LAST OF THE HORRELLS

8/3/1936 - Not as well known now as Wild West sibling renegades like the Reno Brothers, the James Brothers, the Younger Brothers, the Logans of the Wild Bunch, or the Dalton Brothers, but just as cold-blooded and lawless as any of them (an 1889 article on the brothers in the Lampasas newspaper will describe the gunfighting men as "Remorseless and unrelenting, always fighting under the black flag.  They were utter strangers to fear."), the last of the infamous Horrell Brothers of Lampasas, Texas, Samuel, passes away from natural causes in the form of old age on a Monday in the town of Eureka, California at the age of 99, outliving rival gunman, and the bane of his family, John Pinckney Calhoun "Pink" Higgins, by 23 years.

Sam Horrell

A wilderness first roamed by mustang horses and Tonkawa, Lipan Apache, and Comanche Indians, the central Texas location of Lampasas County knows it's first settlers in 1853 when former Georgian, Moses Hughes and his invalid wife, Hanna Berry Hughes, put down stakes near the Lampasas River, hoping the curative powers of the area's nearby sulphur spring can ease Mrs. Hughes' ills.  Soon, recognizing the area's cattle raising potential, other families follow, and by 1855, becoming the county's seat, the town of Burleson, also to be named Lampasas, is established.  Originally from Arkansas, the Horrell Family of Samuel Horrell Sr. and Elizabeth Wells Horrell (married in 1838), seven children in all, six boys (Samuel Jr., John, Martin "Mart," Thomas, Merritt, and Benjamin are born between 1839 and 1854) and a girl (Sarah) arrive in the area.  Growing up the boys learn a myriad of ranching and soldiering skills, and serve together (Sam Jr., Mart and Tom) in a light cavalry regiment of Texas volunteers known as Terry's Texas Rangers (for their first commander, Colonel Benjamin Franklin Terry, a 40-year-old plantation owner killed at the 1861 Battle of Rowlett's Station near Woodsonville, Kentucky) during the American Civil War.  As regiment members belonging to the Confederate Army of Tennessee, the Horrells will burnish their killing skills at blood baths that stretch over seven states and include Shiloh, Murfreesboro, Chattanooga, Chickamauga, the Knoxville Campaign of 1863, Atlanta, and Bentonville.  War over and back in Texas, in 1869 the family decides to pull up stakes and move to California, but during their journey west, find themselves attacked by a band of Apaches while traveling through San Augustine Pass in New Mexico.  In the ensuing ambush, patriarch Samuel and his son John are both killed, but the Indians are beaten off by the accurate pistol and rifle fire of the surviving Horrells.  California dream over, the family returns to the Lampasas region, settles their mother Elizabeth in town, and begin families of their own while starting ranching operations.  Crazy cowboys, at first the only mischief any of the clan get into are holing Lampasas buildings after extended evenings in town drinking, gambling, and howling at the moon (during the town's 1871 Christmas celebrations, a drunken Ben Horrell will shoot out a number of holiday candles lit about town as other cowboys ride horses into a saloon and the drugstore of Doctor W. A. Frazier, and somebody starts a fire that burns down the county courthouse and it's records).  In 1873 however, the Horrell's escapades grow decidedly deadly.

A Terry Texas Ranger

Lampasas

Trouble begins for the Horrell Brothers when Lampasas County Sheriff Shadrick T. Denson attempts to arrest two wild cowboy brothers named Washington and Mark Short for drunken and rowdy behavior.  The brothers are friends with both men.  Not willing to be arrested, when Denson comes calling, the Shorts pull their pistols and begin firing, with one round penetrating Denson's side, where it will remain for two decades, giving the lawman daily pains (the Shorts flee retribution, but four years later, while stepping into a local barbershop for a haircut, Mark Short is shot three times and killed by the lawman's son, the younger man then mounts his horse and leaves Texas for Montana).  A posse called together to take care of the job the sheriff failed to handle, the next set of lawmen are also dissuaded from taking the brothers into custody, this time by the Horrells.  Lawlessness in Lampasas seemingly out of control, word of the situation in central Texas makes it's way to the Austin office of the Texas governor, former Union Civil War brigadier general and Reconstruction Republican, Edmund Jackson Davis.  Davis' "solution" is to ban all firearms from being carried on the streets of Lampasas, and to send law enforcement officers of the Texas State Police, an organization created in 1870 to take the place of the temporarily disbanded Texas Rangers, into the region.  Not pleased with being ordered about by a Northerner, the brothers and their cowboys clean their guns and wait for the right moment to display their displeasure ... a moment that comes on Wednesday, March 19, 1873.    

