Yours to Command: The Life and Legend of Texas Ranger Captain Bill McDonald

Chapter 2. The Making of a Texas Lawman

To grasp the inner workings of the world of Texas Ranger Captain Bill McDonald, one must move in a westerly direction across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World and a place called Texas. Since ancient times humans have sailed westward and marched inland to find fame and fortune and build an orderly society under God.2 This restless force in the cultures of Europe and America—that migrating impulse that has been called the “M-Factor” in American history— was captured in those haunting lines by Stephen Vincent Benet: Americans are always moving on. It’s an old Spanish custom gone astray, A sort of English fever, I believe, Or just a mere desire to take French leave, I couldn’t say. I couldn’t really say.3 This restless temper brought McDonald’s Scottish ancestors from Europe to America. The methods of fighting crime used by Captain Bill resulted from his contacts with people and cultures in the Old South and the Lone Star State. As a youth he grew up in { 2 3 } Chapter 2  THE MAKING OF A TEXAS LAWMAN . . . a Texas Ranger could ride like a Mexican, trail like an Indian, shoot like a Tennessean, and fight like a devil.1 antebellum Mississippi. As a young man he took part in the westward migration to Texas. All these experiences helped to mold the character and shape the career that made McDonald a lawman of note in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.4 Bill McDonald is probably unrepresentative of many lawmen, but his varied career makes him an unusually useful figure for the study of American western history. He upheld and broke the law on different occasions, and he worked at both the lowest and the highest levels of law enforcement, from deputy sheriff to Texas Ranger to United States marshal. He traveled over vast areas in Texas and the surrounding territories in the pursuit of criminals, particularly the Texas Panhandle, No Man’s Land (Oklahoma Panhandle), the Cherokee Outlet, and nearby areas of Oklahoma. These regions were so little populated and had such opportunities for economic advancement that they were a true frontier environment. There was no aspect of the changing criminal justice system of the Southwest that McDonald did not encounter, and he left his mark on judges, lawyers, and jailers. In the fullness of his maturity, McDonald was almost the protean figure out of which the stereotype of the western peace officer in folklore and fiction evolved. Slim, wiry, somewhat large-boned, erect, and generally well-proportioned, McDonald was tall for his day, roughly six feet in height. His head seemed somewhat small for his large angular frame, and he kept a mustache as did many law officers of his generation. His face was weather beaten; his lips were thin; and his prominent, narrow-bridged nose—straight with flaring nostrils—gave him a dignity of expression that offset his hollow cheeks, protruding ears, and steel blue-grey eyes that lay hidden, recessed in his skull. He appeared at once disarming and inept, and only the stern gaze and his graceful movements betrayed the latent threat he posed to potential offenders. Fading photographs do an injustice to this striking figure of a western lawman whose physical makeup was an asset in his contacts with the criminal world.5 Y O U R S T O C O M M A N D { 2 4 } MCDONALD’S SOUTHERN ROOTS Two points about the early life of “Bill Jess” McDonald are clear: he was not a Texan by birth, and he did not grow up with a desire to join a police force. McDonald was born on September 28, 1852, in Kemper County, Mississippi. His parents, Enoch McDonald and Eunice Durham McDonald, like so many other planters on the southern frontier, were of Scottish ancestry. They could boast of a heritage that sometimes aligned them with the forces that had struggled to preserve order and independence in both Scotland and America. McDonald’s father and mother also grew up in Jacksonian America, with its deep-seated faith in rough-hewn heroes, lively politicos, and westering masses. By way of North Carolina (the Durhams) and Georgia (the McDonalds), the parents of Bill Jess entered Mississippi when that area still offered promise for financial success.6 The McDonalds, Enoch and Eunice, were cotton planters. Their plantation (or farm as...