BEN
McCULLOCH
©Lee Paul
1811-1862
If one man could be singled out for being most identified with shaping the West, that man might well be Benjamin McCulloch. A jack of all trades with the natural ability to do whatever needed doing without being told, he participated in and influenced most of the major events that shaped the western frontier. As frontiersman, miner, settler, lawman, Ranger, surveyor, Indian fighter, statesman, and military commander, his life was legend.
Benjamin McCulloch was born in Rutherford County, Tennessee on 11 November 1811. He was the son of Alexander McCulloch, who was himself a veteran of the Battle of New Orleans and the Creek Indian Wars. A neighbor of Davy Crockett’s, Ben originally planned to journey to Texas with Crockett and help fight with the Texans in their bid for independence. Crockett, however, was anxious to go "where the bullets fly" and left without him. By the time Ben could make it to Texas, the Alamo had fallen, and all combatants within were dead. He was, however, in plenty of time to command artillery under Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto.
Ben’s youth was much like that of his flamboyant neighbor’s. Like Crockett, he became a woodsman and hunter, spending so much time in the woods that he acquired a frontiersman’s ability to read signs before he was ten. By the time he was twenty-one, he had surpassed Crockett as a "b’ar hunter," once killing as many as eighty bears in one season. A rather tall man at five feet, ten inches, with a slight build, he had a cool, calculating look about him, as well as the brave and daring energy of several men. His commanding features were pleasant with light hair and blue eyes, but his complexion bore the wizened, weather-beaten cast of the true outdoorsman.
When he was twenty-two years old, he decided to roam west. Leaving Tennessee behind, he crossed the Mississippi River, and for two years, he searched for his own niche in life. It seemed that everywhere he went, he was too late. By the time he reached St. Louis in the hopes of making his fortune in the fur trade, the trappers had gone, having already departed for the majesty of the mountains. He tried to sign up with a freight company bound for Santa Fe, but the mule skinners had just hired a full complement. He decided to drift to Wisconsin where he heard a man could get rich in the lead mining boom, only when he arrived, he discovered large mining claims had already pushed the individual miner aside and destroyed the boom. There was nothing for him to do but to work for wages in the mines until he could earn passage home.
In the fall of 1835, he returned to Tennessee where he learned that his adventuresome neighbor Davy Crockett was raising a force of men to march to Texas to help fight the Texas battle for independence from Mexico. He made arrangements to meet with Crockett in Nacagadoches, Mississippi on Christmas Day, 1835, but he and his brother Henry were late. Arriving in January 1836, the brothers found Crockett and the Tennessee Boys had pushed on the week before. Ben was further delayed when he became sick and was bedridden for several weeks. By the time he was well enough to travel, it was late February, and Crockett and the other defenders were already entrenched in the Alamo, under siege from Mexican General Santa Anna.
The McCulloch brothers decided to journey to Texas anyway, and on their way to San Antonio, Ben and Henry ran into the ragtag Texan army under the command of the former governor of Tennessee, Sam Houston. Houston had been working in the area south of the Brazos recruiting volunteers, and the McCulloch brothers quickly joined with him. Ben was given command of artillery cannon in the small army’s arsenal.
Sam Houston’s method of fighting the Mexican army was one of attack and retreat. The entire Texan army of Regulars and Volunteers numbered only about 800 men, and in a frontal assault against Santa Anna’s blistering thousands, they stood no chance. By attacking and running, Houston kept Santa Anna fuming. He also kept his men fuming, men who were tired of retreating and itching to fight. It appeared to many that Houston didn’t know what to do with so much military might against him, but Houston assured them he was searching for a spot where "you can whip the enemy ten to one." After the Goliad Massacre on Palm Sunday, 27 March 1836, the newly-elected Provisional President David Burnet sent a scathing letter: "Sir; the enemy are laughing you to scorn. You must fight them. You must retreat no further. The country expects you to fight."
