Follow Me to Hell by Tom Clavin

Author:Tom Clavin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER 31

“A PERFECT REIGN OF TERROR”

While Leander McNelly had been back in Burton tending to his farm and his family, the administration of Governor Richard Coke had concluded that a more permanent—and less despised—law enforcement agency than the state police was needed. Recent events had shown that there was still plenty of Indian fighting to do, but cattle rustling and other forms of banditry demonstrated there were too many Texas citizens not abiding by the laws of the state. And an exclamation point was the escalating violence of the Sutton-Taylor feud.

With the governor’s support, the Frontier Protection Act had been passed in April 1874. Coke now had the authority to raise and pay companies and send them to counties plagued by violence. The size of a company could have a wide range, anywhere from twenty-five to seventy-five men, who could serve up to a year. There was a range of monthly wages too, from forty dollars for a private up to one hundred dollars for a captain. Each man brought his own horse and pistols, with the state supplying a rifle, ammunition, and provisions.

Collectively, this new force was known as the Frontier Battalion. It was, essentially, the latest version of the Texas Rangers. The turning point in the state’s history, though, was that this time the police force was permanent—there would be continuity from the contingent of lawmen created in 1874 to the Texas Rangers of today.

Governor Coke selected the previously mentioned John B. Jones to be the “major,” or superintendent, of the Frontier Battalion. He would turn out to be an excellent choice. Jones, born in South Carolina in 1834, moved with his family to Texas four years later. They settled first in Travis County and eventually wound up in Navarro County. A good student, Jones attended Rutersville College near La Grange and Mount Zion College back in South Carolina.

As with many young men at the time, the Civil War interrupted his studies. Jones enlisted as a private in Terry’s Texas Rangers but left the regiment to join the Fifteenth Texas Infantry with the rank of captain. He later became assistant adjutant general of Polignac’s Brigade and was promoted to major at the end of the war. Perhaps still wearing his uniform, Jones went to Mexico hoping to locate a suitable site for an expatriate Confederate colony. This was not a far-fetched notion.

In Reconstruction-era Texas some families, haunted by ruined farms and ranches, a wrecked economy, political persecution, and freedmen exercising their newly won rights sought to build new lives in foreign lands. Indeed, some estimates contend that as many as three million people would leave the vanquished Confederate States of America and emigrate west of the Missouri River, to northern cities, to Canada, to Egypt (like Sibley), and to Mexico and Latin America. The mission undertaken by Major Jones, however, failed, and he returned to Texas.

In 1868, he was elected to the state legislature but was denied his seat by pro-Reconstruction Republicans. Jones focused on making money instead.

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