Texana Ranger
We let Jesse Sublett loose—he brought back these reports.
Digging Texas Outlaws
Wild West outlaws died young and left good looking corpses, but is that any reason to keep digging them up?
It’s a craze in the name of "historical" curiosity that has seen the supposedly-final resting places of guys like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Jesse James, and, most recently, Wild Bill Longley, disinterred and subjected to the prying eyes of DNA experts, reporters, and the more morbid Western buffs amongst us.
Before Bill Longley’s remains were exhumed from the Giddings Cemetery and subjected to the latest is-he-or-isn’t-he test, 21 graves were opened and perused in error. According to history, William Preston Longley was buried in Giddings after being hung for one of his 32 murders in 1878. (Longley had to be hanged twice because the first time, the hangman used the wrong length of rope, and the killer dropped through the gallows’ trap door and hit the ground, neck sore but not snapped). But legend has it Longley’s friends rigged a fake execution and aided his escape from Giddings, after which the outlaw lived to a ripe old age under another name. Similar legends persist about Jesse James, the Wild Bunch, and Billy the Kid.
Researchers at the University of Texas at San Antonio will examine the grave’s remains and perform DNA testing to try to confirm that they indeed belonged to Longley. One part of the body the people in San Antonio don’t have is the skull—which was sent to the Smithsonian, where experts will attempt a facial reconstruction.
Searching for the truth about Bill Longley has always been tangled in ambiguities. A racist killer, thug, and pathological liar, one of the kindest things that can be said about the man is that he was probably exaggerating when he claimed to have killed 32 men. By far the best book on Longley’s murderous career is contained in Bloody Bill Longley, by Rick Miller.
John Wesley Hardin is another Texas gunslinger whose corpse must be spinning from all the fuss over whether it should remain where it has been since his death in 1896—Concordia Cemetery in El Paso—or be moved to Nixon. The Nixon camp, which includes some descendants and Nixon-area residents who think Hardin’s new grave would be a dandy tourist attraction, contend that Hardin was a family man, and should be moved to Nixon where he can lie next to the grave of his first wife. (Jane Bowen Hardin died in 1894, while Hardin was serving 16 years in Huntsville for murder.) The El Paso camp feels Hardin should stay where he is because the El Paso of the late 1890s was obviously Hardin’s kind of town—a place where gambling, drinking, prostitution, and aging gunfighters flourished. After being released from prison, Hardin showed no inclination to retire to the Nixon area, which held plenty of bad memories for him. Hardin, in fact, remarried and spent even less time with his children than he had before he was incarcerated. That is, very little.
Hardin didn’t kill anyone in El Paso. The fact is he was hitting the bottle so heavily at that time he probably couldn’t shoot straight if he wanted to. But the locale did add to his legend. On August 19, 1896, Hardin was shot from behind by El Paso Constable John Selman (himself a multiple murderer and ex-criminal) in the Acme Saloon. Bolstering its claim as not only the place where Hardin fell but where he shall remain, El Paso recently convinced the state to erect a historical marker at Hardin’s gravesite.
In the latest round of legal wrangling over Hardin’s corpse, the county of El Paso filed an injunction against the Nixon camp, which stipulates that the latter must prove they have the authority to move the body, including permission from the owner of the cemetery and the owner of the grave. That seems unlikely, but the matter will be brought up in El Paso County Court sometime in August.
For the past several years, August 19th has been celebrated in El Paso with reenactments of Hardin’s death, tours of his favorite haunts, and a suitably irreverent six-shooters-and-champagne celebration at the cemetery.
If it’s western lawman lore you dig, August definitely promises to be a red-letter month. This year, the Texas Rangers celebrate their 175th anniversary, and August 21-22, the Texas Ranger Museum and Hall of Fame will host a symposium on the Rangers, featuring formal presentations by leading Texas history experts, including Harold Weiss, Chuck Parsons, Mike Cox, and Thomas Knowles, author of the official Texas Rangers history tome, They Rode for the Lone Star (which should be published in December). Other events include a shooting demonstration ranging from black powder guns to the latest in Texas Ranger ordnance, and a keynote address by senior ranger Captain Bruce Casteel. Call 254-750-8631 for details.
Links:
Visit Bill Longley’s grave
Visit John Wesley Hardin’s grave
The Heat is a Killer
The tortuous heat of summer can be a rude awakening for anyone visiting Texas, even a native returning from a few years in cooler climes. For Sam Bass, a native of the Denton area, June and July of 1878—exactly 120 years ago—must have seemed like a cruelly warm welcome home. Bass and his gang had netted $60,000 in a train robbery in Big Springs, Nebraska, and were re-entering Texas with lawmen hot on their trail.