Santa Anna was not one to wait for the Texas army to find him. Upon learning that the Texas government was at Harrisburg near present-day Houston, for the moment anyway, he immediately raced east from Fort Bend, leaving most of his army behind. The dictator reasoned that if he could capture and execute the ringleaders, the war would be over in one stroke. When he found Harrisburg deserted, he burned the town to the ground in rage. This proved to be his undoing, for it riled the Texans like never before. When Houston arrived a few days later with his hot-tempered troops, one look at the smoldering ruins was enough for his men. With inflaming words of "Remember The Alamo! Remember La Bahia!" they raced to their date with infamy.
General Houston had Regulars and Volunteers, all with nervous trigger fingers. Recruiting the Regulars had been a difficult task, even if it did offer a twenty-five dollar bounty and 800 acres of land as an enlistment inducement. According to a committee at Washington-on-the-Brazos on March 10, "of the regular army, there appears to be only sixty privates." Of those, twenty-six had already died in the smoking ruins of the Alamo. The Texan army needed men badly, and it wasn’t long before one garrison of U. S. Army troops from Louisiana had been allowed to "desert" for a short, fighting vacation with the Texas rebels
There were no uniforms of any kind, just a mish-mash of tattered clothing mixed with U. S. Army uniforms and buckskin accessories. It has led many researchers to wonder just how many U.S. Army troops had deserted their own units to join with the Texan rebels. No one really knows. Sam Houston took everyone he could get, and he didn’t care where they came from. It was noted by Jospeh Milton Nance in After San Jacinto that a U.S. Army officer came to Texas in the summer of 1836 to encourage 200 deserters still wearing U.S. Army uniforms to return to their own units. They all refused.
When Ben and his brother Henry joined the ranks of the Texas army, Ben was immediately put in charge of one of the infamous "Twin Sisters," a pair of six-pounder field pieces named in honor of two girls on the ship that had brought the weapons from New Orleans. The foundry of Greenwood and Webb in Cincinnati, Ohio, had cast the cannon, and the Ohio donors had also sent solid and grapeshot. For a time, Sam Houston had borrowed oxen from Mrs. Pamela Mann to pull them through the mud bogs, but as the army tuned toward Harrisburg, Mrs. Mann wanted her oxen back. Houston explained he couldn’t move the cannon without the oxen.
"I don’t care a damn for your cannon," she has been reported as saying. She then jumped down from her wagon and cut the harness from the cannon, taking her oxen with her. A big pistol on her hip defied opposition. As desperate as the times were, the cannon went to San Jacinto by manpower.
It had been part of Ben’s job to pull and push, as the grass gave way and the wheels grooved into the mud under the 1,600-pound burden of gun and carriage. On 21 April 1826, in mid-afternoon, with about twenty men pulling on each cannon with rawhide ropes, it was a mighty struggle to get the two guns into firing position. It was hot, sweaty work, for spring rains had turned the area into a quagmire infested with mosquitoes and other stinging insects. When a Mexican cannon shot passed harmlessly overhead, the Twin Sisters pushed forward at a faster clip.
The Mexican breastwork was 200 yards away when Ben fired his first shot. A wide gap appeared in the barricade. The Twin Sisters were reloaded and again fired grapeshot with deadly effect. During the heat of the fighting, Sam Houston galloped his horse directly in front of Ben’s cannon. Always cool under pressure, Ben shouted, "Cease fire!" in time to prevent a fatal mistake, a mistake which could well have changed the course of history. The Battle of San Jacinto ranks right up there as one of the most important ever fought. It led to the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, and the expansion to the Pacific with the addition of New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma.
After the battle and independence was assured, Ben settled near Gonzales, the small town east of San Antonio which had been dubbed "the Lexington of Texas" when a group of its citizens in October 1835 had touched off a borrowed Mexican cannon at the Mexican army, killing one soldier, and starting the Texas Revolution. For some time, he earned his living as a surveyor and land locator. Hordes of immigrants were flocking to Texas, and he was constantly in the forefront of the frontier, dealing with harsh and cruel land, blazing heat and freezing cold, outlaws and Indians. He proved himself so popular among the settlers that in 1839, they elected him to the Congress of the Republic as a representative from Gonzales. When the government called for volunteer "border scouts" to patrol against Indians and bandits because the State was too poor to afford a standing army, Ben was among the first to sign up.