Mark & Wash Short

Denson

Hearing that the governor has sent men to Lampasas to arrest them and one of their employees and a family member (using the alias Bill Bowen, Clint Barkley, accused murderer is hiding out with his brother-in-law, Merritt Horrell, as a ranch hand), the brothers and some of their men, all armed to the teeth, ride into Lampasas and set up shop in the cowboy friendly confines of Jerry Scott's Matador Saloon, waiting for the state police and getting drunker and drunker as the day progresses.  The police posse the boys are waiting for consists of Captain Thomas Williams (the 28-year-old son-in-law of local rancher, John Pinckney Calhoun "Pink" Higgins) and seven other men.  Arriving in town as dusk is about to descend on Lampasas, the lawmen spy one of the miscreants they seeking, Barkley, wearing a revolver in plain sight, enter the Matador, and Williams decides to begin the arrests with the cowboy gunman, and splitting his force in two, he leaves four men outside (the sole black man in the group, Samuel Wicks, guards the posse's mounts, while lawmen Ferdinand Marschal, W.W. Wren, and Henry Eddy are stationed on the street) and enters the saloon with Private Wesley Cherry (36), Private Jim Daniels (47), and Private Andrew Melville (25).  Inexperience and ego combining with the foolish notion that the Horrells are nothing more than a bunch of fun loving cowboys, the move is a serious error by Williams.  Boldly striding through the bar's swinging door entrance, Williams tells Barkley he is under arrest, a proclamation that causes Mart Horrell to stand up from his seat at one of the small saloon's tables to declare that Barkley doesn't have to submit to the orders of a carpet bagger from the state police.  The declaration causes Williams to state that Matt is now also under arrest as the lawman draws his pistol to back up his announcement; the green light that causes everyone in the saloon to begin firing their weapons.  Pistol and rifle bullets flying about everywhere, when the acrid blue gunsmoke inside the Matador clears, lawmen Williams and Daniels lay dead on the saloon's floor, riddled with bullets, lawman Cherry staggers to the bar's entrance and then drops dead from wounds, and lawman Melville is mortally wounded trying to escape saloon (he will make it to a nearby hotel where he receives treatment, but passes despite the work of a local doctor, he perishes on April 10, 1873), Tom Horrell is shot in the wrist, and Mart Horrell is shot in the neck.  The bullet firing portion of the evening over, the lawmen outside the saloon decide it might be wiser to immediately leave town rather than figure out who did what inside the bar and take the culprits into captivity, while Matt is brought to his mother's home to mend as the rest of the family rides off into the hills to plan their next moves.  Arrested soon afterwards, Mart Horrell, Jerry Scott (the saloon owner and friend of the Horrells), and two Horrell cowboys are transferred to the nearby village of Georgetown's jail.  Also moving to Georgetown is Mart's wife, who nurses her husband back to health and passes on to her in-laws when Mart is ready to ride a horse again.  And so it is that later, on May 2, 1873, the Horrell's and forty of their men and supporters hurrah Georgetown, keeping citizens at bay with their bullets while Barkley breaks into the jail using a sledgehammer and the captives are freed (in the raid, Barkley takes a minor wounding while pounding on the door, and local lawyer A.S. Fisher survives a more serious wound to his chest).    

