May 21, 1865---Of Bounty Hunters and "Regulators."

MAY 21, 1865:            

Mary Martin, a Christian Missionary in China, arrives by ship in San Francisco. After 69 days at sea, Mary writes in her diary:

We were greatly shocked with the news we heard on our arrival this morning of the assassination of President Lincoln but very glad to learn that the war is over and that slavery is abolished. 

As General Edmund Kirby Smith C.S.A. marches westward from Shreveport to Houston he is forced to take stock of his military situation. Many of his Shreveport troops --- almost 2/3rds of 6,000 --- eventually disappear into the Louisiana backcountry or the wilds of Texas as the column moves west.

A Council of War at Texas Senator Louis T. Wigfall’s home brings more bad news. Smith discovers that he is right in believing that there are 40,000 men in gray under arms in Texas. In fact, there may even be more. Unfortunately, most of them have degenerated from soldiers to bushwhackers. Texas, once a land of limitless vistas, cattle and sheep ranches, and rice and cotton plantations, is now a land of lawless road agents, highwaymen, and plunderers who victimize isolated towns, attack lonely ranch houses, rob stagecoaches at gunpoint, and kill each other casually over whatever crude spoils they can find. Mercenary gunslingers act as hirelings to protect towns that can afford them, and are paid in gold by rich men to guard mines and pasturelands. Angry sociopaths, for whom the war cannot end, hunt down real and imagined enemies. Unlucky men die over card games and craps, bad coffee, and spilled rotgut whiskey. Bounty Hunters and “Regulators” seek out men who have killed so that they too can be killed. The value of a life is measured in a few coins, or maybe a plate of bacon and beans and a place to sleep. Brutal men who have killed for no other reason than the sheer enjoyment of it face each other down at high noon in the streets of nameless small boom towns, and the losers in these contests are dragged off to be buried in waste grounds that soon get the universal nickname “Boot Hill.”  Welcome to the Wild Wild West.

Union troops are holding much of the northern panhandle; Mexican bandits and freedom fighters are using the southern borderlands as a sanctuary; Kiowas and Comanches rule the western reaches of the State; sprawling Texas has many hard-core Unionists who control swaths of the State unchallenged.

Governor Pendleton Murrah has been begging for more troops for over a year in order to restore order, and tells Smith he intends to “nationalize” Smith’s Confederate Army to deal with the marauders.

Smith wants to fight the Union. When he says this, he is nearly laughed out of the room.  Murrah explains that he has a few thinned-out regiments on hand and a couple of hundred Texas Rangers to cover a quarter of a million square miles of land, that the Yankee blockade is ironbound along the coasts, and that many towns and cities are under U.S. control.  The consensus is that although it is the heart of “Kirby Smithdom” Texas is not the place for a last stand.

When Smith asks if any of the leaderless men can be cajoled back into Confederate ranks, he is told yes, but most only for a price. Smith has little specie, and Confederate money is now worth less than the paper it is printed on.

Hearing all this, Smith begins to make other plans. After all, he was the supervising architect of the Capitol before the war. With any luck he can build a new Confederacy. But if not in Texas, then where?