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1 Chapter 1 “A carnival of crime and corruption” Luke Gournay in Texas Boundaries: Evolution of the State’s Counties writes that Lampasas is a Spanish translation for an English language word: Lilies.1 There is another truism about Lampasas. Despite the genteel sounding name, at nineteenth-century Lampasas, Texas, there were not many lily-livered folks tramping around town or scattered throughout the county of Lampasas. Cobardes (cowards) were in short supply. The town, sitting at an eastern entrance to the enchanting Texas Hill Country, southwest of Waco and northwest of Austin, was “wide open and the saloonkeepers and gamblers had things their own way.” The sporting crowd was nervy, and growing more bold as each day folded into the next, that year of 1873. Legal statutes were but pesky inconveniences. Outside town limits the surrounding countryside was wonderfully productive cow country. The range country was unfenced. Fattening cattle could during good weather nonchalantly graze on gently rolling uplands, slaking daily thirst in dependable spring-fed creeks sheltered by towering post oaks shading the rich bottom lands. When the mercury plunged, which was not too often, and frost nipped the air, those same limestone creek beds afforded warm and welcoming protection for Lampasas County cattlemen’s walking assets. Problematically those same secretive geographical sanctuaries shielding mamma cows and their newborn calves from nature’s indifference, were also screens for those bent toward a dab of cow stealing. Not so happily Lampasas County folks could boast of a nefarious distinction. It was homebase for quite a number of “shady characters” and incontestably to the honest ranchers’ exasperation, “a good deal of stock was being run out of the county.”2 January was but two weeks old when, on the fourteenth, Lampasas County Sheriff Shadrach T. “Shade” Denson was involved in a frightening gunplay. Upon the orders of Judge W. A. Blackburn, Sheriff Denson attempted to arrest a drunk and disorderly Mark Short at a saloon in Lampasas. Certain details are yet hazy, like who 2  Chapter 1 the real triggerman was. Depending on the particular variation cited, either Mark or his brother George Washington “Wash” Short, jerked a six-shooter and furrowed a bullet into the sheriff’s side. There is, however, no fuzziness about what happened next. The seriously wounded lawman fell to the saloon’s dirty floor, and local toughs, the Horrell brothers, Sam, Martin “Mart,” Tom, Ben, and Merritt, “who were raised to horses, cattle, whiskey and guns,” with help from a few other area yahoos, backed down an intimidated posse of townsmen. The Short boys made good their getaway.3 Lawlessness had taken a foothold in Lampasas County. Local law enforcement was impotent, unable to gain traction. The state’s gendarmes weren’t faring much better; their toehold was but tenuous. Lampasas was a tough town to be sure. There bigotry and bullets held sway. Radical Republicanism and the Texas State Police, with 40% of its ranks filled by freedmen, were not well-liked, nor wellaccepted . A majority of southern bred and Texas raised folks had little respect for the involuntarily imposed Lone Star government’s authority. That black men were legally wearing badges and carrying six-shooters was an anathema, at least in the minds of many unreconstructed citizens. The psychic makeup of young and impetuous Texans had no gear for submission, especially not to Yankee-­ sympathetic policeman, much less a black man. Those ill-mannered bastards, well, they could just strut the streets of Lampasas at their own peril, so voiced intolerance.4 The following month, February, State Police Sergeant J. M. Redmon , posted at Lampasas, advised his supervisor at Austin, the Adjutant General and Chief of State Police, Frank L. Britton, that he had excusably released from duty five of his black policemen, because the probability of their being bushwhacked “any night” was just too great.5 Sergeant Redmon unhesitatingly advised his boss that to bring any semblance of stability to the ubiquitous disorderliness then underway at Lampasas would require that his forces be strengthened and the racial makeup fine-tuned: “I think we ought to have at least twenty five good men (all white).”6 As it turned out Sergeant Redmon wasn’t too far off the mark. At Lampasas those arrogant State Police fellows could all be damned and sent to hell— black or white! And, those hardened Horrell brothers and their pals would stand tight and tall, more than thrilled to be the ones that bid them one and all...

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