Mart Horrell

Tom Horrell And His Wife

A line crossed with the shootings and jailbreak, the Horrells, recognizing it might be too dangerous to remain in Texas, decide to try New Mexico again, taking a thousand head herd of cattle westward (there are roughly twenty-four individuals that join in the move) to a region readying itself to explode in just a few years with a series of back-and-forth murders that will pit business interest against each other for domination of the region and introduce the nation to a host of outlandish figures that include Lawrence Murphy and James Dolan of the Murphy & Dolan Mercantile and Banking Company, lawyer Alexander McSween, rancher John Tunstall, Billy the Kid and the cowboy killers known as The Regulators, Territorial Governor Lew Wallace (a former Civil War general and the author of the religious novel, Ben-Hur), and Sheriff Pat Garrett ... Lincoln County.  It is also an area seething with racial tensions between Hispanics and white settlers.  Peace for the family will not to be found in New Mexico, and Benjamin Horrell is the next family member to pay the price for the family's penchant for violence.  A new Horrell homestead established near the location in the Hondo Valley where the Rio Bonito and Rio Ruidoso come together and become the Rio Hondo, on Monday, December 1, 1873, Ben Horrell, former 36-year-old Lincoln County Sheriff Jacob L. "Jack" Gylam, Georgetown escapee Jerry Scott, 34-year-old rancher David Warner, and cowboys Zachariah Crompton and Ben Harold ride into Lincoln to pick up their mail and to get the holiday season started early with a spree paid for by Horrell.  Carousing between bars and whore houses, the drunken men give Lincoln the Lampasas treatment, shooting pistols and rifles at various businesses, windows, and the sky, drawing the attention of local Constable Juan Martinez.  Everyone friendly at first despite the constable and Warner being sworn enemies, Martinez demands the men surrender their weapons and continue their partying in a more quiet manner.  No problem, except the men get drunker still, acquire another batch of weapons, and start shooting up the town again.  Hearing the bullet cacophony, Martinez puts together a posse of other local Hispanics and the group marches off to arrest the noise makers.  Found at a Mexican dance hall and bordello, Warner decides he isn't giving up a second weapon to his enemy, and when Martinez asks for his gun, he draws it and fires on the constable, killing the man, as he is then killed himself by the men in Martinez's posse.  Outnumbered, Gylum and Horrell flee the building (the others vanish into the darkness and immediately ride out of Lincoln), but are caught trying to escape out of town over the Rio Bonito.  Surrender given as the men beg for mercy, instead of placing the two white drunks in custody, the Hispanic posse opens up on the pair and riddles them both; Ben Horrell will be hit eight times (and additionally, he has a finger cut off so a diamond ring can be stolen off his hand) and Warner is struck by fourteen slugs (along with someone taking a rock to his skull).

Lincoln, New Mexico

Keeping their cool at first when they receive news of their brother Benjamin's death, the Horrells look for the authorities to take care of the matter (an impossibility with both Lincoln's justice of the peace and probate judge both out of town and unable to issue arrest warrants), but then choose to take the law into their own hands when the deaths of Warner, Horrell, and Gylum are considered justifiable homicides and Hispanic posses led by Lincoln County Sheriff Alexander Hamilton "Hamm" Mills (a member of the local Mexican community by marriage) twice try to arrest the brothers at their ranch (efforts that are beaten back by Texan bullets).  The opening deaths in what will be called The Horrell War, other killings with racial overtones follow rapidly.  On December 4th, the bodies of two Mexicans, said to be "rustlers" are found near the Horrell Ranch, leading to the two Mills' raids (incited by a local Hispanic priest that tells the locals to "burn out" the Horrells) on the men's ranch.  Seething with rage, anyone Hispanic now a target (or associates of Hispanics, Deputy Sheriff Joseph Haskins of nearby Pichaco is pulled out of his bed and shot to death simply for being married to a Mexican woman by three members of the Horrell faction), the Horrells and a number of men secretly ride into Lincoln on December 20, 1873, looking for the man they believed killed Benjamin, a local named Juan Patron.  Not able to find Patron wandering the streets of Lincoln, Mart, Sam, and Tom Horrell, accompanied by Zachariah Crompton, Jerry Scott ride up to a Mexican home where a wedding celebration is taking place that they are told Patron might be attending.  Not bothering to identify their targets, the murderous revenge seeking raiders open fire, pouring a massive amount of lead through the windows of the home, before putting spurs to their mounts and riding back to their ranch.  In their wake they leave behind the bodies of Isidro Patron (Juan Patron's father), Isidro Padilla, Dario Balazar, and Jose Candelaria, and two other wounded celebrants, Pilar Candelaria and Apolonio Garcia ... cold blooded gun work that gains all three brothers $500 Dead-or-Alive rewards on their heads (second thoughts, Governor Marsh Giddings soon has the reward notices rescinded).  Retaliation swift in coming for the Horrells, in January of 1874, Sheriff Mills puts together a posse of sixty irate Hispanic deputies that surround the adobe home of the Texans on the Ruidoso River ... an all-day battle takes place, but with no arrests or casualties on either side, unwilling to be ambushed when night comes to the area, Mills and his men return to Lincoln.  The Horrells turn to respond, they put together a payback party of over 50 Texans and ride out to attack Lincoln, but before reaching their destination, some thinking takes place and the brothers realize they are becoming involved in a game they can't win (especially with the troops from nearby Fort Stanton potentially involved), so they return to the ranch and begin another exodus back to the Lampasas region of Texas, by way of Roswell, New Mexico.

