THE
HEADLESS HORSEMAN
"El Muerto"
©Lee Paul
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He was "created" to stop stock theft, but his destiny lay elsewhere, when he galloped into legend as the most fearsome rider in Texas history.
Out of the badlands of the Rio Nueces and across the pages of western lore galloped the most fearsome rider of all time, the dreaded Headless Horseman of South Texas Brush Country. Unlike Washington Irving’s mysterious rider in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, this mounted specter was no figment of the imagination by any means. People called him El Muerto, the Dead One, and all who saw him ran screeching like banshees into the night. El Muerto brought terror and fear to the south plains for years.
There is probably no legend in Texas history more frightening and terrifying than that of the headless horseman. He seemed to be everywhere, and his nightly rides caused more wide-spread panic than did the Indians, bandits, and outlaws combined. All efforts to destroy him went futile, as did all attempts to explain him. Credited with all sorts of evil and misfortune, El Muerto galloped across South Texas like wildfire.
The gruesome horror began turning up in conversations one summer around 1850 after one of two ranch hands out tending cattle in the Wild Horse Desert, which at that time stretched from the Nueces River practically all the way to the Rio Grande, happened to glance off into the darkness and saw what he thought was a lone rider silhouetted against the moon on a nearby low rise. The rider looked odd, and the cowboy wasn’t sure why. Since the cowboy and his partner were frying fatback for their evening fare, and the flickering flames of the campfire made viewing poor, if not totally obscured, the cowboy cautiously stood up for a better view. Squinting into the darkness, he suddenly turned and reached for his rifle. Not only was the rider sitting stiffly upright in the saddle, there was absolutely nothing above the shoulders! When the cowboy turned back around with his weapon, however, the horse and rider had vanished.
Thinking the Comanches were on the move and playing tricks, the two men quickly doused their campfire and spent a tense, restless night on the prairie listening for war whoops that never came. Daylight found them carefully picking through the brush for any signs of Indians or their pony tracks. They found none. What they did find, however, were the faint traces of a horse---a lone, unshod horse which had milled and moved about the meadow in an apparent grazing pattern. The tracks led over the rise and disappeared into the next valley.
As days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, more and more cowboys and travelers spotted the dark horse with its fearsome cargo. All claimed that the rider carried his head under a Mexican sombrero tied to the horn of his saddle. The rider himself wore the light tan, rawhide leggings of the Mexican vaqueros, and a brush-torn serape which fluttered over his shoulders and out behind him like a wind-blown cape. People shot at the horror as much as they shied from it, and some even claimed to see Indian arrows and spears dangling from the body. But El Muerto wasn’t yet ready to be explained. Stealing through the night, creeping up on the unwary, he made the South Texas brush country a place to avoid, a place associated with evil and misfortune. It would be years before the real truth could be learned.
From the outset, Texas was probably the most savage and brutal of all the western states. It was never a Territory---it went from a Republic in 1836 directly into Statehood in 1845---and it had to rely solely on its own wits instead of the United States Army for survival. Even when the Federal government finally dotted the western fringe with Army outposts and forts, Texas was still so wild, so untamed, so gigantic in size, that it was nearly the turn of the century before peace could be attained. It was prime Indian and bandit territory, and the lawless took every advantage of it.
It was because of this rampant lawlessness that El Muerto rode. The headless rider was Texas justice, and Texas justice was all frontier, a system more barbaric and repulsive than most city folk heading out on the noon stage liked to believe. The country was absolutely merciless to the uninitiated. Texas history records well over one hundred distinct bands of Indians for that period with ninety-five percent of them bent on annihilating the white man from the face of the earth. If the Indians weren’t attacking, hordes of Mexican and gringo bandits were, either riding alone or in groups approaching fifty or more. Just about any kind of depredation was likely to occur at any given time with lone ranches and outposts being the primary targets.
"Run for your life" had a real meaning in those days. If you did outrun the raiders, then you did have your life, but that’s about all you had to face the wilderness and desert thirst. A greenhorn coming to the Texas frontier could practically count on being attacked, brutalized, and left for dead. Polite society just didn’t understand the harsh methods needed to bring things under control---until one became a victim, that is. Then, being stripped naked and staked over a red ant hill was considered too good for the barbarians.
