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Texas Tales

published: August 20th 2010
by: Mike Cox

On June 29, during a gun battle in Juarez, Mexico, seven stray AK 47 rifle rounds flew across the Rio Grande and hit city hall in downtown El Paso.
    No one got hurt – at least on the Texas side of the river – but violence in another country had spilled over into the United States. While Juarez has been in turmoil for several years as rival drug cartels fight for control of the lucrative drug smuggling business in their part of the world, the incident earlier this summer marked the first time during the 21st century that gunfire from Mexican narco wars has reached El Paso from its struggling sister city.
    Nearly a hundred years have gone by since the last time it happened.
    When Oscar Branch Colquitt ran for governor in 1910, he told Texans he believed the Rangers—already much smaller in size than their reputation—had outlived their usefulness. He thought local officers could handle law enforcement in the state. But when growing unrest south of the border erupted into violence in the fall of 1910, Colquitt realized he had been wrong about the Rangers.
    Long-time Mexican President Porfirio Diaz allowed a presidential election because it looked democratic, but the eighty-year-old dictator had no intention of leaving office. However, when reform-minded opponent Fran-cisco I. Madero, the intellectual son of a wealthy landowner, seemed to be making inroads on the incumbent, the candidate found himself in prison. Bailed out by his family, Madero on October 5, 1910 left San Luis Potosi for Texas, where he began fomenting a revolution. From San Antonio, he soon issued a proclamation urging the Mexican people to remove Diaz from power.
    The crack of rifle fire shattered an uneasy calm on December 15, when insurrectos loyal to Madero engaged Diaz soldiers four miles upriver from Ojinaga, the Mexican town opposite Presidio.
    Down river, Eagle Pass newspaper editor Joseph O. Boehmer reprinted a clipping from a New York newspaper. According to “a well known citizen who has lately returned from the western borders of Texas,” Eagle Pass lay at the center of the revolution. Texans, however, could rest easy as long as the Rangers rode the river:
“That portion of Texas bordering on the Rio Grande... is being guarded from the invasion of the Mexican revolutionists by the grandest, bravest body of horsemen ever assembled under the stars and stripes or flag of any country, viz: the Texas rangers. They are in a measure similar to the Pennsylvania constabulary or the mounted police of Canada, all young, alert, brawny, keen-eyed Texans and frontiersmen, quick on the trigger, can shoot from the hip, swing the lasso and are unequaled horsemen, superior in fact to the Cossacks of Russia.”
    Calling the story “the most magnificent lie about Eagle Pass it has ever been our pleasure to read,” Boehmer continued:
“Naturally we would like to see one of those magnificent Texas rangers. We have lived here some twenty years and nary a dad-burned Texas ranger have we seen in Eagle Pass yet.”
    Texas did not have many rangers in those days, but most of them were stationed along the border, where by 1911 the violence had intensified. By March 2 that year, rebel fighters held Mexican federal forces under siege in Ojinaga. U.S. troops marched from Marfa to the border to make sure the fighting did not spread into Texas.
    At Juarez, rebels attacked at 10:30 a.m. on May 8. Errant bullets whizzing across the Rio Grande into El Paso killed five U.S. citizens and wounded 15.
    “We are all…watching the fight at Juarez,” Ranger Capt. John R. Hughes said in a telegram to the state adjutant general in Austin. “Wish you and all the force could be here to enjoy the Fun.”
    Meanwhile, local retailers did a brisk business selling field glasses with many El Pasoans cheerfully paying a dollar for access to rooftops affording a view across the Rio Grande. “Stay away from the danger zone,” the A.D. Foster Co. advertised in the city’s two newspapers, “but See Everything Across the River Today” by taking advantage of low prices on “field glasses…of the finest foreign make.”
    Under the watchful eyes of Hughes and thousands of other El Pasoans, the Battle of Juarez ended two days later with Madero’s soldiers in control. The revolutionaries had killed as many as a hundred federal troops while losing only 15 of their own in taking the city, which Madero quickly proclaimed Mexico’s provisional capital.
    As Madero struggled to return Juarez to some sense of normalcy, in El Paso the Hotel Taxi Cab and Auto Co. offered round-trip tours of the battle-scarred city across the river starting at 50 cents a head.
    On May 25, faced with similar defeats elsewhere in his country, Diaz resigned and fled to Europe with his former vice president. In November 1911, a year after starting the revolution, Madero became the republic’s new president. El Paso and the border felt more at ease, but the revolution soon flared again and continued for nearly a decade.