Lincoln Courthouse & Jail

Giddings

Before the Horrells leave New Mexico however, blood lust still up (it doesn't help that on the ride, Ben Turner, a friend of the Horrells is shot from ambush by a Hispanic named Martin Chaves), they come across a group of five Mexican freighters about fifteen miles west of Roswell; to a man, the Hispanics are all killed and their wagons looted (in all, it is believed that in the back and forth killings between Hispanics and Anglos, over thirty people lose their lives).  Before leaving the state, the Texans help themselves to four horses belonging to Dolan teamster Steve Stanley, rustle horses and mules from Roswell resident Aaron O. Wilburn, meet Robert W. Beckwith on the road and rob him of eight horses and mules, the man's saddle and a pistol, and they drive off all the stock on the ranch of their enemy, lawman Alexander Hamilton Mills.  Meanwhile, back in Lincoln, a posse led by Lincoln merchant James Dolan loots and then burns the Horrell ranch to the ground before heading after the Texans.  With the head start they have however, the Horrells make it back to Lampasas, but discover almost immediately that they are no longer considered "fun loving" cowboys in the region.  Placed in custody for the murder of lawman Williams and the subsequent jail escape (during the "surrender," Jerry Scott is shot through the lung and Mart Horrell is slightly wounded, while innocent bystander, Johnny Green takes a wounding slug in the stomach), the brothers go on trial, but with documents missing, friends enough in the area to pack a jury, and witnesses developing memory lapses, the boys are acquitted of murder for the Matador slayings.  Receiving yet another opportunity to move on with their lives, Sam resettles seventeen miles north of Lampasas near Simms Creek, Tom sets up on a property seven miles north of Lampasas, Mart starts ranching southeast of town, near the Burnet County line, and Merritt begins ranching near the property of a neighbor the brothers knew growing up in the Lampasas area named John Pinckney Calhoun "Pink" Higgins.

Higgins

Higgins is born in Macon, Georgia on March 28, 1851, but before he is three years old, his parents (John Holcomb Higgins and Hester West Higgins) have him in a covered wagon as the family moves west, settling first in Austin before moving on to the Lampasas region.  A strict Southern Baptist, he will learn to read using the family's Bible.  Too young to serve with his fellow Texans in the American Civil War, Higgins spends his youth learning the talents it takes to survive on the frontier, horsemanship and accuracy with a variety of weapons (Higgins will come to be known as a gunman who prefers using a Winchester rifle which he fires using his thumb while levering the weapon) and how to herd cattle ... talents he uses driving his father's cattle north to market in Kansas (in 1868, he will participate in a cattle drive that takes Texan steers all the way up to Wyoming), fighting off Comanche and Kiowa warriors (Higgins will be slightly wounded twice keeping the tribe off his father's homestead, now called Izoro Ranch), and running down cattle rustlers (he will personally hang his first rustler at the tender age of eighteen).  After the war, Higgins briefly owns a combination meat store and saloon until it burns down, serves as an officer in the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan, and becomes an active member of the area's Law and Order League.  A formidable individual by the time he is in his twenties, thinking the man is still the youth they remembered from before the war and the friend they often ran their own cattle with, the Horrells, now masters of lazy ranching in which they rustle cattle that crosses their paths, and not knowing the man is still upset by the 1873 murder of family member Williams, treat Higgins as just another mark to be plundered.  It is a mistake that will soon have bloody repercussions for everyone involved in what becomes known as the Horrell-Higgins Feud.

