(Previous parts, here, here and here)

Having made it clear who was boss among the Texas Hill Country settlers, Duff and his Partisan Ranger company were withdrawn late in the autumn of 1863 and assigned to afflict the lower Rio Grande. They left smoking rubble and several decades worth of hatred and distrust in their wake. Upon his unlamented departure, a scratch company of local men, both pro-Union and Confederate alike recruited by Major James Hunter effectively protected the frontier settlements in the Hill Country. It helped that a fresh outburst of Indian raids had re-directed everyone’s priorities towards meeting a more keenly felt and immediate threat. Hunter was respected by all, and trusted by the German settlers, and sensibly confined his attentions towards protecting those scatterings of hamlets and ranches from Indian marauders and left the enforcement of the conscription laws strictly alone.

Unfortunately, continuing Confederate reversals on the battlefields in Tennessee and Virginia led to a demand for more men to feed into the Confederate Army and a renewed outcry to enforce the conscription laws in the Hill Country. One of those new decrees insisted that the volunteers in the frontier company be immediately mustered into the Confederate Army. Opposed to doing any such thing, most of those volunteers promptly deserted, and Hunter’s remaining troops turned to hunting them down. A pair of deserters were killed while resisting arrest near Grape Creek in Blanco County, and shortly afterwards a relative of one of the men killed the neighbor who was assumed to have informed on them.

Meanwhile, a detachment of state troops went searching for Karl Itz, a survivor of the Nueces massacre, who was thought to be hiding near his family home in the Cherry Spring area. Unable to find him, they seized his two younger brothers and took them to Fredericksburg on the pretext of enlisting them forcibly into the Confederate Army. Instead, the two of them were murdered by their guards in the middle of Main Street, presumably as a means sending a message to other draft dodgers and bushmen. Another running fight between troopers and bushmen left authorities with the impression that the situation was truly getting out of hand. Major Hunter was effectively kicked upstairs and local command given to an excitable and impulsive man named William Banta.

Banta soon exhibited a lamentable tendency to see enemies everywhere, encouraged by the whisperings of pro-Confederate neighbors at his headquarters at White Oak Creek, a little north of present-day Kerrville. He and a local pro-Confederate named James Waldrip were also encouraged in this tendency by the arrival of a small squad of men from Kansas, from William Quantrill’s notorious band. Fresh from assorted partisan atrocities in Kansas, they had come to Texas to purchase horses, cattle and supplies. In short order, Waldrip gathered a band of like-minded partisans together with Quantrill’s men and determined to root out Unionists, deserters, draft-evaders and any whose views of the Confederacy were less than wildly enthusiastic. They would become known as the “hangerbande” or “the hanging band”.

Late in February of 1864 a group of about twenty men led by Waldrip burst into the home of Fredericksburg’s public school-teacher, Louis Scheutze, seized him over the protests of his family and carried him away. He was an educated and cultured man, his brother was a music teacher and tutor in Austin, whose pupils included the children of the current and former Governors of Texas, and the home from which he was taken was right in the middle of town. His body was found two days later, hanging from the branch of a tree just outside town. His only offense seems to have been that he was outspoken in criticizing how the authorities had handled investigating the murders of the Itz brothers and the fight at Grape Creek.

Meanwhile, the excitable Banta became convinced by rumors that deserters and evaders were in open rebellion in the district north of Kerrville. A suspected deserter being escorted to Fredericksburg was simply taken away from the troopers by a large group of men and hanged. Several days after that incident, Waldrips hanging-band swept through a cluster of farms and ranches clustered around Grape Creek. One man was shot in the back, and three others taken away without explanation and hanged. There might have been more, but for two children who ran from house to house giving warning. It was never clear why those men were targeted by the hanging band, although later investigation brought forth some ugly suppositions. One man owned a large herd of horses, which went to Quantrill’s purchasing agent and another was known to posess a large quantity of silver coin… also confiscated by that agent. Shortly afterwards the elderly father and teenaged son of another draft-evader thought to be in the area were flogged and tortured by Banta’s troopers in an effort to make them reveal his whereabouts. Both the old man and the boy died without revealing anything.

At that point Banta’s superiors had had enough. Banta and five others were arrested and charged with murder and robbery, although they were never actually tried in court. They would have arrested Waldrip and elements of his band, including Quantrill’s agent, but for all of them making themselves scarce; in some cases, all the way to Mexico. The authorities, after reasserting some measure of control, sensibly concluded that there probably was no earthly way after these goings-on that the local citizens could be brought around to supporting the Confederacy… so best leave them to manage their own affairs. Within a year of the Grape Creek outrages the Confederacy had tottered to its’ final ruin anyway.

Two years after the end of the war, J.P Waldrip suddenly appeared in Fredericksburg. No one was ever able to say why; perhaps he thought he would not be recognized, or that the end of the war constituted some kind of amnesty. But he was soon recognized, and fled for his life. At some point the son-in-law of the murdered school-teacher, Louis Scheutze took a shot at him and missed. Waldrip is supposed to have run towards the Nimitz Hotel; perhaps he was making towards the stage stop which used to be at the back of the present-day property. At any rate, he was shot by an unknown assailant and fell dying, underneath an oak tree which still stands on the Nimitz Hotel grounds, overhanging the sidewalk. The identity of the man who shot him was supposed to have been a mystery for years, although I suspected that it might have also been one of those things that everyone present on that occasion knew, but preferred to keep their mouth shut about. Waldrip may have been hated, and most of the town nourished a grudge against him… but he had friends and kin. And feuds in Texas were notorious for continuing for decades.