Texas Singularities: Prairie Dog Lawyers, Peg Leg Stage Robberies and Mysterious Malakoff Men

By Clay Coppedge and Sarah Haynes

Texas, that most singular of states, conceals an entire parade of peculiar events and exceptional people in the back pages of its history books. A Lone Star man once (and only once) tried to bulldog a steer from an airplane. One small Texas town was attacked by the Japanese, while another was "liberated" from America during the Cold War. Texan career choices include goat gland doctor, rubbing doctor, striking cowboy and singing cowboy, not to mention swatter, tangler and dunker. From gunslinger Sally Skull to would-be rainmaker R.G. Dyrenforth, Clay Coppedge collects the distinctive odds and ends of Texan lore.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Feb 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9781439666227

Clay Coppedge

Clay Coppedge has published four collections of his Texas history columns, a history of baseball in Texas and a memoir. His work has appeared in a wide range of magazines, including Acres USA, Field & Stream, Progressive Farmer, Texas Co-op Power and Texas Highways. He lives and writes just outside of Walburg, Texas.

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PART I

GREAT PRETENDERS

WILLIAM F. DRANNAN TOLD IT LIKE IT WASN’T

In two books that he wrote about his life, William F. Drannan described himself as the Chief of Scouts for the U.S. Army and a contemporary and brother-in-arms of such American icons as Kit Carson, Jim Bridger and General George Crook.

Drannan wrote the books late in life, about the same time he ended up living in Mineral Wells, hawking his books on street corners and at county fairs. He published his first book, Thirty-One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains, in 1900, when he was sixty-eight. Captain W.F. Drannan, Chief of Scouts came out ten years later. The fabled frontier was gone but Drannan was still around, and his books sold well. The stories resonated with young boys in particular because they portray a life full of adventure that was the fundamental stuff of their dreams.

One of those boys was Robert E. Howard of Cross Plains, who would grow up to write the Conan the Barbarian series and many other novels of sword, sorcery and fantasy. Howard loved Drannan’s books and recalled seeing the author in Mineral Wells as a little, worn old man in the stained and faded buckskins of a vanished age, friendless and penniless.

In a letter to H.P. Lovecraft, Howard lamented what a lousy ending it was for a man whose faded blue eyes had once looked on the awesome panorama of untracked prairie and sky-etched mountain, who had ridden at the side of Kit Carson, guided the wagon-trains across the deserts to California, drunk and reveled in the camps of the buffalo-hunters, and fought hand to hand with painted Sioux and wild Comanche. Another writer recalled seeing Drannan during the same time and declared that he reeked of Indians, buffalo and beaver.

William Drannan as an old man in Mineral Wells. findagrave.com.

Others, however, smelled a rat.

One of those people was W.N. Bates, who wrote the 1954 book Frontier Legend: Texas Finale of Capt. William F. Drannan, Pseudo Frontier Comrade of Kit Carson. The book claimed Drannan made up the material in the books and didn’t even write them—his wife did. That none of the histories or biographies of Kit Carson and the others mentions Drannan suggest that Bates had it figured about right, but the truth probably exists somewhere between Drannan’s stories and Bates’s debunking.

Was Drannan chief of scouts during the Modoc War, as he claimed? Not a chance. That distinction belonged to Donald Mackay, known as Daring Don Mackay in a dime novel version of his life. Was Drannan even where he said he was in those books? Did he actually gaze upon that awesome panorama of untracked prairie and sky-etched mountain as Howard imagined? Probably.

Students of the Modoc War, which pitted the U.S. Army against the Modoc tribe of northern California and southern Oregon and figured prominently in Drannan’s second book, have noted that Drannan was generally wrong about major events but surprisingly accurate about some of the details. Recently discovered historical notes show Drannan working as a civilian contractor for the army during the Modoc War, which puts him where he said he was when he said he was there.

Most intriguing of all is a carved rock that somebody found southeast of present-day Prescott, Arizona, a few years ago. An inscription on the rock read: Killed Indians Here, 1849, Willie Drannan. Drannan would have been seventeen at the time, which was also the same time that Kit Carson was in Arizona. Archaeologists and historians examined the rock and determined that it was probably authentic.

This doesn’t mean Drannan’s books describe events as they actually unfolded. All it means is that the old man with long hair and buckskins walking around Mineral Wells in the 1900s had seen some things and done some things, just not all the things he claimed to have seen and done.

The real shame here is that Drannan didn’t use his obviously vivid imagination to write novels grounded in his experiences instead of claiming to be the real-life hero of his stories. Historians would read his books not to point out inaccuracies but for clues about how people during that time and in that place talked, thought and lived and how the weather was. He’d be a real artist, not a con artist.

But it didn’t work out that way. Drannan died in 1913 and is buried in Mineral Wells’ Elmwood Cemetery. A stone placed at his gravesite identifies him as having been a Texas Ranger. He wasn’t.

