"Hit her in the mouth and she'll shut up," Dan Hoerster shouted to his accomplice.

Pregnant Mrs. John Wohrle screamed even louder, alerting many in Mason County, Texas on February 18, 1875. Overpowered, her husband was gagged and bound to a chair. "Now, give me the jail keys!", the intruders insisted. Mr. Wohrle never turned the keys over to them so they left empty-handed.

"Get up!", Sheriff John Clark burst into Hunter's Hotel, waking Texas Ranger Lieutenant Dan W. Roberts. "A lot of men are mobbing the jail!" Joined by James Trainer, they heard a battering ram disintegrating the jail door long before they arrived.

"Halt!", the three heard twenty paces before they reached the jail. They obeyed and backed off, temporarily. Crossing the street to the courthouse, Roberts and Trainer stopped at the door. Clark bounded up the steps to the second story. Sticking his rifle through the courtroom window, Clark warned, "First man that touches the jail door, I'll kill!"

Ten of the forty men broke from the mob and surrounded Sheriff Clark. "We're going to have those men in the jail." Even though the Hoodoos, as the locals called them, wore masks, Clark recognized their voices and clothing. Local vigilantes had declared war on the lawless and had become just as bad as those they chased.

"I give up," Clark caved in. The ten Hoodoos joined the other thirty, breaking the Backus gang out of jail.

By the time Clark regained his composure and his bravado, the Backus gang was well on their way to a party--a necktie party, in their honor. Clark and Roberts rode up too late for the Backus boys. Their bodies swung in the breeze, like out of time clock pendulums. The lawmen cut down the four suspended bodies. This first battle by the Hoodoos only set the stage for more bloody fights.

Of all the Hoodoos, the most colorful had to be Scott Cooley. An orphan, carried off from Palo Pinto County by Indians, after his parents were massacred, he never regained his full mental capacity. This trauma and typhoid fever may have caused his meteoric morbid actions. People thought him to be Cherokee, because his skin was as dark as natives were. But probably not, for he hated Indians worse than whites. Besides being abandoned and having typhoid, Cooley got bit by a rattlesnake and began to have what people only knew to call as "fits." Cooley once took a saddle maker some strips of skin to make a whip from. When Cooley said the material was "Indian hide," the saddle man ran him out of his shop.

A kindly family named Williamson was the only people in the world Scott Cooley cared a hoot about. For they were the only ones, years before, who took in the orphan. When they were murdered, Scott Cooley truly lost any sanity he retained and went on the warpath.

He moved into a Mason County hotel room. Cooley watched and listened for evidence of who killed his friends. It didn't take him long to figure out that Deputy John Wohrle was crooked. Cooley shot Wohrle in the back of the head. Five more shots later, and after stabbing the dead body four times, Cooley lifted Wohrle's scalp. As if he wasn't mean enough alone, Cooley collected George Gladden, John and Mose Beard and Johnny Ringgo to help him. Beard and Gladden soon found themselves alone, facing sixty lawmen. Gladden was wounded but begged for his life and allowed to go free. Beard wasn't so lucky, for he wound up dead at Beaver Creek. Cooley hung around long enough to exact revenge for his friends. He murdered, then had drinks, as if resting from a hard day's work. Cooley was arrested but the charges didn't stick. Many in Mason County saw Cooley as a Robin Hood type and didn't fault him for his unlawful ways.

By 1876, Cooley's gang became so brazen that military aid was called in to stop them. That fall, Cooley stopped at the Nimitz Hotel in Fredicksburg for a drink. Someone slipped poison in his whiskey and he got brain fever and died having never been punished, in this life, for his misdeeds. His partners failed to fare better. Beard turned legal, becoming a peace officer in New Mexico. The man he succeeded killed him. Johnny Ringgo, yes, the Johnny Ringgo, died in Tombstone, Arizona much later, on the receiving end of a bullet from Buckskin Frank Leslie. Gladden got 99 years in the state pen, but was pardoned. He couldn't get past his thieving, and stole stock only to end up back in prison, where he died.

The Mason county courthouse burned to the ground in 1877. Usually this happened when someone who had a criminal record they wanted to dispose of. Probably one of the Hoodoos did it. All evidence of their war went up in smoke, but storytellers like me won't let you forget them.

Source: Ten Texas Feuds, C.L. Sonnichsen, University of New Mexico Press, 1957