If the lawless growth during these years can be traced to any one event, it has to be to the Texas Revolution. By defeating the Mexican army in 1836, General Sam Houston acquired the total responsibility of protecting the settlements, a task the Mexican army had been doing for two centuries with their thousands of troops stationed at garrisons all over the place. It was, however, a hardship the struggling Texan army was ill-manned to do. One estimate has placed the expansion at 600,000 Anglos between the years of 1820 and 1840, and the Texas army only numbered around 1,200 men.
Although General Houston dispensed his men appropriately, and it was growing in small leaps and bounds every week as more and more men rode into Texas to join up, there was absolutely no way it could keep up with the influx of murderers and thieves. The entire situation was almost laughable to Texas’s neighbors. Whenever one of their crooks disappeared or escaped justice, the neighboring lawmen just wrote two little letters in their journals, "G.T."---"Gone to Texas"---and that was the end of it. Except for Texas, of course, which had to contend with the criminals on a large scale.
Fortunately, Texas was never totally defenseless. It had a group of peace officers determined to drive the outlaws from the land. Called Texas Rangers, this roving posse of expert gunmen existed long before the bid for independence took place. And they were not ones to be messed with. They went anywhere and everywhere their adversaries did, living out of the saddle and off the land, dispensing justice as brutally as required, usually by riding their quarry into a six-foot hole in the ground. Two of these men were Creed Taylor and William Alexander Anderson "Big Foot" Wallace, who was himself a folk hero. It was Big Foot, with Creed’s blessing, who unwittingly created El Muerto.
At the time Creed Taylor and Big Foot Wallace created their headless horror, Mexican bandits were a dime a dozen in South Texas. It didn’t matter that the Rio Grande was the declared border between the two countries because Mexico never officially recognized it as the boundary. The Nueces River was Mexico’s choice as a border, and the giant chunk of country lying between the two rivers came to be known as "No Man’s Land." It was prime bandit territory, and the outlaws took every advantage of it. The uproar from Texans finally forced the United States to go to war with Mexico in 1846 to make the Rio Grande stick, but it took another thirty years before Leander McNelly and his company of "Special Rangers" could rid the territory of the Mexican cattle rustlers and thieves.
Creed Taylor and his four brothers had inherited a vast cattle empire from their father when the old man died in 1830, but the big ranch wasn’t exactly what Creed had in mind. Although the Taylor spread was located south of San Antonio near the present town of Cuero---on the eastern fringe of "No Man’s Land"---Creed just couldn’t stay away from the cedar-clad hills of the extreme frontier on the edge of Comanche country. When he finally settled on a place to his liking, it was so wild and inaccessible that it practically begged to be robbed and pilfered at every opportunity.
Creed’s ranch lay west of San Antonio, in the thickest of bandit territory, not far from the headwaters of the Nueces River. He had cattle and horses, and like all stockmen on the open range, he also had a devil of time keeping tabs on the maverick herds. A maverick was created when stock bearing the brand of one ranch mixed with stock bearing the brand of another, thus producing offspring bearing the brand of neither outfit. They were called mavericks after Samuel Maverick, a prominent rancher and merchant in the area who refused to brand his own stock, thus claiming all unbranded stock was his. More often than not, stock disputes were settled at the end of a gun.
Creed Taylor suffered miserably from stock loss. Bandits were everywhere, and stock rustling was the primary sport for the Mexican bandit as well as the Comanche thief. The strategy was to lay low in the rocks, scout out the ranch patrols, and then sneak one or two head from the herd when the cowhands weren’t looking. The Indians would eat their catch, but the Mexicans preferred other tactics. It was a usually a simple matter to alter the brand. When the stolen herd became sizable enough, it was then driven to market and sold, usually at Brownsville or Matamoros on the Rio Grande. In one year alone, more than 30,000 head disappeared in South Texas.
The Indians, if they were caught, were always killed on the spot, but there was a different brand of justice for the bandit. Most bandits rode in groups, and in an effort to find the main party, the unfortunate victim was usually hoisted by his neck off the ground at the end of a rope a few times, hoping he’d spill his guts and blab on any others in his gang. It was a practice most Ranger companies abhorred, but the vigilante posses used it all the time. And it always worked, especially when accompanied with idle promises of jail instead of the gallows. The real truth, however, is that the bandit was left to slowly choke to death in the noose. The sight of the body swaying in the wind was supposed to act as a deterrent to other outlaws, only it seldom worked.
