Wayne Pounds, Prof. Emeritus
Aoyama Gakuin Univ., Tokyo
Editor’s preliminary note: The story told below came to me in the torn pages of a manuscript, and it came by such a devious and unexpected route it strains credulity to think of it now. If memory serves, I got it about 1925 from a junkman in Ardmore we called Old Man Webster who drove his horse and wagon around town picking up discarded household things he thought he could sell for a nickel. Myself, I’m an amateur student of history, which means I have a taste for old scraps of writing, and I paid him a dime for the envelope stuffed with handwritten papers and a few brittle news clippings. The manuscript was a pile of loose sheets, irregular sized paper, foxed brown and yellow, written in pencil and stained with coffee or whiskey and with the pages unnumbered. I have regularized the author’s haphazard grammar and erratic spelling and supplied some capital letters and punctuation. I have left bits of his language to give the flavor and the reader may find some of it abrasive, but I doubt if it is more abrasive than the rope Alec Boutwell coiled in the thirteen loops of a hangman’s noose and fitted around the naked necks of forty condemned men.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, 20 Feb 1864
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Burneyville I.T. 1880
The whole kit and caboodle of them was nigra-lovin Yankee bastards and that’s why we hanged them. People can hate me if they want to but I was the sheriff of Cooke County, and it was my job to execute the orders of the judge and the court. I did my job, whatever it was. That means that I was the executioner. I was the poor son‘bitch who hanged damned near forty men. At the time I didn’t mind so much. I’d killed men before, but at a distance, with a rifle. That’s easy killing. A tug with the thumb on the hammer, a slow pull of the trigger finger, and the man falls down dead. They was mostly indians or half-breeds or mexicans and didn’t count for much anyway, like shootin turkeys. They was men for all that. They didn’t roll their eyes at you and try to talk to you, and they sure as hell not a one of them ever sniveled.
I better start at the first. I was born in the Ozark Mountains, Crawford County Arkansas, oldest of I don’t know how many kids. Must have been a dozen of us by the time I left home. Home wasn’t a bad place, but Pa worked me like a mule in his sawmill and I didn’t cotton to that. He had a free and handy way of tannin our hides with a piece of harness strap that didn’t suit me none either.
I got tired of them mountains with all them goddamned trees. A man can hide behind a big tree and you can’t see him till it’s too late. That’s the kind of trick my pa would pull, slippin up behind me to catch me and give me a strappin before I had time to run. I got to thinkin how it’d be in flat country where you could see for miles. They wouldn’t be any surprises then, and maybe that’s why when I left home I rode south and west through Indian Territory toward Dallas Texas. In a town growin like Dallas was somethin would be happening. There’d be a chance for a strappin young fellow like me good as I was with guns and horses and handy with a rope.
Dallas was full of whores, and I reckon I was so good-lookin they couldn’t leave me alone, so I moseyed on after they got all my money, followed the east fork of the Trinity up around McKinney and then the damnedest thing happened. I was punchin a few cows and stayin out of trouble and this young thing by the name of Permelia set her eye on me and damned if I didn’t find myself engaged to be married. Partly it was her name--I called her Permie but it was really Permelia Gorden Brown. To my Arkansas ear, the “Gordon” sounded like “Golden.” Permelia Golden Brown, a name pretty as a roasted pheasant. No surprise, we were both in our middle twenties and old enough to know better tho that don’t mean we had sense to do better. Knowin is one thing, doin is another. Marriage was fine, but the raw thing is that with a woman in the house a man has to watch his manners. My Ma taught me that, and she taught me good, tho I never liked it the way I liked bein outdoors. Permie was good to me and gave me a houseful of young uns. And I’ll say this for her. She had grit in her craw. She’d charge hell with a bucket of ice water. But I’ll say this too, advice to anybody wants to get married. Marry or don’t marry, you’ll regret it either way.
It was later that same year I believe, about 1848, I joined up with Capt. Fitzhugh’s company for a full year of duty. We was goin with Col. Bell’s Regiment that was the Texas Mounted Volunteers to kill Mexicans but the shindig ended in February before we got within shootin distance. That was my first taste of the army, and by God I liked it. When I was told by my superior to do something, I did it in a stand-up way and the sergeants and officers took notice. I was quite a young fellow.
