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Chapter Eleven. A Desperate Journey across East Texas: October 15, 1902
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chapter eleven A Desperate Journey across East Texas October 15, 1902 spradley returned to nacogdoches on wednesday morning, while lawmen Curg Border and A. Y. Matthews headed to East Texas with confessed murderer Jim Buchanan. Bill Haltom, probably to nobody’s surprise, didn’t get much information out of his longtime enemy. He had to rely heavily on the Shreveport Times account to print a skimpy story that day on the Sentinel ’s front page—which was sandwiched once again between ads for Mayer & Schmidt (dry goods) and Perkins Bros. (druggists, jewelers, and stationers ). When asked by the “Sentinel man” what had happened to Buchanan , Spradley, tongue firmly in cheek, replied, “We tried to cross (the) Red river with him in a skiff, and the blamed thing turned over, and the last I saw of Buchanan an alligator had him by the leg; and that’s as near the truth as you’ll get out of me.”1 Haltom ended his account by writing that a telephone message had arrived from Longview, stating that Buchanan had just been spirited away in a hack from that town, sixty miles north. That was all he was able to provide his readers—certainly not a very impressive display of journalism for the newspaper that, after all, should have been providing the most thorough coverage of any. The Plaindealer, on the other hand, which had reverted to weekly publication after a brief experiment as a daily, provided a far fuller account in its October 16 issue. Spradley, the paper’s founder and former editor, was far more forthcoming to its reporter about his role in capturing the confessed killer of the Hicks family and spiriting him away from the mob in Tenaha. The paper also reported that a petition was circulating, asking that District Judge Tom C. Davis bring Buchanan back from wherever he was being held for trial. “Nearly everybody signed it,” the Plaindealer claimed, 98 } A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution adding, “This is quite proper. Since he is out of reach of lynch law and will otherwise remain so, he should be tried, convicted and hanged in Nacogdoches for the credit of the city.”2 Spradley was praised for his part in capturing Buchanan and delivering him safely: To go with several hundred men and capture a negro murderer and rapist and get thru [sic] forty miles of hostile territory on horseback and a hundred miles or so by rail in safety is a feat rarely performed in this age of mob violence. Telephone connections thru the entire country traversed made it all the harder to accomplish. It is one of the rare occurrences.3 A. F. Henning, the Plaindealer editor, predicted that Buchanan “will be tried here if the proper arrangements are made for protecting him, and inside of a month he will be hung, high and dry.” But whether Buchanan and those in charge of keeping him alive would make it to safety was still a wide-open question. under the cover of darkness, matthews and border left Shreveport on a westbound Texas and Pacific train with their prisoner . A passenger on the train, J. M. Smart, said the mob that the lawmen eluded in Shreveport was the most dangerous group of men he had ever seen: “Every man was armed with a Winchester or shotgun and one to three pistols.”4 But the mob had indeed been fooled, and even the train’s passengers didn’t realize Buchanan was aboard until the train was twenty miles west of Shreveport, across the Texas line. The original plan was to travel to Jacksonville, about 120 miles southwest of Shreveport. From there it would be an easy trip of fourteen miles south to Rusk and the penitentiary—where, behind its brick walls, Buchanan would be safe until his trial.5 But along the way, at every stop, crowds of angry, armed men were gathering. In Longview, sixty miles west of Shreveport, Buchanan was placed in jail at about two on Wednesday morning while his captors awaited the noon train, a southbound Great Northern, to take them to Rusk. Somehow Matthews and Border managed to get Buchanan on the train and out of town before the crowd could get to them. The trio managed to elude yet another mob at Kilgore, some ten miles south, but soon learned that a sizable crowd had gathered at Jacksonville . The two lawmen decided to leave the train, and borrowed a carriage...