Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy

12. Carry Huffman and Joe Sitter, Border Lawmen

✥ 12 ✥ Carry Huffman and Joe Sitter, Border Lawmen Not long ago, I spent a morning at the Marfa Sector Headquarters of the Border Patrol talking with Carry Huffman, who is the Deputy Chief Patrol Agent there. On the surface, Huffman (who pronounces his first name KO-ree) would appear to be the ultimate modern law-enforcement officer. He has been with the Border Patrol twenty-two years and has served in a number of posts, including four years in Washington, DC, and some time in South America. He is a handsome, affable man who can discuss with ease the duties and the problems of his government agency. But there is another side to Huffman, and that was what brought us together in his office. Huffman has an intense interest in the past, and especially the past of the border country that he has seen so much of as a patrol agent since he came to Marfa seven years ago. It is Huffman’s curiosity about the past that first got him interested in Joe Sitter, another border lawman who worked this area (Sitter’s descendants added a final “s” to his name and he is sometimes referred to as Joe Sitters). Sitter was born in Castroville, Texas, in 1863, the son of Alsatian immigrants. He grew up in Castroville, worked as a cowboy on local ranches, and married a local girl, with whom he had three children. But when he was twenty-six, his wife died as the result of a buggy accident. Heartbroken, he gave their children to relatives to raise and struck out west by himself. He got a job as a deputy sheriff in Del Rio, where he became a local hero by helping to capture a gang of out48 ✥ laws who had held up a train and were hiding out in the brush with their loot. This brought him to the attention of Texas Ranger Captain John Hughes, and when a vacancy occurred in Hughes’s Company D, Hughes offered Sitter the job. Sitter served as a Texas Ranger from August 1893 to May 1899. He married again in December 1894, and he and his wife settled down on a ranch south of Valentine, in the broken country below the Candelaria Rim that Huffman now patrols. In 1899, Sitter left the Rangers and joined the US Customs Service as a Mounted Inspector at twice his Ranger pay. It must have seemed like a good job to a man with a growing family (he and his second wife eventually had six children), but it got him involved in a feud that eventually cost him his life. One of the most notorious smugglers in the country below the Candelaria Rim was a man called Chico Cano, who lived with his brothers across the Rio Grande at San Antonio del Bravo. There was a warrant out for his arrest in Texas, and in February 1913 Sitter and two colleagues captured him by surrounding a house where he was attending a wake and threatening to set fire to it unless he surrendered. On their way to Marfa with their prisoner, however, they were attacked by a group of Cano’s men who freed Cano and wounded all three lawmen, one of them fatally. Cano later told relatives that he knew Sitter was going to kill him before they got to the Marfa jail, and he swore then that he would get Sitter before Sitter got him. Two years later, in May 1915, Sitter led a group of lawmen into the country along the river in search of a herd of horses that had been crossed illegally into Texas, probably by Cano. With him were Customs Inspector Charley Craighead and three Texas Rangers, Eugene Hulen, Sug Cummins, and H. C. Trollinger. On the third night of the search they camped near the mouth of a box canyon, and in the night they heard horses going past and voices, one of which Sitter told his companions he recognized as Chico ✥ 49 Cano’s. The next morning, they divided into two groups and entered the canyon. Sitter and Hulen went along a little rise on one side, and the other three men picked their way through the rocks along the other side. Suddenly, the second party was met by a hail of gunfire from the rocks ahead of them. They could see Sitter and Hulen motioning for them to go back...