LEANDER
McNELLY AND HIS DEATH SQUAD
©Lee Paul
In the years following the Civil War, thousands of raiders on horseback regularly crossed the border from Mexico into Texas to pillage, murder, and rape. With their primary objective being to steal cattle, which they stole by the thousands, driving them back into Mexico to sell, these border bandits almost doomed settlement in the Nueces Strip, that giant chunk of territory lying between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. Only an extraordinary Texas Ranger could ever hope to clean up the bandit-plagued land. That Ranger was Leander H. McNelly, as unlikely a legend to ever sit the saddle.
The story of Captain McNelly and his "Death Squad" is one of the most fascinating chapters in Texas history. Brutal in his methods, impervious to pain, the Captain defied the United States government and international law to restore order to a lawless situation. In a few short years, his leadership cleared "No Man’s Land" of border bandits and thieves, a feat no one had accomplished in half a century of trying. His iron will, courage, and daring inspired fanatical loyalty and devotion from his men.
Leander H. McNelly was born 12 March 1844 to P. J. and Mary (Downey) McNelly in Brook County, Virginia. His father was a Methodist preacher, well-educated and respected in the community, and Lee had what might be called a middle-class upbringing. It was his father’s plan for young Lee to follow in his footsteps, but Lee was a sickly child, having contracted tuberculosis when he was about seven years old. It left him without the lung power needed for the pulpit.
By his fifteenth year, it was apparent that Lee’s illness was becoming worse in the warm, humid environment of Virginia. In the Fall of 1860, his family pulled up roots and moved to Texas in the belief that if Texas could not cure Lee’s illness, the dry air and mild temperatures could at least help. The family settled on land in western Washington County and began raising sheep. It’s entirely possible that Lee would have been content as a rancher, if it weren’t for the serious business looming on the horizon.
Lee McNelly was only seventeen years old when the Civil War started, and Texas joined with the Confederacy. He enlisted 13 September 1861 as a volunteer in Company F, Fifth Regiment, Texas Mounted Volunteers. This was General Thomas Green’s regiment of the H. H. Sibley Brigade of the 5th Texas Cavalry, fighting in and around Louisiana and Mississippi. Somehow, considering his health, he served more than four years without a day’s sick leave. He also quickly earned a reputation for bravery and fearlessness under fire and duress, becoming a captain at nineteen in command of the Texas scouts. Ironically, in 1864, he was engaged in a skirmish with Federal troops led by Edmund J. Davis, who would later become Governor of Texas during the Reconstruction Period. It would be Governor Davis who would bring Lee McNelly to the attention of Texans in a big way.
The Texas scouts were a pocket of more than a hundred guerrilla fighters charged with spying behind the enemy lines. McNelly knew horses and men and what they could do, and he soon had his spies in the ranks of the enemy to tell him what the plans of the enemy were. The Austin Democrataic Statesman of 9 February 1876, said of McNelly’s background: "On one occasion, being sent by [General] Walker with seventeen men to feel the enemy entrenched, seven hundred strong, behind his breastworks, he managed, by continually marching his little band in a circle, to create the impression on the Federal commander that he had four of five thousand men. The Federals surrendered, and he immediately procured reinforcements to guard his prisoners." It was said that whereas "General Lee made his plans first and then fought, Captain McNelly made his plans like a chicken hawk---after he had located his target and was coming in for the kill." To the people in Louisiana, he was more of a hero than either General Robert E. Lee or General Andrew Jackson.
After the war, Lee McNelly married Carey Cheek of Long Point on 15 October 1865 in Washington County, Texas. Carey was the daughter of John Cheek and Sarah Hall. Sarah married John Cheek 25 December 1843, and John Cheek died either right before or right after Carey was born in 1848. Sarah then married 7 January 1851 to Richard T. Matson, who died in the Battle of Pine Bluff, Arkansas on 25 October 1863. Lee and Carey had two children. L. R. "Rebel" was born in 1866. Daughter Irene was born 29 April 1868. Irene died on 8 May 1884 as the result of an accidental injury she sustained while she was attending "Old Baylor College," which was then located in Washington County. She is buried next to her father. She had modeled for an unknown artist, and the beautiful painting of her hangs in the residence of the president of Mary Hardin Baylor University of Belton, TX. It formerly hung in the rotunda of the college. Rebel died in January of 1907 of tuberculosis, and is buried next to his mother in Oakwood Cemetery in Austin, Texas. (Editor's note: this information came to me on 5 July 2003 from Carol Switzer Dean, a 2nd cousin, three times removed, to Carey Cheek. Her 4th great-grandfather was James Hall, Jr. who obtained a Spanish Land Grant in Washington Co. Carey was the grandaughter of James Hall III. Many thanks! Lee Paul)
After his marriage, Lee McNelly tried cotton farming on a soldier’s headright in Burton, Washington County, until Governor Davis called him for the State Police in 1870. His life from that point onward belonged to Texas in a way that Governor Davis never anticipated.
From the beginning, Texas was never really a tame and genteel place. It was so huge and rugged that maintaining any semblance of law and order was a tiresome strain on every settlement and community. By the spring of 1874, cattle rustling and banditry plagued the area like it never had before. The Apaches and Comanches were still raiding in the western half of the state, the interior was overrun with outlaws structured into well-organized mobs, and whole terrorized counties were at the mercy of partisan blood feuds. Stock thieves, train robbers, river pirates, bandits, highwaymen...all manner of corrupted brutality existed.
This out and out crime didn’t happen overnight; there had always been some banditry on the untamed frontier. It was only when Texas entered the Union in 1845 that things really got out of control. Federal Government policy did not permit any state to organize bodies of armed men for any purpose, and this meant that protecting the settlements fell mostly to local citizens or to Federal troops, not to the Texas Rangers, who had been doing it efficiently for thirty years. These non-Rangers were just not up to handling the situation, and crime escalated in leaps and bounds.
By the time the Civil War started, the Texas Rangers, as an armed organization, were practically non-existent. The few companies that did survive were dispatched to the frontier to handle the Indian situation, especially after the Federal troops pulled out of the State. This lopsided disbursement of the Rangers fostered a gigantic misunderstanding among the Confederate troops and their supporters, as it was generally assumed that the main reason the small companies of Rangers existed at all was to escape the greater dangers that might be found with General Robert E. Lee. It was, however, an assumption not founded in truth. The Rangers were fighting men, and they were as frequently drawn off to supplement the armies as they were left alone to combat the Indians. They never had enough men to control the crime, however, and the struggle for law and order definitely leaned toward the side of the outlaws.
The end of the war brought even more drastic changes, which helped to increase the crime rate. Since the entire South became occupied by northern troops in the so-called Reconstruction Era, the task of controlling crime and Indian depredations officially became the sole responsibility of the United States Army. The Texas Rangers were largely disbanded. With no Rangers in sight, banditry and corruption ran rampant throughout the State. It became worse in 1869 when Edmund J. Davis got himself elected as the Republican carpetbag governor. When he took office in January 1870, it marked the beginning of the end of any semblance of justice as Texans had known it. In the bitter years of Governor Davis’ rule, Texans had little control over their own business.
