Taming the Nueces Strip

Texas always has been a rowdy place. In 1822, the original anglo settlers began invading what was then Mexico at the invitation of the Mexican government, which hoped American immigrants would do away with the out-of-control Comanches. Texans dispensed with the Comanches in the 1870s, foisting them off on Oklahoma, but long before that, the Texans ran off the Mexican government.

From 1836 to 1845, Texas looked something like the map above. The green parts became the Republic of Texas as the result of treaties signed by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana after Sam Houston and his ragtag-but-zealous army caught the general napping at San Jacinto. The treaties set the boundary between Texas and Mexico at the Rio Grande.

This caused a bit of a fuss in the Mexican capital, because Santa Ana did not possess the authority to dispose of large chunks of land with the swipe of a pen. Mexico eventually conceded Texas could have the dark-green part of the map, but the light-green part still belonged to Mexico. Arguments ensued.

While Texas and Mexico were carefully avoiding one another in the disputed territory, outlaws, rustlers, and other lawless types moved into the patch between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. After all, no respectable outlaw ever lets a perfectly good blind spot on the law-enforcement radar go to waste. The area, 150 miles wide by about 400 miles long, came to be known as the Nueces Strip.

 In 1845, the United States annexed all of the land claimed by Texas, including the disputed territory, and came to military blows with Mexico over the insult. By the time the two countries signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 to settle once and for all who owned what — sort of — the lawless element was firmly entrenched in the strip of cactus and scrub between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. For nearly thirty years, brigands raised havoc — robbing, looting, raping, rustling, and killing — on both sides of the border before retreating to ranchos and other hideouts in no-man's land.

That began to change in 1875 when Texas Ranger Captain Leander McNelly was charged with bringing order to the Nueces Strip. Newly re-formed after being disbanded for about ten years during the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Rangers were determined to clean up the cesspool harboring notorious toughs like King Fisher and Juan Cortina. With a company of forty hand-picked men known as the Special Force, McNelly accomplished his task in two years … in some cases by behaving at least as badly as the outlaws. McNelly was known for brutal — sometimes downright illegal — tactics, including torturing information from some prisoners and hanging others. He and his men also made a number of unauthorized border crossings in pursuit of rustlers, nearly provoking international incidents.

Nevertheless, the “Little McNellys” got the job done. By the time McNelly was relieved of command in 1876, the Nueces Strip was a safer place. Though he remains controversial in some circles, the residents of South Texas raised funds and erected a monument in his honor.

The Nueces Strip plays a small role in “The Second-Best Ranger in Texas,” my contribution to Prairie Rose Publications’ new anthology, Hearts and Spurs. An excerpt of the story is here; the book is available in print and most e-formats at your favorite online bookstore.

Cowboys and ... Nuns?

Sister Vincent Cottier, one of ten
Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word
who died during the 1900 Storm.
(courtesy Sisters of Charity
of the Incarnate Word, Houston)

When the sun rose on Sept. 9, 1900, the island city of Galveston, Texas, lay in ruins. What would come to be called The Great Storm, a hurricane of massive proportions, had roared ashore from the Gulf of Mexico overnight, sweeping “the Wall Street of the Southwest” from the face of the Earth.

Over the following weeks, rescuers pulled more than 6,000 bodies from the rubble, piled the remains on the beach, and burned them to prevent an outbreak of disease. Among the departed, discovered amid the wreckage of St. Mary’s Orphan Asylum, were the bodies of ninety children ages 2 to 13 and all ten Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word. In a valiant, yet ultimately futile, attempt to save the children from floodwaters that rose to twenty feet above sea level, each sister bound six to eight orphans to her waist with a length of clothesline. The lines tangled in debris as the water destroyed the only home some of the children had ever known.

All that survived of the orphanage were the three oldest boys and an old French seafaring hymn: “Queen of the Waves.” To this day, every Sept. 8, the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word worldwide sing the hymn in honor of the sisters and orphans who died in what remains the deadliest natural disaster ever to strike U.S. soil.

Two postulants from the Congregation of the Incarnate Word
in San Antonio, Texas, ca. 1890. (courtesy University of
Texas at San Antonio’s Institute of Texan Cultures)

Established in Galveston in 1866 by three Catholic sisters from France, the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word is a congregation of women religious. Not technically nuns because they take perpetual simple vows instead of perpetual solemn vows and work among secular society instead of living in seclusion behind cloistered walls, they nevertheless wear habits and bear the title “Sister.” Today the original congregation is based in Houston, but back then Galveston seemed an ideal spot for the women to build a convent, an orphanage, and a hospital. By 1869, they had founded a second congregation in San Antonio. From there, the sisters expanded to other cities in Texas, including Amarillo, and even farther west, all the way to California. In 2013, the sisters operated missions in Ireland, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Kenya in addition to the United States.

Sister Cleophas Hurst, first administrator
of St. Anthony’s Sanitarium in Amarillo,
Texas, 1901. (courtesy Sisters of Charity
of the Incarnate Word, San Antonio)

Armed with faith instead of guns, the sisters did their part to civilize Texas’s notoriously wild frontier. They did not do so without significant hardship. Catholics often were not well-tolerated in 19th Century America, although in Galveston the sisters were admired and even loved for their industry and benevolence. That benevolence led to the deaths of two of the original three Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, who perished during Galveston’s yellow fever epidemic of 1867.

As a Galvestonian, the history of the island city and its diverse people fascinates me. I continue to hope for inspiration that will grow into a story set here, where the past overflows with tales of adventure dating back well before the pirate Jean Lafitte built the fortified mansion Maison Rouge on Galveston in 1815. In the meantime, the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word provided the inspiration for the heroine in a short story that appears in Prairie Rose Publications’ new western historical anthology, Hearts and Spurs. The collection of short stories by Linda Broday, Livia J. Washburn, Cheryl Pierson, Sarah J. McNeal, Tanya Hanson, Jacquie Rogers, Tracy Garrett, Phyliss Miranda, and me, is available at your favorite online bookstore in print and most e-formats.

“The Second-Best Ranger in Texas”

A washed-up Texas Ranger. A failed nun with a violent past. A love that will redeem them both.

His partner’s grisly death destroyed Texas Ranger Quinn Barclay. Cashiered for drunkenness and refusal to follow orders, he sets out to fulfill his partner’s dying request, armed only with a saloon girl’s name.

Sister María Tomás thought she wanted to become a nun, but five years as a postulant have convinced her childhood dreams aren’t always meant to be. At last ready to relinquish the temporary vows she never should have made, she begs the only man she trusts to collect her from a mission in the middle of nowhere.

When the ex-Ranger’s quest collides with the ex-nun’s plea in a burned-out border town, unexpected love blooms among shared memories of the dead man who was a brother to them both.

Too bad he was also the only man who could have warned them about the carnage to come.

(Read an excerpt.)


(This post originally appeared at Sweethearts of the West, where I blog on the 12th of each month.)