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:: 114 :: 11 :: The Cousins Tom Potter’s name shows up only twice in the official records of Texas Ranger activities in Kimble County. The first occurrence was when he was arrested by Lieutenant Frank Moore and nine other Rangers on March 14, 1877, with Charles Edwin and William Meeks, and charged with theft of cattle.1 The second mention of his name is in connection with the killing of Dick Dublin at Potter’s Cajac Creek homestead on January 19, 1878, by Corporal James Gillett and his ranger squad.2 Potter was not arrested in that affair, even though he tried to assist Dublin in his ill-fated escape attempt. After that, Tom Potter’s name is absent from the Rangers’ Monthly Returns, General Correspondence, and lists of suspects and wanted fugitives. Similarly, Tom Potter’s eldest Indian son, Frank, was arrested only once by the Rangers, in connection with the Kimble County Roundup in late April 1877.3 Frank was probably the third of the “Potter boys” mentioned in the list of fugitives used by the Rangers in the Kimble County Roundup, the others being his cousins, the two eldest sons of Will Potter, Mack and Bill.4 Only after late July 1880 does Frank Potter’s name appear again in Ranger records, and then only as a person of interest.5 The name of John Potter, Tom Potter’s second son, does not appear in any of the Ranger records in any context until October 1880.6 James “Indian Jim” Potter, Tom Potter’s third son, does not verifiably appear in the Ranger records until December 15, 1879, when he and his Indian brothers were accused by John Miller of threatening to kill him. Miller was a Kimble County citizen and justice of the peace who had been identified as a witness on behalf of the federal government in the upcoming trials of Roll and Dell Dublin, Mack and Bill Potter, Rube Boyce, and Matthew Wilkins, in federal court in Austin .7 But “Indian Jim” Potter was certainly known and wanted by the spring of 1880 and was involved in a night-time shoot-out with Rangers in late July 1880 in the South Llano valley, probably near his uncle James K. P. Potter’s home site on Chalk Creek.8 He was then about nineteen years old. The Enigma of John Potter Among all the “Indian Potters,” the name of John Potter, the second son among the Indian cousins, is conspicuously absent from any mention at all in the records 115 :: The Cousins of the Kimble County Roundup in late April 1877 or of the repeated Ranger actions and patrols in Kimble County during the next three and a half years. In the face of the earlier arrests involving his father and eldest brother Frank, his white Potter cousins and their Dublin partners in crime, and his errant uncle James K. P. Potter as well as the evident maintained affiliation with the interests of the confederation —revealed by the Indian Potters’ threats against putative federal witness John Miller—we may only speculate about possible reasons for this absence. The obvious and charitable explanation is that John Potter, age twenty-one in 1877, was not engaged in criminal activities but was working with, and perhaps looking after, his father, and therefore was not a target of the Rangers’ interest. A second explanation is that he was engaged in livestock theft but worked on his own and was clever and furtive enough to avoid suspicion. A third alternative, as previously suggested, is that he was regularly absent from Kimble County—possibly was living out of sight in northern Mexico, interacting with the Mexican Indians and their merchant supporters as an agent for the Kimble County confederation of cattle and horse thieves.9 The evidence for this explanation is entirely circumstantial: not a single recorded indication or speculation in the official Ranger records, correspondence, or contemporary newspaper articles attaches the name of John Potter to such a role. Evidence does exist, however, that some Texas Rangers may have believed in 1880 that John Potter and his brother Jim had been involved with the Mexican Indians who murdered the Dowdy young people.10 The Mysterious James K. P. Potter Understandably, substantial confusion arises in trying to unravel references in Ranger records to James or Jim Potter during the years 1877 to 1880 in Kimble County. When James K. P. Potter arrived in the county in late...

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