Higgins And Some Of His Men

Bottom L to R - Felix Castello, Jess Standard

Bob Mitchell, Pink Higgins

Standing L to R - Powell Woods, Unidentified

Buck Allen, Alonzo Mitchell

The killings begun in 1873, continue in 1874, when catching a Horrell cowboy named Zeke Terrell butchering a Higgins cow, Pink drops the rustler from ninety yards away with a Winchester slug, and then to send a message to Lampasas outlaws, disembowels the dead cow and sticks Terrell inside before riding in to town to tell local law officers that a miracle is taking outside of town in which a cow is giving birth to a man.  1875 has Higgins getting into a gunfight with a former Quantrill guerilla and buffalo hunter in the employee of the Horrells named Ike Lantier.  Encountering each other at a watering hole used jointly by Horrell and Higgins stock, Lantier slaps leather first, but too slowly considering his opponent, and is shot out of the saddle by Higgins pumping a bullet into the belly of the gunman before he can get a single shot off.  Evidence presented by Higgins that he is not a man to be trifled with, the Horrells obliviously continue to raid Pink's cattle.  Brought to trial twice before but let off twice by local courts when bogus bills-of-sale are presented in court.  Warned by Higgins to leave his property alone or the rancher will take matters into his own hands, 1877 sees the brothers continuing to plunder Pink's property.  Sitting in the former saloon of his friend Jerry Scott (the same Matador establishment where Williams and four of his men were killed four years before, now called Wiley and Toland's Gem Saloon), Merritt Horrell is warming himself with whiskey as he sits near a fireplace at the back of the bar with a friend named Saunders on the cold Monday morning of January 22nd when an unconvivial Pink walks into tavern, yells "Mr. Horrell, this is to settle some cow business," and shoots Merritt in the chest with his rifle (at the time, their are also rumors that Merritt is having an affair with Higgins' wife).  Knocked to the floor by the rifle slug, Merritt pulls himself off the floor, and leaning on Saunders, is in the process of reaching for his revolver, when a second blast from Higgins' rifle puts him down a second time, then making sure his enemy is permanently eliminated, Pink walks up and puts two more rounds into dying enemy.  The feud now red hot with Merritt's death and the surviving brothers vowing to kill Higgins and his associates at the first opportunity they get, there will be more shootings and deaths around Lampasas as 1877 progresses.

Lampasas

Realizing the Horrell's threats against Higgins and his associates are not idle, Higgins decides to strike again before his opponents can translate their talk into violent action.  Riding into Lampasas to clear himself of some past charges during a session of Judge W. A. Blackburn's court, on the Monday morning of March 26, 1877, Mart Horrell, accompanied by his brother Tom, are five miles outside of town when gunfire ambushes both men as they cross a stream that will soon be known as Battle Branch.  Seriously injured, Tom is knocked off his horse and floundering about in the water, provides his attackers with an easy target for a kill shot if brother Mart had been less aggressive in his response to being wounded.  Ignoring his own wounds, Mart jumps off his horse, draws his gun, and charges the assassins hiding in the trees, targeting their positions so aggressively that Higgins and his associates grab their horses, mount, and flee so as to fight another day, while Mart takes his brother to a nearby home before galloping into town for help.  Beyond livid (it does not help that the charges are dropped against Higgins in the killing of Merritt Horrell, a killing the the court deems a "justifiable homicide"), injuries healed, the brothers respond to the second attack on the family by launching an ambush of their own own in June of 1877.  Setting up outside a line camp manned by Higgins cowboys, Mart, Tom, and Sam Horrell wait until two men leave the wooden shack where they sleep to prepare breakfast and then open up on the men, killing both (one will linger for three days).  Sides chosen and blood tasted, the feud flares up again a few days later when both factions show up in Lampasas on Thursday, June 7, 1877.

Lampasas Courthouse

Drawn to the town's courthouse square by news that a few days before the office of the Lampasas County District Clerk's office has been burglarized and had records destroyed, Tom, Sam, and Mart Horrell, Clint (a veteran of gunfights on the side of the Horrells in both Texas and New Mexico) and Tom Barkley (in-laws of the dead Merritt Horrell), and Horrell cowboys John Dixon, Bill Crabtree, and Jim Buck Miller are discussing recent events when they are joined downtown by Pink Higgins, his top aide, Bill Wren, Higgins' brothers-in-law, Bob and Frank Mitchell, another brother-in-law, Ben Terry, and a couple of other Higgins' cowboys.  Instant ire, both sides pull their weapons and begin firing on each other in a gun battle that will last over two hours before citizens convince both sides to continue their fight another day, and in another town.  Gunfight over and the smoke of battle cleared, the Horrells permanently lose the services of new hire Miller, while the Higgins faction has Frank Mitchell killed and Bill Wren severely wounded by a bullet that hits him in his posterior as he tries to take up a position in a wagon yard a block north of the square.  Tired of the back-and-forth killings, Higgins tries to end matters once-and-for-all the following month when he leads fourteen of his allies and hands on a raid of the ranch and bunkhouse of Mart Horrell.  Armed with brand new Winchester '73 rifles, Higgins party surrounds both structures in the night and when dawn breaks, opens fire on the men within.  Surprised by the first volley of bullets sent their way, the Horrells and their men are soon firing back and the battle morphs into a siege and stalemate.  Forty-eight hours of gunplay resulting into only two Horrell cowboys being slightly wounded, the Higgins faction finally leaves when they run low on ammunition for their rifles.  Hostilities erupt again on July 25, 1877, when Higgins sends one of his cowboys, Carson Graham, into town to buy tobacco, whiskey, ammunition, and other ranch supplies, and the man is ambushed by the Horrells, gunned down with the Horrells' brand traced out in the dust beside the body.