It’s about that time that I heard about the Peters Colony and staked a claim on the Elm Fork of the Trinity for 640 acres. That Peters fellow was crooked as a the hind leg of a hound, but the great state of Texas got on his ass and made him do what he promised, and by God if I didn’t come out of that with damned near a section of land. Though I was still all hat and no cattle, I wore my hat with pride. I knowed I’d been given a chance to make somethin of myself.
A few years later, about 1854 it was, I scored a double first. I was appointed the first sheriff of Cooke County, and I opened the town's first saloon in a log cabin that had been a school. You might wonder what drinkin had to do with schooling. I told everyone it was a place where young fellows could come and learn to drink and play poker, tho where drinkin was concerned I never saw many that had to be learned anything. Except to hold their liquor. Gainesville became the county seat the same year, and I was sittin pretty.
Then a long about 1858 I served as lieutenant under Col. Bourland goin after the Indians. James G. Bourland wasn’t a man you could warm up to. He had a crucifixion in his face so that you saw the skullbone under the flesh, but he was the richest son’bitch in the county with nigh on 30 slaves in a county where they weren’t many slaves and he had more land than you could cross in a day’s ride. I knew I couldn’t go wrong a-followin the Colonel. He held the reins of power in the county--him and Col. Young who had a big plantation on Horseshoe Bend of the Red River. He must a had 5000 acres there and twice that in the neighborin counties and about sixty slaves.
By this time I had a couple of slaves myself, just to show I could. They was never worth a damn to me, a couple of rapscallions I didn’t know what to do with, but I was keepin company with the leadin citizens. By the time the war started, to the best I know, they wasn’t more than a half a dozen men in the county owned slaves, me the sheriff, Col. Bourland the chief justice, Col. Young, and three or four of the county commissioners. Well, that was the circle of power, and I had fair joined it even if I was the smallest frog in the pond.
When news reached us in north Texas that that cussed Illinois rail-splitter nigger-lovin Abe Lincoln had been elected President, we had a public meetin for Cooke and Grayson counties over in Whitesboro the next week “to take into consideration the present political condition of this country.” John R. Diamond presided.
Nigger uprisins and poisonins were everywhere and arson fires occurred almost at the same time in Dallas, Denton, Pilot Point, Black Jack Grove, Maxahachie, and Kaufman. A big one in Dallas in July burned down twenty-five business establishments. In North Texas we was also threatened by Kansas Jayhawkers and their Indian allies. Texas bein such a humongous big state, Kansas was closer to us than the capital in Austin. And they was white people amongst us who thought this was just fine and dandy. We’d see about them.
I still have the paper givin the resolutions from that meetin in Whitesboro. “Resolved: That we will proceed to organize and properly equip within our midst a least a company of 100 men ready and willing at any time and on the shortest notice faithfully to carry out the purpose of this meeting (which is to do our whole duty in defending Southern interest and Southern equality in the Union or out of it) under the direction of either our State Governor, or such powers South, as may give direction to our energies.” In short, we were read to fight to protect our lives, our property, our wives and children, our sacred honor--and of course our asses.
Col. William C. Young, who lived near the old Shawneetown on the Red River, received orders to raise 1,000 men. The first company organized in Gainesville was Capt. Twitty’s Mounted Volunteers, formed up in May of 1861. They were authorized to spend $1200 to outfit two companies in Cook County, and yours truly was once again named first lieutenant, this time in Capt. Twitty’s company. I was ready to fight and to take advantage of the benefits I saw comin my way as a result of this dandy little war kickin Yankee butt. Yessirree, I was ready.
