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:: 176 :: 17 :: Judgments and Insights Istarted this project with the intent of weaving together and tying up the various loose ends of a fascinating larger story that—inescapably—had been described incrementally in the literature of the time as eight separate incidents : the Kimble County confederation, Major John B. Jones’s Kimble County Roundup, the killing of Dick Dublin by Corporal Jim Gillett, the murders of the Dowdy youngsters, the capture and trials of the Pegleg robbers, Corporal Rush Kimbell’s heroic pursuit and capture of Jim and John Potter, the execution of John Potter, and the subsequent acquittal of his murderers, the Dowdys and Dunmans. Judging John Potter I naturally expected to come to a clearer perception of John Potter’s innocence or guilt in the Dowdy murders. Because there is no direct evidence placing Potter at the scene of the massacre, any assessment must rest on informed, objective judgment . The historical evidence is still circumstantial, still equivocal. The case for John Potter’s guilt begins with the fact that he was a twenty-yearold Indian man who probably harbored violent resentment against white people, arising from his own family’s mistreatment at their hands in California during the 1860s, when Potter was growing up. The brutal assaults upon the Dowdy young people were perpetrated by Mexican Indians on a horse-stealing raid on October 5, 1878. A contemporary newspaper report, supported by Dowdy family tradition, indicates that, just before Alice Dowdy died, she was able to inform her mother, Susan Cassell Dowdy, of the name of a white man who was with the Indians who assaulted her; her mother’s subsequent confrontation of the prisoner, John Potter, on May 8, 1881, in the presence of Kimble County law officers, supports that report. Tracks made by moccasins as well as boots were found at the scene of the crime. Raids on frontier settlements around the periphery of the Edwards Plateau were not uncommon during the 1870s; such raids supplied clandestine markets in Mexican border towns, at which were traded horses, cattle, booty, and, occasionally , captives. John Potter was a member of a family-related criminal confederation headquartered in the South Llano river valley, only about thirty miles northwest of the Dowdy home site. This gang traded regularly in the Mexican livestock markets and was widely rumored to have conducted raids themselves, disguised 177 :: Judgments and Insights as Indians. Indian raids and horse thefts were reported frequently in the South Llano valley during 1875–80. Such an outlaw ring would have found it useful to have had one of their own in Mexico, acting as a representative to facilitate interactions with Indian raiders and Mexican traders. During 1875–80, when his father, two oldest brothers, two uncles, and two cousins were involved in the criminal activities of the Kimble County confederation, it is likely that John Potter himself was frequently absent from the South Llano valley, possibly in Mexico, serving as an agent on behalf of his family. John Potter and his outlaw brother “Indian Jim” Potter were horse thieves who engaged in a gunfight with Texas Rangers before being taken into custody on October 8, 1880. Jim Potter was mortally wounded; John Potter, shot through the right lung, recovered. On November 21, 1880, the day before being returned to the custody of the sheriff of Kimble County, Potter attempted unsuccessfully to escape from his Ranger escort. On hearing of the massacre, Tom Dowdy, the elder brother of the murdered young people, immediately left his home in Goliad County and traveled to Mountain Home with his wife, Susan Reeves Dowdy, to assist his parents and surviving siblings. She claimed afterward that John Potter had stolen horses from her family in Goliad County, sometime prior to the murders of the Dowdy youngsters. Upon being delivered to the Bexar County jail for safekeeping, awaiting his May 1881 trial in Kimble County for horse theft and resisting arrest, John Potter was placed in a jail cell with Bill Dunman, who was also awaiting trial in Kimble County, for an 1879 murder. The two prisoners may have known one another previously in Kimble County. Sometime in spring 1881, Bill Dunman reported to the Dowdy family that John Potter had admitted to being involved with the Dowdy murders and that “the eldest daughter wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”1 The reclusive, possibly guilt-ridden, lifetime behavior of the only surviving Dowdy daughter, and her brothers’ apparent antipathy toward her, may...

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