The Reckoning: The Triumph of Order on the Texas Outlaw Frontier

9. The Dowdy Raid

:: 90 :: 9 :: The Dowdy Raid A Southern Family For the first twenty-five years of their married life, James Elias and Susan Cassell Dowdy lived a settled farming life on the lush rolling prairies and moist fertile bottomlands of the Texas Gulf coastal plain. They had married in 1852 in the old town of Goliad; James was thirty-four and Susan twenty-two.1 Goliad County was a relatively benign area, for pre–Civil War Texas. The violence of the Texas Revolution was sixteen years in the past, and the Karankawa Indians had been killed off.2 It was too far east for Mexican raiders, and too far south for Comanche and Kiowa war parties. Furthermore, the country was rapidly filling up with new settlers from the east, which promised even more security against raids by Indians and banditti. The luxurious grasslands of the lower coastal plain nurtured the infant rangecattle industry of Texas. After the Civil War, legendary cattlemen such as Dillard Fant, Buck Pettus, and Shanghai Pierce began gathering wild longhorn cattle and driving them north to Kansas railheads.3 James Dowdy and his younger brother John G. (Gib) were farmers;4 even so, they also owned cattle that grazed the open prairies of the lower Gulf plain—Goliad County’s registry of cattle brands and earmarks contains those registered under the Dowdy name.5 The Dowdys farmed in the far south corner of Goliad County, in rich alluvial soil where Blanco Creek, the southwestern boundary of Goliad County with neighboring Bee County, joins its tributary, Mucorrera Creek. Goliad town lay about twenty miles north.6 James and Susan Dowdy raised a stair-stepped family of eight: Tom (born in 1854), Dick (1856), Mary (1857), Alice (1860), Martha (1862), Susan (1864), James (1868), and George (1871).7 In 1870 the four eldest children attended school. Nearby lived James’s brother John G. (Gib) Dowdy, his first wife Juduth, and their seven children.8 After Juduth’s death, Gib Dowdy remarried and moved his family just over the line into Bee County.9 Like most of their neighbors, they were southerners—James and Gib from Georgia, Susan and Juduth from Mississippi. Both Dowdy brothers were reasonably prosperous, compared with their neighbors. In 1860 each showed real estate valued at $1,000 and personal property worth $2,000. Ten years later, with Texas 91 :: The Dowdy Raid beginning to recover from the Civil War, Gib Dowdy owned real estate worth $1,000 and personal property valued at $1,400. James Dowdy had fared less well, with real estate worth $550 and personal property worth $1,500. Even so, they were better off than most of their neighbors.10 Then the Dowdys lost their land. In July 1876 they found themselves in a dispute over 603 acres of land in far southern Goliad County with one H. C. Withers of Austin.11 Withers may have filed officially on the tract even though the Dowdys had been living there for some time without holding legal title. Or perhaps Withers discovered a flaw in the Dowdys’ title and filed upon the land. His complaint indicates that on July 11, 1876, “John G. and James Dowdy with force and arms entered upon the lands aforesaid and ousted your petitioner therefrom, since which time [they] have continually possessed and occupied said land.”12 One may speculate that perhaps the Dowdys ejected Withers from the disputed tract when Withers came to notify them of his title claim, or to complain about their occupancy. In any case Withers brought suit against John G. and James A. [E.] Dowdy on February 1, 1877, in Figure 19: The James E. Dowdy family in Texas. Bold font signifies characters who were prominent in the events related herein. The Reckoning :: 92 Goliad. Adding insult to injury, Withers also claimed damages of one thousand dollars for removal of one thousand post oak trees, valued at one dollar each, as well as unpaid rents of three hundred dollars. Final judgment in favor of H. C. Withers was handed down sometime early in 1878. The Dowdys also probably lost the value of their improvements. This reversal in family fortunes may well have contributed to a decline in James Dowdy’s health at about this time.13 In 1877 James Dowdy’s eldest son, Thomas A., married Susan Reeves in Goliad . She came from an old Texas ranching family that was...