With the Battle of San Jacinto, Texas gained a big problem. Until then, the Mexican army had been defending the citizens against Indian attacks and outlaw bands, and they had been doing a decent job of it for two centuries. With the withdrawal of Mexican troops, however, the settlements were left to themselves for protection. Texas was a Republic, not part of the Union. It had no U. S. Army at its beck and call. It wasn’t long before it was a bandit’s paradise.
Back in the colonial days of Stephen Austin fifteen years earlier, Texas had roving bands of protectors called Rangers. Their main duties were to protect the settlements from hostilities, something that was hard to do even with the presence of the Mexican army to help. With the formation of the Republic, the job was nearly impossible. By this time Sam Houston had officially been voted President of the Republic, and he wasted no time in reorganizing the border scouts into a force of 600 men, officially calling them Texas Rangers, the only law along the Texas frontier.
Ben McCulloch became Captain of a Ranger company while still in his twenties, and it wasn’t long before he and his Rangers were involved in one of the worst Comanche battles in Texas history. It began in San Antonio, on 19 March 1840, when overzealous soldiers slaughtered a peace delegation of Comanche, including practically all the chiefs and top men. Known to history as the Council House Fight, it started a Comanche war which lasted nearly forty years.
The Comanche had come to talk peace. They stated that several days previously, the tribe had held a conference and had agreed, among themselves, to ask the Texans for peace. However, before any sort of truce would be considered, the Comanche were ordered to bring in all their white captives. They agreed to do this, and the place chosen was a house on the corner of Main Plaza and Market Street in San Antonio where the Comanche would hold council with the whites. On the appointed day, the Indians arrived, bringing only two captives with them, a Mexican boy and a white teenage girl. The girl was Matilda Lockhart, and she was very intelligent. She told the Texans that she had seen several other prisoners whom the Indians planned to barter one at a time in hopes of getting a better price. The Texans immediately surrounded the council house.
When the chiefs were asked to produce the other captives, they refused, claiming they had no other captives. A company of soldiers then entered the room and placed the Comanche under arrest. One made a dash for the back door, and being blocked by the sentinel, stabbed him. Others drew their weapons, and the soldiers attacked. An all out melee ensured. By the time it was over, thirty-five Comanche were dead and another twenty-seven were captured.
Six months later, the Comanche exacted revenge for the deaths of their chiefs. Swarming through the Guadalupe River valley on their way to the Gulf of Mexico, they burned white settlements, took captives, stole what they wanted and destroyed everything else. Their rampage ended at Linnville, a small seaport community south of Victoria. After burning all the houses, destroying all the goods and killing all the cattle they could not take with them, the Comanche began the slow journey home.
The border was aflame with thoughts of revenge. Most Texans thought the Comanche should die and the Rangers should be the executioners. Burdened by their plunder and nearly 3,000 stolen horses and mules, the Indians could not travel fast. It was not long before McCulloch’s Rangers and 200 other volunteers caught up with them. On 11 August, at Plum Creek near Lockhart, the battle began. By using the new Colt Paterson repeating revolvers, which fired five shots without reloading, and while riding their horses at full speed, the Rangers swiftly defeated the Comanche.
Ben McCulloch quickly became a familiar and celebrated figure from the Brazos River to the Rio Grande. Between 1840 and 1847, he led Rangers against Indians and badmen all over Texas. Samuel Reid, a volunteer from Louisiana in the Mexican War of 1846, described McCulloch and his Ranger company thus: "Men in groups with long beards and mustaches, dressed in every variety of garment, with one exception, the slouched hat, the unmistakable uniform of a Texas ranger, and a brace of pistols around their waists, were occupied drying their blankets, cleaning and fixing their guns, and some employed cooking at different fires, while other were grooming their horses. A rougher-looking set we never saw. They were without tents, and a miserable shed afforded them the only shelter. Captain McCulloch introduced us to his officers and many of his men, who appeared orderly and well-mannered people. But from their rough exterior, it was hard to tell who or what they were. Notwithstanding their ferocious and outlaw look, there were among them doctors and lawyers and many a college graduate."
