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48. A Killing in the Big Bend
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✥ 48 ✥ A Killing in the Big Bend Ol d t ro u bl es in the Big Bend are like the pearl in the oyster. The simple fact of a man’s being killed in a dispute is the irritating grain of sand; then layers of narrative build up around it until the story is a polished pearl, handed down from generation to generation as a community treasure, even though it has its beginning in tragedy. Most of the killings in the Big Bend in the early days were the result of the way the range cattle industry was organized and the fact that most of the people involved in it were Southerners. Southerners had a heightened sense of personal honor. A nineteenth -century visitor to the South wrote, “Call a Yankee a liar and he’ll say ‘you’re another’; call a Southerner a liar and he’ll kill you.” In the Big Bend’s open range ranching system, herds of cattle belonging to different owners grazed on enormous tracts of unfenced public land. They mixed together, and when it came time to sort them out, there was plenty of room for disputes about who owned what and plenty of occasions for men to call each other liars. The killing of Jim McCutcheon by Dick Riggs in 1906 was the result of just such a dispute. I first heard the story from Wid McCutcheon of Fort Davis, a great-grandson of Jim McCutcheon’s brother Willis and a former sheriff of Jeff Davis County. Several years ago, Wid took me on a tour of the country north of Fort Davis where the McCutcheons ranched a hundred years ago and told me stories about the places that we passed. He explained that four McCutcheon brothers, Willis, Bill, Jim, and Beau, came into that country in the 1880s ✥ 189 from South Texas and acquired ranches around Barilla Springs, Cavalry Springs, and Seven Springs. At one time they controlled most of the northern part of Jeff Davis County. All of the brothers had hot tempers and a penchant for quarrels. In 1891, Wid said, Bill McCutcheon got into an argument with some freighters whose burros had gotten into the alfalfa on his Seven Springs ranch. He started shooting the burros; the freighters shot back, and Bill McCutcheon was killed. No one was ever indicted for his murder. Wid’s narrative of Jim McCutcheon’s death was equally straightforward. In 1906 there was a roundup at Barilla Springs. Dick Riggs had recently sold a ranch there to Jim McCutcheon, and he and McCutcheon got into an argument over the ownership of some of the cattle, which Riggs said belonged to his wife and were not included in the sale. McCutcheon started hitting Riggs over the head with a quirt, and Riggs drew a pistol and fatally shot McCutcheon. When he realized what he had done, Riggs spurred his horse, rode into Alpine, and gave himself up to the Texas Ranger there. He was tried in El Paso for murder a year later and acquitted on grounds of self defense. Wid finished the story by saying that after the trial, Riggs went to New Mexico. Shortly afterward , Jim McCutcheon’s two brothers also went to New Mexico. They came back, Wid said, but Riggs didn’t. There are other tellings of this story, embellished with more and sometimes contradictory details. Roy Reid, who came into the Barilla Springs country in 1909 and knew the surviving McCutcheon brothers, related a more complicated version of the matter to his young friend Winfield Russell McAfee, who published it in his book The Cattlemen (Alvin, Texas: Davis Mountains Press, 1992). According to Reid, a man named Miller owned a section of land with a spring on it near Jim McCutcheon’s headquarters. In the summer of 1906, Miller leased the grazing and watering rights on his section to Jim 190 ✥ [44.222.142.210] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:24 GMT) McCutcheon for a hundred dollars. A few days later he leased the same rights to Dick Riggs for two hundred dollars. Riggs rounded up his cattle to move them to the newly leased land; McCutcheon showed up at the roundup and asked Riggs where he was moving the cattle to, and the argument ensued. According to Reid, Riggs shot McCutcheon twice. The first shot knocked McCutcheon off his horse and broke the quirt-wielding arm. The second shot, the fatal one, was fired when McCutcheon was...