1RESTLESS BEINGS
FOREVER IN THE SADDLE
May 19, 1886
The trio of Texas Rangers wake in their temporary campsite in the Washita Valley, inside the Indian Territories. They handle this Saturday morning’s1 work the way Rangers always do, with each man responsible for a specific task. One prepares food, the other makes a fire, another tends to the horses.
Being a Ranger means getting used to staples of life on the trail, which are enshrined in the 1874 law that created the Frontier Battalion: bacon, corn, meal, fresh beef, beans, peas, green coffee, potatoes. There’s always plenty of salt, pepper, and vinegar.2 Breakfast is made, served, and eaten within a half hour. The morning fire is then doused and stamped out. Camp-grimed overalls are replaced by buttoned shirts and vests. Blankets are rolled and stowed in saddles.
The campsite efficiency comes with professionalism, not urgency. Still, their pace is brisk. Sergeant James Brooks, freshly promoted at age thirty, doesn’t want to send the wrong message to the two privates. Rangers are always expected to ride hard.
Brooks is easy to respect but harder to like. When not obscured by a hat, Brooks’s pronounced forehead bulges slightly under his steadily receding hairline. Brooks’s mustache forms a tight inverted V under his nose, hiding the corners of his mouth. The facial hair makes his default expression seem like a scowl.
Or maybe that’s just because he doesn’t talk all that much. A reporter for Harper’s will one day meet Brooks and offer his idealized impression of the Ranger and his men. “They were somewhat shy with strangers, listening very intently but speaking little, and then in a slow, gentle voice,” he writes. “As they spoke so seldom, they seemed to think what they had to say was too valuable to spoil with profanity.”3
Brooks has a reputation for being tough, but he doesn’t project much flash or swagger. He prefers a quiet demeanor coupled with definitive action. Later in life, he’ll say, “We only performed our work as best we saw it, and all this ‘hell in boots’ stuff is tommy-rot.”4
Each Ranger’s waist is ringed with a three-inch-wide leather belt festooned with twin rows of bullets for pistol and rifle, which use the same ammunition. This example in commonality comes courtesy of hard lessons learned by prior Rangers who jammed their rifles with pistol cartridges during gunfights. The “scout belts” are folded so they can hold money and the L-shaped tools used to tighten the screws of their firearms; some Rangers have rusted the screws with salt water to hold them fast against the repeated impacts of long rides on horseback.5
The rifles are stowed for the ride but kept within reach. There’s a Winchester ’73 in Brooks’s saddle scabbard. A Colt Frontier Six-Shooter rests easily on his belt.6 It’s holstered high on his right side, a typical strong-side carry. If the target is close enough to grapple, a savvy lawman will fend off any advances with the weak hand and use the dominant, unobstructed one to pull his pistol.
Brooks has young privates Dee Caldwell and Henry Putz with him. There are not many ranks within the Ranger organization, so privates come with a wide range of experience. “The recruit is not subjected to any examination as to his fitness beyond that which the captain of the company may insist upon,” observes writer Earl Mayo after visiting the Rangers in 1901. “The membership of this unique organization has consisted always of those restless beings in whom the spirit of adventure is the compelling motive.”7
These two privates are still early in their service, which is measured in one-year commitments. Captain William Scott only signed Caldwell to Company F in March.8 Brooks has quiet doubts that he has what it takes to stay a Ranger very long.
Henry Putz is more experienced, having joined the previous September, and Brooks has seen him in action during manhunts. The nineteen-year-old Ranger was with him when they got the drop on the remaining pair of the Wade Gang and brought them to a Dallas jail, all without bloodshed.9 But Putz doesn’t fit the picture of a quiet but deadly Ranger. He’s quick to open his mouth, and what comes out is often glib, a bad mix for a deliberate, soft-spoken man like Brooks.
As a tenderfoot just the previous year, Putz can sympathize Caldwell’s attempts to keep up. “I was not used to the saddle and by the time I had negotiated the thirty-five miles on the back of a mount whose movements suggested nothing of the rocking chair, I was sore head to foot and ready to drop with fatigue,” Putz later recalls of his first days with Company F. “Next morning Capt. Will Scott ordered me to return the horse to Sheriff Baylor and gave me a pack mule to take along and ride back. From the back of the horse to the back of the mule was decidedly a change for the worse and when I got back to camp I was more dead than alive. I fell on a blanket, sound asleep, only to be rudely disturbed by Sgt Brooks, who said we were to go on a scout.”10
That day featured a new recruit’s other hurdle: hazing. “We set out at a gallop but had proceeded only a few miles when my right stirrup gave way. Some of the men had cut the laces that fastened the stirrup to the leather as a practical joke. I had no time to stop and repair my saddle but had to gallop on with my leg rubbing against my Winchester at every leap of my horse.”
