Gunfight at the Lampasas Saloon
Lampasas, Lampasas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In the early 1870s Lampasas was a wild frontier town. In January 1873 Sheriff S.T. Denson was shot while arresting brothers Wash and Mark Short. The district judge sent men to apprehend the Short brothers, but the posse was stopped by Ben, Tom, and Mart Horrell and several others. Sheriff Denson and the justices of the peace of Lampasas County appealed to Governor Edmund J. Davis for the assistance of the State Police. On February 10, Governor Davis issued a proclamation prohibiting the carrying of sidearms in Lampasas. On March 14, Captain Thomas Williams and seven state policemen entered Lampasas to enforce the proclamation. The State Police immediately arrested Bill Bowen for carrying a gun in town. Bowen persuaded Captain Williams and two of his men to enter Jerry Scott's Lampasas Saloon, this led to a gunfight between the State Police and the Horrell brothers and their associates. Three officers were killed in the saloon and a fourth was fatally wounded while trying to escape. The police were buried in Lampasas, but Captain Williams was reinterred in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin. More State Police came to Lampasas and joined forces with the sheriff and Lampasas and Burnet County Minute Men companies to search for the Horrell Gang. They arrested four men connected with the incident. In early May the Horrell gang attacked the Georgetown Jail and released Mart Horrell and Jerry Scott form custody. The Horrell gang remained in the Lampasas area until September when they left for New Mexico. In 1874 they returned to Lampasas. In 1876 the Horrell brothers stood trial for the murder of the State Police, but were found not guilty. (2000)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1873, Lampasas was a raw frontier town where authority was thin and firearms were everywhere. When Governor Edmund J. Davis's Reconstruction-era State Police tried to enforce a ban on carrying sidearms, a confrontation inside Jerry Scott's saloon erupted into gunfire, leaving four state policemen dead. The killings drew in Texas's Minute Men companies and a manhunt for the Horrell brothers, who fled to New Mexico before returning to stand trial and win acquittal in 1876.
Why it matters
The bloodshed captures the volatile clash between Reconstruction state authority and frontier communities that resisted it, a tension that shaped law and order across post-Civil War Texas.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early 1870s, Lampasas was a raw and volatile frontier town in central Texas, the kind of place where the reach of the law was thin and nearly every man went armed. This was the Reconstruction era, a tense and unsettled period across the defeated South, and in Texas the friction between state authority and fiercely independent local communities could turn deadly with little warning.
That friction had a specific institution at its center: the Texas State Police, created under Governor Edmund J. Davis's Reconstruction government. To the administration, the State Police were a tool for imposing order on a lawless frontier. To many Texans, they were resented outsiders — the armed edge of a government they regarded as illegitimate.
Into this powder keg came an ordinary but explosive ingredient: the sidearm. In a town where carrying a gun was simply how men lived, an official ban on doing so was never going to be just a matter of paperwork. It was a direct collision between state power and frontier custom.
People & events
The trouble began in January 1873, when Sheriff S.T. Denson was shot while trying to arrest brothers Wash and Mark Short. When the district judge sent men to bring the Short brothers in, the posse was blocked by Ben, Tom, and Mart Horrell and several others — a defiance of the law that turned a local arrest into a standoff. Sheriff Denson and the county's justices of the peace appealed to Governor Davis for help from the State Police.
Davis responded on February 10 with a proclamation banning the carrying of sidearms in Lampasas. On March 14, Captain Thomas Williams and seven state policemen rode into town to enforce it. They quickly arrested a man named Bill Bowen for carrying a gun — and it was Bowen who then coaxed Captain Williams and two of his men into Jerry Scott's Lampasas Saloon. Inside, the confrontation with the Horrell brothers and their associates erupted into gunfire. Three officers were killed in the saloon and a fourth was fatally wounded trying to escape.
The aftermath was a long, grinding pursuit. More State Police arrived and joined the sheriff and the Minute Men companies of Lampasas and Burnet counties to hunt the Horrell Gang, arresting four men connected to the killings. In early May the gang stormed the Georgetown jail to free Mart Horrell and Jerry Scott. The Horrells lingered in the area until September, then left for New Mexico, returned in 1874, and finally stood trial in 1876 for the murder of the state policemen — where they were found not guilty.
Its place in the American story
This bloodshed is a sharp illustration of one of Reconstruction's central struggles: the effort of state governments to project authority into communities that rejected it. The Texas State Police were among the most contested institutions of the era, and what happened in Lampasas shows how quickly that resentment could turn to gunfire.
It also captures a tension that runs through the whole story of the American West — the clash between formal, centralized law and a frontier culture built on self-reliance and the ever-present gun. A ban on carrying sidearms was, in a sense, an attempt to declare that the frontier's rules no longer applied. The result showed how bitterly that declaration could be resisted.
The 1876 acquittal speaks volumes, too. When local juries would not convict local men for killing agents of a distrusted state government, it revealed the limits of law imposed from outside. Across the post–Civil War South and West, the question of whose authority actually held sway on the ground was often settled not in statehouses but in streets and saloons like this one.
If you visit
Lampasas today is a quiet central Texas town, and part of the power of a stop here is the contrast between that calm and the violence the marker records. Stand where the old frontier town once bristled with armed men and try to picture a single saloon doorway becoming the site of one of the deadliest days in the history of the Reconstruction-era State Police.
Use the marker to trace the sequence in your mind: an arrest that went wrong, a governor's proclamation, seven lawmen riding in to enforce it, and the fatal decision to step inside Jerry Scott's saloon. Frontier gunfights are often flattened into legend, but this one has a documented chain of cause and consequence worth following slowly.
If your travels take you on to Austin, there's a fitting coda: Captain Thomas Williams, killed here, was reinterred in the Texas State Cemetery. Reading this marker and later visiting that resting place ties the local tragedy to the larger official history of the state — a reminder that the men behind these stories were real, and that Texas chose to remember them.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Captain Thomas Williams
- · Governor Edmund J. Davis
- · the Horrell brothers
Related events
- · 1873 Lampasas Saloon gunfight
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Horrell-Higgins Feud
Lampasas, TX
Four years after the saloon shootout, Lampasas County exploded into one of the most notorious blood feuds in Texas history. Beginning with cattleman Pink Higgins's 1877 killing of Merritt Horrell over accusations of rustling, the feud raged for six violent months of ambushes and street battles until the Texas Rangers forced a written truce. The reconciliation held on paper, but the feud's true end came in 1878 when a vigilante mob killed Tom and Mart Horrell in their jail cell.
Hanna Springs
Lampasas, TX
These sulphur springs, first developed by John Hanna of a prominent local family, drew hundreds who came to camp and take the healing waters in early Lampasas. As the resort's fame grew, the Central Texas Town Company formed in 1884 to promote the park and built a convention hall. There, the 1892 State Democratic Convention backed Grover Cleveland for president and nominated James Hogg for governor — both of whom won — before the hall became an opera house and the resort faded after 1900.
Lampasas County
Lampasas, TX
Lampasas County was organized in 1856, formed from Travis and Bell counties as Anglo settlement pushed up the Texas rivers in the years before the Civil War. Its name derives from Lampazos, the Spanish name for the local river, said to refer to the cockle-burs that grew thickly along its banks. First settled around 1850, the county grew steadily and gained its first railroad in 1882, with the town of Lampasas as its seat.
Lampasas County Jail
Lampasas, TX
Raised in 1883 of native stone with Romanesque trim, this county jail was a substantial statement of law and permanence in still-young Lampasas County. Later stuccoed over, it still holds the supports of its interior scaffold. It was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.