James Buchanan Gillett
Marfa, Presidio County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(Nov. 4, 1856 - June 11, 1937) A very famous Texas Ranger. Born in Austin, son of Adjutant General of Texas. At 16 became cowboy on Western frontier. At 19 joined Rangers; hunted down raiding Indians, rustlers, feuding settlers. After serving 1875-1881, became El Paso city marshal. Ranched 41 years in far West Texas (living in and near Marfa) and New Mexico. His book, "Six Years with the Texas Rangers", is read as an Old West classic. Recorded 1969
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
James Buchanan Gillett came of age on the far western Texas frontier, trading a teenage cowboy's saddle for a Ranger's badge at nineteen during the turbulent late 1870s. His years of service coincided with the last decades of open-range conflict, when Rangers policed a sprawling, thinly settled country. After leaving the force he pinned on an El Paso marshal's star and spent the rest of a long life ranching the dry high country around Marfa, later setting his experiences down in a memoir still read as an Old West classic.
Why it matters
Gillett embodies the mythologized figure of the frontier Texas Ranger, and his firsthand account helped shape how Americans remember law and disorder on the closing Western frontier.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · James Buchanan Gillett
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Ruins of the Ranch Home of Manuel Musquiz
Fort Davis vicinity, TX
In 1854 the pioneer Manuel Musquiz built a ranch home in the rugged country near the Davis Mountains, only to abandon it under the pressure of raids. In the early 1880s the deserted buildings found new purpose as an intermittent Ranger station while the region was being pacified.
Pioneer Cemetery
Fort Davis, TX
Used from the 1870s until 1914, this Fort Davis graveyard holds the memory of the frontier: the Belgian-and-Spanish Dutchover family, whose coined surname still endures among their descendants; a bride named Dolores, said to have burned mountain signal fires for a lost love for thirty years; and two Frier brothers shot as horse thieves. It reads as a roll call of the hazards and legends of far West Texas settlement.
First Rural School West of Pecos River
Fort Davis, TX
In 1881 settlers P. H. Pruett, Cal Nations, James Dawson, and Joe Dorsey raised this adobe schoolhouse, said to be the first rural school west of the Pecos River. A nearby Texas Rangers' camp shielded the families from Apache raids, and Mrs. Pruett once rode at midnight to warn the Rangers of approaching Apaches. When Pruett sold his home in 1883 and moved to found the Lone Cottonwood Ranch, the school closed.
Barry Scobee Mountain
Fort Davis, TX
This 6,300-foot peak overlooking Fort Davis served from the 1850s to the 1880s as a campground and lookout for soldiers, mail coaches, freighters, and emigrants crossing the Trans-Pecos, and it saw the area's last Indian raid in 1881. In 1964 Governor John Connally named it for Barry Scobee, a writer and historian whose efforts helped preserve old Fort Davis.