Chapter XX: Fruits of Ranger Service

Early in the spring of 1881 the old town of El Paso awoke out of her Rip Van Winkle sleep to find that four grand trunk railroad lines,--the Santa Fe, Southern Pacific, G., H & S.A., and the Texas & Pacific--were rapidly building toward her and were certain to enter the town by the end of the year. Situated as it was, many hundreds of miles from any other town, it was a foregone conclusion that El Paso had the making of a great city and was a fine field for investment. Bankers, merchants, capitalists, real estate dealers, cattlemen, miners, railroad men, gamblers, saloon-keepers and sporting people of both sexes flocked to the town. They came in buggies, hacks, wagons, horseback and even afoot. There was not half enough hotel accommodations to go around, so people just slept and ate at any old place. El Paso Street, the only business thoroughfare at that time, was flooded with crowds.

At night there was not enough room for people to walk on the sidewalks and they filled the streets. To me it looked just a miniature midway at a world's fair. A saloon was opened on almost every corner of the town with many in between. Each drinking place had a gambling house attached where the crowds played faro bank, monte, roulette, chuck-a-luck, stud poker and every gambling game on the calendar. If one wished a seat at the gaming tables he had to come early or he could not get within thirty feet of them. Two variety theaters, the Coliseum, operated by the Manning Brothers,--the largest in the southwest--and Jack Doyle's, were quickly opened.

An election was called in El Paso and the city was duly incorporated and a mayor and board of aldermen installed. George Campbell was elected city marshal and given one assistant, Bill Johnson. The new marshal had come to El Paso from Young County, Texas, where he had been a deputy sheriff. Campbell had done some good detective work and was a fairly good and efficient officer, but his assistant was much below ordinary.

The city marshal soon found that with but one man to aid him he had the biggest kind of a job on his hands with something doing every hour in the twenty-four. Campbell decided he was not getting enough pay for the work he had to do and asked the City Council for a raise in his salary, but the council refused it. The marshal at once resigned and left Bill Johnson to hold the town. Campbell was very friendly with the sporting element in El Paso, especially with the Manning Brothers, who were running two saloons and a big variety theater. Campbell and his friends decided to use strategy to force the council to increase his salary and planned to shoot up the town, thinking this would cause the city fathers to reinstate Campbell in his old position with a substantial increase in pay. At 2 o'clock one morning the town was shot up, some three or four hundred shots being fired promiscuously and with no attempt to make arrests.

The following morning Mayor McGoffin sent a hurry call to Captain Baylor at Ysleta and asked that a detachment of Texas Rangers be sent to El Paso to help police the town. At that time I had not severed my connection with the rangers, so I was ordered to make a detail of five rangers, issue them fifteen days' rations and have them report at once to the mayor of El Paso.

The peace loving citizens of the town welcomed the rangers, secured nice quarters for them and furnished the detachment with a stove on which to cook its meals. The rangers had been in El Paso on police duty about a week when there appeared in the town from New Mexico the famous Dallas Stoudenmire. The newcomer was six feet two inches in height, a blonde and weighed one hundred and eighty-five pounds. Stoudenmire had a compelling personality and had been a Confederate soldier, having served with General Joe Johnston at Greensboro, North Carolina. Mr. Stoudenmire applied to the mayor and City Council for the position of city marshal. He presented good references and was duly appointed town marshal.

George Campbell now saw his chances for reinstatement as an officer in El Paso go glimmering. Marshal Stoudenmire called on Bill Johnson for the keys of the city jail, but the latter refused to surrender them. Thereupon Stoudenmire seized the recalcitrant assistant, shook him up and took the keys from his pocket, thereby making his first enemy in El Paso.

About ten days after the new marshal had been installed it was reported in El Paso that two Mexican boys had been found murdered some ten or twelve miles from town on the Rio Grande. The rangers stationed in the city went out to the ranch to investigate. The bodies were brought to El Paso and a coroner's inquest was held in a room fronting on El Paso Street. Johnnie Hale, manager of Manning's little ranch, was summoned to appear before the coroner, and it was believed by the rangers that Hale and an ex-ranger named Len Peterson had committed the double murder.

The inquest, being held in such a public place, attracted a crowd of onlookers. Besides the rangers, Marshal Stoudenmire, ex-Marshal Campbell, and Bill Johnson were present. A man named Gus Krempkau acted as interpreter. The trial dragged along until the noon hour and the proceedings were adjourned for dinner. The rangers went at once to their quarters to prepare their meal, though there was still a crowd standing about the scene of the inquest. Krempkau came out of the room and was accosted by John Hale, who had become offended at the way the interpreter had interpreted the evidence. After a few hot words Hale quickly pulled his pistol and shot Krempkau through the head, killing him instantly. Marshal Stoudenmire ran up, shot at Hale but missing him killed a Mexican bystander. At the second shot from the marshal's pistol John Hale fell dead. George Campbell had pulled his pistol and was backing off across the street when Stoudenmire suddenly turned and shot him down. Four men were thus killed almost within the twinkling of an eye.

Stoudenmire was held blameless by the better class of citizens for the part he had played, but a certain sporting element--mostly friends of Campbell--was highly indignant at Marshal Stoudenmire for killing Campbell, and declared the latter had been murdered. The Manning Brothers were especially bitter against the marshal, as he had killed their ranch foreman, Hale, and their friend, Campbell. This feeling against Marshal Stoudenmire never subsided, and just a little more than one year after, Dallas Stoudenmire was shot and killed in a street fight by Jim and Dr. Manning within fifty feet of the spot where Stoudenmire himself had killed the three men the year before.

