A Texas Cowboy Recalls Anti-Mexican Violence
Background: Roland Warnock grew up in south Texas and was a ranch hand in Hidalgo County in 1915. He witnessed the murder of Jesus Bazán and Antonio Longoria near the Lane Ranch where Texas Rangers were encamped and helped to bury their bodies. In 1973, he recalled these events in an oral history recorded by his grandson, Kirby Warnock who was a student at Baylor University at the time. Kirby Warnock went on to publish the oral memoir as Texas Cowboy in 1992 and turn it into a film entitled Border Bandits in 2004.
In 1911 there were quite a few raids going on up and down the border. There was a revolution going on in Mexico and both sides fought back and forth into the interior and up and down the border. . . .
When they brought the Rangers in there, they stopped a lot of it. They killed lots of Mexicans and several innocent ones that I knew of. The Rangers differed from the soldiers in that a soldier would yell, “Halt!" and then shoot. The Rangers shot and then yelled, "Halt!” It was just as rough as the dickens there for several years, and the bad part was that I was right in the middle of it. . . .
In the summer of 1915, we were leaving out early one morning to gather some cattle that were twenty miles east of the main headquarters. There were five of us with 60 saddle horses. We passed in front of what is known as the McAllen Ranch. There was a strong southeast wind blowing as we were moving to the east. About the time that we passed this McAllen Ranch, there were fourteen Mexican bandits there who had come to kill old man McAllen. McAllen's family lived in Brownsville where they had a nice home. He stayed out at the ranch during the summertime and had a Mexican woman cook and a girl there.... This girl's parents back in Mexico did not care a lot for these living arrangements. These fourteen Mexicans had been sent in there by that girl's family to kill old man McAllen. …
This woman went to the door and asked them in Spanish what they wanted. Their reply was, “We want McAllen's head.” She went back inside to where he was asleep and woke him and told him what was out there … He placed a gun by each window and moved around the house shooting and moving from spot to spot. Each time he fired, the Mexicans would pepper that window, but he would move on to another one and fire again. They shot from sunup until noon. He killed three horses and two men in front of the ranch. Finally, they rode away, but as they did one of them hollered back, “That's okay, we have 80 more men and we'll be back. . . ”
What they [the group of Mexicans] had done was to ride over to a little Mexican farm about three miles from the Guadalupe headquarters. Those Mexicans [Jesus Bazán and Antonio Longoria] took them in, dressed their wounds and fed their horses. If they hadn't, the bandits would have killed them.
About one o'clock that afternoon, those Mexicans that had aided the bandits rode up to Lane's ranch [where Texas Rangers were encamped] and called him out. What was said between them we never did know, but they turned and rode back to their farm. The captain of the Rangers recognized them and waited until they got about 300 yards from the headquarters and began to follow them. These two Mexicans pulled over to the side of the road to let them pass, and when they did, the Rangers just shot them off their horses, turned around and went back to the ranch and went back to sleep.
About two days later we could hardly sleep because of the stench. Human scent is the worst in the world. We went over there and found the bodies still lying where they had been shot. We buried them the morning of September 29, 1915. Their horses wandered back to their farms, and when the families found out what had happened, they pulled up everything and left, never to come back. These Mexicans were afraid that if they told the Rangers anything, the bandits would kill them, but if they hadn't helped the bandits then the bandits would have killed them. They were right in the middle of it and didn't know what to do. You felt sorry for them. One of these men I knew real well, old 67-year-old Jesus Bazán.
It was some mighty dirty work going on then. None of this stuff ever got in the papers and no one investigated it as far as I know. There were so many innocent people killed in that mess that it just made you sick to your heart to see it happening. If those ranchers caught a Mexican with a bunch of cattle, they didn't ask him where he got them, they killed him. I knew of one time when they hung 18 men in a grove of trees. A man's life just wasn't worth much at all.
Source:
Texas Cowboy by Roland A. Warnock as told to Kirby F. Warnock, Trans Peco Productions, 1992, pp. 41–50.