Higgins (L) And Associate

Enough is enough, the re-established Texas Rangers, the locals under the command of Major John B. Jones (the group will be known as the "Frontier Battalion"), return to the area again (Jones and seven rangers), this time bound and determined to end the feud one way or another.  Arresting the major players in the conflict, after giving both groups of men all the negative options that will take place if the killings continue, the Texas Ranger is able to get both sides to sign off on a truce in which the two factions agree that the blood letting is a "by gone thing" (the Horrells, Sam, Tom, and Mart, agree first and sign the truce on July 30th, and three days later, on August 2nd, Higgins, Bill Wren, and Bob Mitchell also go along with the agreement).  And so the feud ends ... or does it?  A year later, suspected of complicity in the robbery and murder of a elderly Bosque County country shopkeeper named J.F. Vaughn, Tom and Mart Horrell are arrested west of Waco and confined in the nearby town of Meridian's jail.  There, on December 15, 1878, a mob of vigilantes three hundred strong, break into the jail, subdue the guards, and then pull their guns and blast Tom and Mart into eternity (the two brothers are each struck by dozens of bullets and will be buried in a unmarked grave at the Oak Cemetery in Lampasas).  Afterwards, it will be rumored that Higgins has instigated both of his foes  arrest and is instrumental in wiping the vigilante mob, into a killing frenzy.  Whatever the case, the rumors are never proven and Higgins goes back to being a rancher with violent temper and a quick trigger finger ... in 1884, Pink's ire is red hot again.  Traveling with two of his men to Del Rio, Texas to pickup 125 horses he has purchased from a Mexican rancher, Higgins crosses the Rio Grande River to get his property, but is told by the seller that the cost of the horses has gone up, word that cause Pink to send killing rounds into the Mexican, an action that almost costs Higgins his life when the rancher's friends, totaling twenty men, attack, chasing the Texans to the Rio Grande's riverbank, where Higgins and his cowboys fort up until night falls and they are able to slip away from their antagonists and swim back to Texas.

Major Jones

Proving that he can do something beside feud with other ranchers and shoot down rustlers, in 1875, Pink marries Delilah Elizabeth Mitchell (the couple will have two sons, Tom and Cullen, and a daughter, Malinda Caledonia ... all three are well educated, and the two boys will both grow up to be lawyers).  Discovering his wife has cheated on him, after seven years of marriage, in 1882, Higgins divorces his wife and begins a relationship with fifteen-year-old Lena Rivers Sweet.  Marrying Lena the following year (the couple will have six daughters and one son), Higgins leaves the Lampasas area, moves to the Texas Panhandle to raise cattle on the open range, and establishes a homestead on Kent County's Catfish Creek, near the 570,000 acre Spur Ranch of British investors (for a time, Higgins will partner with Jefferson Davis Hardin, the younger brother of Texas gunslinger, John Wesley Hardin).  Finding himself once again in a hot bed of rustling as a new century begins, Higgins is hired as a range detective by Spur Ranch manager Fred Horsbrugh to keep the local riff-raff away from the ranch's stock, a service Higgins has some experience with (by Pink's own count, with guns or a rope, he sends eighteen men on to perdition during his career as a gunman).  Unfortunately, his hiring sets up one final feud requiring his abilities at hitting a human target while being fired on himself. 