There comes a tide in the affairs of men, the poet says, but in North Texas we didn’t have tides bein as how we didn’t have no ocean. We had a place where the road divides, and a man bein only one man takes the road to the left or to the right. He can’t take both, so he’ll never know where the other road might have led. For me that split in the road came in October of 1862, and I had no problem knowin which side I was on. The war was goin well for the South and the Yanks were discoverin that they’d poked their stick in a hornet’s nest, but we had troubles at home. To begin with, my 11th Texas Cavalry unit didn’t do well at Pea Ridge. Some even claimed we lost that battle. In March, the unit was broken up and Capt. Twitty resigned in April with me followin him three months later. Just about then we started gettin them fires set across the country, mostly to cotton gins, and we knew they had to be set by Lincoln’s scalawags. At the end of May. General Hebert imposed martial law, givin military officers expanded powers. In Cooke County this meant Col. Bourland who was appointed Provost Marshall and accordin to his enemies became as great a tyrant as ever reigned since Nero.
Col. Bourland made General durin the war and though the snivelin Union sympathizers accused him of all kinds of evil deeds, killin women and children and such, the Confederate Army knew better--after all, there was a war goin on. At the end of the war he even got a pardon from President Andrew Johnson, I never heard that he was ever subjected to no Union court martial neither. He was also acquitted of wrong-doin by a civil court at Gainesville. Still, he died in seclusion, a lonely and broken old man. I felt sorry for him. About two years ago, 1879 that was. There might a been a lesson there for me but it was too late for the learnin. But I’m gettin ahead of myself.
We’d always had some trouble with Yankee lovers in North Texas, and after Texas succeeded from the Union we had still more from people who thought Cooke County shouldn’t have joined the confederates. Hell, I guess they thought the county could just join the union by itself. Naturally right-thinkin folks didn’t like this kind of sedition and stirrin up of trouble and finally we stood all of it we was goin to stand. Texas was now part of the Confederate States of America, and them that opposed us were committin treason. I remember now it was a gray, rainy morning of Oct. 1, 1862, we rousted out about 70 men from their houses in and around Gainesville and corralled them inside a vacant store, arrested on suspicion of treason. Within 13 days, we had about 80 more. We set up a citizen’s court, made up of the most prominent men in the county, slave-holders to the man, and immediately found seven of the bastards guilty by majority vote. It was up to me at that point and with a couple a deputies I took ‘em out and hanged them from an old tree. As the townfolks got angrier, a mob a people stood outside the store, worried that the remainin men were not just seditious but bandits, or even John Brown supporters, or friendly to the hostile Indians that was always attackin us. Within a little over a week, 40 men had been turned over to me to be hanged and I set the noose around the neck of ever last son of a bitchin one of them. Later on they’d call this the Great Hanging of Gainesville, but they was nothin great about it. It was just a few days work was all it was, and as I said before I was always handy with a rope.
I conducted myself in a cheerful but official manner. “It’s just a short drop, friend,” I’d tell ‘em as we stood on the gallows. “Dyin’ ain’t nothin to be scared of. Better men than you have done it. You’ll feel better when it’s all over.”
The way the hangin got started was me and Newt Chance held a rally on the town square durin the first morning, musterin support for Bourland before the official meetin scheduled for noon. We said we should hang ‘em all. Barrett spoke against us but most of the crowd seemed to be settlin down on beginnin to hang. They’d already picked out a large elm down on Pecan Creek, a quarter mile east of town, to make-do as the gallows.
Cols. Young and Bourland created a citizen's court of twelve jurors and right off they tried and condemned seven of the leaders for treason. Startin with Dr. Chiles, he was the first to die, the order of execution signed by Daniel Montague, the guy they named Montague County after. Ol’ black Bob Scott was the driver on everyone of these trips to the elm trees, and he drove the wagon from underneath Chiles, who swung in the air while the branches of the elm trembled like an aspen under the weight and shudderin of the doctor.
That got the town’s blood up, and a mob lynched fourteen more of the accused men we was holdin in jail. Then a week later on October 16, 1862, some cowardly unionist bastards murdered Col. Young while he was huntin and that cooked the goose.. Nineteen more unionists were fast convicted and executed, completin what was later called the Great Hanging. My part in this, I didn’t hang them all, I had some help from the mob, though later it was said I hanged all forty. However many I in fact hanged, I was an officer of the court and I was followin orders, and I did everything in a cheerful and officious manner so that no one had cause to complain.
