Corpus Christi History
By Murphy Givens

Wednesday, April 14, 1999

Hanging Times -- Part 3

No good place for a lynching

   The year after the Peascal murders came the Nuecestown Raid. I have written about this before. On Good Friday, March 26, 1875, bandits from across the border rode into Nuecestown, 12 miles from Corpus Christi on the Nueces River, near where Calallen is today. The bandits captured a number of people traveling on the roads and drove them on foot as they entered Nuecestown. Many of the captives had been on their way to church services. The bandits terrorized the town, hanged a man who refused to join the gang, shot a customer at Tom Noakes' store, plundered the store, and set it on fire. Word of the raid spread quickly to Corpus
   Christi and a posse was formed in front of the Bidwell Hotel. The posse rode hard until the riders reached Nuecestown, where they found the former captives on the road, some without clothes or shoes. One man, whose boots were taken, had been forced to wear women's slippers. One posse ran into the bandits and shots were exchanged -- killing posse member George Swank. The bandits got away, all but one who was found wounded in the brush. He had been shot by Noakes.
   They brought the bandit to Corpus Christi and sent for Dr. Arthur Spohn to treat his wound and then took the man, riding in a two-wheeled cart called a dray, to a shoemaker's shop on Leopard. They tried to hang him from a sign that said "Zapateria" in front of the shop, but it wasn't high enough. Three men climbed to the roof of the old adobe Catholic church, St. Patrick's, at Tancahua and Antelope. The men were fixing a rope to the steeple when a local cattleman, Martin S. Culver, ordered them to get down and not to desecrate the church by hanging a man from its steeple.
   With the wounded prisoner riding in the cart, they headed for a field where a new gate had been put up. A cross pole between gate posts was high enough to fix the rope. William Ball, who knew how to make a hangman's noose, got into the cart and put the noose around the bandit's neck. The rope was thrown over the pole and the cart driven on, leaving the man hanging from the cross-bar. Next morning, a priest from the church (perhaps Father Claude Jaillet) cut down the body.
   The problem of finding a suitable spot for a lynching happened a decade earlier, involving the hanging of one J. Garner.
   Garner quarreled with a storekeeper named Scheuer (or Shier) over payment for a pair of boots. It was said that Scheuer made insulting remarks to Garner, who pulled out his pistol and killed the storekeeper. The store where the shooting took place was in the 300 block of Chaparral, in the Staples building. People came by to look at Scheuer's body, laid out on his own counter.
   John Fogg, who operated a stagecoach line, ran to Felix Noessel's store and grabbed a long coil of rope. Others hustled the killer, still drunk, across the street, looking for a good place to hang him.
   Mrs. Noessel was adamant: They could not string him up from a sign that extended over the sidewalk in front of Noessel's grocery store. The mob, dragging the captive along, went down Chaparral and stopped in the next block at "the house with an iron front." This was Conrad Meuly's house, decorated with ornate iron grillwork that had been shipped from New Orleans. Like Mrs. Noessel, Mrs. Meuly stopped the mob from hanging Garner from her second-floor gallery.
   The mob went on, looking for a place high enough to loop a rope. One account said it looked as if the entire town's population of men and boys -- excluding the womenfolks -- tagged along. They came to an arroyo off the south end of Broadway, where they found a mesquite tree with a limb overhanging the gulley.
   Garner was sobering up fast. He pleaded with the mob. "Give me a trial, boys. Give me a trial."
   The plea might have found more sympathy if it had not been for the fact that Garner had killed a fisherman two months before. The lynch mob was in no mood to spare his life.
   Over the mesquite limb went a 30-foot rope and a dozen hands or more grabbed for it, holding on to the other end as Garner kicked and strangled to death.
   Capt. John Anderson said later that he helped hold the rope and that "the crowd was very quiet. Everybody left pretty quickly." Another observer was W.S. Rankin, who also owned a grocery store. He said the lynching was a terrible thing that haunted him. "I didn't sleep a wink for a week. His tongue stuck out. I couldn't shut my eyes without seeing that tongue sticking out."
   It's hard to believe, but Garner's father, it was said, was not stricken with grief. He took his son's body down and said the hanging at least had provided him with a good stake rope.
   (This is the third of four parts. Part four will appear in this space next Wednesday.)