Ep. 04: Bloody Texas

Gunfighters

The episode explores the extreme violence of post-Civil War Texas, arguing that the state's unique blend of political instability and cattle-industry conflict

Key takeaways

• Texas hosted nine of the fifteen deadliest American blood feuds between the 1840s and early 1900s.
• The Reconstruction era in Texas was marked by an 'American dirty war' involving racial terror, lynching, and attacks on carpetbaggers by groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

Main topics

• Reconstruction-era political violence
• Racial terror and the KKK in Texas

Notable quotes

Texas literally ran with blood

Conclusion

The episode provides a grim foundation for understanding the Old West'

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Speaker 5 (0:02) Guaranteed human. Speaker 1 (0:16) Davis Tutts staggered forward, shouted, boys, I'm killed, and keeled over dead. Speaker 2 (0:22) Listen to Gunfighters starting on September 15th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (0:34) So when I ask people what they imagine the bloodiest feud in American history might have been, I've always, like every single time, gotten the same answer. The Hatfields and McCoys, right? Kentucky, West Virginia, killer hillbillies in the late 1800s, all that. I mean, it's pretty much the only blood feud most Americans have ever heard of. For my money, it's also among the most overrated. By my count, at least in terms of actual provable body count, The Hatfields and McCoys might rank fifth on the list of deadliest American feuds. You know where most of the worst of them actually happen? Texas. That's right, Texans. Again, by my count, of the 15 deadliest American feuds, nine played out in Texas between the 1840s and early 1900s, including the second and third deadliest of all. The extreme violence you see in these Texas feuds is much the same kind of violence that Texans would spread across the Old West frontier during the gunfighter era. Revenge killings, honor killings, every kind of killing. I mean, in the years after the Civil War, Texas men practically marinated in this kind of bloodshed. How that happened and how that spread is one of the great underappreciated stories of American history. This is Gunfighters, brought to you by Tecova's. Good boats for good times. Speaker 1 (2:10) Hey y'all, Brian here, and welcome to episode four of The Gunfighters. Thanks for coming by. This is an episode that is just jam-packed with stuff that I never knew before I began researching gunfighters, and almost all of it has to do with a mostly forgotten facet of Texas history. In these first episodes, we've talked a bit about the importance of Texans to the gunfighter era, how they popularized the Colt sidearms that made this all possible. But really, that's all just a prelude to their influence after the war, when Texas suffered through one of the most violent periods in American history. You can read some academic accounts asserting that in terms of violent periods among American civilians, it may have been the single most violent period of all. Me, I think it's one of the main reasons this whole gunfighter era happened. Because the violence born in Texas didn't stay in Texas. In fact, I've argued, it gave birth to a new kind of hyper-violent ethos that in time spread across the old western frontier, transforming the way many young men initiated and handled their disputes. Texas cowboys, cattlemen, outlaws, and lawmen were some of the most important players of this era, and the cattlemen and cowboys especially helped to spread these behaviors. Speaker 1 (3:37) Now, to understand how this all happened, I've got to tell you a story that can be, well, at times, I want to warn you, pretty rough. It's not just the violence, the sheer number of people who gets killed. It's who and how they get killed. I mean, it's not pretty. It's a story bound up in two distinct Texas impulses that emerge in the first years after the war, the period historians call Reconstruction. One is the violence that emanates from the state's post-war politics. The second is violence that arose from its preeminent post-war business, the cattle business. Let's take the political side first because it really sets the scene. Texas actually made it through the Civil War in much better shape than the rest of the old Confederacy. It never got seriously invaded. Its far-flung towns, ranches, and cotton plantations never got burned and pillaged. So once Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox and blue-coated Union soldiers began arriving at Texas ports and spreading across the state, let's just say Texans, who even then were a notoriously proud and touchy people, did not take this well, like at all. The arrival of federal troops in the summer of 65 coincided with the collapse of not just the state's government, but pretty much its entire economy. The Confederate governor and his top men fled to Mexico. Mobs rampaged through the streets, looting stores and overrunning state commissaries and warehouses. In June 1865, one crowd ransacked