Creed Taylor finally decided that he’d had enough. The bandits just weren’t getting the messages left strung all over the hills by the necktie parties. One well-known raider was a Mexican horse thief known as Vidal, and when Vidal’s band made off with a string of Taylor’s horses one crisp, summer morning, driving them down from the hills to the waters of the Nueces southeast of Uvalde, Taylor and a neighbor gave chase.
Vidal had always been as elusive as the will-o’-the-wisp. Back in the earliest days of the Texas Revolution, he had been a lieutenant in the Mexican army. One night in early December 1835, he deserted his post and slipped into the Texan ranks, insisting he was a friend. Although he brought valuable information for the rebels, one Texan rebel took a keen interest in the little Mexican army officer. That man was Creed Taylor, and Taylor never looked a gift horse in the mouth.
Taylor’s intuition turned out to be right. After the Revolution and people turned to peace, Vidal turned to horse stealing. It was a risky business, for at that time a man could get away with shooting his neighbor easier than he could stealing horses. At first, his reputation as a patriot cloaked his operations. By the time his real character became known, he was the uncontested leader of a string of outlaws camps on both sides of the border. His area of operation even stretched clear into Louisiana and Mississippi.
Vidal took advantage of everything. His rustling was so wide-spread that he had a price on his head all over South Texas. That summer of 1850, taking advantage of a Comanche raid which pulled most of the men northward in the pursuit, leaving the sparse settlements temporarily unguarded, he and three of his top confederates gathered up a considerable bunch of horses on the San Antonio River and headed southwest toward Mexico. It was to be the proverbial straw which broke the camel’s back, for Creed Taylor had some prized mustangs in the stolen herd, and when Vidal made off with all of them, Taylor lost all his patience.
Unknown to Vidal, Taylor was not out chasing Comanches. In fact, it was one of the rare times that Taylor didn’t go Indian hunting---he could usually be found leading the posse. Another man not out hunting the Indians was a Mexican rancher named Flores. Flores had also lost a string of horses in the theft, and he and Taylor promptly gave chase. The further the two hunters trailed the horse thieves, the surer they were that they were tracking Vidal.
Creed Taylor was as skilled as any Comanche when tracking, and he determined that Vidal had just pulled the last raid on anyone’s ranch. Taylor, like most of the other early Rangers, worked at upholding the law about as much as he worked at building Texas. Rangering for him was always on-again, off-again as the need dictated. He had killed Mexicans with Jim Bowie and Ben Milam in the Revolution, fought the Indians as a Ranger under Jack Hays, and scouted for old "Rough-and-Ready" Zachary Taylor in the Mexican War. As patriarch of the western fringe of the huge Taylor clan, he was as mean as a snake and a dangerous man to cross. He tolerated guff from no one. When he went after Vidal, he was as determined as a black thundercloud looming on the horizon. Where the river bends below Uvalde, he and Flores ran into Big Foot Wallace.
Big Foot was a natural frontiersman, always ready to hunt bandits and thieves. He could trace his family back to a near kinship to the famous William Wallace, Son of Scotland and leader of the Scottish army in the 13th Century war against the land-grabbing King Edward of England. Through his grandmother Elizabeth Bruce, Big Foot was also related to Sir Robert Bruce, otherwise known as Bruce the Fierce, a famous Scottish king. Like his two famous ancestors, Big Foot was a skilled fighter and a natural-born leader.
Also like his two famous ancestors, he was a giant of a man. He stood six feet, two inches tall and weighed somewhere around 240 pounds. Legend says that the spread from the fingertips of one hand to the fingertips of his other hand was several inches past six feet. He got his nickname because he always wore moccasins, and his footprint was once mistaken for the moccasined footprint of a particularly bloodthirsty Waco Indian who had been murdering in the settlements for more than twenty years.