Governor Davis was in no sense of the word "a representative of the people of Texas." He won the election only because he disfranchised the Confederates, and those in sympathy with them, and enfranchised their former slaves. Realizing he needed help to maintain control, he created a large body of state militia---and a law enforcement agency called the State Police. It effectively dismissed the Texas Rangers completely. The State Police took shape on 1 July 1870. It had an Adjutant General, four captains, eight lieutenants, twenty sergeants, and 125 privates. In addition, every local peace officer throughout the State was a member and subjected to the orders of the Adjutant General. One of the four captains was young Leander McNelly.
The State Police never really accomplished much of anything, other than to make the citizens hate and despise them. Adjutant General James Davidson eventually absconded with $34,000 of public funds. Captain Jack Helms was described as a man ignorant of the law and of the rights of the citizens. On 26 August 1870, he and his posse killed Will and Henry Kelly, who were prisoners in their care. Lieutenant W. T. Pritchett unlawfully searched and ransacked homes, plundering private citizens of their property by aid of military power. State Policeman Mitchell Cotton, a Negro with hated a league long toward the whites, shot and killed a white man in cold blood in the streets of Groesbeck in Limestone County.
Captain McNelly, Civil War hero and natural partisan fighter, was one of the few in the force fighting on the side of justice. Even then, he found himself shot and wounded trying to protect the law. He worked less than a year, and then quit when he saw that the State Police aimed to take law enforcement into their own hands and not let the people of Texas have any say in the matter.
No one trusted the State Police, which made it extremely difficult for the few non-corrupt members to do their jobs. It was widely held that it was an organization which sanctioned official murder and legalized oppression. Public opinion of it ranged from open ridicule to "wiping the buccaneers off the face of the earth." It was finally disbanded in late April 1873.
Democratic Texans had finally had enough. They voted Richard Coke the new governor. One of the first items on the agenda when he reached office in 1874 was to take immediate steps to restore some semblance of law and order throughout the State; namely, the respected, fearless, incorruptible Texas Rangers. Under Coke’s leadership, the Legislature created two organizations of Rangers: a Frontier Battalion under Major John B. Jones to drive the Indians back on the western frontier and then turn their attention to the outlaws of the interior, and a Special Forces branch under Captain Leander McNelly to destroy the outbreak of feuding and cattle rustling in the wild Nueces Strip along the bloodthirsty Rio Grande border.
The Frontier Battalion was six companies dispersed, several hundred men strong, and spread all along the vast western frontier from the Panhandle to the Rio Grande, from San Antonio to El Paso. The Special Forces, by comparison, had only thirty tough men for the giant chunk of country bounded by Corpus Christi on the east, San Antonio on the north, and Eagle Pass on the west all the way to the Mexican border.
It says much for Captain McNelly’s reputation that he was chosen to command a Ranger company after his brief service in the hated State Police. But it also says much for Governor Coke’s intuition in selecting the young Captain, as McNelly soon became famous as the "Tamer of the Nueces Strip."
The Nueces Strip is a most unique stretch of territory. It is a hot, humid, desolate area of stirrup-high grassland stretching as far as the eye can see between the Nueces and Rio Grande Rivers at the southern end of Texas. In the early 1800’s, local folks called it the "Wild Horse Desert" because of the large herds of wild mustangs that roamed there. The people who tried to tame it and make it produce called it the "Desert of the Dead." The soil has never been fertile, and all that has ever managed to grow in the Strip is sparse vegetation.
The area is sandy, and the sand is constantly shifting northeastward by the prevailing wind off the Gulf of Mexico. It creates great dunes of blazing whiteness spotted with sea oats, moss rose, and Spanish dagger plants. There are low-lying tidal flats with shallow lakes of brackish water surrounded on higher ground by a cover of sacahuiste or salt grass. Some places have clumps of live oak thickets called "mottes," a few mesquites, and the black-barked, native huisache trees. The area has very little drinking water, as there are no live creeks and few natural basins to capture water from the rains. In fact, it is even difficult to ranch, although that is what is currently being done with the Texas longhorn, the Santa Gertrudis, and other short-horned cattle.
What the Strip does have is an unique history. In the beginning, when Texas won its independence from Mexico in 1836, Texas claimed the Strip under the treaty signed by Santa Anna following the Battle of San Jacinto. But the government of Mexico repudiated this and claimed that the boundary set between Texas and the Mexican State of Tamaulipas was the Nueces River. That broad ribbon of water ran from its headwaters up near Rocksprings, northwest of San Antonio, to the Gulf of Mexico at Corpus Christi. When the Republic of Texas joined the Union in 1845, the United States and Mexico went to war over the disputed territory. In 1846, General Zachary Taylor made the Rio Grande stick. At least, that’s the way it was supposed to be.
Bandits, however, never honored the river border, and the worst of the Mexican bandits was a dignified dandy known as General Juan Nepomuceno Cortina (sometimes spelled Cortinas). For years after the end of the Mexican War, he raided in, and controlled, the Brownsville area. He flagrantly flew the Mexican flag on American soil and only retreated across the Rio Grande when the United States forces were finally able to force him across in 1859. But he didn’t stay in Mexico. Before Captain McNelly went after him in 1875, Cortina had recrossed the river, captured and looted Brownsville, and then captured and looted Fort Brown. Whole ranch families were murdered, flayed, burned alive, and tortured in the course of his raids. He hated any and all things Texan and was undoubtedly the uncontested king of the badmen.
Cortina was no common, ordinary outlaw. He was the third generation of a Spanish family that had owned the Espiritu Santo grant of 260,000 acres, which had included the entire city of Brownsville. He had even once been governor of Tamaulipas and still had friends and family on both sides of the river. From his headquarters in Matamoros, where he was the Mayor, he controlled the largest army of hired gunman---rumored at better than 2,000 men---that ever came and went across the river at will. And most of his will was stealing stock. He was the recognized head and protector of all the cattle thieves and murderers from Camargo to the mouth of the Rio Grande.
Further north up the Rio Grande lay the Juan Flores Salinas outfit. They were every bit as ruthless and criminal as the Cortinistas. Beef was worth up to twelve dollars a head on the Mexican side; men were worth nothing. The Salinas gang murdered everyone who got in their way. The band headquartered at the Las Cuevas ranch outside the Mexican town of Camargo, directly across the river from the United States Army outpost of Ringgold Barracks, which was located about five miles downriver from the small Texas town of Rio Grande City. General Juan Salinas was the Alcalde, or Governor, of Camargo. Next to General Cortina, he controlled the biggest bandit camp on the river and could rally four or five hundred men to raid and plunder anywhere within a 200-mile area.
