The Headless Horseman "El Muerto"

He was created to stop stock theft, but his destiny lay elsewhere, when he galloped into legend as the most fearsome rider in Texas history.

Out of the badlands of the Rio Nueces and across the pages of western lore galloped the most fearsome rider of all time, the dreaded Headless Horseman of South Texas Brush Country. Unlike Washington Irving’s mysterious rider in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, this mounted specter was no figment of the imagination by any means. People called him El Muerto, the Dead One, and all who saw him ran screeching like banshees into the night. El Muerto brought terror and fear to the south plains for years.

There is probably no legend in Texas history more frightening and terrifying than that of the headless horseman. He seemed to be everywhere, and his nightly rides caused more wide-spread panic than did the Indians, bandits, and outlaws combined. All efforts to destroy him went futile, as did all attempts to explain him. Credited with all sorts of evil and misfortune, El Muerto galloped across South Texas like wildfire.

The gruesome horror began turning up in conversations one summer around 1850 after one of two ranch hands out tending cattle in the Wild Horse Desert, which at that time stretched from the Nueces River practically all the way to the Rio Grande, happened to glance off into the darkness and saw what he thought was a lone rider silhouetted against the moon on a nearby low rise. The rider looked odd, and the cowboy wasn’t sure why. Since the cowboy and his partner were frying fatback for their evening fare, and the flickering flames of the campfire made viewing poor, if not totally obscured, the cowboy cautiously stood up for a better view. Squinting into the darkness, he suddenly turned and reached for his rifle. Not only was the rider sitting stiffly upright in the saddle, there was absolutely nothing above the shoulders! When the cowboy turned back around with his weapon, however, the horse and rider had vanished.

Thinking the Comanches were on the move and playing tricks, the two men quickly doused their campfire and spent a tense, restless night on the prairie listening for war whoops that never came. Daylight found them carefully picking through the brush for any signs of Indians or their pony tracks. They found none. What they did find, however, were the faint traces of a horse---a lone, unshod horse which had milled and moved about the meadow in an apparent grazing pattern. The tracks led over the rise and disappeared into the next valley.

As days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, more and more cowboys and travelers spotted the dark horse with its fearsome cargo. All claimed that the rider carried his head under a Mexican sombrero tied to the horn of his saddle. The rider himself wore the light tan, rawhide leggings of the Mexican vaqueros, and a brush-torn serape which fluttered over his shoulders and out behind him like a wind-blown cape. People shot at the horror as much as they shied from it, and some even claimed to see Indian arrows and spears dangling from the body. But El Muerto wasn’t yet ready to be explained. Stealing through the night, creeping up on the unwary, he made the South Texas brush country a place to avoid, a place associated with evil and misfortune. It would be years before the real truth could be learned.

From the outset, Texas was probably the most savage and brutal of all the western states. It was never a Territory---it went from a Republic in 1836 directly into Statehood in 1845---and it had to rely solely on its own wits instead of the United States Army for survival. Even when the Federal government finally dotted the western fringe with Army outposts and forts, Texas was still so wild, so untamed, so gigantic in size, that it was nearly the turn of the century before peace could be attained. It was prime Indian and bandit territory, and the lawless took every advantage of it.

It was because of this rampant lawlessness that El Muerto rode. The headless rider was Texas justice, and Texas justice was all frontier, a system more barbaric and repulsive than most city folk heading out on the noon stage liked to believe. The country was absolutely merciless to the uninitiated. Texas history records well over one hundred distinct bands of Indians for that period with ninety-five percent of them bent on annihilating the white man from the face of the earth. If the Indians weren’t attacking, hordes of Mexican and gringo bandits were, either riding alone or in groups approaching fifty or more. Just about any kind of depredation was likely to occur at any given time with lone ranches and outposts being the primary targets.

Run for your life had a real meaning in those days. If you did outrun the raiders, then you did have your life, but that’s about all you had to face the wilderness and desert thirst. A greenhorn coming to the Texas frontier could practically count on being attacked, brutalized, and left for dead. Polite society just didn’t understand the harsh methods needed to bring things under control---until one became a victim, that is. Then, being stripped naked and staked over a red ant hill was considered too good for the barbarians.

If the lawless growth during these years can be traced to any one event, it has to be to the Texas Revolution. By defeating the Mexican army in 1836, General Sam Houston acquired the total responsibility of protecting the settlements, a task the Mexican army had been doing for two centuries with their thousands of troops stationed at garrisons all over the place. It was, however, a hardship the struggling Texan army was ill-manned to do. One estimate has placed the expansion at 600,000 Anglos between the years of 1820 and 1840, and the Texas army only numbered around 1,200 men.

Although General Houston dispensed his men appropriately, and it was growing in small leaps and bounds every week as more and more men rode into Texas to join up, there was absolutely no way it could keep up with the influx of murderers and thieves. The entire situation was almost laughable to Texas’s neighbors. Whenever one of their crooks disappeared or escaped justice, the neighboring lawmen just wrote two little letters in their journals, G.T.---Gone to Texas---and that was the end of it. Except for Texas, of course, which had to contend with the criminals on a large scale.

Fortunately, Texas was never totally defenseless. It had a group of peace officers determined to drive the outlaws from the land. Called Texas Rangers, this roving posse of expert gunmen existed long before the bid for independence took place. And they were not ones to be messed with. They went anywhere and everywhere their adversaries did, living out of the saddle and off the land, dispensing justice as brutally as required, usually by riding their quarry into a six-foot hole in the ground. Two of these men were Creed Taylor and William Alexander Anderson Big Foot Wallace, who was himself a folk hero. It was Big Foot, with Creed’s blessing, who unwittingly created El Muerto.

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