Texas became part of the Union in 1845, affixing the Rio Grande as the boundary. Mexico claimed the Nueces River was the boundary. In 1846, the United States went to war with Mexico to end the border dispute. General Zachary Taylor marched on Mexico, employing several companies of Texas Rangers as scouts. By this time, Ben McCulloch had been promoted to Major. He became General Taylor’s chief scout.
It’s been said that McCulloch was one of America’s first great spies. Experts at the time claimed that he could sneak inside the enemy’s lines, gather information, and escape unhurt. He could maintain such self-control that no one could fathom what he thought or intended. His motto was "to strike like a bullet and remain calm in the face of danger." He also spoke excellent Spanish. On one occasion, he led a probe deep into Mexican territory in search of General Antonio Canales, known as the Chaparral Fox. His Rangers covered 250 miles in ten days and never took off their boots. Although they missed Canales, they did find a better route to Mexico City for General Taylor.
It was February 1847, just prior to the bloody Battle of Buena Vista, that General Taylor dispatched Ben and one of his men, William Phillips, to locate Santa Anna and fix the Mexican general’s position. The two Rangers found the opposing army sixty miles south of Encarnacion. They quietly slipped past Santa Anna’s guards, and under cover of darkness, slipped into the enemy camp and stationed themselves on a small hummock, where they quickly, methodically, estimated the enemy troop strength at 20,000 men.. Determining Santa Anna’s probable direction of march, they returned to General Taylor with their information.
Ben McCulloch and his Rangers fought in the Battle of Buena Vista, and it was a narrow victory for the United States. It did, however, open the way for General Taylor to advance to Mexico City. They also fought with such ferocity at Monterrey that General Taylor was repulsed. He said later, "On the day of battle I am glad to have Texas soldiers with me, for they are brave and gallant; but I never want to see them before or afterward."
The Mexican War ended in 1849. It was also the year of the California gold rush. Ben McCulloch immediately headed west. As with his 1833 trek into Missouri and Wisconsin, he arrived too late to share in the gold boom. He did try some prospecting in the area around Sutter’s Mill, but with very little to show for his hard work, he decided to run for sheriff of Sacramento County.
Busting the heads of the rowdy miners wasn’t exactly to his liking, and in 1853, he returned to Texas, where he became the United States Marshal for the Eastern District. He never married, claiming that he was gone for such long durations that he never found the time for courtship. Five years later, President James Buchanan appointed him "peace commissioner" to avert a Mormon war in Utah. At the time of his appointment by the President, he was well-known and respected by the citizens of several states from his political career, military leadership, and law enforcement expertise. It would seem that he had reached the pinnacle of his success, but there was more to come.
The Mormon war began in 1847 when Brigham Young led his committed followers to the shores of the Great Salt Lake in open defiance against United States policy. At that time, the Mormons practiced polygamy, and this went against the sensibilities of America’s religious leaders. More than 11,000 people lived in the region of the Salt Lake when it became part of Utah Territory as the result of the Compromise of 1850, and Brigham Young easily became the Territory’s governor. Unrest ensued.
For several years, a shaky truce existed, but in 1857, Mormons dressed as Indians attacked a westward bound wagon train, slaughtering more than 100 men, women, and children. The Mountain Meadows Massacre, as it was called, prompted President Buchanan to act. He appointed a completely new set of territorial administrators, including a new governor to replace Brigham Young, and authorized 2,500 troops to be sent to Utah to enforce his order.
Young, in defiance, placed Utah under martial law. He mobilized everyone he could and prepared to oppose what he called the "federal invaders." He thundered, "Before I will suffer what I have in times gone by, there shall not be one building, nor one foot of lumber, nor a stick, nor a tree, nor a particle of grass and hay that will burn, left in reach of our enemies. I am sworn, if driven to extremity, to utterly lay waste to this land…."