The King Fisher band ruled the Eagle Pass area. John King Fisher had arrived as part of the Texas reconstruction era after the Civil War and had promptly run afoul of the despised State Police organized by the Republicans. When he left Austin, he headed south to Goliad and then west to the Pendencia settlement located about ten miles northwest of Carizzo Springs. It was just off the west point of an old channel of the Nueces River called Espantosa Lake, which translates to "ghost" lake. The settlement was a stage stop on the main wagon trail from San Antonio to towns in the Mexican state of Coahuila. Hundreds of travelers disappeared in the area, as did stock and other items of worth. His legacy remains today; Espantosa Lake is haunted.
Along the Gulf Coast around Corpus Christi, river bandits plundered and murdered in ever increasing thrusts into the interior pockets of civilization. They used the inland waterways as escape routes to the sea or as navigational aids toward cronies waiting on the frontier, all peddlers in the lucrative black market trade. No river town was safe from the river pirates. As they became bolder and bolder, honest citizens screamed to the Governor in protest.
Even further inland, the worst land feud in history was in full operation. The Sutton-Taylor feud was a blood bath going back to before the Civil War. Incredibly, the two families managed to follow each other from South Carolina to Georgia to Texas, always settling on neighboring lands. Before it was over, it involved virtually every family in DeWitt County, and also included their various allies in several of the surrounding counties. Both sides of the feud employed hundreds of gunslingers and hired hands, including cattle baron Abel Head "Shanghai" Pierce for the Suttons and outlaw John Wesley Hardin for his Taylor cousins.
Leander McNelly had his work cut out for him, and even though he was frail and dying, he was every bit up to the tough task. After leaving the State Police, he had worked for a citizens’ group in Karnes and DeWitt counties, trying to calm down the Sutton-Taylor feud. But things were so rowdy that towns couldn't hold a district court, and he decided he didn’t have the authority to do anything but make arrests anyway. He left to become a marshal in LaGrange, working for the congressional committee.
At the time Governor Coke charged him with commissioning a Ranger company in 1874, Captain McNelly was back at his home in Burton with his wife, Carey, and their two children, Irene and son, Rebel. The 1870 Washington County census lists the boy’s name as "Rivel," and he was then four years old, but the Rangers all called the boy "Rebel." According to George Durham, one of McNelly’s Rangers, it was a name that aptly fit the young scamp.
McNelly was making a crop of cotton, but mostly he was recuperating from another attack of the consumption that was slowly killing him. At that time, the only known cure for the lung disease was plenty of bed rest and good food, something Carey made sure he got. But it often got him down, and when that happened, it usually took three or four weeks for him to bounce back.
To look at him, no one would ever figure Captain McNelly for the giant that he was. He stood only five feet six inches tall and weighed little more than 130 pounds. Most of the time, he had difficulty breathing, and his weak, thin voice didn't carry very far. Sometimes, he could barely speak above a hoarse whisper. Still, he would crack orders with the sharpness of a bullwhip.
His eyes were deep blue and could warm a man to the cockles or slap him down with one icy glare. Soft brown hair fell over a high forehead and thin face, and he wore it long, as most men did in those days. He also wore a mustache and beard which he always kept neatly trimmed. Mostly, he kept to himself, seldom mingling with his men---not because he didn’t like them---but because no one knew what to do with tuberculosis or how to control it. Still, his orders were that his men could sit down with him any time they wanted, something that shocked and surprised most Army officers, who believed in the old adage of never mingling with the enlisted troops. There was absolutely nothing about McNelly’s delicate body or in his voice or manner to indicate the iron will that he carried in his frail form.
Believing in the Scripture which said that ‘the day and hour are set the day a man’s born’---meaning that the time of his death was fixed and nothing he could do would ever change it---Captain McNelly was absolutely fearless with unbelievable courage in the face of danger. He seldom got mad and never did get excited, preferring to handle his men as a father would his children. He never spoke a cross word to one of them, but when he gave a command, it had to be obeyed. He acquired the art of taking care of his men in the presence of overwhelming odds, leading his men into danger and bringing them out alive. It earned him the respect and loyalty of everyone who ever rode with him, even long after his death. His men worshipped him, calling themselves "little McNellys" in his honor.
He had several rules he lived by, all governed by his deep belief in God. By the time he was ten, he could practically recite the Bible from cover to cover, and he always carried one in his pocket everywhere he went; it wasn’t unusual for him to read from it whenever he could or was asked. After one particularly fierce and bloody battle at the Palo Alto, he knelt at the side of a wounded bandit and read verse after verse until the dying man quit breathing.
Captain McNelly was a keen judge of character and horseflesh. Those he took with him had something. They all showed the wear and tear of a hard life. Most had dirt under the fingernails and deeply-furrowed, tanned faces. All wore coarse, heavy work-clothing and worn, scuffed boots. But just looking at one, no one would ever want to push one around. Those that couldn’t live by his rules, or found them too harsh, were let go. One of his men once put it this way: "Captain can’t order you shot, but he can bounce you out of this outfit with a black mark that’ll go down on the books and follow you to your grave."
One of his requirements was that each rider and horse had to be able to go thirty-six hours without rations. On one particularly long scout, he pushed that limit to five days. His motto was to "keep your mouth shut and never ask questions." He never flinched, never bluffed, never wasted a word or a movement. And he didn’t make bets. He told his men that "fighting is a chancy business. Both sides have guns. Both sides aim to win. Praying makes the difference. A man who’s in the right can pray. A man on the wrong side can’t. And a peace officer doing his sworn duty is on the right side."
If he was totally ruthless and hard to the enemy, he was totally generous and fair to those on the right side of the law. "People respect an officer if he’s fit to respect," he impressed upon his men. He also claimed there were only two kinds of people: outlaws and law-abiding. All law-abiding people deserved respect, regardless of color, age, or size. Abuse to women and children got him quickly riled up. He was the leader that Governor Coke was counting on to bring law and order to the Nueces Strip.
That Spring of 1874 when Captain McNelly organized his first company of men from his home in Washington County, he took no longer than two days to assemble the meanest, toughest, hard-bitten group he could find. Some were new recruits, but many were his men from the old days in the Texas scouts. As one man put it, "Once a McNelly, always a McNelly." The Captain took only those "whose reputation for honesty, sobriety, bravery and gentlemanly conduct had won for them the respect of the communities in which they resided." One rumor has it that Frank James, hiding under an alias, was one of the men. The following year would see George Durham from Georgia among his men. Durham would be the youngest Ranger in McNelly’s outfit at eighteen years of age, the son of a "little McNelly" from the Civil War days of fighting in Louisiana.
Captain McNelly’s first assignment was to deal with the outlaws who had shown up in Texas---the men who were terrorizing their own people and taking the law into their own hands. He headed his small band of men straight to Cuero in DeWitt County, and straight into the Sutton-Taylor feud.