On June 13, 1878, a posse led by Texas Ranger June Peak and Sheriff W. F. Eagan caught up with the Bass gang at Salt Creek, Texas. In the shoot-out that ensued, the lawmen killed a gang member named Arkansas Johnson and captured all of the gang’s horses. The surviving outlaws escaped on foot and made it to Denton riding stolen horses.
During his flight through Denton, Bass asked a young black man named Andy Nelson to show him the quickest route to the lower crossing of the Trinity River. Years later, Nelson would recount this harrowing incident in an interview with field operatives with the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
Bass concocted a plan to rob the bank at Round Rock, but one of his cohorts, Jim Murphy, turned informant and got word to the Texas Rangers. After camping outside of town, Bass and his buddies—Seaborn Barnes and Frank Jackson—rode into Round Rock on Friday, July 19, a day before the robbery was to take place, to case the bank. Pretending to be three average cowpokes, the outlaws tied up their mounts near Henry Koppel’s general store on East Main Street where Bass intended to buy some tobacco.
That’s when the outlaws were accosted by two local deputy sheriffs, Ellis Grimes and Morris Moore. Supposedly, Grimes and Moore had no idea who the three outlaws were. They had merely noticed that the strangers appeared to be wearing pistols—which, at the time, happened to be against the law in Texas.
Grimes boldly approached Bass and said, “Young man, give me your gun.”
“You can have both of them,” replied Bass, who whipped out a pair of pistols and immediately began firing.
Grimes fell dead with five bullets in his body. Deputy Moore went down with a chest wound. Suddenly, the whole town seemed to erupt in a storm of bullets and gunsmoke.
A shot from Texas Ranger Dick Ware fatally wounded Seaborn Barnes. Through the hail of gunfire from other Rangers, lawmen, and armed private citizens, Bass and his pal Frank Jackson made it to their horses and galloped out of town. Bass, however, had suffered a serious wound, and Jackson dropped him off under a tree just outside of town and rode on, never to be seen again. Bass was soon captured and brought back into Round Rock, where he drifted in and out of consciousness for the next two days, refusing to divulge any details of his criminal activities to the lawmen. On Sunday, July 21, Bass uttered these last words: “The world is bobbing around me.” It was his 27th birthday.
Sam Bass will probably always be Texas’ most famous outlaw. Even today, Round Rock is best known as the place where his life came to a tragic and brutal end.
San Antonio’s Missions
The original objective of the 36 Spanish missions that were established in Texas between 1690 and 1793 was to help Spain cement a firmer foothold in this contentious frontier. Sure, the missionaries hoped to convert the local Indians to Christianity, but that aim was almost secondary to Spain’s political agenda in the New World. The Spaniards figured that about ten years would be enough time to convince the natives to adopt European habits and so regarded the missions as temporary institutions.
So much for transience. Little did the Spaniards know that many of the missions (which, on the whole, failed miserably in most of their goals) would not only remain standing 300 years later, but would rank among the state’s most popular tourist attractions. The irony is that, although the Indians stubbornly resisted learning the ways of the Spanish, modern archeologists, tourists, and other history buffs flock to these fascinating, highly evocative structures to learn what life was like for European settlers and the natives they interacted with in 17th, 18th, and 19th-century Texas.
In June of this year, San Antonio kicked off Phase One of a $17.7 million project to make improvements to the city’s five historic missions, including schemes that will benefit the residents who live in the neighborhoods around the missions. One of the objectives of San Antonio’s Mission Trail Project is the construction of a 12-mile trail linking the city’s best-known mission, the Alamo (originally established in 1716 as Mission San Antonio de Padua and renamed Mission San Antonio de Valero in 1718) with four other missions, San José, Concepcíon, San Juan Capistrano, and San Francisco de la Espada, already included in an 850-acre national park. The trail linking the park to the Alamo will make it much easier for tourists to visit the missions, which San Antonio regards as the city’s “crown jewels.”
Touring in person is really the best way to gaze through these haunting windows on Texas’ past, but for those of you who just can’t seem to find the time or scrape up the gas money, taking a virtual tour of the missions is an easy, cheap, and surprisingly educational alternative. There are several online options:
To go straight to the mission of your choice, visit the official National Park Mission Trail Or you may choose to start at the Knowledge Trail link and visit the missions in designated order. If the browse encourages you to jump in the car and actually go there, this is the website to visit to learn the hours of operation, parking information, and all the other stuff that matters in real time.
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