Gobbla2001
03-09-2007, 06:56 PM
There's a place in history for family feuds
March 09, 2007 - Posted at 12:00 a.m.
That was especially true around Cuero where so many incidents occurred during what former Advocate editor Roy Grimes described as being "a blood-drenched chronicle which holds undisputed title to being the longest lived and deadliest of all the deadly vendettas in the history of the western frontier."
Grimes did a considerable amount of research on the feud, and there is a chapter about it in the book "300 Years in Victoria County," published by the Advocate after the newspaper did an expansive historical edition in 1968. Even though the feud pretty much bypassed Victoria County, Evergreen Cemetery is the gravesite of William Sutton and an associate, Gabe Slaughter, who were gunned down in broad daylight at old Indianola by cousins Jim and Bill Taylor on March 11, 1874.
The only Sutton to be involved, the Fayette County native was associated with the State Police during the tumultuous period of Reconstruction following the Civil War. There are a number of books, along with others now being written about the feud that covered two decades and more, with the animosities being carried over long after all the actual participants were dead and buried.
Even when we first started writing this column a century after the feud, there were occasions when someone from one side or the other would object to most any mention of it. I particularly remember once when a member of one of the families that were involved took issue with something we had written, but after some explanation the disgruntled reader admitted to being descended from the other side as well.
We had apparently satisfied that side and afterwards had a good conversation.
It certainly wasn't always that civil back in the old days, like I was reading something about the feud recently that appeared in October, 1923, in The Cuero Record during Cuero's 50th Anniversary Celebration. In a story that mentioned how Cuero was often referred to as a "town where at least one man is killed every morning before breakfast," mention was also made of one of the pivotal events in the feud without any names being provided.
Fact is, the feud was not even mentioned by name, only that there were "pitched battles between factions."
"One story," the newspaper noted, "tells of the efforts of a band of men to kill a Cuero resident who lived on the outskirts of the city. The victim of the assault was shrewd enough to learn of the plan of the assassins but the assassins outwitted him. A large cornfield adjoined the home of the victim of the plot, but the land surrounding his home had been cleared of all trees and growth and approach to his home was impossible."
So, according to the newspaper, a scheme was connived to kill him.
"Attaching cowbells to two horses the assassins drove the horses into the cornfield. The victim, on hearing the bells, left his home to rid the field of what he believed to be stray cows. When he entered the field he was shot from ambush."
That would have been old Pitkin Taylor, one of the patriarchs of the Taylor family.
"Along in 1872," according to Grimes, "somebody tolled old Pitkin Taylor out of his house in the dead of night by rattling a cowbell and shot him down without warning. The old man was months a-dying."
Two of Pitkin's sons-in-law, Henry and William Kelly, had been arrested on Aug. 26, 1870, and were unceremoniously shot to death, William supposedly by Bill Sutton and Henry by Doc White.
"Then came the incident that brought Taylor vengeance to a fury, at old Pitkin's funeral," Grimes notes. "The Taylors always said that Sutton and some of his men were just across the Guadalupe from the burying ground, whooping and cavorting in drunken glee, while the patriarch was laid to rest. It was then that the Taylor boys took their blood oath."
In that old Taylor Cemetery south of Cuero, there rests three Taylors, two Kellys and a couple of others, Winchester Smith and J.G. Hendrix, who were casualties of the feud.
Though there are other versions of how the feud started, Grimes believed the real beginning was on Christmas Eve 1868 when William B. (Buck) Taylor went down in a blaze of gunfire on the streets of the old DeWitt County seat of Clinton with Sutton getting credit for the killing. Seven years later, in June after Sutton and Slaughter were gunned down at Indianola, a mob of Sutton sympathizers took Pitkin's nephew, R. P. (Scrap) Taylor, and two companions from the jail at Clinton and lynched them from the limbs of a nearby oak tree.
Taylor family descendants have regular reunions now, even occasionally with some of Sutton's descendants present, with the feud finally being accepted as a time in Texas history when both factions shared some of the blame for what was happening.
We have stood by numerous graves of those who died on both sides and have come to one conclusion.