    Some of El Paso’s older buildings still bear bullet pockmarks from that long-ago revolution. And now the border city is in the line of fire again.
***
    The stereotypical Texan is seldom gun shy when it comes to settling a difficulty with violence, a mythology reflected in the number of Lone Star communities with names evocative of rough and tumble ways. 
    At least five such towns come to mind: Cut and Shoot, Gun Barrel City, Gunsight, Point Blank and Winchester.
    Of these Second Amendment-esque place names, Cut and Shoot has gotten the most ink over the years. Out-of-state journalists have periodically pointed to this Montgomery County community as having a name particularly representative of Texas’ supposed willingness to resort to violence.
    The story goes that the name came from an incident in 1912 that nearly led to bloodshed. Ironically, in all three versions of the tale, the triggering factor was an argument over church-related issues. Some said the intra-congregational tiff concerned the selection of a preacher while others later maintained the argument was over how the church steeple should look. The third version has it that the barely averted battle had to do with a despute among church members over land matters.
    Supposedly, a young boy nervously watching the building confrontation was heard to say: “I’m going to cut around the corner and shoot through the bushes in a minute.”
    While that may be the story, the simplicity of the name seems to belie that. In Texas, two of the three basic ways to resolve an issue involved cutting or shooting, the third being fisticuffs.
    Gun Barrel City is in Henderson County, about 20 miles northwest of Athens. As Texas towns go, it’s not very old, having started during the building of Cedar Creek Reservoir in the 1960s. Since then, you might say Gun Barrell City has grown faster than a speeding bullet, shooting from a population of 60 in 1970 to 5,000-plus in 2000.
    Many a barroom denizen has learned the hard way that gunpowder and alcohol do not mix, but Gun Barrel City was incorporated to facilitate the legal sale of beer and wine.
    The town got its name from its motto, “We shoot straight with you.” The town’s symbol, of course, is a rifle. But, as the Handbook of Texas Online points out, a roadway known as Gun Barrel Lane cut through the area well before the lake was there. Since the road represented a short cut from Mabank to Seven Points, the Gun Barrel descriptor might have had to do with its straightness between A and B.
    Gunsight, a mostly ghost town in Stephens County with only six residents as of the last census, dates back to 1879. It was named for a set of low mountains that from a distance look like the V-shaped notch in the middle of a gunsight.
    A year afer its settlement, Gunsight got a post office which lasted until the Breckenridge oil boom of the late teens played out in the 1920s when the Wichita Falls and Southern Railroad closed its station there.
    Point blank is the range at which you want to shoot at something if you don’t want to miss. Point Blank is the name of a community in San Jacinto County, 85 miles north of Houston. Alas, the story behind the naming of Point Blank has nothing to do with shooting.
    A Frenchwoman named Florence Dissiway, while working as the governess for two branches of the pioneer R.T. Robinson family back in the 1850s called the settlement Blanc (as in white) Point. Leave it to Texans to corrupt that to Point Blank, which they did.
    Point Blank didn’t get its own post office until 1884 and slumbered along until the construction of Lake Livingston in the 1960s perked things up. But even after the lake filled and began to attract anglers and tourists, the 2000 population was only 559.
    One would think the Fayette County community of Winchester honors the weapon that won at least half the West, the lever-action repeating rifle generically known as a Winchester. But one would be wrong.
    Turns out Winchester is named for a town of like name in Tennessee. (Founded in 1809, that town was named for James Winchester, a Revolution-ary soldier who served as a brigadier general in the War of 1812.)
    Located 20 miles northwest of La Grange on a tract of land first settled in 1827, Winchester, Texas was laid out in 1857 by John Gromme. By 1866 the community was of sufficient caliber to merit the opening of a post office. A farming town, Winchester boomed as much as it ever would when the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway came through on its way to Waco in the mid-1880s.
    Cotton being king back then, the communtity had 18 businesses by the turn of the century. But as cotton became less dominant as a Central Texas crop and better roadways made it easier for folks to trade in larger towns, Winchester withered like so much long staple in a dry year. By 1950 the population had decreased to 220. Thirty years later it was down to 50, which was also the head count in 2000.
    Finally, for a time when it had the reputation of being a wild and wooly railroad town, Hearne was known as Six Shooter Junction. But that was only a nickname, nothing worth fighting over.