Texas Rancher
Charles Schreiner

On Christmas Eve 1869 - with $10,000 put up by August Faltin of Comfort - Schreiner opened a general store in a cypress plank building in Kerrville. Before closing for the day, the store had sold 7.5 pounds of coffee and two quarts of whiskey - on credit. Whoever bought that liquor probably intended to enjoy eggnog and toast the arrival of a new year, but whiskey also dulled the ongoing pain of Reconstruction and the terrible memories that haunted many Texans who had fought in the Civil War.

Texas - never successfully invaded by the North - had escaped most of the physical devastation of the bloody conflict. Unlike Georgia and other Southern states, its cities did not lay in smoke-stained ruin, but Texas's economy had nearly been destroyed.

After the war, to hitch supply to demand, Texas ranchers began rounding up Longhorns and walking them north to the railheads, first to Sedalia, MO and starting in 1867 to Abilene, Kansas. One of the major routes, known initially as the Dodge City Trail and soon simply as the Western Trail, passed through Kerrville.

Schreiner soon acquired a financial interest in the trail and built shipping pens in Kerrville. The captains also moved tens of thousands of his own Longhorns up the trail. And Kerrville's emergence in the mid-1870s as a cow town did nothing to harm his bottom line at his general store.

But cattle were not the only animals that could get by on the semi-arid land of Southwest Texas. Schreiner and Caspar Real had pioneered sheep raising in the area, successfully breeding Delaines to his flock to produce better wool. Soon he also began raising goats.

Schreiner's three-pronged approach to ranching not only enhanced his success, it helped transform Kerrville from a town with a courthouse and a few businesses into a regional agricultural center. Ranchers came to Kerrville for their supplies, giving Schreiner's store a steady business, and freight wagons hauled wool and mohair from there to San Antonio and the state's coastal bend. Before long, the astute Alsatian-Texan had enough cash to begin loaning money to others, the beginning of Schreiner's soon to be quite profitable banking business.

While an increasingly successful young capitalist, Schreiner had not forgotten what the business end of a Winchester was for. On June 30, 1873, a rowdy-looking group of cowboys walked into his store, ostensibly to have a drink or two. But what they really had in mind was relieving Schreiner of any money he had on hand. Unluckily for them, the captain had been tipped off as to their true intentions and members of the local minute man company that he commanded had been strategically positioned outside to await developments.

One of the strangers unwisely shot at a local resident inside the store and the minute men opened up on the party. When the smoke cleared, five of the outlaws were dead and several lay moaning in spreading pools of blood or staggering around wounded to various extents. The survivors had mounted their horses and galloped out of town, the minutemen in hot pursuit. The Kerrville men caught up with the robbers about eight miles from town and surrounded a house where they had holed up. Newspaper accounts are sketchy as to what happened next, but the Galveston News reported later in July that some 20 outlaws had been killed in the area recently.

Two years later, when five horse thieves hit town and appropriated two head of other people's stock, Schreiner led a group of his minutemen in pursuit. Thirty miles upriver, the ranger-like unit and their tracking hounds caught up with the thieves and mortally wounded one of them. Ten horses had been recovered, with another accidentally killed in the exchange of gunfire. Even though the minutemen had recovered the stolen stock, they rode on after the other thieves. "The Highwaymen Come to Grief!," the San Antonio Express reported on June 16, 1875. "Captain Schreiner and the Kerrville Minute Men Do Their Business."

Schreiner went on the establish the famous YO Ranch. He died in Kerrville in 1927.


© Mike Cox
"Texas Tales" October 12, 2016 column

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