Texas Boomtowns:: A History of Blood and Oil by Haile Bartee

Author:Haile, Bartee [Haile, Bartee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2015-11-30T05:00:00+00:00

Governor Pat Neff had zero tolerance for lawbreakers in Mexia. Library of Congress .

Governor Neff was ready to move against the boomtown lawbreakers by December 1921 but did not want to go off half-cocked. Any decision to intervene had to be based on facts rather than the emotional appeals and anecdotal evidence from the letter-writers. To that end, he ordered Adjutant General Thomas D. Barton of the Texas National Guard to send his best agent to Mexia on an undercover investigation. H.C. Greathouse took his time devoting a full week to the assignment. The secret agent’s shocking report “was of such a nature that it was hard to believe” Barton informed the governor, causing the two to agree they needed a second opinion. Greathouse returned to Mexia in the company of a federal agent. Their joint finding, Barton told Neff, was “even worse than the one submitted by Greathouse to begin with.”

As Neff well knew, martial law and National Guard occupation rubbed most Texans the wrong way if such drastic action was not taken as the last resort only after all other remedies had proved ineffective. The Rangers, as usual, were confident they could handle the situation in Mexia on their own. The governor had his doubts, but he was willing to let them try under two conditions: they would concentrate on the Winter Garden and Chicken Farm with the Adjutant General and Assistant Attorney General Clifford Stone riding shotgun. Although it went against the Rangers’ grain to limit the scope of their clean-up and, worse yet, to have someone looking over their shoulder, they reluctantly agreed to Neff ’s conditions.

Two companies of Texas Rangers caught the clubs completely by surprise with simultaneous raids on January 7, 1922, which happened to be a busy Saturday night. Fortunately for all concerned, the armed guards at both locations offered no resistance and admitted the khaki callers into the inner sanctum of both establishments. Besides gambling equipment, six hundred quarts of whiskey and a substantial stash of narcotics, the raiders confiscated “a virtual arsenal of weapons.” That a mere twenty-two men were taken to jail could only have meant the customers and female employees were let go.

The number-two man in the Attorney General’s Office summoned every official responsible for enforcing the law in Limestone and Freestone Counties to a meeting the following day at the Winter Garden. The district judge, district attorney, county attorneys, county judges and county sheriffs had the gall to play dumb, insisting they were unaware the two notorious nightspots even existed. Their denials were an insult to the intelligence of Clifford Stone and the governor and a clear indication that the powers-that-be were happy with the status quo.

Stone and Adjutant General Barton had every intention of giving the Rangers the time needed to sweep Mexia clean, but the roadblocks thrown in their way by local authorities sabotaged that option. Less than forty-eight hours after the Winter Garden meeting, the frustrated pair gave the governor their recommendation. The only remedy for what was ailing Mexia was a strong dose of martial law administered by the National Guard.

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