| |
YOCUM'S INN:
The Devil's Own Lodging House By
W. T. Block | |
Stories
about the old Goodnight and Chisholm Trails have so dominated the writings of
Western Americana that even Texans have forgotten that their first great cattle
drives ended up at New Orleans rather than Abilene
or Dodge City, Kansas.
When the Spanish viceroy lifted a trade ban between
Texas and Spanish Louisiana in 1778, a New Orleans-bound cattle drive of 2,000
steers, driven by Francisco Garcia, left San
Antonio in 1779, the first drive of record along the unsung Opelousas Trail.
By the mid-1850s, more than 40,000 Texas Longhorns were being driven annually
across Louisiana, and no one welcomed the cattle drovers more enthusiastically
than did Thomas Denman Yocum, Esq., of Pine Island settlement in Southeast Texas.
The first Anglo rancher along the Opelousas Trail was James Taylor White, who
by 1840 owned a herd of 10,000. In 1818 he settled at Turtle Bayou, near Anahuac
in Spanish Texas, and he was a contemporary of Jean Lafitte, whose pirate stronghold
was on neighboring Galveston Island. By 1840, White had driven many large herds
over the lonely trail, and a decade later, had more than $150,000 in gold banked
in New Orleans, the proceeds of his cattle sales.
By 1824 there were others
from Stephen F. Austin's colony, between the Brazos and Colorado Rivers, who joined
White in the long trail drives, and a favorite stopover was Yocum's Inn, where
the welcome mat was always out and the grub was always tasty and hot.
Thomas
Yocum settled on a Mexican land grant on Pine Island Bayou, the south boundary
of the Big
Thicket of Southeast Texas, around 1830. It was then a virgin, sparsely-settled
region of prairies, pine barrens, and thickets, and any settler living within
ten miles was considered a neighbor. The deep, navigable stream, 100 feet wide
and 75 miles long, was a tributary of the Neches
River and had already attracted ten or more pioneers who also held land grants
from the Mexican government. Often they heard the pound of hoofs and bellowing
of thirsty herds, bound for the cattle crossing over the Neches at Beaumont.
There were more than thirty streams which intersected the trail and which had
to be forded or swum in the course of travel. And always Yocum rode out at the
first sound of the herds and invited the drovers to quench their thirst and satisfy
their hunger at the Inn.
Some people who stopped at the Inn were headed
west. Sometimes they were new immigrants driving small herds into Texas. Some,
like Arsene LeBleu, one of Jean Lafitte's former ship captains, were Louisiana
cattle buyers carrying money belts filled with gold coins, and were en route to
White's Ranch or elsewhere to buy cattle. The popularity of Yocum's Inn spread
far and wide. Its genial host soon became the postmaster of Pine Island settlement
under the old Texas Republic, supervised the local elections, served on juries,
and was widely respected by his neighbors and travelers alike.
Yocum acquired
much land and many slaves, and by 1839 his herd of l500 heads of cattle was the
fourth largest in Jefferson
County. While other settlers rode the wiry Creole, or mustang-size, ponies
of a type common to Southwest Louisiana, Yocum's stable of thirty horses were
stock of the finest American breeds, and his family drove about in an elegant
carriage.
A
gentleman's life, however, held no attraction for Squire Yocum, a man who literally
was nursed almost from the cradle on murder and rapine, and for many years Yocum's
Inn was actually a den of robbers and killers. What is the most startling is the
fact that Yocum was able to camouflage his activities for more than a decade,
maintaining an aura of respectability while simultaneously committing the worst
of villainies, with a murderous band of cutthroats unequaled in the history of
East Texas.
How Yocum could accomplish this since he used no alias, is
unexplainable, for he, his brothers, his father, and his sons were known from
Texas to Mississippi as killers, slave-stealers, and robbers. If any neighbor
suspected that something at Yocum's Inn was amiss, he either feared for his life
or was a member of the gang.
One account, written by Philip Paxton in
1853, observed that Yocum, "knowing the advantages of a good character at home,
soon by his liberality, apparent good humor, and obliging disposition, succeeded
in ingratiating himself with the few settlers."
Squire
Yocum was born in Kentucky around 1796. As a fourteen-year-old, he cut his criminal
eyeteeth with his father and brothers in the infamous John A. Murrell gang who
robbed travelers along the Natchez Trace in western Mississippi. At first Murrell
was reputed to be an Abolitionist who liberated slaves and channeled them along
an "underground railroad" to freedom in the North. Actually, his gang kidnapped
slaves, later selling them to the sugar cane planters of Louisiana.
Murrell
soon graduated to pillage and murder, but slave-stealing remained a favorite activity
of the Yocum brothers, and on one occasion two of them, while returning to Louisiana
with stolen horses and slaves, were caught and hanged in East
Texas.
When law enforcement in western Mississippi threatened to
encircle them, the Yocums fled first to Bayou Plaquemine Brule, near Churchpoint,
Louisiana, then in 1815 to the Neutral Strip of Louisiana, located between the
Sabine and Calcasieu
Rivers. Until 1821 the Strip knew no law enforcement and military occupation,
and hence became a notorious robbers' roost for the outcasts of both Spanish Texas
and the State of Louisiana.
