Essays
Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado
Who were the Pickethouse Unionists in Texas during the Civil War?
November 21, 2007
Just who were the pickethouse unionists? I have become fascinated with a group of people that evaded Confederate conscription during the Civil War and lived out beyond the edge of “civilized” country. In most Texas histories these people were labeled renegades, deserters, and bushwhackers. I have not been able to find any book that focuses on the different groups that lived off the land, avoiding Comanches and Texas Rangers (who operated under Confederate laws.) They often constructed the simplest of houses, built of cedar poles and rock and chinked with mud. In some places only men were present, but there are references to wagon trains filled with families who finally headed west through Horsehead Crossing on their way to California or Mexico.
Some of these folks lived in the region between the Concho River and the Colorado River in present day Coke and Tom Green County. Others lived along Jim Ned Creek south and east of present day Abilene. Many of the Germans around Fredericksburg were also Unionists. In a famous incident, Texas cavalrymen overtook a party of sixty-one German Americans planning to flee to Mexico. The troopers opened fire on the refugees and massacred thirty-four German men in cold blood, taking no prisoners.
Others lived west of Jacksboro, along the upper Brazos near the modern Possum Kingdom Lake, who had moved south from Ohio and Missouri, were “Free-soil, Free-men” Republicans who espoused rhetoric that would now be considered leftist. There were even early day socialists who had come to Texas as part of failed utopian colony at La Reunion. Added to the mix were the various Indian tribes such as Seminoles (including escaped slaves that had become part of the Seminole Nation) and Kickapoos from Oklahoma who went back and forth to Mexico beyond the edge of civilization.
In ecological parlance, this “no-man’s land” is an ecotone, an area between two ecosystems. Ecotones are “fluid” places, where adaptation and speciation occurs and are regions of high diversity. Such “frontiers” are fascinating. This human ecotone was based on political philosophy. Unionists rejected the Confederate philosophy as aristrocratic, decadent, and opposed to the progress of the fledgling Industrial Age. The Unionists were morally opposed to slavery, of course, and refused to support the Confederacy and its legal existence based on “states rights.”
David Paul Smith’s book, “Frontier Defense in the Civil War (Texas Rangers and Rebels)” chronicles the development of the “Frontier Battalion” of minutemen companies to defend Texas from Comanche raiders. As many, if not more, of the organization’s campaigns were against the Unionists as against Indians. Early in the war, unexplained fires in the Dallas area were considered the work of Unionists. This created a panicked flurry of rumor that led to violent reaction, including lynching of Unionists, the burning of their property, their murder, or their imprisonment. The 2003 film “Cold Mountain,” a story about the excesses of Home Guards in North Carolina, does an excellent job of portraying the human cost of living in a rural society dominated by the politics of fear.
To try to control the brushmen, the Frontier Battalion attempted to infiltrate the Unionists, and some groups were hunted down effectively. But as the Civil War wore on, many Confederate Soldiers that had fought in the war, and a number of the Frontier Battalion members deserted and joined the “brushmen.” By 1863 the brushmen had grown to such numbers that the Frontier Battalion had to pick its battles judiciously. The commanding officer of the Northern District, H.E. McCulloch, even enlisted the help of “Bloody Bill Quantrill,” the Missourian Confederate guerilla leader whose men sacked Lawrence, Kansas, to fight the brushmen. Over 1000 brushmen were in at least 3 camps in North Texas and actively carried on raids against the Frontier Battalion (and even stole the McCulloch’s horse.)
The threat of Comanche attack was less likely in the region between the Colorado and Concho Rivers, so many of the brushmen began congregating there in 1864. Many were planning to head to California. Governor Murrah outlawed immigration to the frontier to slow the exodus to the unorganized counties of the frontier. Over 500 men, women, and children in forty wagons did leave that summer – a much too large force for a small force of 20 men of the Frontier Battalion posted in the Concho River valley. Over 300 brushmen were in the upper San Saba River watershed, and after one attempt by the Rangers to arrest them these brushmen appear to have been left alone.
I have not discovered what these brushmen did after the end of the Civil War. I have not found any evidence that any stayed where they hid during the war. Ex-Confederate soldiers and impoverished Southerners later settled much of Coke County in the 1870s. The infamous Ketchum and Kirkpatrick outlaw bands that invented train robbery were born and raised in the region around San Angelo. They, too, were the offspring of ex-Confederates that deeply resented the black troops that were posted in the region after 1868 to fight the Indians. Even Jesse James hid out along the Concho River for one winter after the war, hunting buffalo for a living.
I believe, however, than some of the brushmen became open-range cattlemen and participated in the cattle drives taking cattle to Kansas, Nebraska, and Montana in the 1870s and 1880s. Part of my hypothesis is based on the socialist rhetoric used by the “Whitecaps” (free-range cattlemen) who fought the introduction of barbed wire in Coke and Coleman County. Another factor in my hypothesis comes from my own family’s history.
My grandfather ran cattle on the Seminole Indian reservation in the 1890s and early 1900s in Oklahoma and wintered-over cattle for many West Texans including Bull Shannon and Ira Yates. For leads on which rancher wished to fatten a herd in Oklahoma, he relied on reports from the black Seminoles (working as free-range cowboys) who once had fought with Captain Bullis in the 1870s and had relatives in Oklahoma. Family stories about racial equality indicate that there was a number of people in Oklahoma and West Texas after the Civil War that sought to establish an inclusive society that offered respect to all, not just white males, and that many had been Union sympathizers doing the war.
If anyone can steer me to diaries of brushmen, books on individual brushmen, or any other source that might help my quest to learn more, please email or call me.