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.
Copyright © 2022 by Joseph Pappalardo