Brooks and Putz, guided by a deputy sheriff, caught two horse thieves that night. As soon as they returned to camp, more orders came for the pair to track a man running horses across the Rio Grande. “And thus it went,” Putz says. “One hard ride after another—forever in the saddle.”11
The current hard ride in the Washita Valley brings Brooks and his Rangers outside of the borders of Texas. Nine days ago, the sergeant received orders from Captain Scott, who in turn was responding to a direct request from the governor’s office. Governor John Ireland, the self-styled foe of all desperadoes, was rankled by yet another report of out-of-state lawbreakers operating in northern Texas. A crew of Anglo cattlemen, including a man named Sam Gopher, came to Texas seeking horses and mules, stiffed a local merchant named O. P. Wood12 on a deal, and hightailed it back to the Indian Territories with two unpaid mules in tow.13
Word of this reaches Austin and prompts a telegram from the governor’s office to Captain Scott, whose Company F is camped in Wilbarger County but deployed to Fort Worth in response to a chaotic railroad strike. Scott literally waves the governor’s telegram at Brooks with orders: He’s to take two privates, go back to Wilbarger, and then head north into the Indian Territories. They are to return with either the mules or the money.
The territories are a patchwork of relocated tribes, each managing large swatches of land mostly in what is modern-day Oklahoma. The Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole formed the official territories, but the U.S. government has deposited scores of others in nearby, adjoining land.
Cattle is a big moneymaker in the Indian Territories, like everywhere else in the West with a patch of land. Mixed families of Anglo and Indian ranchers are taking full advantage of the beef boom. Those traditionalist Native American families who have no interest in ranching can rent their land to cattlemen driving their hungry herds north from Texas to the railroads.
The mortal threat hanging over these operations are shaky lease licenses, which are tangled by unclear federal regulations and legal rulings. There is a steady push to seize the Indian lands outright, and squatters, tacitly encouraged by state politicians in Oklahoma, are setting up illegal settlements. The open range makes this even messier, as massive herds drift from Texas and Oklahoma into the territories to mix and mingle, causing all manner of disputes and confrontations.14
Brooks needs a local guide to steer through this terrain, so the Rangers’ first stop in Indian Territory was Fort Sill to ask U.S. Indian agent Robert Owen for backup. Lieutenant Thomas Knight, of the United States Indian Police, drew the assignment. He’s the fourth man in the Ranger camp that spring morning.
The five-foot, ten-inch, 165-pound Cherokee lawman is the eldest member of the quartet at forty-one, but the seasoned campaigner has no problem keeping up. He was a university student at Baptist Mission School in Cherokee territory before the Civil War, and like the bulk of the Cherokee Nation, he supported the Confederacy. Knight joined the First Regiment Cherokee Mounted Volunteers at the war’s start and served four years, taking part in a handful of set-piece battles and, more commonly, guerrilla tactics aimed at other tribes that supported the Union. Some of their efforts tied up thousands of soldiers, and others led to the slaughter of fellow Native Americans.15
The territories bounced back from the Civil War on the back of cattle and mining. Like many veterans, Knight became a small rancher and farmer. In 1870, he married Rachel Sixkiller, the sister of Sam Sixkiller, the well-known captain of the U.S. Indian Police, federal lawmen with jurisdiction across the territories. Knight resisted the pull of law enforcement until 1884, when he moved to the town of Vinita and joined his brother-in-law’s ranks.16
Armed with Knight’s local knowledge, the hunt for Sam Gopher shouldn’t be a hard one. The man lives on Red Alexander’s farm, the only landmark around. Alexander owns the only store and runs the only post office for miles. People have taken to calling the small, unincorporated town springing up around the store “Alex.” It’s only fifteen miles from the Rangers’ overnight campsite.
The four men mount up. The Indian Territories remind Brooks of an earlier time in Texas cattle history, of the raw and wild edge that is elsewhere being dulled by stock farming and barbed wire. It makes Brooks reflect on his earlier life, of professions and moneymaking schemes attempted and failed, of long rides watching over herds of animals.
