several months earlier, but it had not produced results.

Now, to gain early intelligence about raids and stop them before they started, or to gain intelligence and stop the raiders before they crossed back into Mexico, McNally used two tactics that the company of the Frontier Battalion had not. A network of spies and a hard-nosed interrogator. McNally had developed the first tactic in DeWitt County during the Sutton-Taylor feud. He paid a network of informants to bring him information. Unfortunately, it didn't lead to the capture of the ringleaders, but it was a good thought and he did the same thing in South Texas. At the same time, he used his second tactic, which was less ethical, to put it mildly.

And it would be downright illegal today. McNelly met a local rancher named Jesus Sandoval who was eager to help. He was eager because he said bandits had raped his wife and daughter, burned his home, and stolen all his horses. Whether or not that story was true, no one ever knew. But Sandoval joined McNelly's company and became their principal interrogator, and he was very, very effective. In mid-May 1875, McNelly established his camp and an abandoned ranch just outside the community

that is called Hidalgo today. It's right on the banks of the Rio Grande and is the site of the present-day McAllen-Hidalgo International Bridge that allows people to travel back and forth from Texas to Mexico. In the 1870s, Hidalgo was called Edinburgh. Over time, it changed its name to Hidalgo and then a new community 15 miles north adopted the name Edinburgh, which it still holds today. McNelly met with the captain of the ranger company that had worked in the region until that point, and he learned what he could about the situation. Then he quickly put his money to work. He had received cash from the state and from wealthy ranchers, and he spread it around to develop his network of spies.

Through the informants, McNally learned Juan Cortina was reportedly making himself a very wealthy rancher on stolen Texas cattle. Cortina had been Texas Ranger Rip Ford's old enemy in the late 1850s, and he was even more powerful now than he was then. McNelly sent out scouting parties to search for signs of Cortina's rustlers, and over the course of a week, the Rangers geared up for their first action. On June 5th, McNelly learned from his spies that Cortina had sent a raiding party into Texas somewhere near Brownsville. McNelly sent a detachment to the area of the supposed

crossing. On June 8th, the detachment caught a bandit, and Haisu Sandoval interrogated the man. Sandoval's favorite method of interrogation was to place the captive on a horse and tie a noose around the person's neck. Sandoval threw the rope over the captive on a horse and tie a noose around the person's neck. Sandoval threw the rope over the limb of a tree and then slowly walked the horse forward until the captive started to strangle. In short order, the captive gave up all his secrets. The legend which then filtered down through the years was that when the person was of no further use, Sandoval slapped the back of the horse and the animal took off, leaving the captive swinging in the air to strangle to death.

Sandoval, whom McNelly's Rangers called Old Casus, would use his favorite method to acquire the information that led to McNelly's first big fight on the border. According to the man who was captured on June 8th, Juan Cortina sent 18 men on a raid with the goal of stealing 1,800 cattle. Three days later, on June 11th, the Rangers caught another bandit, and Sandoval persuaded the man to reveal his information. The captive announced that the bandits were driving a herd of cattle across to Mexico that very night. According to historian Robert Utley, McNelly turned those two bandits over to the sheriff of Cameron County instead of letting them swing. Afterward, McNelly gathered his men and rushed them into the field.

With a former slave named Ben Kinchelow as their guide, the Rangers set up a screen north of Brownsville with the understanding that the bandits would use the same crossing. They settled in to wait, and it might have been a long one. It's hard to tell exactly when they realized they had missed the raiding party, but it was certainly known by the early hours of the morning of June 12th. It seems likely that sometime between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m., McNelly learned that the raiding party had slipped past his ambush and was still moving south toward Mexico. With Ben Kinchelow following the tracks, McNelly sent

his men on a pounding ride to intercept the party. A couple hours after dawn on June 12th, the Rangers spotted the bandits near the old battleground of the first engagement of the Mexican-American War 20 years earlier. Your mom hates it when you leave six half-full glasses on your nightstand. It's a good thing mom lives on the other side of the country. And it's an even better thing that you can get six Ikea 365 plus glasses for just $9.99. So go ahead. You can afford to hoard because Ikea

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AirMile. At about 7 a.m. on June 12, 1875, McNelly's men spotted the raiding party near the old battleground of the Palo Alto prairie, about 10 to 15 miles from the Mexican border. The party amounted to 16 men and about 300 cattle. McNelly had 20 to 30 men with him. His rangers charged and sent the raiders and their cattle running.

The bandits must have been pretty good vaqueros because they stayed ahead of the rangers while herding the cattle for three miles. At that point, the bandits drove the cattle out onto a small island in a salt marsh. Once they had the cattle under control, they lined up in a loose battle formation to face the rangers across the waterway. The rangers slowed their advance, formed a skirmish line, and walked their horses forward. When their horses reached the water that separated them from the island with the bandits, the bandits opened fire with Spencer and Winchester rifles. The rangers continued their methodical advance without firing or speaking.

And they must have been out of range, or the bandits must have been bad shots, because it's a pretty good bet that none of the rangers fell during the early onslaught. When the rangers were 75 to 100 yards from the island, the bandits started a slow retreat. When the rangers made it across the marshy waterway and onto dry land, they picked up their pace to get within firing range.