In the Land Office Register of 1824, T. D.
Yocum, his father, and two brothers were listed as claiming land grants in the
Neutral Strip; and during the 1820s, according to the Colorado "Gazette and
Advertiser" of Oct. 31, 1841, Yocum's father was tried several times for murder
at Natchitoches, La., and bought acquittal on every occasion with hired witnesses
and perjured testimony.
By
1824, Squire Yocum, once again feeling the pinch of civilization, had moved on
to the Mexican District of Atascosita in Texas. He lived for awhile in the vicinity
of Liberty on the Trinity
River. Writing about him in 1830, Matthew White, the Liberty alcalde, notified
Stephen F. Austin that Yocum was one of two men who allegedly had killed a male
slave and kidnapped his family, and as a result "were driven across the Sabine
and their houses burned." But Yocum was not about to remain so close to the hangman's
noose and the fingertips of sheriffs and U. S. marshals. And he soon took his
family and slaves to the Pine Island Bayou region where he built his infamous
Inn. Having acquired some wealth and affluence by 1835, the old killer and slave
stealer could become more selective with his victims.
Among the many
travelers along the dusty Opelousas Trail, the eastbound cattleman often stayed
at Yocum's Inn and left praising the owner's hospitality. And of course the genial
proprietor always invited him to stop over on his return journey. It was the westbound
Louisiana cattle buyer and the Texas rancher who had already delivered his herd
in New Orleans whose lives were in danger. Usually drovers paid off and dismissed
their hands in New Orleans. Texas cattlemen often traveled alone on the return
trip, and if any of them lodged at Yocum's Inn, a bulging waist line, which usually
denoted a fat money belt of gold coins, virtually signaled his demise. The drover's
bones were left to bleach in the Big Thicket, at the bottom of the innkeeper's
well, or in the alligator slough.
In East Texas, Squire Yocum's crimes
spawned more legends, many of them about his buried loot, than any other man except
Jean Lafitte. And every legend tells the story differently. One relates that a
Texas rancher was backtracking a missing brother, who was overdue from a New Orleans
cattle drive, and stopped at Yocum's Inn to make inquiries. A Yocum cohort informed
the rancher that no one had seen the missing brother on his return trip; then
suddenly the missing brother's dog rounded a corner of the Inn. Glancing elsewhere
about the premises, the rancher recognized his brother's expensive saddle resting
on a nearby fence. When the conversation became heated, Yocum's partner grabbed
for a shotgun, but the rancher fired first and killed him. As told in the legend,
Yocum overheard the conversation and accusations from a distance, and quickly
fled into the Big
Thicket.
Another legend tells of a foreigner who was carrying a grind
organ and a monkey with him when he rode his big gray stallion to Yocum's Inn
in search of a night's lodging. Earlier the stranger had played the hand organ
for some children who lived nearby and who had given him directions to reach the
Inn. The story adds that Yocum traded horses with the foreigner during his stay.
When the children later found a battered hand organ abandoned beside the trail,
there was little doubt about the foreigner's fate.
There
are many early records, written at the time of Yocum's demise, which chronicle
the innkeeper's death, but they sometimes conflict. The longest of them was written
by Philip Paxton in 1853, and his account of how Yocum's misdeeds were exposed
appears to be the most plausible. {{Indeed, his account is deadly accurate. See
sources at end}} Paxton claimed that a man named (Seth) Carey, who owned a farm
on Cedar Bayou near Houston, had killed
a neighbor during a quarrel over a dog and fled to Yocum for asylum. It was agreed
that Yocum would receive power of attorney to sell Carey's land grant and that
Yocum would forward the proceeds of the sale to Carey in Louisiana. A gang member,
however, told Carey that he had no chance of escaping to Lousiana. Yocum planned
to pocket the proceeds of the sale and, besides, Carey had wandered upon some
skeletons in a Pine Island thicket and thus had learned "too many and too dangerous
secrets" about the murder ring at Yocum's Inn.
The earliest published account,
which appeared in the San
Augustine "Redlander" of Sept. 30, 1841, stated that Yocum was killed
by the "Regulators of Jefferson County who were determined to expel from their
county all persons of suspicious or bad character." The newspaper chided the vigilantes
for killing Yocum and not allowing him the due process of law and a speedy trial.
But the editor conceded that Yocum had a notorious record in Louisiana "as a Negro
and horse stealer, repeatedly arrested for those crimes."
Three other
accounts, however, two in the Houston papers of that era and another in the "Colorado
Gazette and Advertiser," published at Matagorda,
Texas, alleged that "Thomas Yocum, a notorious villain and murderer, who resided
at the Pine Islands near the Neches River, has been killed by the citizens of
Jasper and Liberty Counties . . . ."
"Yocum has lived in Texas twenty
years and has committed as many murders to rob his victims. The people could bear
him no longer so 150 citizens gathered and burned his premises and shot him. They
have cleared his gang out of the neighborhood," thus putting an end to the Pine
Island postmaster, his gang, and his Inn. Of course, only Yocum could reveal the
true number of murder notches on his gun, which may have reached as many as fifty.
