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56 Chapter 4 “I was acting the fool kid” The Company D boys detailed as part of Major Jones’ escort would have a whopping good story to tell upon returning to Menardville, the company’s headquarters station.1 Though they may not have mixed it up with vengeful Kiowas that summer, the main body of Company D rangers had not been idle. Numerous were the gut-wrenching days each spent forked in the saddle scouting for Indian trails under the commands of Lieutenants Ledbetter and Roberts, and even Captain Perry himself.2 The Company D fellows would, however, have big news of their very own to share when the escort detachment worked its way back through the section during its next stopover. The month of July 1874 would mark a first for the Frontier Battalion’s Company D: They would make arrests. Their law enforcing career as Texas Rangers had been set in motion. Not all of the Company D rangers would find it agreeable or personally rewarding work. On July 29 at Menardville, Captain Perry with a ten-man ranger squadron “aided the Civil Authorities….in bringing Felix Mann & Accomplices to Justice.” The badmen had been drunkenly “treeing the town,” indiscriminately shooting six-shooters and just plain raising hell throughout the settlement.3 The townsmen could tolerate no more, sending for help from rangers camped nearby. Regrettably for a reader in want of a stirring shoot-’em-up story, this one, Company D Texas Rangers’ very first confrontation with mal hombres, isn’t the stuff legends are made from. By the time the trainee lawmen had saddled up, checked the loads in their Colt’s revolvers, and marched into town ready for triggerfinger action the wearied ruffians were comatose, soundly snoring .4 The fun was over. The whiskey bottles had been drained dry. Sometimes suddenly awakening drunks from unconsciousness can prove touchy, real touchy. So, it’s fair to give these young rookies due credit. The inebriates were roused out of their stupor at gunpoint and safely jugged in Menard County Sheriff William C. Martin’s lockup. “I was acting the fool kid” 57 Though this business was heretofore foreign to the boys that had signed up to hunt Indians, the civil authorities’ requests kept coming . Trying to help the sheriff, they even took a stab at catching some more evildoers. Much to the Texas Rangers’ credit, even though they were unsuccessful in tracking the wanted men, they had tried.5 The raring-to-go boys from Company D had jumped into the game running , not knowing what to expect nor showing any fear. The good lawman goes when and where he’s called; these Texas Rangers were learning yet, but when asked—they went. During August, and also at Menardville, Sergeant Plunk Murray and a detail of rangers arrested the “noted character” Thomas Hopper .6 How prisoner Hopper had registered notoriety is still nebulous due to the loss of early courthouse records, but that designation was awarded the arrestee in Captain Rufe Perry’s Monthly Return. Those summer months of 1874 had been calendar months for the Frontier Battalion’s Company D. Some of the eager boys had been introduced to Kiowa Indians up close and personal in that murderous Jack County spot, Lost Valley. Other tenderfoot rangers had shackled— figuratively if not literally—bad white men at Menardville, while their comrades were desperately hunting for others throughout the Texas Hill Country. Texas Ranger history was in the making. Unfortunately a few of Major Jones’ Company D boys acting like hormonally charged little fighting bulls were making some trifling history of their own. Major Jones is typically portrayed as an intractable disciplinarian , not a martinet, but a sufferer of no monkey-business whatsoever. During the early fall of 1874 the boys of Company D brazenly tested his resolve. In September, although the exact date is indeterminate, a young private, Morton Sublette, defied the naïveté of latter day writers who suppose and sometimes scrawl that gentlemanly Texas Rangers sported haloes under their spotless broad-brimmed white hats. Texas Ranger Sublette did what he shouldn’t have done, that’s unarguable. He got drunk, totally ripped right there in the Menardville ranger camp. Instead of making an excuse of some sort and somehow begging off, when the preset time rolled around, Ranger Sublette blearily assumed his station as one of the camp’s nighttime sentinels, evading notice of either a downright derelict or a slackly sympathetic Sergeant of the...

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