Big Foot had come from Virginia in 1836 right after the Battle of the Alamo to wreak vengeance on the Mexicans. His brother and a cousin had been killed with Colonel James Fannin’s army at the Battle of Goliad, after peacefully surrendering to Santa Anna’s army. This betrayal of kin so inflamed Big Foot that he never in his entire lifetime forgave the Mexicans. To his dying day, he had nothing but contempt for all of them. Knowing Vidal’s reputation as a Mexican horse thief, it took no coaxing for Big Foot to make the hunting party a threesome.
The two old Ranger friends mulled over the rustling problem with Flores. Every deterrent imaginable had proven worthless in the past. Bandits had been strung up in the trees and left hanging until all flesh fell from the bones. No luck. Rustlers had been shot and left on the prairies to rot. Still no luck. They’d even been chopped into pieces and left as coyote bait. Nothing seemed to work. Bandit attitudes seemed to taunt, "Catch me if you can."
But Big Foot was about as eccentric as he was ingenious, and he decided that what was really needed was a truly drastic example of frontier justice. Since coming to Texas, he’d spent much of his time alone in the woods hunting meat for the settlements, freighting rocks for the building of the city of Austin, or just learning the ways of the wilderness. And one thing that he had learned during these solitary jaunts was that Indians and Mexicans were terribly superstitious. He already knew how to get to the Indians: mutilate the body in some fashion---like scalping---and then leave the body to rot. But, getting to the Mexican superstitious beliefs required a little more thought.
When the three men finally located the camp of their quarry, they waited until night, when all the thieves lay sleeping, before making their attack. Sneaking up on the camp from downwind to keep from spooking the stolen herd, the three men had no problem in the ensuing gunfight. The thieves were quickly killed, and that included Vidal. Although Vidal was wanted dead or alive, Big Foot had other plans. As disgusting as the task was, with the help of his friends, he severed Vidal’s head from his body.
It was now just a matter of selecting the proper horse. The wildest mustang in the stolen herd was a young, charcoal-colored stallion. It stood about fifteen hands at the shoulder, was incredibly strong, fleet as the wind, and fairly smart. It’s eyes also blazed with fury and hate. As it stood blindfolded and securely tied between two trees, its angry snorts and screams left no doubt that it’d sooner stomp the life out of anyone rather than be ridden. But the horse was just what Big Foot wanted, and he wasted no time throwing a saddle onto its back.
The men then lashed Vidal’s body on the protesting horse, binding the hands to the saddlehorn, legs to the stirrups, and securing the torso in such a fashion that it sat upright in the broad, Mexican saddle and couldn’t fall out. They then tied the stirrups to each other under the horse’s belly so they could not fly up. When that was finished, Big Foot worked a rawhide thong through the jaws of Vidal’s decapitated head, and with the chin strap of the sombrero, secured it in the sombrero, which he tied to the saddlehorn where it would flop and bounce with each step of the horse. He then turned the terrified mustang loose with an ear-splitting yell that could have been heard in the next valley. The maddened pony went bucking and stomping over the hill...and into legend.
Big Foot never expected the gruesome sight to do anything other than deter cattle rustlers and horse thieves. He knew it would terrify the Indians---just about anything out of the ordinary spooked them---and he judged the Mexican bandits would also see it as an evil omen. If the headless rider could patrol the range for any measure of time, stock theft would definitely diminish.
Big Foot’s creation, however, rode into legend. Why? Because no one knew what it was. No one was ever able to "kill" it. The black horse never came close to anyone or anything. It just milled about on the fringes of vision, scaring everyone who saw it. Furthermore, although frontiersmen took long shots at it and claimed that they hit it, it continued to ride. Creed Taylor and Big Foot couldn’t advertise what they had done because then it would not have been effective. No doubt they chuckled every time they heard stories of the fearsome rider. As it was, the specter, clad in its Mexican rawhide leggings, buckskin jacket, and blowing serape, with its severed head tied on the saddlehorn beneath the tattered Mexican sombrero, frightened everyone on the south plains for years. As more and more ranchers, cowhands, and stage drivers saw the dark horse with its gruesome cargo galloping through the brush, more and more outlandish characteristics were added to its countenance.
Eyewitnesses claimed the horse spouted flames from its nostrils and sent lightning bolts skyward with each clop from its hooves. The eyes in the head under the tattered sombrero were said to be like two fiery coals chipped from the cinders of hell. Some even claimed the specter glowed with an eerie green light and smelled like brimstone as it thundered through the tumbleweeds and desert sage.