Cuero lay on the east bank of the Guadalupe River. A few miles across the river lay Clinton, the center of the feuding factions. Clinton no longer exists, but in 1846, it was laid out on land belonging to Richard Chisholm. By 1850, it was a small village with good schools, Presbyterian and Methodist churches, and the county’s earliest Masonic Lodge. It was also the county seat of DeWitt County, but with all the turmoil from the two clans, Cuero took that honor two years later, in 1876.
There are five counties bordering DeWitt County, namely Goliad, Victoria, Lavaca, Gonzales, and Karnes. McNelly’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Thomas C. Robinson, writing under the alias of "Pidge," reported to the editors of the Democratic Statesman on 18 September 1874, "...I have since been told by an old citizen of Clinton that it takes five large counties to bound DeWitt, and it is an awful strain on them to hold it all." He wasn’t joking.
The feud was becoming incredibly bloodthirsty, with the folks of Karnes, Gonzales, and DeWitt Counties lining up and taking sides. It was also threatening to spill over into Victoria County on the south. Although it had been a land dispute between two families for nearly two generations, it had escalated out of control in 1868 when prominent rancher Buck Taylor drove a herd of horses to East Texas and sold them. As was the practice, he made up the big herd from several smaller herds from the various local ranches. The horses he got from rancher Bill Sutton turned out to be stolen, and that got Buck Taylor into trouble. When he got home, he told everyone who would listen that Bill Sutton was a horse thief. No one in either family was safe after that.
Bill Sutton and Buck Taylor owned probably the largest ranches anywhere in the area, and it was all open range. While everyone was gone during the Civil War, stock had roamed free, creating wild, unbranded "maverick" herds to which the Sutton and Taylor stock had contributed. As a matter of course, maverick branding became the law of the land. Sutton and Taylor were soon at odds over ownership of the maverick herds along their shared land border, and their smoldering quarreling was getting on the nerves of everyone in the county.
Jack Helms, the inept Captain from the old State Police and staunch supporter of Bill Sutton, was the District United States Marshal at the time. He was as mean a snake as ever lived. Back during the Civil War, he killed a black man for merely whistling a Yankee song, and in San Patricio County in July 1869, he murdered Taylor men John Choate and his nephew Crockett Choate. As Marshal, he appointed as his deputy, a cattleman named Joe Tumlinson to help end the range wars in the local area. Tumlinson was also a friend of Bill Sutton’s, and in his ambition, he allowed a band of men calling themselves "Tumlinson’s Regulators" to kill a cattleman friend of Buck Taylor’s. Ironically, Tumlinson was also related to the Taylors through marriage, and this betrayal of kin prompted Buck Taylor’s cousin, John Wesley Hardin, to shoot Jack Helms dead in the streets of Albuquerque, Texas in July 1873.
By the spring of 1869, the feud was out of control with the two families involving hundreds of others. A State Policeman and Sutton "regulator," C. S. Bell, shot and killed Jack Hays Taylor in 1871. Taylor’s brother Phillip "Doboy" Taylor was killed in 1872. Both men were sons of Creed Taylor of Texas Ranger fame. That same year, Creed’s brother Pitkin Taylor was called from his house and shot so badly that he died the next day. Two friends of Bill Sutton’s were killed in reprisal in 1873 by members of the Taylor clan. Later that same year, Mark Taylor was killed by a member of Jack Helms’ posse. Helms had already killed the Kelly brothers, William and Henry, Taylor cousins, in a fit of vigilante justice. On the night of a community dance held by District Court Judge Henry Clay Pleasants in his courtroom in Clinton, then county seat of DeWitt County, Buck Taylor and his cousin Richard Chisholm were shot dead as they dismounted from their horses. Shortly afterwards, a rider for the Sutton outfit was killed.
By the Fall of 1873, Bill Sutton and his brother James decided it was best to sell out and leave the area. James sold his land quickly and headed into West Texas, never to be heard from again, but it took Bill until the early spring of 1874. On 11 March 1874, he and his wife Laura Eudora (McDonald) and family friend Gabriel Webster Slaughter were boarding the Steamer Clinton at the wharf in Indianola, a tiny community on the Gulf of Mexico in Calhoun County, when James and William Taylor, brothers of Rufus P. "Scrap" Taylor---some accounts say they were nephews---shot and killed Sutton and Slaughter, leaving Laura Sutton in a dead faint on the ship’s deck.
The police in Indianola went after the Taylors and finally managed to capture William. But the great hurricane of 15 September 1874 blew in from the sea, carrying water from Matagorda Bay deep into the Indianola streets. The storm lasted two days, inundating everything in the town. William and several other prisoners were released from jail to prevent their drowning, and after risking his own life in helping others escape the floodwaters, William then promptly escaped. He was recaptured, tried, convicted, and then set free when the Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the verdict. James Taylor was never arrested and brought to trial for his part in the Sutton killing in Indianola. He was eventually bushwhacked and killed by what was left of the Sutton faction on 27 December 1874. (Indianola no longer exists. It was wiped out in a hurricane at the turn of the century and never rebuilt.)
During the search for William and James Taylor, authorities arrested Alfred "Kute" Tuggle, James White, and "Scrap" Taylor for cattle theft. Before Judge Pleasants could try the case, all three Taylor men were taken from the jail by a lynch mob consisting of Sutton men and shot during the night of 21 June 1874. The Taylor men were reportedly in the employ of John Wesley Hardin as cowboys. Earlier, during the night of 7 June 1874, three other Hardin associates---brother Joseph G. Hardin and cousins W. A. and T. K. Dixon---were also lynched.
The Taylors and Suttons mustered full strength. Hundreds took sides according to their inclinations, and men went about heavily armed, ready to shoot at the drop of a hat. By the time the two factions finally met in the streets of Clinton, at least a thousand heavily-armed men from all over DeWitt and Gonzales counties had gathered. Somehow, Judge Pleasants managed to disperse them, stating with cool bravado, "We are not barbarians, and while I am judge in this district, I intend to see that peace prevails in DeWitt county."
The feuding parties headed peacefully out of town under a shaky armed truce, which ended immediately after they crossed the river at the edge of town. Each side fired a few random shots as they took their separate roads which, strange as it seems, both led to the city of Cuero, north of Victoria about twenty miles. It became once again open season for bushwhacking.
By the time Captain McNelly arrived, more than 150 people had been murdered, and hundreds of other felonies had never been brought to trial or even had indictments returned. In fact, Judge Pleasants hadn’t been able to hold court in more than five years. Witnesses...jurors...everyone became targets.
McNelly’s Rangers began immediately to restore some semblance of peace in the county, but they were met with armed resistance nearly everywhere they went. On one witness escort for the trials, the Rangers encountered an armed mob outside town, and one Ranger was wounded before the shooting stopped. It prompted McNelly to declare that the method of destroying unfavorable testimony in DeWitt County by murdering the witnesses was about to come to a screeching halt.