There is no way to fully understand today the way it was then.
March 09, 2007 - Posted at 12:00 a.m.
That was especially true around Cuero where so many incidents occurred during what former Advocate editor Roy Grimes described as being "a blood-drenched chronicle which holds undisputed title to being the longest lived and deadliest of all the deadly vendettas in the history of the western frontier."
Grimes did a considerable amount of research on the feud, and there is a chapter about it in the book "300 Years in Victoria County," published by the Advocate after the newspaper did an expansive historical edition in 1968. Even though the feud pretty much bypassed Victoria County, Evergreen Cemetery is the gravesite of William Sutton and an associate, Gabe Slaughter, who were gunned down in broad daylight at old Indianola by cousins Jim and Bill Taylor on March 11, 1874.
The only Sutton to be involved, the Fayette County native was associated with the State Police during the tumultuous period of Reconstruction following the Civil War. There are a number of books, along with others now being written about the feud that covered two decades and more, with the animosities being carried over long after all the actual participants were dead and buried.
Even when we first started writing this column a century after the feud, there were occasions when someone from one side or the other would object to most any mention of it. I particularly remember once when a member of one of the families that were involved took issue with something we had written, but after some explanation the disgruntled reader admitted to being descended from the other side as well.
We had apparently satisfied that side and afterwards had a good conversation.
It certainly wasn't always that civil back in the old days, like I was reading something about the feud recently that appeared in October, 1923, in The Cuero Record during Cuero's 50th Anniversary Celebration. In a story that mentioned how Cuero was often referred to as a "town where at least one man is killed every morning before breakfast," mention was also made of one of the pivotal events in the feud without any names being provided.
Fact is, the feud was not even mentioned by name, only that there were "pitched battles between factions."
"One story," the newspaper noted, "tells of the efforts of a band of men to kill a Cuero resident who lived on the outskirts of the city. The victim of the assault was shrewd enough to learn of the plan of the assassins but the assassins outwitted him. A large cornfield adjoined the home of the victim of the plot, but the land surrounding his home had been cleared of all trees and growth and approach to his home was impossible."
So, according to the newspaper, a scheme was connived to kill him.
"Attaching cowbells to two horses the assassins drove the horses into the cornfield. The victim, on hearing the bells, left his home to rid the field of what he believed to be stray cows. When he entered the field he was shot from ambush."
That would have been old Pitkin Taylor, one of the patriarchs of the Taylor family.
"Along in 1872," according to Grimes, "somebody tolled old Pitkin Taylor out of his house in the dead of night by rattling a cowbell and shot him down without warning. The old man was months a-dying."
Two of Pitkin's sons-in-law, Henry and William Kelly, had been arrested on Aug. 26, 1870, and were unceremoniously shot to death, William supposedly by Bill Sutton and Henry by Doc White.
"Then came the incident that brought Taylor vengeance to a fury, at old Pitkin's funeral," Grimes notes. "The Taylors always said that Sutton and some of his men were just across the Guadalupe from the burying ground, whooping and cavorting in drunken glee, while the patriarch was laid to rest. It was then that the Taylor boys took their blood oath."
In that old Taylor Cemetery south of Cuero, there rests three Taylors, two Kellys and a couple of others, Winchester Smith and J.G. Hendrix, who were casualties of the feud.
Though there are other versions of how the feud started, Grimes believed the real beginning was on Christmas Eve 1868 when William B. (Buck) Taylor went down in a blaze of gunfire on the streets of the old DeWitt County seat of Clinton with Sutton getting credit for the killing. Seven years later, in June after Sutton and Slaughter were gunned down at Indianola, a mob of Sutton sympathizers took Pitkin's nephew, R. P. (Scrap) Taylor, and two companions from the jail at Clinton and lynched them from the limbs of a nearby oak tree.
Taylor family descendants have regular reunions now, even occasionally with some of Sutton's descendants present, with the feud finally being accepted as a time in Texas history when both factions shared some of the blame for what was happening.
We have stood by numerous graves of those who died on both sides and have come to one conclusion.
There is no way to fully understand today the way it was then.