He feels an equal lack of regret over all of them because he is right where he belongs. J. A. Brooks only found a skin that fit when he became a Texas Ranger.
THE KENTUCKIAN
January 1, 1877 (eight years and seven months before Brooks’s deployment to the Indian Territories)
James Brooks steps off the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway train at Marion, Texas. From this humble wooden platform, the twenty-one-year-old is ready to take on the whole state.
Brooks has taken the Sunset Route train line as far as it’ll go, disembarking at this camp for railroad workers twenty-five miles outside San Antonio proper. The wooden depot just opened for service in spring 1876, with passengers taking hack coaches or their own horses to the town. The Sunset Route is slowly extending passenger service into South Texas and won’t reach downtown until February 5, 1877, sparking the boom of “Alamo Town” into a major city.
The allure of endless plains, high adventure, and steep profits stands in sharp contrast to Brooks’s youth in Kentucky. It starts well, at least. His father, John Strode Brooks, is a respected doctor who owns a small parcel of land and a few slaves in Bourbon County. He has one younger sister, Lillie, and his mother is healthy, being fifteen years younger than her husband.
But the Brooks family’s reality shatters in twin blows when the Civil War breaks out in 1861 and John Strode Brooks dies in 1863. The young boy shoulders a lot of extra weight. “When eight years of age Jim would take old Red and Blue, two oxen, hitched to a sled and haul fodder in over snow-covered fields,” a reporter for The Corpus Christi Times describes, based on details from an interview with Brooks. “In the spring, when the sap began to flow, he would press old Red and Blue into service again, bringing the valuable yield from the maple trees to his big pans.”17
The Civil War brings hardship to his literal doorstep. “When the Yankees came through our part of Kentucky they killed and ate all of our sheep,” he recalls to the newspaper. “But they couldn’t eat the wool.” The slaves gather the discarded wool, spin it into cloth, and weave some into Brooks’s first pair of long pants.18
At the war’s end, the freed slaves stay on to work the Brookses’ small farm. J. A. Brooks grew up outdoors and on horseback, in the land that produced some of the nation’s finest riders. A former slave who grew up with Brooks became a famous racehorse rider, according to The Corpus Christi Times, but the man’s name is not mentioned. The area also produces the nation’s best whiskey, and like a good Kentucky boy, Brooks learns its taste at a young age.
Brooks knows that when he turns twenty-one in November 1876, he’ll be leaving Kentucky. Like so many, the frontier of Texas draws him in. This is partially by design—the state has proactive offices in the United States and abroad to entice immigrants. It’s not a place, it’s a buzzword for ambition and adventure.19
The young man bids farewell to his mother and sister on Christmas Day and boards a train for Chicago, the easiest route to his ultimate destination. After touring the city, Brooks takes another train, heading south. He watches anxiously as the landscape changes from endless plains to arid desert. He arrives in Marion on New Year’s Day.20
Texas proves itself thick with opportunity and disappointment. Cow punching makes the most sense as an initial profession. He rides the Chisholm Trail to Kansas, but he finds it both risky and dull. Sickness nearly kills him in Kansas, and he returns to Texas, forever from then on his adopted home. He tries his hand as a miner, gold speculator, and ranch hand. No luck.
Brooks tries settling down at a homestead. In 1878, he owns acreage on the headwaters of Wilson Creek, valued at $300. His belongings, listed in tax records that year, include one horse, one wagon, forty-nine head of cattle, and four hogs. He also races horses, courts women, and suffers when they choose other men or spurn his advances toward the altar.21 Brooks’s romantic streak, seemingly at odds with his preference for travel and hard drink, endures his entire life. “I don’t know which I think is prettier, a fine racehorse or a pretty girl in a hoop skirt dancing the Virginia Reel,” he will later remark.22
Ranching doesn’t take, and neither does family life. Brooks then throws himself back into the frontier, seeking opportunity while on the move. In 1880, for example, he drives a herd of sheep northward through Texas, from the town of San Diego to the city of San Antonio.23 Across the years, he makes many temporary business partners, some of whom would find fame later in life. His only steady company is alcohol.
