Up the road from Boerne: the fight on Walker’s Creek

Boerne did not exist in June 1844. The town was not laid out and named until 1852, and Kendall County was not created until 1862. But the ground was here, and an old road crossed it. The Pinta Trail was a Native and Spanish route from San Antonio toward the Fredericksburg country. It forded Cibolo Creek some miles east of where Boerne now stands, and crossed the Guadalupe near present-day Sisterdale.

What Hays reported

On June 8, 1844, Captain John Coffee Hays, called Jack, was riding back toward San Antonio with about fifteen Texas Rangers. They had been on a scout between the Pedernales and Llano rivers. Hays was twenty-seven, a Tennessean who had come to Texas in 1836 and worked as a surveyor before he led Ranger companies.

Eight days later, in San Antonio, he wrote his report. He described the party they met as “Comanches, Wacoes, and Mexicans,” and put its number at “between sixty and seventy.” His men fired their rifles, he wrote, and then closed “hand to hand” with their “five-shooting pistols.” The fight ran about three miles. Hays reported twenty-three of the other party killed and thirty wounded. Of his own men, one was killed and four were wounded.

Two of the wounded Rangers were Samuel H. Walker and Robert A. Gillespie. Both were wounded by lance.

The five-shooting pistols

The pistols were Colt’s Paterson revolvers: five shots each, made at Paterson, New Jersey, from 1837. The Republic of Texas had ordered 180 of the .36-caliber Holster model in August 1839, and it had ordered them for its navy. Hays’s Rangers got theirs later, by reissue. By the time of the fight, the company that made them had already failed, two years earlier, for want of a government contract.

So the Rangers were carrying hand-me-down pistols from a maker that had gone under. This was Hays’s verdict on them:

“Had it not been for them, I doubt what the consequences would have been. I cannot recommend these arms too highly.”

The Handbook of Texas is careful about what this fight was. It does not say that no Colt revolver had been fired in a fight before. It says this was the first time an entire Ranger company used them. The difference matters, and it is the kind of difference that gets sanded off when a story is retold.

Where it happened

The honest answer is that the early accounts do not agree on the exact ground.

Hays wrote that his camp was “on Walker’s creek, about fifty miles above Seguin.” A letter written in San Antonio the next day by Ben McCulloch, passing on news that had just reached town, puts the camp “within five miles of the Guadalupe River on the ‘Pinta trail’.” The Handbook of Texas places the fight near the junction of Walker’s Creek and West Sister Creek, northwest of present-day Sisterdale, in Kendall County, and lists other names it has gone by: the battle of Pinta Trail Crossing, Cista’s Creek, Sisters Creek.

Sisterdale is thirteen miles north of Boerne.

For a long time the fight was called the Battle of the Pedernales. That is the wrong river. Hays had been to the Pedernales and was on his way back.

So: in what is now Kendall County, near present-day Sisterdale. The accounts written that month will not support a pin in the map, and this piece won’t try to place one.

How it was told at the time

A letter written from Washington-on-the-Brazos on June 23, 1844, and printed a month later in the Clarksville Northern Standard, called the fight

“unparalleled in the history of this country for the gallantry displayed on both sides”

On both sides. That is how a Texas newspaper told it within weeks, and it is a better guide to tone than most of what came later.

Why a gunsmith tells this story

Not because the shop has any claim on it. It doesn’t. It happened up the road, a long time before there was a road.

It is worth telling because of what Hays did afterward. He sat down and wrote, plainly, what the tool had done for the men who depended on it. Two years later one of those men, Samuel Walker, told the maker what was wrong with it. That is the next piece.

A report like Hays’s is what anyone who makes or mends a thing hopes to get: specific, honest, and from someone who used it.