October 11, 1902

Finally, the heat of summer was gone.

In Deep East Texas, summer is the longest season. From May until early October the hot air hovers, thick with humidity and mosquitoes. This year had been no exception, though in late June a freak storm had dropped fourteen inches of rain in twenty hours, causing a flood that washed out all the bridges over the Attoyac River, which divides Nacogdoches and San Augustine counties, and wreaking widespread damage in the old Spanish town of Nacogdoches, the county seat.¹

By October the leaves were just starting to turn in the...

The name “nacogdoches” comes from the nacogdoche tribe of Hasinai Indians, who made their home on the present site of the city, between two creeks that run from north to south, the Banita and the Lanana. The tribe was one of eight in the Hasinai confederation of Caddoes, four of which lived in the area that became Nacogdoches County. Archaeological evidence, including a number of burial mounds, indicates there was a large Caddoan settlement in the thirteenth century near where downtown is now located, and there is evidence that Indians had settled in the area as early as the ninth...

In 1902 andrew jackson spradley was forty-nine, a year older than the slain Duncan Hicks. In a photo taken when Spradley was first elected sheriff, he bears a resemblance to Bat Masterson—the infamous occasional lawman, occasional gunslinger, part-time sportswriter, and full-time card shark—who was of the same era. Each had a thick moustache, wavy, dark hair, and piercing eyes. By 1902 Spradley’s hair was streaked with gray and perhaps a bit thinner, but the moustache was still full. In a photograph taken that year, posed with one of his bloodhounds, Spradley looked the picture of a Texas sheriff:...

October 12, 1902

Spradley arrived at the hicks home in black jack at about daybreak on Sunday. The bodies still lay where J. W. Jernigan had found them the night before. Hicks and his wife were on the front porch, dead from shotgun blasts. Their daughter, Allie, was inside the house, her head bashed in.

Judging from the state of decomposition of the bodies, Spradley determined that the parents were killed first and the daughter afterward, maybe as much as several hours later. A broken target rifle was found near the girl’s body in the dining room, and Spradley assumed...

Nacogdoches in 1902 was a sleepy little place inhabited by a goodly number of trigger-happy citizens, who were called “gun toters” by the state’s newspaper writers. Local voters proved time and again unwilling to pay for public improvements, apparently satisfied with muddy streets, a porous jail, and raw sewage running down the ditches. They scrapped constantly over politics. Most folks barely scratched out a living on red-dirt land that was nearly played out from the ravages of raising cotton and cows, or else they worked in the forests, cutting down huge pines and hardwoods for lumber. Blacks were treated barely...

October 13, 1902

The night before, spradley and matthews had decided that Buchanan likely was headed toward the Pre-emption community, on the border between San Augustine and Shelby counties, where many blacks lived in relative isolation and peace. A significant number of blacks in San Augustine had retreated to this area after Reconstruction. When federal troops occupied much of the South—including San Augustine—after the end of the Civil War, a number of blacks gained political power, albeit briefly. Harry Garrett, a former slave of a prominent white plantation owner, Milton Garrett, became one of their leaders and formed...

There is no doubt that the safety of buchanan was in grave peril. Lynchings, mainly—but not exclusively—of black men, were a grim fact of life in the postbellum South, and the last decade of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth century saw a marked increase in their number.

The Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881, began keeping records of lynchings the next year, though those records are, necessarily, incomplete. Suffice it to say the totals recorded by Tuskegee represent theminimumnumber of people executed extralegally.

These lynching statistics are...

By 1902 the populism movement that ten years earlier had nearly swept the entrenched Democratic Party out of power in Texas was on its last legs. But its effects were far reaching, and in Nacogdoches County the issue of populist versus Democrat still bitterly divided the citizenry.

Populism began as a farmers’ alliance movement in the 1880s and was an effort to obtain higher prices for crops (cotton, mainly); to reduce costs by regulating transportation monopolies, especially the railroads; and to more fairly redistribute wealth, land in particular. As one historian put it, “The old Alliance doctrine was summarized in...

Sheriff a. j. spradley and editor bill haltom had been sniping at each other for at least a decade by the time of the Hicks murders in 1902. The differences between these two headstrong men stemmed primarily from their political rivalry. Spradley was a confirmed Populist and Haltom a staunch Democrat. But after Spradley established thePlaindealerto compete first with Haltom’sChronicleand then theDaily Sentinel, those differences became personal.