He did not confine his activities to guarding prisoners, escorting the judges, and protecting courts. By establishing an espionage system, he sent his scouts over the country in search of troublesome characters. When he learned that John Wesley Hardin and one other Taylor would be in the county on a certain date, he said that ‘if they come, I will kill all my horses or have them.’ By the end of November 1874, McNelly had aided the United States marshal in serving twenty-seven writs.
By April 1875, Captain McNelly was back in Burton and again raising a contingent of Rangers to attack the lawless Rio Grande Valley. He started with about forty-seven men and by the time he reached the Juan Salinas bandit camp at Las Cuevas, he had twenty-eight tough enough to serve his purpose. From Burton, he took a day to make sure they worked like old hands, and then pushed them straight to Corpus Christi on the western side of the Gulf end of the vast Corpus Christi Bay, where the Rangers found the citizens fortified and preparing for a bandit raid.
The bandits had just plundered Nuecestown, a tiny community about eight miles distant. It made history as the first time the bandits had plundered so far inland from the Mexican border. They had come across at Camargo with about 150 men, split into groups of thirty or more, and raided Duval County, west of Corpus Christi, before moving on to Refugio and Goliad Counties to the east. Nuecestown, on the south bank of the Nueces River, lay directly in their path.
In Duval, Refugio, and Goliad Counties, armed vigilantes from the ranches turned the pirates back, but at Nuecestown, the pirates found the plunder not only plentiful, but east to take. The raid had taken place on a religious holiday---Good Friday, 26 March 1875. In pulling off the raid, the pirates had also beaten a store owner’s wife with a quirt, and otherwise mistreated her.
If for no other reason than the beating of a woman and the total lack of respect for religion, McNelly wanted the pirates. In particular, he wanted the gringo, Jack Ellis, a man with an ugly scar on his cheek, who rode with the Mexican raiders. Ellis had been identified as the one who had beaten and mistreated the shopkeeper’s wife.
McNelly learned that the bandits took eighteen expensive new saddles made by the Dick Heyes saddlery in San Antonio, which were the Cadillacs of the saddle world. The saddles were new in the area, and none had been sold prior to being stolen. They were also easily identifiable because they were heavily studded with bright, silver conchos in a pattern that could be distinguished from a mile off.
More saddles just like the stolen ones were due any day, and McNelly politely asked the storekeeper not to sell any until further notice. Captain McNelly then turned to his sergeant, John Armstrong, and issued his now famous orders, "Describe those saddles to the Rangers. Make sure they understand exactly. Then order them to empty those saddles on sight. No palavering with the riders. Empty them. Leave the men where you drop them, and bring the saddles to camp." He could not know it, but his order would later result in twenty-six of the descriptive saddles finally making their way back to the shopkeeper at Nuecestown---where no one would dare buy one or accept one as a gift. The shopkeeper could not even give one away.
McNelly then asked a prominent storekeeper in Corpus Christi, Sol Lichtenstein, to issue supplies to his men, saying, "You might not get paid. The carpetbaggers didn’t leave much money in Austin, and the boys up there ain’t willing to spend any of it to stop what they call a war in this Nueces country." Sol Lichtenstein, whose store still remains a prominent landmark in downtown Corpus Christi and is known as the "old Lichtenstein building," although it has not been called Lichtenstein’s since the late 1970’s, gladly issued anything and everything McNelly wanted, including Sharps rifles and ammunition ("Sharps, Captain? I thought you were going manhunting---not buffalo. If you miss a man...." "I don’t want men who miss.") Everywhere McNelly went in the Nueces Strip, it was the same thing. The people would rather give to the Rangers than to have it taken from them by the raiders.
Captain McNelly and his men then headed into war. His orders were based on an old Spanish law, la ley de fuga, which meant that prisoners were to be killed on the spot if any rescue was attempted. Actually, the Captain never went strictly "by the book." Outlaws didn’t fight by the rules, so neither did he. When bandits made their own rules, Captain McNelly made his. If outlaws didn’t mind killing, neither did McNelly. Outlaws didn’t take prisoners, so Captain McNelly didn’t, either. He made one exception: he always got control of the leader when he had a mob or crowd to handle.
The first thing McNelly did was disband the vigilantes. He issued orders that any armed bands picked up in public would be treated as outlaws. Without that rule, McNelly would never have been able to distinguish between the bands of roving Mexican outlaws and the vigilantes organized by the terrified citizens living in the area. This order has since been given credit as the catalyst for preventing an all-out civil war in the Strip.
On his way to the valley, he stopped at the King ranch, where Captain Richard King insisted on providing good horseflesh and tack for the wornout brutes McNelly and his men rode. Captain King was a staunch supporter throughout the McNelly Campaign, providing anything the Rangers needed at any time they needed it. After Las Cuevas, Captain King sent a wagon into the Ranger camp loaded with thirty new 44-40 Winchester repeater carbines and several thousand rounds of shells. And after it was all over, one of McNelly’s Rangers, George Durham, returned to work for Captain Richard King, later marrying Caroline Chamberlain, niece of Henrietta Chamberlain King who was Captain King’s wife. Durham worked on the Ranch for the rest of his days.
McNelly’s Rangers arrived in Brownsville in June 1875, where the red-bearded General Juan Cortina and his men had the place in an uproar. Cortina was born in 1824 in Camargo, Tamaulipas, the son of an unpretentious ranchero and an heiress to great Spanish land grants surrounding Brownsville on both sides of the border. Although uneducated and illiterate---he didn’t learn to write until he was governor of Tamaulipas---he possessed a great natural ability to lead. He resolved to defend his holdings against any U. S. encroachers who were taking sections of his land as part of a broader-based policy of discrimination. He killed as many of these land grabbers as he could, and a warrant was duly issued for his arrest.
During the Mexican War, he served in the forces of General Mariano Arista, who opposed General Zachary Taylor at the battle of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma in May 1846. As the leader of the border bandits, Cortina was bold enough to take on any officer of the law foolish enough to arrest any of his men. He held the courts and judicial system in his back pocket.
When he organized 1,000 cutthroats into an armed band and captured the city of Brownsville, the U. S. government finally began to act. According to reports, he executed many people during the siege and held the town ransom for $100,000. Under pressure from less militant family member, he withdrew his army from the town center, permitting a Brownsville resident to summon the Texas Rangers, and he moved on to capture the towns of Edinburg and Rio Grande City, where he exacted a ransom payment of $100,000 in gold. By Christmas Day in 1859, the Rangers had succeeded in driving him back across the border, but he insisted on periodic forays into Texas territory. Over a million head of cattle were taken over the next several years, an act that Cortina viewed as retribution for what he had lost to the Yankee over several previous generations.
At the time McNelly went after him, Cortina had a major contract to furnish beef to the Cuban government, which he honored by sending raiding parties into Texas to steal cattle and horses. This activity also had the added benefit of drastically reducing his expenses. In McNelly's estimate, more than 2,000 ranchers and other citizens had been killed and more than 900,000 head of stock stolen, 30,000 alone from the King Ranch. At the time of McNelly’s arrival, Cortina was in the process of loading a steamer with 400 head of cattle, two-thirds of which came from Texas.
