AC. Bigfoot Wallace Reveals the Fate of Jeff Turner at the Hands of Indians (ep.11)

Bigfoot Wallace Reveals the Fate of Jeff Turner at the Hands of Indians (ep.11)

Welcome to another edition of “Unworthy History.”  Today we have a little more true story from that book: The Adventures of Bigfoot Wallace, Texas Ranger and Hunter by John C. Duvall.  This book was published back in 1871.  So, in the last episode of this series about Bigfoot Wallace, he met an interesting character named Jeff Turner.

His family was killed by Indians, and now he has sworn revenge on them.  So now we’ll see what happens when Bigfoot Wallace, Jeff Turner, and others track down the Indians who stole their horses. About half an hour before sunset, Jeff Turner stopped.  When we all gathered around him, he ordered us to be vigilant and not to make any noise, as the Indians were very close by.

And indeed, we had scarcely gone 300 yards when we saw their blanket tents on the edge of an oak grove about a quarter of a mile to our right.  We spurred our horses and in a few moments we were among them. The Indians did not notice us until we were within 50 yards of their camp, but they had time to grab their guns, bows, and arrows, and fired a volley as we rushed to the attack.

Fortunately, no harm was done, except for a slight injury to one of our horses.  We immediately jumped off our horses and began to fire devastatingly at them from our rifles.  As soon as I had jumped from my saddle to the ground, a large Indian came out from behind an oak tree and aimed an arrow at me that seemed to me to be as long as a barber’s pole.

I hid behind another tree as deftly as a city clerk in a store when a crowd of customers rushes in, and I was short of time: the arrow flew so close to my head that it tore a strip of bark from the tree the width of my finger. I aimed my rifle as he started to run away, but his arrow rattled my nerves a bit and I missed.

The battle was quite fierce on both sides for 15-20 minutes, until the Indians lost hope and retreated into the thick bushes, leaving seven of their warriors dead on the ground.  I noticed Jeff Turner several times during the fight, and each time he was busy scalping an Indian that he or someone else had shot.  They say practice makes perfect, and it was impressive to see how quickly Jeff scalped an Indian and loaded his rifle in preparation for the next one.

One swing of the butcher knife, a sharp jerk— and the bloody scalp was already swinging on his belt. At the same time, he never seemed rushed, but was as calm and measured in everything he did, like a carpenter who works for a daily wage, not for the amount of work.  As the Indians began to retreat, one of them jumped on our horse, which they had tied tightly to an oak tree near the camp, having forgotten to untie the rope in their haste, and he circled around the tree until he pulled himself up to the trunk.  It was at this

moment that Jeff shot him with a half-ounce bullet and scalped him before he could stop twitching. After they retreated into the chaparral, an incident occurred which shows the bravery of these Indians when cornered.  We were all standing together, loading our rifles , for we did not know whether the Indians had retreated deliberately to lull our vigilance, when suddenly we were startled by a shrill cry and the firing of a rifle.

And at that moment, a tall guy who had come with us from the settlement dropped his rifle and, clutching his face with his hands , shouted: ” Guys, I’m dead.”  I looked back to see whence the shot came, and saw an Indian lying on the grass 30 yards away, his rifle in his hand, slowly sinking to the ground, from which he had partly risen in a dying rush to fire a last shot at the enemies of his kind.

I saw this Indian fall during the fight, and of course I assumed he was dead, which he was, in fact, a moment after he uttered a cry and fired his gun.  For I immediately went to the place where he lay, and found him as dead as a doorknob, with the gun still firmly clenched in his hands .  And yet, at the moment he fired, he had no less than seven bullets in different parts of his body, because the wounds were clearly visible , since he had almost nothing on except the powder magazine and the bag of shot.

Jeff Turner approached him almost at the same time as I did, removed the scalp faster than you could say “if you want,” and hung it on his belt to the three others already swinging there. The scalp seemed to calm Jeff down quite a bit , just as he had promised me.  After the fight, he became quite sociable with the boys and once even laughed when one of them told a funny story about how he shot a tree stump three times , mistaking it for an Indian, before realizing his mistake.

But whether the unusual sound of his own laughter frightened him, or he had run out of all his supplies, I never saw him smile again.  As it turned out, the boy who was shot was more scared than hurt, because the Indian’s bullet only grazed his head, but hitting a nearby tree, it chipped off a piece of rough bark, which flew violently into his eyes.

The pain from this made him think he was already dead. The Indians had killed a fat deer, and when we attacked them, the best pieces were already roasting on the fire.  And after the fight, we discovered that they were perfectly prepared.  We had n’t eaten anything all day, so we pounced on the venison as a legitimate war trophy and had a hearty dinner of it, along with the crackers we had in our bags.

