‘He was every inch a fightin’ man’ — Part I

In August 1931, the great pulp adventure writer Robert E. Howard wrote in a letter to H.P. Lovecraft:

“If I could choose the age in which I was to live, I can think of no better epoch than this: to have been born about a hundred years earlier than I was, to have grown up on the Southwestern frontier, to have fought through the Texas Revolution and taken a part in San Jacinto, to have served as a soldier in the war with Mexico, to have gone to California with the ’49ers, and to have fallen in some great battle of the Civil War…”

Howard was a Texan and knew his history, so there is every possibility that he knew he was describing the life and career of Ben McCulloch.

If there were a Mount Rushmore for Frontier Partisans, Ben McCulloch’s stern visage would be staring down from it, with “eyes of lead and steel forged into tools of war,” as the Steve Earle song goes..

It’s strange that the ace Texas Ranger scout and spy isn’t better known today; by the beginning of the American Civil War he was so famous that the Northern press was convinced he had ridden up from Texas with a gang of wild cutthroats and was going to swoop down on Washington, D.C., capture Lincoln and single-handedly win Southern Independence.

Ol’ Ben had earned that kind of outlandish reputation with deeds of valor that have made warriors the heroes of song and story for millennia. But history is capricious and McCulloch is now little known except to frontier history and Civil War buffs. Let this stand as a small way of recapturing the luster of his name…

Ben McCulloch was born and bred Frontier Partisan. A native of Tennessee, the young man followed David Crockett to Texas; a missed Christmas rendezvous with Crockett in Nacadoches in 1835 and a fortuitous case of the measles left him too far behind to end up at the Alamo, but close enough to be blooded at San Jacinto, where he manned one of the legendary Twin Sisters cannon.

From then on, Ben was a dedicated fighting man. He played a prominent role in the Texas Rangers’ victory at Plum Creek in 1840, when they caught up with and harried a massive Comanche war party that had raided all the way to the Gulf of Mexico and sacked the coastal town of Linnville.

But it was in the Mexican War of 1846 that Ben McCulloch truly made his name.

Ben formed a company to serve under another legendary frontier partisan, Jack Hays. His duties were primarily scouting and reconnaissance, duty that chafed at men who were spoiling for a fight with Mexicans who, over the past decade, had become enemies in a blood feud.

Hays’ Rangers came from a culture steeped in feud, going back to the bloody English/Scottish Borders of the 16^th Century. They were a rough lot, though not the semi-barbarians they have often been portrayed to be. Many were professional men — doctors, lawyers, newspaper editors — whose accomplishments and social standing belied their “outlaw appearance.”

 

General Zachary Taylor described them thus:

“One species of mounted force, peculiar to the western frontier of the United States is … efficient. The inhabitants of that frontier, from their vicinity to hostile Indians, are well practiced in partisan warfare, and although they will not easily submit to discipline, yet take the field in rough, uncouth habiliments, and, following some leader chosen for his talent and bravery, perform partisan duties in a manner hardly to be surpassed.”

The indiscipline of the Texas Rangers and the blood-feud nature of their personal war with Mexicans occasionally led to “some disgraceful atrocities… perpetrated by them,” according to one U.S. Army officer. Yet, the Rangers played an essential role in the capture of the city of Monterrey in northern Mexico.

McCulloch’s Rangers were part of a force that swung around the city to the southwest and interdicted the Saltillo Road to prevent reinforcements from reaching the beleaguered city. McCulloch’s men were involed in a couple of sharp skirmishes with Mexican cavalry , then participated in the storming of Federal Hill and Independence Hill, the commanding heights that protected the city’s perimeter. The Rangers and regular troops stormed the defensive works and inflicted severe casualties, taking the fortified Bishops Palace which the Rangers, ever practical, called simply The Black Fort.

Much to his and his men’s disgust, the Rangers were then pulled out to conduct more recon, which meant they missed most of the bitter house-to-house street fighting that followed in Monterrey.

Once cut loose from recon and picket duty, Ol’ Ben and his Rangers charged into the city on horseback, “yelling like Indians and discharging their rifles at the Mexicans on the rooftops, a few of whom still continued to fire upon them as they passed along the street.”

A frightened citizen said:

“My heart almost failed me failed me… The Texians, with their coarse hickory shirts and trowsers confined by a leather strap to their hips, their slouched hats, and their sweat and powder-begrimed faces certainly presented a most brigandish appearance!”

Col. Jefferson Davis of the Mississippi Rifles (future president of the Confederate States of America) observed stiffly that “This was no place, sir, for the charge of horsemen.”

Davis and McCulloch never would get along.

The Mexicans were rooted out and pushed into the city’s plaza, where they suffered under American artillery fire. The Texans were whetting their Bowie knives in anticipation of bloody payback for several Mexican slaughters of Texans during the War of Independence and during the Mier Expedition of 1842. But Zachary Taylor scotched those hopes, negotiating a cease fire and surrender of Monterrey, granting the Mexican commander Ampudia and his army safe conduct to retire southward. McCulloch’s Rangers were mightily pissed off. Once of Taylor’s guard’s wrote:

“Ben McCulloch’s Texas Rangers were still loud in their expressions of indignation; threats were made against General Taylor and the old hero deemed it necessary to double the Dragoon guard around his Headquarters.”

The army provided Ampudia and his men an escort to protect them from the angry, bloodthirsty Texans.

The Rangers, most of them, were mustered out of service shortly after the capture of Monterrey. McCulloch recruited another band and went back to war. He’d made a hero’s reputation for himself at Monterrey, but his most significant contribution to the American defeat of Mexico was yet to come.