According
to Paxton, the Regulators found the bones of victims in Yocum's well, in the neighboring
thickets, in the "alligator slough," and even out on the prairie. They then burned
Yocum's Inn, the stables and furniture, but allowed his wife, children, and slaves
a few days to leave the county. The posse trailed the killers into the Big
Thicket and eventually caught up with Yocum on Spring Creek in Montgomery
County. No longer willing to trust a Yocum's fate to the whims of any jury, the
vigilantes gave the old murderer thirty minutes to square his misdeeds with his
Maker, and then they "shot him through the heart" five times.
Paxton also
reported that "not one of Yocum's family had met with a natural death." Little
is known of the fate of Yocum's sons other than Christopher, who in 1836 who had
been mustered into Captain Franklin Hardin's company at Liberty,
and who had served honorably and with distinction for one year in the Texas Army.
Chris, whom many believed to be "the best of the Yocums," may not have been implicated
in the murder ring at all, but he fled, leaving his young wife behind, perhaps
because of the stigma that his surname carried and the public anger that was then
rampant.
Believing that the public clamor for revenge had died down after
a span of four months, Chris Yocum returned to Beaumont,
Texas, one night in January 1842. Sheriff West, although he had no specific crimes
to charge him with, was aware that a thirst for retribution still lingered and
he arrested young Yocum for his own protection. Jefferson County's "Criminal
Docket Book, 1839-1851" reveals that Chris was lodged in the county's log
house jail on the afternoon of Jan. 15, 1842. What the book does not reveal is
the fact that young Yocum faced Judge Lynch and an unsummoned jury of Regulators
on the same night. The following morning West found him swinging from a limb of
an oak tree on the courthouse lawn, with a ten-penny nail driven into the base
of his skull.
During
the second administration of Sam Houston as president of the Texas Republic, there
were many excesses and assassinations, principally in Shelby County in East Texas,
attributed to vigilante bands, who called themselves "Regulators." On Jan. 31,
1842, he issued a proclamation, ordering all district attorneys to prosecute the
Regulators stringently for any offense committed by them. The proclamation began
as follows: "Whereas . . . . certain individuals . . . have murdered one Thomas
D. Yocum, burned his late residence and appurtenances, and driven his widow and
children from their homes . . . ."
Whether or not President Houston's
paper might have been worded somewhat differently if the chief executive had been
forced to witness the bleached bones in Yocum's well or to bury some of the skeletons
out on the prairie is, of course, another question.
Almost
from the date of T. D. Yocum's death, legends began to circulate concerning the
murderer's hoard of stolen treasure, because the vigilantes knew that neither
the old robber nor any member of his family had had time to excavate it before
they were driven from the county. Some of them thought that only Yocum and one
of his slaves actually knew where the loot was hidden. Others claimed that Chris
Yocum knew where the treasure site was, and that one of the reasons for his returning
to Beaumont was to dig
up the gold so that he and his young wife could start life anew somewhere under
an assumed name. For years treasure hunters dug holes along the banks of Cotton
and Byrd Creeks, and decades later sinks and mounds in the Pine Island vicinity
were said to be the remains of those excavations.
Time passed, the Civil
War was fought, and the Yocum episode became only a dim memory in the minds of
the early settlers. Finally it was an elderly black woman in Beaumont
who triggered the second search for Yocum's gold. She told her grandchildren that
about 1840 she was a young slave girl who belonged to the owner of a plantation
in the vicinity of Yocum's Inn. One day whe was picking blackberries when she
heard voices nearby. She moved ahead along the banks of a creek until she finally
spotted Yocum and one of his young slaves at a low spot or crevice in the creek
bank. Both of them were busy backfilling a hole in the ground.
As a result
of the old lady's story, another network of pot holes were dug up and down the
banks of Byrd and Cotton Creeks. And once or twice a stranger appeared who claimed
to have a map drawn by someone who said he was formerly Yocum's slave. But if
anyone ever found the treasure, that fact was never made public, and one writer
claims it is still there awaiting the shovel that strikes it first. Maybe so,
but gold hunters usually don't print their findings in newspapers. And they, like
buccaneers, ain't especially noted for their wagging tongues either. |
©
W. T. Block, Jr.
"Cannonball's
Tales" >
April
5, 2006 column
Reprinted from FRONTIER TIMES, January, 1978, p. 10ff; also
note all sources in footnotes of Block, HISTORY OF JEFFERSON COUNTY, TEXAS, etc.
p. 78. The best source is Seth Carey's memoirs, "Tale of a Texas Veteran," Galveston
DAILY NEWS, Sept. 21, 1879, as reprinted in Block, EMERALD OF THE NECHES, pp.
158-163, at Lamar University and Tyrrell Libraries. Many other writings of recent
vintage are pure fiction.
See
also:
Seth
Carey's Escape from the Murderous Yocum Gang
by W. T. Block
"Just
another fly caught up in Yocum's web of murder and intrigue, Carey not only survived
his slated assassination and dismemberment in Yocum's alligator slough, but he
lived instead to finger the gang and account for its destruction."
More
Rooms
with a Past
More Small
Town Sagas
More Texas History |
|
|