Although there were at least 150 soldiers stationed at Fort Brown, they were inexperienced in fighting the border bandits and absolutely no match for Cortina’s raiders. McNelly had to resort to his spy system, a system Major General Edward Otho Cresap Ord, Commander of the Military Department of Texas located in San Antonio, had been trying to establish in the area for months without success. McNelly discovered that the Cortina outfit was driving a giant herd through the Palo Alto, and he laid his ambush.
The Palo Alto is a broad expanse of prairie located about twenty-five miles from the Rio Grande. It extends roughly on a line east from near present-day Los Fresnos on State Highway 1847 above Brownsville to the coast at Port Isabel and all points southward toward the Rio Grande. The area is a salt flat of hardpan country brushed with salt cedars, some marsh grass, Spanish dagger, yucca, and a few pockets of scrub-oak mottes. Resacas (shallow waterways) intertwine all through it, breeding huge numbers of mosquitoes and other stinging insects. It can be bitter cold in the winter and is always sweltering hot in the summer. High humidity permeates everything, and anyone not used to it suffers immeasurably. In 1846, it was the scene of one of the most graphic battles of the Mexican War when General Zachary Taylor shot it out with an overwhelming force of Mexican invaders.
Waiting in the mottes, perspiration soaking their clothing and streaming in rivulets down their bodies, McNelly’s Rangers surprised a group of sixteen Mexican cattle thieves---and one white man---driving about 300 head of cattle toward the Rio Grande, toward Juan Cortina, and toward the steamer for Cuba. They were Cortina’s hand-picked men, who had boasted they could cope with any Rangers or vigilantes. Captain McNelly issued his orders. "Don’t shoot to the left or the right. Shoot straight ahead. And don’t shoot till you’ve got your target good in your sights. Don’t walk up on a wounded man. Pay no attention to a white flag. That’s a mean trick bandits use on green hands. Don’t touch a dead man, except to identify him."
Spying the Rangers, the Mexicans took flight, driving the herd before them at a frenzied pace, until they reached a little island in the middle of the salt marsh. The Mexicans then turned and waited for the Rangers, who were right on their heels, to cross the shallow, muddy lagoon. But McNelly anticipated the ambush and stopped to issue his pep talk, "Boys, across this resaca are some outlaws that claim they’re bigger than the law---bigger than Washington law, bigger than Texas law. This won’t be a standoff or a dogfall. We’ll either win completely, or we’ll lose completely."
The battle, which has since been called the "Red Raid" or the "Second Battle of the Palo Alto," waged nearly all day in a succession of single hand-fights which left dead Mexicans and horses covering a swath through the prairie about two miles wide and six miles long. All the Mexican drovers were killed, including the gringo, Jack Ellis, who had beaten and mistreated the shopkeeper’s wife at Nuecestown. Two hundred and sixty-five head of stolen stock were rounded up and eventually returned to their rightful owners in the neighborhood of the King Ranch country. Nine of the fourteen saddles recovered turned out to be the Dick Heyes saddles stolen in the raid on Nuecestown three months earlier.
One Ranger, eighteen-year-old L. Berry Smith, who wanted to be in on the action, also died in the fighting. He was the son of camp cook D. R. Smith and the youngest Ranger ever to die in the line of duty. Smith was apparently too inexperienced to fully appreciate McNelly’s terse orders because he got too close to a wounded Mexican bandit, and the bandit killed the boy before Smith even knew what was happening. Berry Smith was buried in the northwest corner of the Brownsville cemetery on June 16 with full military honors. The funeral was recorded as one of the finest the city had ever seen.
The fight took its toll on Captain McNelly. He took to his sick bed in a hotel in Brownsville, finally moving to an adobe house in a cottonwood grove. Carey McNelly journeyed from Burton to care for her husband. She brought Rebel along, and while the Captain was recuperating, Rebel spent all his time at the Ranger camp. The Rangers tolerated the boy, even allowing him to play with their unloaded revolvers, but the day Rebel surprised several Rangers bathing in the river, taking potshots at them with their loaded pistols, which he had found on the bank, the boy was banished from the camp. By the end of the summer, Carey McNelly and Rebel were on their way back to Burton on the stagecoach. And, after a five-day scout in the first damp, cold weather of autumn, Captain McNelly was, too.
It was November before Captain McNelly bounced back. This time, he ordered his men northward toward the Army’s Ringgold Barracks and the Juan Salinas outfit, which operated out of the Las Cuevas ranch at Camargo. The area was also known as "Robbers’ Roost" or "Robbers’ Den." Today, the old army fort forms part of the Rio Grande City Consolidated Independent School District, but back in McNelly’s time, Ringgold Barracks was one of a string of United States forts set roughly 100 miles apart along the Rio Grande border. It was first called Camp Ringgold, then Ringgold Barracks, and even later after McNelly’s time, Fort Ringgold, which it remained until it was closed in 1944. It was named for Major Samuel Ringgold, the first officer killed in the Battle of Palo Alto in 1846, the first skirmish of the Mexican War.
Ringgold Barracks was a major staging area for a succession of conflicts. Davis Landing, next to the town of Rio Grande City, was for many years the fort’s only access to the outside world. Steamboats laden with soldiers, adventurers, pioneers, and cargo chugged northwest along the unpredictable Rio Grande, bypassing islands, swamps, and bandits, until arriving at the outpost. For a brief time before the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee were stationed together at the fort. And in 1860, Colonel Lee returned to the fort as a special liaison of the Federal Government seeking cooperation from Mexico in capturing the bandit---or revolutionary, as the Mexicans liked to think of him---Juan Nepomuceno Cortina. (Robert E. Lee was a favorite with South Texans and was a special friend to Captain Richard King. It was also Robert E. Lee who selected the site on Santa Gertrudis creek where Captain King built his home, which became famous as the headquarters of the sprawling King Ranch.)
Although word had gotten around about McNelly’s war with the Cortina gang at Palo Alto, it hadn’t put a dent in the bandit crossing at Las Cuevas. At the time Captain McNelly arrived in Rio Grande City, the raiders were driving 250 head of stolen cattle across the Rio Grande and firing on the Army, who could do nothing but stay on the Texas side of the river and watch the cattle emerge on the opposite bank. It was completely frustrating for the Army.
Captain McNelly lined his men up and said, his voice no frailer than usual, even though he had just risen from his sickbed, "I’m going to bring those beeves back to Texas. I can’t order a single one of you men to go with me...but I sure need you...every one who’ll volunteer." He got twenty-eight volunteers to go against the Salinas bunch, who were a group of bandits who could muster four or five hundred men at most any time. The Army told him he was breaking two American laws: one was against mounting an armed invasion in Texas, and the other was against committing suicide.
