Peaceful Area Once Scene of Yule Shootout.

Dallas Morning News—Sunday, December 20, 1998 By Kent Biffle

    McDade---All of the stranger’s yuletide cheeriness vanished in a cloud of locomotive steam as he got off a train in this Bastrop County settlement on Christmas Day 1883.      On the platform lay five bloody and bruised dead men, all in a row. Three had been lynched by vigilantes the night before Christmas.  Two had been killed on Christmas morning in a saloon shootout.

            The stranger, Andrew Morgan Smith, had come to inspect a promised land.  Kinsmen had written glowingly of fat cows, fat cotton bolls and fat watermelons.  They forgot to mention that a man could get killed.

            As he awaited the arrival of inquest officials, the young traveler from Georgia was stunned by the dead men.  Tall, broadbuilt Smith was so rattled, in fact, that he took a wrong turn on the way to his cousin’s farm.

            On that cold, windy Christmas night, the 21–year-old Georgian ended up miles from McDade, and nowhere near his cousin’s place.  He stopped at the Harvey farm for directions.  Old man Harvey asked him in to warm by the fire.  They talked crops and  recent killings.[i]

            Noticing the hour, the old man invited the young one to stay the night.  Andy Smith reckoned his weary bones could stand a rest.  Besides, the farmer’s daughter fetching Edith May, had lively blue eyes.  But that’s getting ahead of the story, the story that Erhard Goerlitz was telling me one night last week.  He had grown up and grown old with accounts of the violence.

            This neck of the woods is often called the Knobbs because of several geological warts that rise from rolling plains north of McDade.

            Octogenarian Erhard, his wife Louise, and I escaped the evening chill in a friendly back room of the Goerlitz farmhouse near McDade.

            Nowadays, McDade (pop. 345) is as peaceful a village as you’d find in a day’s ride.  The old Rock Saloon still stands a reminder of the settlement’s repast.  Citizens are contorting it into a McDade Museum.

            The Rock Saloon is at the west end of a row of buildings aglitter with strings of Christmas lights.  At the east end is Jesse and Ann Skinner’s General Store, retailing fresh gossip and groceries.

Livelihood from Railroads

            The buildings face the railroad tracks, and early source of prosperity and excitement in McDade.  The 1869 railhead of the Houston and Texas Central, McDade was busy as an anthill.

            They called the place “Tie Town” back then because of the railroad ties cut from local timber.  The first business was a tent saloon.  A tin cup of whiskey cost a dime—a small fee for a lot of trouble.

            Not all the rowdies moved on with the railroaders as they continued building---tie by tie---to Austin.  A number of thugs hung around, stealing cows, robbing citizens of their cotton money, and eventually uniting in a sort of pastoral underworld.

            Tale-meister Goerlitz told me that the upshot was a gang that ranged through Bastrop, Lee, and Williamson Counties, doing nocturnal business as  the Notch Cutters.  He explained, “Each would cut a notch in his weapon when he killed somebody.”  There were notches aplenty.

            Lawmen in the stricken area were commonly absent or absent-minded.  So, civic-minded citizens began learning the ropes of homemade justice.

In 1875, they hanged two suspected outlaws, prompting retaliation by Notch Cutters who, in turn, slew a couple of the vigilantes.  In response, the good guys self-righteously hanged another bad guy.

            In 1876, two men were caught red-handed with a skinned cow.  The skin showed the Olive brand, mark of a family that counted among its formidable members ranchman Print Olive, whose rugged reputation would spread through the West, The Olives went to work.

            They shot the two rustling suspects and wrapped then in the hide, a green one that would shrink to hug them snugly as a shuck on a tamale.

            Months later, a gang of 15  riders, led by a son of one of the slain men, raided and burned the Olive ranch house, killing two men.

            On a June night in 1877, vigilantes, who had the goods on five rustlers, called on a country damce where the five were cavorting .  The Elgin Courier and the Bastrop Advertiser, covered the resulting necktie party.  So did the Galveston News.

            “McDade, Texas---June 27, 1877—About 2 o’clock this morning while at a dance 10 miles north of this place in Lee County, Wade Alsup, John Kuykendall. Young Floyd, and Beck Scott were taken by 15 men and hanged to one limb.  The cause is supposed to be horse stealing and other outlawing……….”

            The fifth man escaped the fatal roll call because of a call of another nature.  Lucky for him, he was out in the outhouse.

            In 1883, two men were murdered and another was robbed, beaten and left dying.  When Deputy Sheriff Bose Heffington came out from the safety of the civilized county seat to investigate, he was assassinated on a dark night by a gunman hidden in shadows.

            His killing aroused the countryside and triggered a meeting of 200 in a McDade church of what the Galveston News styled “the best citizens.” The League for Law and Order was organized.

            On Christmas Eve 1883, Thad McLemore was arrested in McDade for burglary.  League men were on every road leading into McDade.  Travelers were allowed to enter, but no one was permitted to leave.Masked men soon strode into McDade’s streets.  They snatched Thad McLemore from his guard.  And they swept through the saloons, gathering two more reputed hard cases—Thad’s brother, Wright McLemore, and Henry Pfeiffer.  They draged them a mile northwest of town, and hanged then to a hickory limb.

            At 10 a.m. Christmas Day, the brothers Beaty—Asa, Jack and Heywood –rode into town with Charlie Goodman, Bart Hasley and Robert Stevens.  Not one was a man to fool with.

            Asa Beaty called on Tom Bishop at his meat marker, demanding to know what happened, to the McLemores and Henry Pfeiffer.  After an exchange of hot words, Tom Bishop got in the first shot, killing him.  Saloonkeeper George Milton flew to help Tom Bishop.

            In the shootout that followed, up and down the street, in and out of saloons, Asa and Jack Beaty were killed, not to mention a non-combatant named Willie Griffin who ran fatally into a wild bullet.  In their gunfight with these hombres who were widely feared, Tom Bishop and George Milton didn’t get a single scratch.

            The lifeless Beaty pair had joined the McLemores and Pfeiffer on the platform by the time Andrew Smith hit town.  He didn’t know he was witnessing the closing scene of the Notch Cutters.  Like the final curtain on a drama, a wagon sheet was thrown over the dead players.

                Nor did Andy Smith, an ambitious young man, know that destiny was directing or misdirecting his steps that Christmas night in 1883.

            His call on the Harvey farmhouse that night signaled the start of a courtship that culminated in his lifelong marriage to the farmer’s daughter, Edith May Harvey.

            A few decades later, Erhard Goerlitz married Louise Smith, the farmer’s granddaughter.  Like Edith May, she has lively blue eyes.