The future lawman makes an irresponsible cowboy. C. V. Terrell, a state treasurer and railroad commissioner, tells a rare story about Brooks’s early years in a 1948 memoir. Brooks rides into Decatur to purchase supplies and gets into a bottle of moonshine whiskey. When the Decatur marshal begins to arrest him, a grocer known as “Uncle Charley” Cates talks the officer out of it, and Brooks gallops unsteadily out of town. He wakes in the saddle, standing on the property of a bemused settler, his horse slurping from a water barrel. The Hobson family, who lives there, must be a charitable one, because they take him in for breakfast and decline his offer to pay for the hospitality. “Not a cent,” settler Nemi Hobson tells him. “Just don’t drink any more.”24
By the end of 1882, Brooks is scouring the spreading web of train lines, seeking opportunity in the rowdy boomtowns that spring up along these routes. He aims for the town of Cotulla, and his fateful January 1883 meeting with Lieutenant Charles McKinney. Now he’s a private stationed in a wild boomtown.
“Girlie” McKinney, who was in temporary command, soon retires to become sheriff with jurisdiction over Cotulla. Brooks then works for Captains Joe Shely and William Scott. He considers them both influential mentors, men who fill the void left by his late father, but has a closer connection with Scott. “While Lieut. Wm Scott was in charge of the eastern detachment of old Co. ‘F’ stationed in DeWitt County, Scott encouraged young Ranger Brooks to be a real worthwhile Texas Ranger, under all circumstances,” Brooks will say.
As the fence cutting rises to crisis levels in 1883, Brooks is sent on a mission that will directly lead to a new, violent phase of the Texas Rangers’ struggle against it.
Late that year, Governor John Ireland’s gaze falls on Gonzales County, near his home constituency, where cowboys in Lee County are destroying fences. Scott needs a Ranger to go to Austin and report to Adjutant General Wilburn King, who has the assignment straight from the governor. It’s a testament to Scott’s trust in Private Brooks that he selects him to go.
Brooks and Lee County deputy sheriff William Scurry head into adjacent Bastrop County to hunt for “nipper” suspects. As usual, the cutters are not exactly shy. They operate with a sense of immunity that comes from community support and toothless criminal charges. The pair of lawmen generate the names of twenty-eight fence cutters.
Faced with the results of this investigation, and hearing equal frustration from Scott in Gonzales County, the governor sees that misdemeanors are not deterring these self-righteous bands. Ireland calls a special session of the legislature to meet on January 8, 1884; fence cutting becomes a felony punishable by one to five years in prison.25 Cutters who would earlier have surrendered can now be counted on to fight.
Back in Cotulla, the usual mix of thieves, killers, and drunks keeps the Rangers busy. Brooks spends the next two and a half years there with Company F, where he is promoted to corporal and then to second sergeant. Commanders applaud his mix of intimidating calm and deliberativeness. He has plenty of chances to prove himself as the city grows fast and wild. “El Paso, Tombstone, Tascosa and the other widely publicized frontier towns could not equal the deadliness of this cattle center on the Nueces River,” says writer W. W. Sterling, Brooks’s friend and fellow Ranger. “In most of the rough places, a noted officer could make his play stand up on the strength of his reputation. This was not the case in Cotulla.”26
The rowdy town hardens Brooks, although he never kills anyone. His reputation as a tough man grows quickly in the Rangers’ ranks and on the muddy streets. Rangers love shooting competitions, and Brooks is unnaturally fast. This mystique actually helps keep his pistol in its holster. Sterling writes that Private Brooks’s “steely blue eyes, square jaw and panther quick movements were the marks of a good man to let alone … After sizing him up, the array of local gunmen decided to take him at his face value. He quickly became a veteran.”
Austin politicians are foes the Rangers can’t outride or outshoot. Budgetary maneuvering brings unwelcome change to the Rangers as the state legislature’s cuts force the Frontier Battalion’s reorganization. In October 1885, all companies are slashed by six men each, and Company A is mustered out of the battalion permanently.
The reorg chart becomes a ladder for Brooks, who is promoted to first sergeant that October. Shortly after his promotion, Company F is sent to Wilbarger County, on the Red River border, across from the Chickasaw Nation.
THE DARK-HAIRED COWBOY
May 19, 1886
Alex isn’t yet a town. It’s a collection of frontier settlements scattered in proximity to the road connecting Chickasha and Erin Springs. In time, these roots will support a thriving population, but for now, the place is a crude, remote outpost in Chickasaw territory.27
Copyright © 2022 by Joe Pappalardo