The friends of George Campbell now sought to take the life of Marshal Stoudenmire, and they used as their instrument Bill Johnson, a man almost simple mentally. The plotters furnished Johnson with plenty of free whisky and when they had made him drunk they told him Stoudenmire had no right to catch him in the collar and shake him as if he were a cur dog. Johnson finally agreed to kill the marshal. Armed with a double-barreled shotgun the tool of the plotters took up a position one night behind a pile of bricks in San Antonio Street where it enters El Paso and lay in wait for his intended victim.

Marshal Stoudenmire was then down at Neal Nuland's Acme saloon, and it was well known he would soon make his round up the street. Shortly afterward he was seen coming, and when he had approached within twenty-five feet of the brick pile Bill Johnson rose to his feet and fired both barrels of his shotgun. Unsteady with drink, Johnson's fire went over the marshal's head and left him unharmed. The marshal pulled his pistol and with lightning rapidity filled Johnson's body full of holes. At the same moment Campbell's friends, posted on the opposite side of the street, opened fire on Stoudenmire and slightly wounded him in one foot, but the marshal charged his attackers and single-handed put them to flight.

From this day Marshal Stoudenmire had the roughs of El Paso eating out of his hand. There was no longer any necessity for the rangers to help him police the town and they were withdrawn. Stoudenmire's presence on the streets was a guarantee of order and good government. He was a good man for the class of people he had to deal with, yet he knew there were those in El Paso that were his bitter enemies and always on the alert for a chance to take his life. This caused him to drink, and when under the influence of liquor he became mean and overbearing to some of his most ardent supporters, so much so that by the spring of 1882 he was asked to resign. In a dramatic and fiery speech Stoudenmire presented his resignation and declared he had not been treated fairly by the City Council and that he could straddle them all.

Immediately on leaving the rangers, as narrated at the close of the preceding chapter, I accepted a position of captain of guards on the Santa Fe Railroad under my friend, Captain Thatcher. I did not long remain in the railroad's employ, and after a few months I resigned my position there to become assistant city marshal under Mr. Stoudenmire.

Upon the resignation of Mr. Stoudenmire I was appointed city marshal of El Paso. Upon my appointment the ex-marshal walked over, took me by the hand and said, "Young man, I congratulate you on being elected city marshal and at the same time I wish to warn you that you have more than a man's size job on your hands."

Stoudenmire at once secured the appointment as United States deputy marshal of the Western District of Texas with headquarters at El Paso. Stoudenmire always treated me with the greatest consideration and courtesy and gave me trouble on only one occasion. I reproduce here a clipping from an El Paso paper of the time:

"Last Thursday night a shooting scrape in which ex-Marshal Stoudenmire and ex-Deputy Page played the leading parts occurred at the Acme saloon. It seems that early in the evening Page had a misunderstanding with Billy Bell. Stoudenmire acted as peacemaker in the matter. In doing so he carried Page to Doyle's concert hall, where the two remained an hour or so and got more or less intoxicated. About midnight they returned to the Acme and soon got into a quarrel. Stoudenmire drew his pistol and fired at Page; the latter, however, knocked the weapon upward and the ball went into the ceiling. Page then wrenched the pistol from Stoudenmire and the latter drew a second pistol and the two combatants were about to perforate each other when Marshal Gillett appeared on the premises with a double-barrel shotgun and corralled both of them. They were taken before court the following morning and fined $25 each and Stoudenmire was placed under bond in the sum of $250 to keep the peace."

My election to the marshalship of El Paso I attribute solely to my training as a ranger and to the notoriety my kidnapping of Baca out of Mexico had given me, so that the marshalship of the town was one of the direct fruits of my ranger service.

I was an officer of El Paso for several years. Not very long after my acceptance of the marshalship Captain C.L. Nevill, with whom I had served in Lieutenant Reynolds' company, resigned his ranger command and became sheriff and tax collector of Presidio County, Texas. The Marfa country was now seen to be a very promising cattle section, so Captain Nevill and myself formed a partnership and embarked in the cattle business. This did not in the least interfere with our duties as sheriff and marshal, respectively, and we soon built up a nice little herd of cattle.

In the spring of 1885 General Gano and sons of Dallas, Texas, formed a company known as the Estado Land and Cattle Company. The new concern arranged to open a big ranch in Brewster County and General Gano wrote to Captain Nevill, asking him please to secure a good cattleman as ranch manager for the new company. Nevill at once wrote me and advised me to accept this position. In his letter he jokingly remarked:

"Jim, you have had a quart cup of bullets shot at you while a ranger and marshal, and now that you have a chance to quit and get something less hazardous I advise you to do it. Besides you will be near our own little ranch and can see your own cattle from time to time."

I considered the proposition seriously, and on the 1st day of April, 1885, I resigned from the police force of El Paso and became a cowboy again. In accepting the marshalship I reaped the fruits of my ranger service and now, in resigning from that position I completely severed all my connection with the ranger force and all that it had brought me. Henceforth my ranger days and ranger service were to be but a memory, albeit the most happy and cherished one of my life.

I was manager of the Estado Land and Cattle Company's ranch for nearly six years and during that period the herd increased from six to thirty thousand head. When I resigned the ranch managership it was that I might attend to my own ranch interests, which had also grown in that period. Though today I own a large and prosperous ranch in the Marfa country and though my business interests are many and varied, I still cherish the memory of my ranger days and am never too busy to see an old ranger comrade and re-live with him those six adventurous, happy and thrilling years I was a member of the Frontier Battalion of the Texas Rangers.

THE END

_J.B. Gillett_ IN 1921]