McNelly and his Rangers entered Mexico 20 November 1875. Under cover of brush and scrub oak, they made their way on foot to General Juan Salinas’ stronghold at the Rincon de Cucharras outpost of the Las Cuevas ranch, which in plain English translates to "the spoon corner." The ensuing shoot-out pitted Rangers against an estimated four hundred of the bandit king’s men. Totally outnumbered and fearing the mounted bandits would surround his men, McNelly ordered his men to pull back to the river to make a stand. At the river, about half the 24th Infantry and the 8th Cavalry under Lieutenant Colonel James F. Randlett had lined up on the Texas side. In the melee that followed, with the aid of the Army firing their Gatling gun on the bandits, General Juan Salinas, Alcalde of Camargo, and eighty of his banditos died on the riverbank.
The fracas wasn’t over. It was a Mexican standoff with the bandits retreating to regroup after their leader’s death, and McNelly refusing to back down from his demands on the return of the stolen cattle. Later that afternoon, Major A. J. Alexander from Ringgold Barracks arrived with a missive from Colonel Potter at Fort Brown, located on the Rio Grande at Brownville:
"Advise Captain McNelly to return at once to this side of the river. Inform him that you are directed not to support him in any way while he remains on Mexican territory. If McNelly is attacked by Mexican forces on Mexican soil, do not render him any assistance. Let me know if McNelly acts on this advice." McNelly carefully read the telegram and then issued four terse words. "The answer is no."
At sundown, another message arrived: "Major Alexander, commanding: Secretary of War [William W.] Belknap orders you to demand McNelly return at once to Texas. Do not support him in any manner. Inform the Secretary if McNelly acts on these orders and returns to Texas. Signed, Colonel Potter." In less than a minute, Captain McNelly penned his now famous reply: "Near Las Cuevas, Mexico, Nov. 20 1875. I shall remain in Mexico with my rangers and cross back at my discretion. Give my compliments to the Secretary of War and tell him and his United States soldiers to go to hell. Signed, Lee H. McNelly, commanding."
After a rested night’s sleep, Captain McNelly moved his men directly opposite Camargo on the Texas side of the river. It was now Sunday, and the stolen cattle had been moved and penned in a corral, but still on the Mexican side of the border and under guard by plenty of armed horsemen riding herd. Diego Garcia, a Camargo official next in charge to the dead Alcalde, promised to move the cattle across by three o’clock in the afternoon.
McNelly, however, was too smart to trust the Mexicans. He smelled a trap, and in figuring out how to handle it, he pulled his men to Rio Grande City, where they leisurely relaxed while he made his plans. At three o’clock, he made his move.
He returned to the ferry landing, took twelve or thirteen Rangers, not including himself (the accounts differ), and crossed the river in a rowboat in another invasion of Mexico. He also took along five horses. The "Death Squad," as they have come to be known, were composed of Captain McNelly, Lieutenant Thomas Robinson, Sergeant George A. Hall, Sergeant John Barclay Armstrong, Sergeant R. P. Orrell, Corporal William L. Rudd, and Rangers Robert H. Pitts, William Crump Callicott, Thomas McGovern, Horace G. Mabin, Thomas Sullivan acting as interpreter, George Durham, and Jesus Sandoval, also an interpreter. James R. Wofford is listed in one account as also being along. It is known for certain that the five mounted men were Robinson, Sandoval, Hall, Armstrong, and Orrell.
The "Death Squad" marched up the riverbank to the customs house, demanded the cattle, and when the Mexican Captain stalled by politely saying they didn’t do business on Sunday, the "Squad" promptly took the Mexican Captain prisoner. McNelly then hauled the prisoner to the Texas side and told the captured Mexican leader to get the cattle started within the hour or he would die.
Instead of 250 head returning to Texas, more than 400 were crossed back. Nearly every brand in the Nueces Strip was in the herd, from the King Ranch’s "Running W" up near Corpus Christi to Hale and Parker’s "Half-moon" brand over near Brownsville. Later, at the spot where Juan Salinas died, Mexico erected a stone marker:
Al Cuidadana
To citizen
JUAN FLORES SALINAS
JUAN FLORES SALINAS
Que Competiendo
Who fighting
Murio Per su Patria
Died for his country
El 19 de Noviembre
November 19
1875
1875
Within a few months, General Jose de la Cruz Porfirio Diaz (1830-1915) took control of Mexico, and using his power, he quieted the border disputes. He also put General Juan Cortina behind bars, and the outlaw remained there until 1890, when he was pensioned to a big hacienda below Mexico City. Cortina never again regained power in Mexico. He died 30 October 1894 and was buried in Mexico City with full military honors. Porfirio Diaz served as Provisional President of Mexico from 1876-1877 and became President in May 1877. He was re-elected in 1884 and served until 1910, resigning in 1911 when faced with the revolt of Madero, Zapata and Villa. He died in exile in Paris.
By the spring of 1876, with most of the Rio Grande bandits now under control, McNelly turned his attention to the King Fisher business in the Texas interior up near Eagle Pass. The King Fisher outfit was an organized band of desperadoes stretching from Goliad to the headwaters of the Nueces River, northwest of San Antonio. The gang was made up of men who had committed crimes in other states and had fled to Texas for refuge, where they continued robbing for a living. They were organized into parties of twenty-five to forty men and formed camps in all the counties, where they kept in touch with each other in a sort of underground grapevine voice. They stole horses and other items of worth and passed them along the line to be sold up north.
John King Fisher was only in his early twenties, but he had blazed his way into the talk and the history of South Texas in a big hurry. After the Civil War, he had migrated to Texas with his father from Kentucky. They settled in Fort Worth, where they ran afoul of the reconstruction police. When his father died in a gunfight along with three of the hated police, King Fisher escaped and headed south. Just sixteen, he finally ended up in Goliad doing odd jobs on the ranches for his keep---and killing Republicans on the side for revenge. Old hands taught him how to use a six-gun, and he became a crack shot and a quick draw.
When things got too hot for him in the Goliad area, he headed west toward the Pendencia settlement, where he bought a ranch and began stealing cattle. A shred gambler, he was quick to anger and even quicker to draw a gun. Somehow, he managed to become marshal, and as a teetotaler, allowed no saloons and no drinking. He was described as harder on a bootlegger than he was on a stagecoach robber or a stock thief. Fisher promptly put the word out to robbers and bandits to keep clear of the Pendencia. He even erected the first road sign in the area; "THIS IS KING FISHER’S ROAD---Take the other." His domain stretched over most of the upper Nueces country from San Antonio to Eagle Pass. Rumors had it that he had killed twenty-six men, mostly Republicans, and he was a clean shot with either hand, one of the truly expert, two-pistoled gunmen anywhere in the west.