As I ate my dinner, I felt a little sorry for the poor things that had been cooked just half an hour before, and were now lying around us, cold and stiff on the damp prairie grass, waiting to be eaten by vultures and coyotes.  However, this thought did not take away my appetite, or if it did, the grilled ribs and about 5 pounds of meat disappeared with it.

As soon as we had finished our supper, we changed from our horses to those which the Indians had stolen from us and which were already rested;  we started back to the settlement, which we reached at dawn the next day, having covered 75 miles in part of the day and night, never dismounting except for the few moments when we fought with the Indians.

Jeff Turner left us here, heading to his camp on the Chicolaite, and I never saw him again. I was told, when I was in the settlement a few years after , that he remained there for a long time, sometimes visiting the settlement for ammunition, etc., and always bringing four or five scalps with him. He eventually left and never returned, and it is believed that the Indians eventually caught him by surprise.

At least that was the last anyone saw or heard of Jeff Turner. So, this ends the story of “The Adventures of Bigfoot Wallace.”  However, I found an article by J. Frank Dobie published in the Southwest Review in 1955 that provides a little more information about Jeff Turner’s subsequent fate . Little has been written about Jeff Turner, but in the homes of frontiersmen his name was once well-known.

Many whites considered him a monomaniac, which he was.  The Indians considered him the devil, which he was.  Turner came to Texas from Kentucky and settled on the Guadalupe River with his wife and three young sons. One day he returned from hunting and found all four dead, and the Indians scalped .  He killed four Indians that day, and after that he lived for one purpose only— to kill and scalp other Indians.

He could be counted on in any expedition against them, but he usually hunted and ambushed alone.  His type was rare, but it had its precedents. Mad Anne Bailey of Virginia, who lived from 1747 to 1825, was perhaps the most famous of these.  After her husband was killed by Indians, she lived only for revenge. Charles Goodnight told how one rainy evening he came across a lone frontiersman in his cabin, drying a fresh Indian scalp over a fire in revenge for his daughter, who had been killed by Indians while she was nursing an infant.  This man

treasured his collection of these well-preserved trophies.  Any dedicated hater is a twisted anomaly. The haters represented by Jeff Turner cannot be compared to those murderous bounty scalp hunters led by Santiago James Kirker and John Glenton, who in Chihuahua and Sonora harvested not only Apache scalps but also the dark hair of innocent Mexican citizens.

I have no idea how many scalps Jeff Turner had before his death .  How he died is a matter of legend.  One December evening in 1932 , while I was in a hotel in El Paso, a loud knock made me jump to my feet.  When I opened the door, there stood a man in the doorway, over six feet tall, with a stocky build, wearing a huge cowboy hat that didn’t look too big on his head at all.

This man was Frank Collinson, who is no longer alive.  In the early 70s, he came from England to Texas, where he enthusiastically took up mustang hunting, bison hunting, farming, and other forms of outdoor living .  He was an educated man with a cultured outlook, and in later years he wrote extensively for Western magazines.

That evening , before he even sat down in the big chair in my hotel room, he started talking. After a while he asked if I knew Bigfoot Wallace.  I didn’t know.  He met him on the Medina River, west of San Antonio, where Bigfoot lived as a recluse.  “Have you ever heard of Jeff Turner?” asked Frank Collinson.  “Yes,” I replied.

“I read about him in Duval’s book about Bigfoot Wallace.” “Does the book tell what happened to Jeff Turner?” “No, and I’ve often wondered about it .” “Well, Bigfoot told me. He said that Turner kept chasing the Indians, catching them one by one when he got a chance and keeping their scalps, until one day they found him sleeping in the bushes.

He was too valuable to kill him on the spot, so they took him to their camp, where the chief’s wife was about to give birth to a child, they hoped— a boy. They crucified Jeff Turner on the ground and sat the chief’s wife down beside him. Then the chief cut out Turner’s heart and, while it was still beating, gave it to his wife to eat hot and raw.

It was believed that Turner’s bravery would be passed on to the unborn child. When I heard this story, I understand why Duvall, who was a Victorian and wrote his books for children’s magazines, didn’t tell what happened to Jeff Turner. But maybe that’s just a story. Then again, maybe it’s a fact. So , that’s the end of this story, which is actually a two-part story, along with the last episode of the series I’m doing about Bigfoot Wallace.

So , we see that the Indians eventually catch up with Jeff Turner and get their revenge on him. So if you want to see other episodes of mine like this, you can watch my episode about the Joy family, where Wiley Joy turned into the same character as Jeff Turner after his family was killed by the Indians. You can also see a similar case with Geronimo, after his family was killed by Mexican soldiers around 1860, he started a similar vendetta against them.

So, if you want To see more episodes like this, be sure to like and subscribe, and see you next time on Unworthy History.