That was that, and afterwards we had a war to fight. The Yanks had invaded and for us they was no lookin back. I ain’t goin to recount the war, it’s all been told in the books. My own tale picks up again in 1865, after the no-count Lee surrendered--I never did think he was such great shucks as a general. We’d a been better off under Texas’s own General Bourland--he’d a never surrendered at no Appomattox.
Back in Gainesville it didn’t take long before the Yankees started comin in to town and takin things over. When they did, I could feel it was just a matter of time before the situation got too warm for me, people had already started talkin about them hangings, so one night I saddled up and lit out for the Red River. Me and my wife both had some kinfolks around Burneyville, which ain’t but a ways north from the Red. So that
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Editor’s second note: With “so that” the narrative part of the manuscript ends. A few other pages exist, however, on which Alex Boutwell has scribbled notes. I give them as I find them, in no particular order. Some of them have a kind of crude eloquence that the author probably had trouble trying to fit into his unvarnished tale. The handwriting of these notes suggests the work of a later, posthumous editor who may have thought of fictionalizing the whole.
The first entries, concerning Alec’s death, are clips from old newspapers, though each is date and gives the name of the paper. Clearly, they are the work of a later editor. The rest are of unknown provenance and a couple even appear to be quotations.
Burneyville is about thirty miles north of Gainesville by modern roads.
People didn’t forget the great hangin but a lot of it was just curiosity seein as how most of the families of the hanged men had left the country durin the war. A storm uprooted the hangin tree about the time I died--I may have been dead but the human spirit continues to frequent old haunts is how I know--and some enterprisin fellow got the idea of carvin it into walkin sticks. They sold like hotcakes.
Ardmore Ardmoreite, Oct 18, 1914
“Reminiscences”
Alec Boutwell was living almost at present day Cheek and other places scattered at intervals several miles apart.A story is current of how Boutwell tied the ropes around the necks of 16 horse thieves who were hunted at one time in Cooke County, Texas near Gainesville, but the old gentleman, before his death, would neither confirm or deny the story. He was arrested for some trivial offense by the U. S. marshal, and while on the way to Paris, Texas, to stand trial, another prisoner became enraged at him and killed him. This was in 1881.
The Indian Journal March 3, 1881
A Seminole Indian under arrest and en route for Fort Smith was shot and killed by a deputy U. S. Marshal, while attempting to escape. So says the Marshal. Perhaps it would be well to investigate a little. --Journal
Why don’t you state the whole case? The Seminole beat another prisoner with an empty rifle and inflicted injuries from which he, an old man named Boutwell, has since died. Nothing short of a bullet would stop the murderer in his flight. --New Era
We should be glad to state the whole case. That is just why we asked for a little investigation. Why did the Seminole beat a fellow prisoner? What was the provocation? Did he recognize him? The Seminole prisoner was in chains; shackled and manacled, he started to run, an empty rifle only in his hand. The deputy marshal and posse, relieved from the necessity of guarding Boutwell by his condition, could have mounted their horses or even on foot, with their legs free, might have overtaken and recaptured their prisoner without killing him. It is not clear that “nothing short of a bullet would stop his flight,” encumbered as he was with irons.
I’ve learned a little Latin since I died, and I’d already picked up ragtags of legal Latin from my long hours in the courtroom. It suits me. I’m dead and Latin is a dead language. The phrase I remember is de mortuis nil nisi bonum--of the dead say nothin except what is good. Don’t speak ill of the dead is the idea. Dead now over a hundred years, I see I have a memorial on a database, where the mindless wavers of flowers and flags toot my patriotism. Damned sentimenterin fools.
His dying was long and blasphemous. On the third day they had to put makeup on him. On the fourth day, to great jubilation, he was buried.
So that I would feel myself less alone, I could only hope that there would be lots of spectators the day of my execution, and that they would greet me with howls of execration.
Sometimes I dream of elm trees, and sometimes I have a nightmare in which the elm tree has one long horizontal limb that goes on forever with an endless string of men dangling from it.
Some educated guy spoke of my hempen necklaces. That phrase haunts me. It has a ring to it.
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