’Tis The Season For Family Fun at Geronimo Creek Retreat
Violent bunches, those Huns, Mongols, and Cossacks. Meg , I'm glad you like the piece.
Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction. And thanks for the congrats! In fact, he was living in Germany when he wrote the story!
The Legend of El Muerto
In some quarters, the early Rangers were called "outlaws with badges. I imagine some cowpokes did swear off likker after running across el Muerto! Thank you for visiting Sweethearts of the West! Saturday, October 12, El Muerto: German, Irish, Scandinavian, and English legends all offered versions of the ghoulish phantoms, who usually were said to appear to proud, arrogant people as a warning. South Texas has its own gruesome headless horseman legend. Some say he still does. In the summer of , a Mexican bandito by the name of Vidal made an egregious error: He and several compadres rustled a sizable herd of horses from several ranches south of San Antonio.
One of the ranches belonged to Texas Ranger Creed Taylor, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence and a man not inclined to forgive his enemies. Taylor later would be one of the participants in the Sutton-Taylor Feud, a bloody, years-long running gun battle that rivaled the better-known fracas between the Hatfields and McCoys.
Together with fellow Ranger William A.
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As a group, the early Texas Rangers were hard men. Killing the desperados was not enough for Taylor and Wallace, though. The entire Ranger force was fed up with the rash of rustling plaguing Texas at the time. Not even leaving bodies hanging from trees or hacking them to pieces and using the bits for predator bait had made a strong enough statement.
After Mayne Reid, James T. DeShields was the next interpreter. A dry-goods salesman, he was known for one novel, Cynthia Ann Parker. DeShields wrote pieces for the "Fort Worth Press" based on material he bought from old Texans; and his sometimes exaggerated articles were presented as factual. Warren Hunter sold his Taylor interview manuscript to DeShields, who lightly rewrote parts.
Warren Hunter's son, J. Marvin Hunter editor of Frontier Times , took his turn. He personalized crimes of Vidal's rustlers, who were now stealing horses from Creed Taylor. The younger Hunter vividly sketched events, while changing the time to , the year of a sweeping Indian raid that drained frontier manpower, leaving few defenders against bandits.
John McPeters disappeared from the narrative altogether. The younger Hunter declared that Capt. Reid's novel was based on fact. Frank Dobie changed the tale in his Tales of Old Time Texas , suggesting the headless rider was once a "ghostly guard of the mine of the long-abandoned Candelaria Mission on the Nueces to protect it from profane prospectors".
El Muerto: The Ghostly Ride of the Headless Horseman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Headless Horseman disambiguation.
- Texas Legend.
- Shapechangers Progress (Shapechanger Tales Book 2).
- Spooktacular Boobies.
- Gesichtskosmetik: Zur Karriere des Lippenstifts (German Edition).
- The Headless Horseman (novel) - Wikipedia;
- America's Haunted Roadtrip!
- Texas Roots Grow a Love of Science in New Middle-Grade Book Series;
The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction second ed. Then they tied his body to his horse, affixing that portion of his anatomy which once fit under his sombrero onto his saddle horn. After that, one of them slapped the already terrified horse on its rump and off he galloped. The blazing South Texas sun soon did its work on the corpse, which became increasingly fearsome until it was nothing but a skeleton. People of a superstitious nature saw the headless horseman not as a macabre warning to others, but as a mounted ghost whose appearance did not presage good news.
Before long, the dead rider became El Muerto, the Dead One. The horse and the headless skeleton astride it continued to roam South Texas until the animal died of old age. But horses can live 20 years or more, so El Muerto and his caballero scared a lot of people before the sightings stopped.
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