People credited it with all kinds of curses and misfortune. When a posse of local ranchers and cowboys finally became brave enough to bushwhack it at a watering hole on a ranch at the tiny community of Ben Bolt just south of Alice, they were thunderstruck to discover a dried-up Mexican corpse riddled with hundreds of bullet holes, arrows, and Indian spears. It was lashed to the horse and saddle so tightly that the rope had to be cut to unfasten it. Beneath the rotting sombrero was a small skull, shriveled from too many years in the grueling, Texan sun.
Vidal---what was left of him---was finally laid to rest in La Trinidad’s tiny ranch cemetery at Ben Bolt. The grave lies back in the brush marked only by a small, jagged chunk of limestone.
Although El Muerto was now properly "dead" and buried, his ghost apparently never got the message. Right up until the fort closed in 1869, soldiers at Fort Inge (present-day Uvalde) saw the headless rider---and properly avoided him. So did travelers and ranchers throughout "No Man’s Land."
At the turn of the century, the headless horror rode straight through a wagon team in Old San Patricio, passing soundlessly through the traces, the wagon, and the terrified occupants at a place now called Headless Horseman Hill. The site is on the outskirts of town, near the old cemetery. Even today in the tiny community of San Diego in Duval County, a headless rider can occasionally be seen on dark nights, galloping through the desert sage toward a dried up pond once known as "Dead Man’s Lake."
There are still rumors that "El Muerto" continues to ride. In a modern-day manhunt in the brush near Freer in 1969, members of the mounted posse reported a strange horseman off in the distance. Two men rode to investigate, but they found no indication that a horse and rider had been in the area. Furthermore, although unwilling to admit it in front of other members of the posse, one officer was overheard to whisper that he thought the unknown rider had no head.
What became of the two old Rangers who created "El Muerto?" Well, they rode into Texas history as legends also. Creed Taylor was part of the infamous Sutton-Taylor feud, the bloodiest and longest-running range war in American history. It began in South Carolina around 1810, moved through Georgia and on into Texas, as the two families followed each other, incredibly settling on neighboring properties. Before it was over, it spanned more than seventy years, peaking in the decade between 1866-1876 when it involved literally thousands of people in five counties. The feud only died out when the kids grew old enough to become targets.
Creed lies buried in a little out-of-the-way cemetery north of Mountain Home in the hill country that he had loved all his life. Part of his legacy, the famous Y-O Ranch at Mountain Home, is a working ranch also used by Texas Rangers as a retreat, courtesy of Charles Schreiner, III. Schreiner’s grandfather, the first Charles Schreiner, who was also a famous Texas Ranger, obtained the ranch from the Taylor kin in the 1880s.
And Big Foot? Well, he rode into legend as one of the most colorful characters ever. There are probably more stories and tales told about him than anyone else in Texas history. He never married, and when he was about fifty-five years old, he found a permanent home with the McHenry Bramlett family in Devine, a tiny community about stick’s throw down the road from the even tinier community of Bigfoot, named after him. As a member of the Bramlett family, he took a special interest in Frances Ida, the middle child, possibly because she was most like him in free spirit and temperament. When Fannie, as she liked to be called, married W. W. "Doc" Cochran, Big Foot moved into a downstairs room in the Cochran house, living with them for twenty-two years, until he died.
On January 7, 1899, while sitting on his bed, putting on his shoes, Big Foot died from what was thought to be pneumonia. Although he had caught cold a few days earlier, he had never taken to his sick bed. In fact, he was visiting with McHenry Bramlett and Colonel George Holcombe, the editor of the Devine News, while Fannie fixed breakfast.
Colonel Holcombe had just published the Life of "Big Foot" Wallace by Andrew Jackson "Jack" Sowell, and had just brought the book, hot off the press, to show Big Foot. Holcombe sat in a chair folding it, getting it ready for binding, when Big Foot fell over dead. The two men laid Big Foot back on the bed. Colonel Holcombe said, "He’s gone." After lying at rest for one month in the tiny community cemetery of Devine, his body was removed by the State and buried with full military honors in the State Cemetery in Austin. He was eighty-eight years old.
Although everyone is gone now, the legend lives on. The Headless Horseman of South Texas Brush Country is still very much real.