The bandits hurried their withdrawal, and the rangers were having a hard time matching their speed. McNelly sent a small group of his best riders to race around the right side of the bandit force. When the men took off, the bandits shifted their position to meet the new threat. At that time, McNelly charged ahead with a few of his men. With attacks coming from two sides, the bandits broke all formation and started to run. They bolted south toward the Rio Grande, which was still a few miles in the distance. The rangers spurred their horses

and chased the bandits, and the engagement that had started as two distinct lines of battle dissolved into a running free-for-all. Over a space of six miles, twenty to thirty rangers battled sixteen bandits, all on horseback, all galloping and firing. In the series of running fights, the rangers overtook and killed fifteen of the sixteen bandits. They wounded the 16th man, and he survived by crawling deep into some bushes.

The rangers recovered the cattle between 250 and 300 head and set to work collecting the dead. One of the dead was Barry Smith. He was 16 or 17 years old, and he was the only member of McNelly's troop who died in the Palo Alto fight. Barry's father was also part of the troop, so it must have been particularly hard on the man to bury his son after they both fought in the engagement. The company took Barry's body to Fort Brown, where

the soldiers buried the young man with full military honors. As for the bandit dead, they received different treatment. Captain McNelly was a small man who was known as a quiet person in peacetime, to use an easy description, but he did not mess around in wartime. He barked orders when needed, he was a fiery, confident leader, and he had no problem with Jesus Sandoval's strangulation technique during interrogations. And he was ruthless in battle. One of his company, a young ranger named Bill Calicot, narrated his time with McNelly to Walter Prescott Webb in the 1920s. Calicot said that during the Palo Alto fight, the ranger shot the horse

out from under one of the bandits. The man hit the ground and then scrambled into a thicket of what they called Spanish daggers. Spanish daggers are yucca plants that look like small palm trees. They have clusters of narrow, spiky leaves. And according to Calicot, when the bandit into the thicket, McNeely dismounted and walked in after him. The bandit was out of ammo, so he pulled a knife.

McNeely shot him in the face. Now with the young Barry Smith buried, McNeely ordered the bodies of the dead bandits to be stacked like cordwood in the Brownsville Plaza as a grisly display for those across the Rio Grande in Matamoros. Like many commanders, McNelly could be a fierce and determined fighter, and yet also respect the ferocity, determination, and ability of his enemy. That was the case with the group of bandits who were killed on June 12, 1875. McNelly had taken General Steele's orders literally and had followed them to the letter, destroy any and every such band.

McNelly and his company had destroyed that particular band of rustlers, but he praised them in his report to Steele. I have never seen men fight with such desperation. Many of them, after being shot from their horses and severely wounded three or four times, would rise on their elbows and fire at my men as they passed." Governor Richard Koch had lots of praise for McNally in a letter to the captain a month after the Palo Alto fight. The governor wrote,

The pride of true Texans in the historic fame of the Texas Ranger is fully gratified in the record your command is making, and the people of the state are confidently expecting that your combined efforts will contribute greatly towards the restoration of peace and a sense of security to our long-suffering border. Much was and is expected of your command. You have done well. Continue the good work." For the moment and for the rest of the summer of 1875, McNelly's warm work of fighting bandits in the field was done, and that applied to McNelly personally as well as his company.

His men were still out scouting and doing whatever they could to stop raiding parties, but McNelly wasn't with them. In the summer of 1875, McNelly was 31 years old, and he had been suffering from tuberculosis, which was more commonly called consumption back then, since he was 16. He was pretty sick before he had accepted command of the unit, and after the Palo Alto fight, he was struck with a bad cough. He spent the rest of the summer holed up in a Brownsville hotel room while he tried to recover enough to get back into the field. He still kept his men in the saddle constantly,

just as he had in DeWitt County during the Sutton-Taylor feud when his company patrolled the region nonstop for months. The same thing happened along the Rio Grande during the summer and early fall of 1875, with Lieutenant T.C. Robinson leading the company. Robinson had been one of the original enlisted men the previous year before the Sutton-Taylor feud and he had continued service with McNally on the border. In addition, there was a young sergeant named John Armstrong who was proving himself to be a capable ranger. He had joined the company down in South Texas and he would start to make a name for himself

in the events to come. But at the moment, there was little action and fewer results. McNelly kept his spy network going, but the spies didn't produce the same type of actionable intelligence that they had produced soon after the Rangers arrived in late May. And that might not necessarily have been the fault of the spies. There was a big development across the river in Mexico at the same time that McNelly's company was getting established near Brownsville. In May 1875, the president of Mexico ordered the arrest of Juan Cortina.

By the 1870s, Cortina was in the realm of what we might call a warlord today. That term is probably a little too strong, but it's in the vicinity. Cortina basically ran his own little kingdom in northern Mexico, and he had for years. But late that spring, right before the big Palo Alto raid, the President charged him with smuggling, levying import and export taxes without authority, insubordination and the theft of government property. Cortina was thrown in prison, but he escaped. He later declared his allegiance to a new president, who was actually a dictator who

held power multiple times in the continuously revolving door of leaders in Mexico during that era. But within a couple years, Cortina was thrown back in prison for a long stint before finishing the final few years of his life on house arrest. Juan Cortina was just one of many warlord types along the Rio Grande who blurred the lines between military commander, politician, and criminal kingpin. McNelly and his company would contend with another in the near future, and McNelly's decision and actions would spark international turmoil, and not all of his men would be willing to follow his lead.

Next time on Legends of the Old West, in the fall of 1875, Captain McNelly follows another group of bandits to the border and becomes frustrated when they escape into Mexico. He makes the controversial decision to follow them into Mexico, and that decision lands him in a shootout and then some hot political water. He finishes his service in South Texas by chasing an outlaw named King Fisher and then a protege and a second in command make headlines of their own. That's next week on the season finale of Texas Rangers here 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 Valier. I'm your writer, host, and producer, Chris Wimmer. Thanks for listening.