Corpus Christi History
By Murphy Givens

Wednesday, Jan. 6, 1999

Tough women, Part 2

Sally Skull was deadly with a six-shooter

   Sally Skull, like the Great Western, defied the conventions of her time. She cursed like a muleskinner. She rode like a man. She could rope like a vaquero and pick flowers with her black-handled bullwhip. She was deadly accurate, with right or left hand, with either of the two six-shooters she wore. She owned a horse ranch at Banquete before and during the Civil War. Much about her life is a mystery, but history holds the door ajar just enough to peek inside.
   She was born Sarah Jane Newman in 1817. Her grandfather William Rabb was one of Stephen F. Austin's first settlers. She married at 16 to Jesse Robinson, bore two children, and divorced him in 1843. A few days later, she married gunsmith George H. Scull. He disappeared six years later. When asked what happened to him, Sally would say, "He's dead," with a look that shut off other questions. She kept the name, though, changing it from Scull to Skull.
   She moved to Nueces County in 1852 and bought 150 acres at Banquete. Her cousin John Rabb and his wife Martha also moved in and began cattle operations.
   Legendary Texas Ranger "Rip" Ford came across Sally in May, 1852, when Ford attended the Lone Star Fair in Corpus Christi. As Ford was leaving, he heard a pistol shot and, raising his eyes, saw a man fall to the ground and a woman in the act of lowering her six-shooter.
   "She was a noted character named Sally Skull," Ford wrote. "She was famed as a rough fighter, and prudent men did not willingly provoke her in a row."
   Sally was an established horse-trader in October, 1852, when she married her third husband, John Doyle. She even dropped the name of Skull and paid taxes on her land and livestock as Sarah Doyle. She hired vaqueros and made horse-buying trips to Mexico; some said she got the horses by other than legal means, but they didn't say it in her hearing. One man learned that lesson.
   Sally had heard that a fellow had made uncomplimentary remarks about her. When she ran into him, she whipped out one of her guns.
   "Been talking about me, huh? Well, dance, you son of a bitch, dance!" She shot at his feet while he did a lively two-step.
   Doyle, the third husband, disappeared, just like Scull before him. There are two versions of Doyle's death, but neither has ever been verified. One story was that he drowned with a team of oxen trying to cross a river in flood. Sally, it was said, watched him drown and when a vaquero asked if he should retrieve the body, she said, "I don't give a damn about the body, but I sure would like the $40 in that money belt he had on him."
   The other story was that Sally and Doyle had been drinking all night at a fandango in Corpus Christi. Next morning, he was anxious to gather their horses and leave and tried three times to wake her. Finally, exasperated, he dumped a pitcher of water on her head and she came up shooting. She said she would not have killed him "had she knowed."
   She married her fourth husband, Isaiah Wadkins, in 1855. He disappeared in a more typical way, moving in with another woman in Rio Grande City. Sally divorced him.
   When the Civil War broke out, Sally Skull turned from buying and selling horses to freighting cotton from the railhead at Alleytown on the Colorado River to Matamaros. This was Los algodones, the cotton era, when immense fortunes were made at the back door of the Confederacy.
   Sally's mule trains hauled cotton south to Mexico to evade the federal blockade and brought back guns, medicine, sugar and coffee on the back haul.
   On one trip, north of Brownsville, she ran into a freighter who owed her money but had been avoiding her. She grabbed an ax, walked up to his wagon, and said, "If you don't pay me right now, I'll chop the front wheels off every damned wagon you've got." He paid her.
   Sally was 43 when she married her fifth husband, Christoph Horsdorff, 20-something, nicknamed "Horse Trough." It was said of him that, "He wasn't much good; mostly just stood around."
   After the war ended, Sally vanished. Some believe "Horse Trough" blew the top of her head off with a shotgun to get the gold she carried in her saddlebags. Whatever happened to Sally Skull, she was one of the most remarkable women in the history of South Texas.
   Sources for the Great Western and Sally Skull: "Legendary Ladies of the Southwest" by Brian Sandwich; "Outlaws in Petticoats" by Gail Drago and Ann Ruff; "Shady Ladies of the West" by Ronald Miller; "Legendary Sarah rode with Zachary" and "Sally Skull" by Bill Walraven; "Taylor's Trail" by Robert Thonhoff; "Two Sixshooters and a Sunbonnet" by Dan Kilgore; "Legendary Ladies of Texas" edited by Francis Edward Abernethy; and Caller-Times Library archives.