Ben McCulloch and another peace commissioner, former Kentucky governor Lazuras W. Powell, entered a deserted town when they arrived in Salt Lake City on 6 April 1858. Brigham Young had made good his threat, and all his followers had fled to the hills. It took two days of careful negotiations before McCulloch could persuade the Mormon elders to abide by the Constitution of the United States. The elders were insulting and stubborn, ready to fight with every last man, woman, and child. With their fortifications high in the hills, it would have been a blood bath. They only capitulated when Ben made it clear that they stood no chance with the advancing federal troops.
About the time that Ben decided to retire and become a rancher, the Civil War broke out. On 16 February 1861, when the U. S. arsenal in San Antonio was surrounded and its surrender demanded, he led the Texas volunteers. It was an encounter in a charged atmosphere which could have become the first armed conflict of the Civil War, although it ended without the firing of a shot and with the U.S. troops leaving the State. Less than two months later, on 12 April 1861, the Confederate shot on Fort Sumter prompted President Abraham Lincoln to call for 75,000 federal troops to settle the conflicts of states’ rights and slavery once and for all. Ben stood by Texas when it seceded from the Union. "To Texans," he announced as he accepted his commission as a brigadier general in the Confederate Army on 14 May 1861 from President Jefferson Davis, the first general staff commission in the Civil War, "a moment’s notice is sufficient when their State demands their service." Ben once again was in command of military troops. It was to be his last command.
McCulloch helped raise troops for the defense of Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Indian Territory. He made treaties with the Indians to fight for the South and once rode as far north as Baltimore in an arms quest for the Confederate cause. Upon his return, President Davis ordered him to Fort Smith, Arkansas, to prepare against an imminent invasion. From there, he took his men, along with the South Kansas-Texas Brigade and other volunteers, into Missouri and helped reinforce the Missouri State Guard against the federal forces struggling for control. In August 1861, he narrowly won the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, but the Missouri situation was still a tossup. Instead of advancing and attacking, he chose to withdraw to winter quarters in the Boston Mountains outside Van Buren, Arkansas.
By January 1862, General Earl Van Dorn was commander-in-chief of the Confederate combined forces in Missouri and Arkansas. His army included 7,000 soldiers of the Missouri guard, 8,500 men from McCulloch’s Arkansas regiment, and General Albert Pike’s 1,000 Indians from Indian Territory. He thought he had the troops necessary to drive the Union troops from Missouri.
General Samuel E. Curtis of the Union army thought otherwise. With his trained men, he pushed the Missouri Guard south and advanced on Van Buren. At 10 AM on 7 March 1862, the two armies met in a bitter battle at a place called Elkhorn Tavern at Pea Ridge. It was inside the Arkansas border just northeast of Bentonville in the extreme northwest corner of the state.
For hours, the battle waged back and forth around Elkhorn Tavern and Oberson’s Field, with neither side able to declare victory. During a lull in the fight, around 2 PM that afternoon, Ben McCulloch rode out to the edge of the wood to study the battlefield. Dressed in his black velvet suit and Duke of Wellington boots, he sat his horse quietly in the shadows of the trees. A Union sharpshooter named Peter Pelican of the Thirty-sixth Illinois drew bead on the lone rider. It was over in a second.
The Battle of Pea Ridge ended with the Confederate soldiers scattered all over northwestern Arkansas. Some soldiers went in search of food, some in search of comrades, and some in search of home. They had lost both Missouri and the war in the west. General Benjamin McCulloch, the man whose adventuresome soul had led him to put his mark upon many of the great events in America’s move west died on the battlefield. It was the end of a great man, but his legend lives on. Texas didn’t forget. It named McCulloch County in his honor, and its county seat, Brady, has the distinction of being the geographical center of the state. Somehow, being honored in this fashion seems a fitting tribute to a great man.