the treasury in Austin and made off with more than half of the state's cash reserves. The end of slavery, meanwhile, ended the only economy white Texans had ever known. The cotton industry, by far the most serious business at the state to that point, withered. Savings were wiped out. Families lost everything. Chaos enveloped much of the state. At the same time, more than 200,000 black people, freed from slavery, were suddenly left to wander, unsure where to go. Federal troops herded many of them into refugee camps. And now those soldiers, many of them black men themselves, were suddenly everywhere. White Texans who saw a soldier on the street would glare and cross to the far side or spit at him or curse him under their breath. Then, in short order, Texans began picking up their guns. What erupted in Texas was a kind of American dirty war, an orgy of murder, rape, and lynching. It raged for a good four years, the worst of it in North and East Texas. The targets of this violence were black people at first. But it soon extended to anyone who would support them, especially federal troops and the newcomers, known as carpetbaggers, who moved into positions of power to help them. Ku Klux Klan and Klan-like groups sprouted like weeds, with Knight Riders who'd string up and burn just about anyone on their hit list. By one count, 39 Texas counties hosted some kind of terroristic organization focused on harassing and killing black people. But truly, the violence went well beyond these organized groups, and only a fraction of it was ever documented. The new federal authorities were overwhelmed. In 1869, a journalist from Ohio wrote, quote, You cannot pick up a paper in East Texas without reading of murder, assassinations, and robbery. And yet not a fourth of the truth has been told. Not one act in ten is reported. The civil authority is powerless. Close quote. Even compared to other southern states, scholars agree the violence in Texas was on a whole other level. Quote, Texas literally ran with blood, is how one put it. I've already mentioned the massive influx of handguns into society after the war, either sold as surplus by the Army or brought home by returning veterans. And many of those Confederate veterans, having been trained to use those guns, came home angry, vengeful, and scarred by battle. There were thousands of them across post-war Texas, armed and all too quick to take offense, especially from a person of color or a Union man. As awful as their aims, you can look at men like these as the first post-war gunfighters. And Texas really had more of them than anywhere in the South. As I've said, these folks are not a pretty bunch. While the most famous of the Reconstruction gunfighters, that would be Jesse James up in Missouri, mostly confined himself to robbing banks and trains, his peers in Texas were stone-cold killers who murdered black people, blue-coated soldiers, and carpetbaggers, often without consequence. In 1868, the state's military commander offered big rewards for the three worst of these men, each operating in strife-torn North Texas. Of the three, the most notorious was a man named Cullen Baker, sometimes called the Swamp Fox of the Sulphur, as in the Sulphur River. which flowed through Baker's haunts in the extreme northeast corner of Texas. Outside Texas, Baker is probably best known for the notion, first advanced by the author Louis L'Amour in a 1959 novel, that he pioneered the fast-draw duel with revolvers. There's no evidence he did, but it's a fun tale. Baker, alas, was not a fun guy. He was born in Tennessee, probably in 1835. And as a boy, he moved to Cass County on the Arkansas border. As an adult, Baker was described as 5'9 and pale skin, with sandy hair and blue eyes. He grew up poor and mean, maybe suffering the effects of an early blow to the head. By the time he joined a cavalry outfit at the start of the war, he'd already killed at least two men in arguments. In 1863, he mustered out sick. Legend has him leading a marauding guerrilla band in Arkansas, killing and burning out anyone suspected of disloyalty to the Southern cause. You can find entire books packed with this stuff. Baker's modern biographers make clear, though, that there's not a shred of evidence to the legend. When he came home to Texas, we're told, he tried to establish a ferry business and failed. When his wife died, he sank into a depression that sent him on a downward spiral. We're told he proposed to his wife's sister, who instead married a schoolteacher named Thomas Orr. Baker and Orr fell into a nasty feud. In a letter that survives, Baker wrote, and here you get the sense of one seriously unhinged dude, quote, If I could sink this whole country into hell by stamping upon the ground, I would stamp with all my power and send it and every living creature with myself into the infernal regions. Yikes, right? When all the neighbors sighted with ore, Baker lashed out, riding to several farms and, oddly, gunning down every dog in sight, eight or nine in all. Along the way, for good measure, for some reason, he shot a goose.