Fisher was a colorful dresser. He favored fringed shirts, red sashes, and bells on his spurs. Anyone ridiculing his apparel ended up shot. The most persistent legend about him was the story of four Mexican cowboys who showed up at his ranch wanting to purchase cattle. He thought they were out to steal his herd, and when they refused to leave, he brought down a branding iron on the skull of one, outdrew a second and killed him with a single shot through the head, then spun and killed the other two, who were in the process of drawing their weapons. In the blink of an eye, he had killed all four men.
The Rangers swarmed over the Fisher place, eventually arresting about a dozen men without a shot being fired. Captain McNelly personally arrested King Fisher, and witnesses said it was a showdown between the two best pistol shots in Texas, before or since. It was also the first time McNelly took prisoners. He might as well have been spitting in the wind. When he got the prisoners to the Sheriff in Eagle Pass, a lawyer proclaimed that McNelly had to "produce the bandit victims and produce them as witnessess. You must produce the bodies of his homicide victims, with proper witnesses." All that were arrested were set free.
It appeared Captain McNelly held for one kind of law and King Fisher for another. McNelly had been hired by Austin; King Fisher by the folks on the Pendencia. Whereas Captain McNelly’s law was written down in the law books of Texas, King Fisher’s law was by agreement. McNelly held for saloons and drinking, but stock rustling was punishable by death. King Fisher stole stock for a living.
At the time when McNelly headed after King Fisher, McNelly was no longer the tower of strength he had been just thirteen months earlier. He now lived in a covered wagon with Carrie nursing him as best she could, and his men seldom saw him at all. (Rebel remained back on the family farm in Washington County.) But even this form of constant attention, bed rest, and good food did not help him. He slipped further and further into his sickness, coughing up blood, unable to bounce back. Two weeks after the King Fisher incident, Captain McNelly turned his command over to Lieutenant Thomas Robinson and pulled out for a doctor in San Antonio.
Robinson was a perceptive and articulate Virginian, who was also a student of the classics. He wrote a series of articles detailing his experiences while serving under McNelly for two Texas newspapers, using the pseudonym "Pidge" to conceal his identity. The articles were enthusiastically received by the editors, and they provide an insight into the historic events of McNelly’s invasion of Mexico and the Sutton-Taylor feud.
Under McNelly’s orders, Robinson returned the Rangers to Brownsville, where he took leave of them and boarded a steamer to New Orleans. He was going home to Virginia on a leave of absence to attend to family business. On 4 April 1876, he died in a duel along with his opponent, Jesse E. Mitchell. The duel was apparently the culmination of a long-running disagreement over Mitchell’s sister, Pidgie E. Mitchell, whom Robinson loved and which relationship Jesse Mitchell disapproved.
After Lieutenant Robinson left them in Brownsville, the Rangers headed north under the direction of Sergeant John Armstrong. Their Captain was in San Antonio, and they planned to camp nearby awaiting his orders. When they reached Oakville, the government in Austin ordered Lieutenant Jesse Lee Hall to be second-in-command to Captain McNelly.
Lee Hall had been born 9 October 1849 in Lexington, North Carolina to Frances Mebane (Rankin) and Dr. James King Hall. His father aspired to make him a physician, but Lee lived and breathed western. In 1869, he headed to Texas, where he soon became schoolmaster in Grayson County. In 1871, he retired from his job as a school teacher to become the city marshal of Sherman. Two years later, he was a deputy sheriff in nearby Denison and was soon the sergeant-at-arms of the Texas Senate. He was wounded during a gun battle in 1873, after agreeing to take part in a duel with an outlaw he was attempting to arrest. Two passersby fatally wounded the fugitive, saving Hall’s life, and he left to become a Lieutenant in the Texas Rangers. When he took control of McNelly’s Rangers in 1876, he promptly ordered them back out after King Fisher.
The second raid on the King Fisher outfit netted about a dozen dead bandits and twenty-two prisoners. King Fisher was hauled to jail again in Eagle Pass, and again was set free. In fact, Lee Hall and McNelly’s Rangers hauled Fisher to jail two or three more times, but the charges never stuck. Fisher finally ended up as the Chief Deputy Sheriff of Uvalde County, started the 7D brand in the southern part of the county down around Zavala, which is still a famous brand today. He began to reform, and in 1884, he went to Austin on official business, meeting an old friend, the fierce gunfighter Ben Thompson. They journeyed to San Antonio together, and the two friends died in an ambush at the Vaudeville Variety Theater on the night of 11 March. King Fisher was thirty years old.
By October 1876, McNelly was back in the saddle and once again after the Sutton-Taylor feud, which was still fuming in DeWitt County and again threatening to flare into an open range war. He took five Rangers and went to Clinton to escort five members of the Sutton party to the Galveston jail, where the prisoners had been committed by Judge Henry Clay Pleasants. Although McNelly never ended the feud---Charles Schreiner III of the Y-O Ranch said it ended when the kids grew old enough to become targets---his Rangers managed to once again bring it under control. McNelly was so successful in stemming the flow of blood-letting that it was suggested that he be appointed Sheriff of the county and allowed to retain his command to enforce the law, which would effectively break up both gangs or at least eliminate their carrying of weapons. As for the notorious John Wesley Hardin, it was Captain McNelly’s trusted bulldog, Sergeant John Armstrong, who later brought the bandit to justice.
The escort of prisoners from Clinton to Galveston was McNelly’s last official duty for the State. He was too ill for further service, and when his Rangers reorganized in Victoria in January 1877, Lee Hall was made captain in his place. It resulted in widespread criticism from the press and the people, most claiming that the State could never get another man like McNelly. His adoring public gave him full credit for putting down the thieves and desperadoes terrorizing their lives. Although Lee Hall was an outstanding Ranger and did excellent work, he couldn’t equal the frail man who had done so much to bring peace and security to the Nueces Strip. Leander McNelly died at his home in Burton, 4 September 1877. He was just thirty-three years old. Upon news of his death, Captain Richard King commissioned a monument to be erected at the grave in Mount Zion Cemetary, Washington County.
After Lee McNelly's death, his widow worked in the State Land Office and eventually remarried to W.T. Wroe of Austin, who had been with Captain McNelly on Sibley's New Mexico campaign. Carey joined the Albert Sidney Johnson Chapter 105 of the Texas Daughters of the Confederacy in 1901. She was very active in their affairs. She was, for a number of years, the oldest living student to attend "Old Baylor College." She was admitted to the Texas Women's Confederate Home in Austin on 28 September 1937, and she died there on 29 October 1938 of pneumonia. Her funeral was at St. David's Episcopal Church in Austin, at 7th and Jacinto Streets. She is buried next to her son in Oakwood Cemetery, at East 16th and Navasota Streets.
An oil painting of Leander McNelly hangs not only in the Texas Governor's Mansion, but also in the White House in Washington, DC.
"There ain’t but one Captain McNelly," said the postmaster of Burton in April 1875 to a young George Durham, who was looking to sign on as a Ranger. "There’ll never be another."