An ‘unfortunate’ man’s bad end in Big Bend
ALPINE — Visitors to Big Bend National Park might or might not know Townsend Point as one of the sentinels towering over the Chisos Mountains Basin. Even though it’s 7,500 feet high and is named for the man considered the father of the park, the travel guides and hiking trail booklets don’t always mention it.
The same with E.E. Townsend, whose colorful, eventful life could fill a year’s worth of columns. A West Texas cowboy, a Texas Ranger in the 1890s, a federal border agent, a Brewster County sheriff and a state representative, Townsend dealt with smugglers and Mexican border bandits; got shot in the chest and survived, thanks to a bullet-deflecting notebook in his vest pocket; and, as a lawmaker, pushed for years to save Big Bend for the public’s enjoyment. His decadeslong crusade culminated in the fall of 1943, when Big Bend State Park passed into the national park system.
From a thick and tattered scrapbook his wife Alice kept over the years — now in the Bryan Museum in Galveston — and from Townsend material in the Big Bend archives at Sul Ross, I was able to piece together the following curious tale from Townsend’s tenure as sheriff during the early 1920s.
Then as now, the vast ranch country around Alpine can be eerily quiet, particularly at night. Under a glittering array of stars, you might hear the yip of coyotes or the screech of a scavenging owl; for sure you’ll hear every four or five hours, night and day, the mournful keen of a freight train’s whistle.
On the night of Jan. 24, 1922, a long westbound freight pulled into town, and a brakeman heard something else, something that sounded like groans coming from an empty boxcar. He slid open the door, thrust his lantern inside and was shocked to see lying on the floor a semiconscious man with a handkerchief tied over his mouth as a gag.
The brakeman called for help and then summoned the sheriff. When Townsend and his deputies arrived from their office a few blocks away, they
were able to get the young man out of the boxcar and onto a cot inside a nearby work train. An examination showed that he had been shot in the back and struck repeatedly on the head with some kind of instrument, later determined to be a pistol.
Near death, he managed to tell Townsend that his name was Clifford H. Rogers, that he was from Austin and that his father was a conductor on the Houston and Texas Central Railroad.
A tragic story
An Army veteran and carpenter by trade, Rogers, 27, had been in Philadelphia, where, on Jan. 1, according to the Alpine Avalanche, he had married “a beautiful young lady” and was on his way to California to take a job, his new wife planning to follow. “Just why he was traveling by the box car could not be developed,” the newspaper reported.
Rogers was able to tell authorities that his assailant was his boxcar traveling companion. Mrs. Clay Roberts, a café owner in nearby Marathon, confirmed that two young men had eaten supper at her place the night before, that Rogers had paid for the both of them with a twenty-dollar bill and that she had watched them hop the westbound freight.
“It is hell to feed a man and then have him shoot you in the back for $20,” Rogers told authorities. He died the next day.
Later that morning, Townsend’s deputy, T.I. Morgan, arrested a young man in the small town of Toronto, six miles west of Alpine. His name, he said, was Harvey Leon Hughes, he was 21, from Delphos, Ohio, and he was traveling cross-country to Los Angeles when he happened to meet up with Rogers. Hughes had on his person Rogers’ money, watch, a fountain pen and other personal effects. He told Townsend that he and Rogers had quarreled between Marathon and Alpine and that Rogers had insulted his mother.
Less than a month later, a Brewster County jury rejected Hughes’ claim of self-defense, despite what the Avalanche described as “one of the most brilliant pleas ever heard in a Brewster County court” by defense attorney Walter Haynes.
“Unmoved,” the newspaper reported, “as if not realizing what the verdict means, the boy showed no emotion and paid little attention to the awful words that placed the hangman’s noose around his neck.”
In late October, Townsend and Morgan were in San Antonio to attend court proceedings, and Morgan’s wife was left in charge of the jail. Checking on her young prisoner at about 8 in the evening, she discovered that Hughes had somehow picked the lock to his cell and was hiding in the corridor. She struggled with him, but he ran out the door into the cold, rainy night.
“The sheriff ’s department and the county attorney have made free use of the wires and a net has been spread for Hughes which, sooner or later, will entangle him in its meshes,” the Avalanche predicted.
It was sooner. Three days later, he was discovered, cold and wet, hiding in a cave near Toronto, within sight of Alpine.
Execution changes
As Hughes’ date with destiny approached in the spring of 1923, the Texas Legislature was considering a bill that would change the state’s method of execution from hanging to electrocution. In the Townsend scrapbook is a copy of a typed letter Townsend sent to Gov. Pat Neff requesting that the young man’s execution be postponed, so that he could die in the electric chair.
Townsend emphasized that he wasn’t asking for mercy, just a postponement. The governor refused. He also refused a petition from a group of Alpine citizens asking that he commute Hughes’ sentence to life in prison.
Despite his violent crime and his brief escape, the petition suggests that Alpine residents had come to feel a certain pity for the “unfortunate young man.” In an autobiographical essay published in the Avalanche — “my first writing on any subject” — Hughes described a youth in and out of reform schools, where he “became acquainted with the different types of criminals, which had a great deal to do with my future.”
On a Saturday morning in April, the condemned man was escorted up the steps of gallows erected the day before on the north side of the courthouse. Accompanying him were a minister, Townsend and other officials. As Hughes stood listening to the minister’s prayer, a hemp-rope noose around his neck, he received what historian Mike Cox calls “a final courtesy from Sheriff Townsend.” To spare him from knowing the exact moment of his death, the sheriff sprang the trap before the minister intoned amen.
Hughes was the only man ever legally hanged in Brewster County and one of the last hanged in Texas. (The last was in Brazoria County on Aug. 31, 1923.) The next year, the state began using Ol’ Sparky, considered more humane than hanging.