In 1892 James H. Haltom Sr. ran for sheriff against John Rusk in the Democratic Party primary, the winner to face Spradley, who had switched to the Populist...

October 14, 1902

Sentinel editor bill haltom was furious.

Unconfirmed reports ran rampant as to the whereabouts of Jim Buchanan, the accused killer of the Hicks family: he was in the Rusk prison, he had barely escaped a howling mob in Tenaha, he had been seen in Appleby. As it turned out, there was some truth to all of these reports.

But Sheriff A. J. Spradley was nowhere to be found.

TheDaily Sentinelwas an afternoon paper, which meant that by late morning Haltom had no choice but to go to press with what little news he had to...

October 15, 1902

Spradley returned to nacogdoches on wednesday morning, while lawmen Curg Border and A. Y. Matthews headed to East Texas with confessed murderer Jim Buchanan.

Bill Haltom, probably to nobody’s surprise, didn’t get much information out of his longtime enemy. He had to rely heavily on theShreveport Timesaccount to print a skimpy story that day on theSentinel’s front page—which was sandwiched once again between ads for Mayer & Schmidt (dry goods) and Perkins Bros. (druggists, jewelers, and stationers). When asked by the “Sentinelman” what had happened to Buchanan, Spradley, tongue firmly in cheek, replied,...

October 16, 1902

Upon learning that jim buchanan was safely ensconced in the Rusk Penitentiary, Adjutant General Thomas Scurry phoned District Judge Tom C. Davis in Nacogdoches to let him know that the prisoner was secure. Scurry also wired Sheriff Reagan of Cherokee County, where Rusk is the county seat, and instructed him to have Spradley tell Scurry what type of military protection he would need to get Buchanan safely to Nacogdoches and to guard him during the trial.

In addition, Spradley called the judge and asked if a trial could be held quickly. Buchanan had already been indicted by...

October 17, 1902

Under cover of darkness, a specially commissioned train left the Rusk railroad station at 3:00 a.m. on Friday. The autumn air was crisp, the temperature in the mid-forties.¹

By road, it was only thirty-five miles from Rusk to Nacogdoches. The route was a bit more convoluted by rail because there was no direct connection between the two cities. The old Houston, East and West Texas (HE&WT) rail line had been purchased three years earlier by Southern Pacific, but no new lines had been built.² Thus, to get from Rusk to Nacogdoches by train required traveling forty-three miles...

Word soon spread outside the courthouse that Buchanan had pleaded guilty and been sentenced to death, but that Judge Davis had given the condemned man the required thirty days to appeal the sentence. He ordered the prisoner returned to Rusk Penitentiary.

It soon became obvious that Buchanan wasn’t going anywhere. As Fuller later wrote in Spradley’s biography:

There was an ominous stillness in the atmosphere as the dense crowd milled around the streets. There were no paved streets in those days. The old public well was in the center of the square. A fence was around it, and several chinaberry...

It didn’t take long for the editorial writers across the South to weigh in on the hanging of Jim Buchanan. The day after Buchanan’s death, Bill Haltom of theSentinelpraised the quick dispensing of “justice”:

Yesterday was a great day in the annals of Nacogdoches and is an example to all the South. We tried, convicted, sentenced and executed a negro murderer and rape fiend in the space of about six hours [actually it was just over three hours], and the law was scrupulously obeyed from start to finish. No people ever had stronger provocation to sweep the law...

The year 1903 began inauspiciously. the violence of the previous decade or so continued unabated. The hanging of Jim Buchanan and the bitter election just a few weeks later seemed to contribute to an even more hostile atmosphere for black residents. And the economic doldrums that had enveloped the area since the Depression of 1893 worsened.

In the first six weeks of the year:

A downtown bank closed its doors on the fifth day of the year, and the son of the owner fled the country, having absconded with more than a half million dollars. He was never brought to...

The political fortunes of haltom and spradley headed in opposite directions in 1904. At the urging of fellow Democrats, Haltom made his third try for the state legislature. He lost his first bid, in the 1898 Democratic primary, to J. B. Stripling, who narrowly defeated the Populist candidate, W. A. Skillern. Haltom managed to win the Democratic nomination for state representative in 1900, but lost to Populist B. A. Calhoun, 2,008 votes to 1,940—thus earning the dubious distinction of being the last Democratic candidate to lose a legislative race in Texas to a Populist candidate.¹

In early February 1904,...