Higgins

Also hired to stamp out rustling against the Spur Ranch at the same time as Higgins begins working for Horsbrugh is a former Lampasas cowboy and sheriff (of Crosby County from 1888 to 1894 and of Hartley County from 1900 to 1903), J. William "Little Bill" (as a full grown adult, the man barely weighs 140 pounds) Standifer, a gunman quick enough to send at least seven men to perdition.  Whether it is over Standifer's support for the Horrells during the recently concluded Horrell-Higgins War (Standifer is a distant relative of the the Horrells), Pink's lawyer son Cullen representing Mrs. Standifer in her divorce from Little Bill (a job that finds Standifer verbally abusing Cullen Higgins so badly that Pink is forced to intervene and challenges Standifer to a gunfight should the abuse keep coming, a threat that does not dissuade Little Bill in the least), Pink having a history of pistol whipping a friend of Standifer, Higgins hearing that in his cups, Standifer has told anyone who will listen that he is going to kill Higgins someday, Standifer breaking into laughter when he hears that one of Pink's houses has burnt to the ground, Higgins accusing Standifer friend, Bill McComas of cattle rustling, or just the need to test themselves against another gunman.  Whatever the cause is, the men quarrel and quarrel every time they are within each others presence to the point where Horsbrugh is forced to fire both individuals at the end of 1902.  Animosity finally exploding (the antagonists play cat-and-mouse with each other for weeks trying to set up successful assassination ambushes), the two men settle their differences on Sunday morning, October 4, 1903.

Horsbrugh

No more setting up fruitless ambushes, Standifer rides to the Higgins property to go after Pink once and for all, and from his home, the rancher spots his foe, and mounts up on his favorite horse, Sandy, and armed with one of his prized Winchester rifles (a Winchester Model 1894), rides out to deal with his foe as his daughter and brother-in-law watch from the ranch house.  At sixty yards distant from each other, the men pull up and after a short burst of insults are yelled by both men at the other, the very short gun battle begins.  Determined to let loose with his rifle as soon as Standifer takes his left foot out of his stirrup believing that the men will duel from behind their horses, when the move takes place, Higgins goes to tear his rifle out of it's scabbard, but has difficulty with the move and his opponent gets off the first shot of the contest with a round that hits Sandy in the flank, causing the animal to buck against it's owner before bolting away, throwing Pink's shot off target and leaving him exposed to the fire of Standifer.  Luckily for Higgins, Standifer spends the next few seconds jumping about as he sends a number of inaccurate shots at Pink, who waits for a slow moment from the former sheriff.  When the moment presents itself, Higgins, down on a knee to steady his aim, sends one rifle bullet at Standifer, a .30-30 round that hits the man in the elbow before crashing into his heart.  With a look of confusion on his face as the bullet takes it's toll, Standifer shifts his weapon to his good arm to continue the fight, but staggers only a few feet before falling face first into the ground, dead (the spot where the shooting takes place will henceforth be known as "Standifer's Thicket."  Fearing Standifer is only playing possum though, Higgins then remounts his wounded horse and trots it back to his house, where it drops dead.  Grabbing a new ride, Higgins heads off for the nearest telephone from which he calls the local Kent County Sheriff B.F. Roy to tell the lawman that he thinks he has killed Standifer ... no friend of the former lawman, Roy tells Higgins "if you aren't sure, you'd better go back and finish the job" (later, when the shooting is dismissed as another "justifiable homicide," Roy will hire Higgins as a deputy, and Horsbrugh will give him back his position as a range detective).  Last notch, Pink is 52-years-old when he takes out his last gunfighter.  Slowing up as he gives up gunfighting for enjoying the company of his wife and playing with his children, on the chilly morning of December 18, 1913, while building a fire in the rock fireplace of his ranch house, Higgins suffers a massive heart attack and dies at the age of 62.    

Little Bill

And so it is that Samuel Horrell Junior becomes the last man standing of the Horrell-Higgins Feud, living on for 23 more years after Pink Higgins finally goes off to the town of Spur, Texas' Boot Hill.  Guessing that the violence that seems to be a magnet for his family will soon come calling for him too, Sam and his family (Sam is married to Martha A. Stanley Horrell and the couple will have eight children) abandon the Lone Star state in 1882 (after spending two years in Runnels County, Texas), moving half a continent away and settling in the forest country of Oregon (he will found the community of Sammyville, where some of his bloodline still roam and blow up tree stumps on the Fourth of July), before coming to rest one final time in Eureka, California.  Still listed as wanted fugitive from justice in Texas for his wild days with his brothers in Lampasas, Sam passes away from natural causes on August 3, 1936 at the age of 99 in Eureka.  The former gunslinger is buried at the Ocean View Cemetery of Eureka County, California. 

Rest In Peace

Namesake

Grandson And Mayor Of Sammyville
  

.