THE REAL TEXAS JACK

Of the several men known to history as Texas Jack, Jack Omohundro is the most well known, though he comes to us now as little more than a footnote. The public celebrated the life he lived on the frontier, hunting buffalo and battling various hostile tribes even as that era was fading into history.

Like his good friend Buffalo Bill Cody, Texas Jack was a superstar of early twentieth-century American culture. Both men were tall, handsome and not opposed to a little self-promotion. While Buffalo Bill went on to personify the frontiersman as mythic hero in America’s popular culture, Texas Jack died too young to cash in on the fame and fortune of being a rootin’ tootin’ product and myth-maker of the Old West.

Born in Virginia, Omohundro first came to Texas as a teenager to work as a cowboy. Still just a kid when the Civil War started, he served the Confederacy as a courier and scout. His fellow soldiers called him the Boy Scout of the Confederacy. When the war ended, he returned to cowboy life and earned the nickname Texas Jack during a cattle drive to Tennessee. Then he went and got famous.

Both Texas Jack and Buffalo Bill served as hunting guides on several well-publicized hunts, including one featuring Russian grand duke Alexei. These events, covered by news organizations and dime novelists the world over, helped create a market for tall and handsome men named Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack.

Ned Buntline, Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack. The Texas Jack Association.

Beyond Texas Jack’s celebrity façade, however, was a bona fide frontier scout who was good enough at what he did that armies put their collective fates in his hands. By all accounts, he was an expert guide, tracker and marksman. The other Texas Jack spent part of the year on the East Coast, playing himself on stage. Yes, he was a great pretender, but Texas Jack was also the genuine article. He introduced roping acts to the American stage, a contribution that Will Rogers and others would exploit for years to come. He starred with Buffalo Bill in the Ned Buntline production of Scouts of the Prairie in 1872 and the next year in a renamed Scouts of the Plains. Cody and Texas Jack remained close friends, but relations with Buntline were not so cordial. Cody never worked with him again.

Texas Jack was on old friend of mine, Cody said of Omohundro in 1908. I learned to know him and respect his bravery and ability.…He was a whole-souled, brave and good-hearted man.

Omohundro had to contend with several other people who billed themselves as Texas Jack, either onstage or in real life. Some did not bring credit to the name, such as one man who may have never stepped foot in Texas. Asked why he called himself Texas Jack, he replied, Because I’m from Virginia. But there was really only one Texas Jack.

We can also say that Texas Jack married well when he wed his costar Giuseppina (Josephine) Morlacchi, known to stage audiences as the peerless Morlacchi. Just as Texas Jack brought roping acts to the theater, Morlacchi introduced Americans to the cancan.

Omohundro led a storybook life in many ways, but the script ended too soon. He died suddenly in 1880 after coming down with pneumonia following a performance in Leadville, Colorado. A series of dime novels with titles like Texas Jack: The Lasso King kept him in the public eye until the books went out of print. The National Cowboy Hall of Fame admitted Omohundro to the Hall of Great Western Performers in 1994. Unlike some others in the same hall, Texas Jack also played his roles in real life.

THE SOUTH AMERICA KID

We could marvel at the life and times of Milt Hinkle even without references to Old West legends such as Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Just accepting the fact that he was born on the XIT Ranch in Bovina, Texas, in 1881, the son of George Hinkle, who listed his occupation at that time as buffalo hide dealer and saloon owner, is enough to pique curiosity. That he was born when such an occupation as buffalo hide dealer existed and didn’t die until three years after humans walked on the moon tells us this man must’ve told some great stories. And he did. Some of them were true.

Late in his life, Hinkle related his stories for magazines like True West, Old West and Frontier Times. He had barely a third grade education and hired ghostwriters to polish his stories for the magazines, which eagerly published his firsthand accounts of being on a first-name basis with many Old West legends.

According to Hinkle, he rode with Butch and Sundance in Bolivia and went by the rather unimaginative name of The South America Kid. He always claimed that Butch Cassidy didn’t die in Bolivia in 1908 as the popular 1970s movie with Robert Redford and Paul Newman would have us believe. Hinkle said he promised to keep Cassidy’s secret as long as he—Cassidy—was alive. In fairness, we note that Hinkle is not the only one to make the same claim.

Hinkle’s father, the aforementioned buffalo hide dealer George Hinkle, supplied Milt with some of his most enduring stories. Apparently, George wasn’t much of a presence in young Milt’s life, but he no doubt stopped by long enough to spin a few yarns about his time in Dodge City, where he defeated incumbent Bat Masterson for sheriff in 1877. Other stories, passed down from one generation to the next, don’t hold up. George told his son how he threw a rowdy Masterson out of a saloon one night, then got the drop on an agitated Wyatt Earp the next night.

Robert K. DeArment, Masterson’s biographer, doesn’t trust the tale. DeArment notes that George Hinkle labored at various times as a cowboy, scout, soldier, hide and bone buyer, prizefighter, wrestler, railroad worker, blacksmith, teamster and bartender in addition to serving four years as chief law officer of turbulent Ford County.