in Beeville, where even before the shooting twenty-one leading citizens (known as the “relators”) had filed a suit to oust the sheriff from office and they persisted with that effort. There were two or three hearings, the last one on February 22.
. . . it has become manifest, that he (Vail Ennis) is temperamentally, and by habits of thought and action, and expression, and by disposition to and acts of violence, wholly unsuited and unfitted to exercise the duties of said office, and that to permit him longer so to do would endanger the lives and liberties of the citizens and the public, and would disturb the peace of said county, in that during his aforesaid tenure he has, by his own violence, caused the deaths of at least five citizens, has assaulted, beaten, and tortured, without justification or excuse, various and sundry other citizens, has illegally arrested and held under false imprisonment, and violated the sacred civil rights of a large number of other citizens and individuals . . .
The action was abruptly dismissed by the district judge on the grounds that the relators had no legal standing for such a suit, leaving the town elders dazed and confused, and giving the last word to Sheriff Vail Ennis: “I harbor no ill will against those who sought to remove me from office. All I have to say with reference to the ouster suit is that I completely deny all the allegations contained in the petition.”
The shooting of the gentlemanly farmers was a tragedy. The Rodriguez funeral was the largest in the town’s history, larger than that of A. C. Jones, who brought the railroad to Beeville; larger than that of William McCurdy, who published the first newspaper in Beeville. Eight hundred signed the mourners’ register at the bullet-riddled house on the George West highway. More than a thousand, Hispanics and Anglos, nearly a quarter of the town’s population in 1945, attended the brothers’ burial on the Monday after the shootings. Father Berg, the new priest at Our Lady of Victory, officiated. The priest asked relatives and friends to refrain from vindictive acts.
Excessive violence by law enforcement. The debate went back to the Texas frontier, to the original Rangers. No group of lawmen had been more praised or vilified. Their history was a patchwork quilt of heroism, political confrontations, and harsh reprisals. After rustlers killed a Ranger in the Rio Grande Valley in the 1870s, Rangers shot, killed, and stacked twelve of the rustlers in the town square at Brownsville. During the decade that followed the Mexican Revolution of 1910, shootouts on the Rio Grande were said to have killed thousands of people, Mexicans and Anglos. Rangers became known to Mexican schoolchildren as the “rinches,” figures scarier than the Grimms’ ogres. Politicians never knew quite what to do with them. Time and again they were called to rescue Texas, only to be dismissed when politicians felt safe. Ma Ferguson expelled the entire Ranger corps when she became governor of Texas in 1933, leaving Texas towns as fair game for the new outlaws of the Depression, Machine Gun Kelly, and Raymond Hamilton. The Bonnie and Clyde rampage included the murders of two police officers in Missouri, a sheriff and a constable in Oklahoma, and two young highway patrolmen in Texas and the wounding and kidnapping of several other peace officers—all that before the ex–Texas Ranger Frank Hamer tracked them down.
Folklore favored the outlaw. Harry Wells, the “cowboy bandit,” had shot two Beeville peace officers in 1938. Newspaper reports dwelled on how handsome and daring he was. He was selected as the top news story of the year in Bee County. There was a ballad about Bonnie and Clyde. Another one about Gregorio Cortez. No ballad for Frank Hamer.
The deciding factor in the Rodriguez incident was that the Rodriguezes had guns. In Texas, you don’t pull a gun on someone unless you are prepared to use it. Everyone knew that. Alfred Allee knew it better than most. The Allee family history was one of shooting and being shot at. His grandfather, for whom he was named, had tracked down the bank robber Brack Cornett in 1888 and shot him in a gunfight at full gallop. That grandfather, as well as Allee’s father and great uncle, all Rangers, had died violent deaths.
Alfred Allee had little sympathy for those who complained of excessive force by peace officers. He had seen too much of excessive force by the other side.
And most of Texas agreed with him. In some places, there were lawyers who argued that it was better to free a hundred criminals than to convict one innocent man. That just made no sense in Texas.
4
Keep Austin Weird” T-shirts wouldn’t appear for another half century, but the capital was already well distanced from Old Texas by the 1940s. Austin was a two-hour drive from Beeville, but it was so much farther away.
The Texas soul was split between its two great institutions of higher learning. The University of Texas at Austin embraced the values of urban Texas—expansion, outreach, the future. Texas A&M College was the corps: honor, agrarianism, tradition. The University offered liberal arts, philosophy, the school of law—the broad understanding of the universe. A&M was devoted to engineering, geology, agriculture—learning how things worked, building things, making them better. The University of Texas aspired to be the finest institution in America, the Harvard of the west. Texas Aggies cared nothing for Harvard. They aimed to be the finest institution in Texas, which meant you were the best anywhere. The University was a fraternity and sorority school of eleven thousand men and women at the undergraduate level alone; it was set in the beauty of the hills of Central Texas. A&M was a military school of seven thousand males laid out on the stark lands of the Brazos River bottom. Austin was Athens. College Station was Sparta. The Aggies mocked the fraternity boys in Austin, where the only cowboys were the “Cowboys,” just another exclusive frat rat club, safely distanced from the working cowboy by fortunate birth. Texas students told jokes that made the Aggies into clodhoppers, coarse and obtuse.
In an earlier decade, Johnny Barnhart would have gone to Texas A&M. Joe Barnhart, Johnny’s great grandfather, had left the Pennsylvania Dutch country to join the Texas Army in 1836, the year of Goliad, the Alamo, and San Jacinto. When Texas won its independence, the army settled north of Austin, near Round Rock, where he and his family farmed and ranched for fifty years. Johnny’s grandfather, another Joe Barnhart, sold out in the 1890s and bought a bigger spread near Childress, in the Texas panhandle. Johnny had heard his grandfather tell about seeing the bullet-ridden body of the outlaw Sam Bass at the blacksmith’s shop in Round Rock in 1878. Johnny’s father, the third Joe Barnhart, was a trick-riding cowboy good enough to be a U.S. Cavalry riding instructor at the start of World War I. Joe Barnhart had left ranching long ago to establish an insurance and real estate business. His older son, Joe IV, studied medicine. Johnny was in law school. Most sons of turn-of-the-century ranchers had moved on. In 1900, four of five Texans were rural. By the end of World War II, rural Texans would be less than half the population. By 1950, more than 60 percent of Texans would be classified as city folks. In downtown Beeville, Joe Barnhart and his friends wore business suits and fedoras, even in summer.
Each year on Thanksgiving Day, the mutual denigration between the Aggies and the Longhorns was celebrated on the football field. For the Longhorns, the game was a reason for the last big party of the season. For the Aggies, it was the defense of Texas tradition. Dead serious, jaws set, the Aggie band took the field in military uniforms, horns and drums resounding with
GOOD-BYE to Texas University, Farewell to the orange and the white,
Here’s to the good old Texas Aggies, they are the ones who show
the fight! fight! fight!
The Texas Aggies, like everyone else playing against time, rarely won the Thanksgiving Day game. They lost again that year that Johnny led the yells: 6–0.
Johnny’s year as head pep leader saw UT’s first female cheerleader. Patsy Goff was so good at tumbling that the student body revolted against the no-females policy mandated by the band director, Colonel Hurt. (The colonel, a displaced Englishman, feared the sight of bare female legs would distract the public from the band’s on-field performance.) The others on the pep squad were a Texas boy named Coy Foster, and
