Of the four men that fought the Round Rock battle with Sam Bass and his gang all are dead: General J.B. Jones, and Rangers R.C. Ware, Chris Connor, and George Harold. Of the ten men that made the long ride from San Saba to Round Rock only two are now alive—Lieutenant N.O. Reynolds and myself.
A WINTER OF QUIET AND A TRANSFER
In the fall of 1878 a man named Dowdy moved from South Texas and settled on the headwaters of the Johnson Fork of the Guadalupe River in Kerr County. His family consisted of himself, wife, three grown daughters, a grown son, and a young son twelve or fourteen years old. Mr. Dowdy owned two or three thousand sheep and was grazing them on some fine upland pasture just above his home. He contracted for his winter supply of corn, and when the first load of grain arrived at the ranch the three girls walked out half a mile to where the sheep were grazing to stay with their younger brother while the elder returned to the ranch to measure and receive the corn. When young Mr. Dowdy returned to the sheep an hour later he was horrified to find that his three sisters and his little brother had been massacred by a band of roving Indians. From the signs on a high bluff nearby the sheep and their herders had been under observation by the redskins for some time and, seeing the only man leave, the Indians descended upon the defenseless girls and boy and killed them. As there was no ranger company within one hundred miles of Kerr County at the time, a party of frontiersmen quickly gathered and followed the murderers, but after pursuing them for nearly two hundred miles the posse lost the trail in the rough Devil's River country.
Kerr County then called for rangers, and General Jones ordered Lieutenant Reynolds to proceed to that county and go into camp for the winter at the Dowdy ranch. This descent upon the Dowdy family was the last raid ever made by Indians in Kerr County, and was perhaps the most heart-rending. We herded our horses that winter on the very ground where the unfortunate young Misses Dowdy and their brother were killed. At the time they were murdered the ground was soft and muddy from a recent rain, so one could see for months afterward where the poor girls had run on foot while the Indians charged on horseback. I remember one of the young ladies ran nearly four hundred yards before she was overtaken and shot full of arrows by a heartless redskin. These murderers were probably Kickapoos and Lipans that lived in the Santa Rosa Mountains, Old Mexico, and frequently raided Southwest Texas, stole hundreds of horses and killed many people. While guarding their horses on the ground where the Dowdy family was killed the ranger boys built a rock monument eight or ten feet high to mark the spot where the victims fell.
Lieutenant Reynolds kept scouting parties in the field at intervals throughout the winter but, like lightning, Indians never strike twice in the same place. The winter of 1878-79 was the quietest one I ever spent as a ranger. Kerr County was pretty well cleaned of outlaws and we made fewer arrests that season than ever before.
The rangers encountered but one real bad man in Kerr County. His name was Eli Wixon, and he was wanted for murder in East Texas. It was known that Wixon would be at the polls of the county precincts to vote on election day, November, 1878, so Lieutenant Reynolds sent Corporal Warren and Privates Will Banister and Abe Anglin to arrest Wixon. Corporal Warren found his man at the polls and lost no time in telling Wixon what he was there for, and ordered him to unbuckle his belt and drop his pistol. Wixon hesitated and finally called on his friends to protect him from the rangers.
The crowd came to his relief, and for a time it looked as if there would be trouble. Wixon abused the rangers, called them a set of dirty dogs, and dared them to shoot him. Corporal Warren was brave and resolute. He told Wixon his abuse did not amount to anything; that the rangers were there to arrest him and were going to do it. The corporal warned the citizens to be careful how they broke the law and if they started anything he declared Wixon would be the first man killed.