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In Their Own Words:

"They Just Passed the Bucket"

Robert Nieman

New York and Chicago were not the only towns that "boomed" during the 1920s. Many towns in Texas such as Beaumont, Borger, Eastland, Mexia, and Ranger—to name a few—boomed when oil was discovered. But the granddaddy of them all was Kilgore. When the fabulous Lou Della Crim blew in at over 30,000 barrels a day on December 30, 1930, the population of the sleepy hamlet of Kilgore exploded from 800 to 8,000 in twenty-four hours. People were sleeping in fields, trees, tents, shebangs, and cardboard boxes—anything to give a tiny bit of shelter.

   But as is all too often the case, along with the hard-working roughnecks who wanted jobs to support their families came the crooks, thugs, killers, prostitutes, pimps, and gamblers. As sure as day follows night, so the Texas Rangers also came to bring law and order. Not once in all the activity in the oil boomtowns that sprung up all over Texas during this period did the Rangers fail in their duties.

   To Kilgore came two of the greatest Rangers of all time: the legendary M. T. "Lone Wolf" Gonzaullas and his partner, the deadly Bob Goss.

   On July 7, 1931, Ranger Dan McDuffie was shot to death in nearby Gladewater. His killer was instantly killed by Ranger Bill Dial. Twenty-five years later, in July 1956, a historical marker was placed at McDuffie’s grave in New Boston, Texas. Gonzaullas was one of many friends of McDuffie’s who attended that ceremony.

   At that 1956 ceremony, someone sat Gonzaullas down for a fascinating interview. Regretfully, the interviewer was never identified. Since the voice of Gonzaullas is the only one heard on the tape, it would seem that the interviewer had told Gonzaullas what was wanted: for Gonzaullas simply to talk about his days in Kilgore and also about the McDuffie killing.

   But regardless, listening to Gonzaullas tell about wild and wooly Kilgore is absolutely fascinating.   

    It has been written that people get the law enforcement that they want. As you read this short transcription from the interview, you will quickly see how the enforcement of law has changed.

   Remember as you read this: there were only two Rangers—Lone Wolf Gonzaullas and Bob Goss—to stand between thousands of hard-working oil field men and women and a lawless element who understood only one law: "the point of a gun."

§

       And now the words of Texas Ranger Hall of Fame Captain Manuel "Lone Wolf" Gonzaullas:

   " I was called in there because they [the people of Kilgore] made an appeal to the governor that the undesirable elements from all over the country had come on in with the working people and that things were in very bad shape in every way you look at it. There was no city. There was no town. There was no police department—it didn’t exist.

   It was just a little old town and the only law enforcement officers there was the constable and a deputy who handled his precinct. There was no jail and it was very, very, very bad. The streets were mud [and] what few sidewalks there were was wooden. The shacks were....They were starting to build rooming houses and they were building little hotels. I remember you could get a good meal for 25 cents: ham and eggs...or bacon and eggs and coffee and toast was a quarter. People were panhandling on the street. And above all, men wanted to work. It was just at the first part of the boom; everybody didn’t know what was going to happen. And they had no place to stay, no place to eat, and besides that, they had no money.

   As I say, things were very bad and we had to have a jail of some sort and we didn’t have one. So I went down to the hardware store and I secured from Mr. Crim (Malcolm Crim, who owned the big hardware store) a chain, oh I guess it was a city block long, maybe not quite that long. But anyway, it was a long chain that he had hanging all around his store on little posts, that drooped from one post to the other where you used to tie your horses. And I took this here chain and I put about a hundred trace chains on it. I put pad locks on the trace chains [small secondary chains] and then I used that for my jail.

   Well at first I opened a little jail in kind of a seed store. It wasn’t very big—an old kind of a seed storage building, an old frame building—but it wasn’t very good and the rats was awful bad and all. So finally they had a little old church in town, which I don’t know the denomination of the church [Baptist], but anyway it was a little old church and this church let people sleep in there at night and they loused the place up so bad that when Sunday came and the local people in town came to have a church meeting, why the fleas were so bad in there that the town people there couldn’t stand it. The fleas like to ate ‘em up. So finally the citizens decided to give the church to anybody who wanted to sleep in it. But finally I ended up with it for a jail, and it was a church first and then it was finally a jail.

   I chopped a few holes in the floor on each end and run the chain through the old church. And then I put the trace chains on the long chain and then I put the constable or a deputy—one or the other done picket duty. And he’d sit up where the preacher used to sit—where he’d make his talk from, pulpit up there—and he’d sit there and watch ‘em with a shotgun. And of course when they ah.....We put the men on [one] end with the chains around the men’s necks and we put the women on the opposite end. We’d put the chains on the women’s ankle with a padlock on it. And we never lost any.

….And of course when they wanted to go to the rest room or anything, why they just passed the bucket!!!"

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