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Bigfoot Wallace � that wild and wacky Texas Ranger -- returned to the wilds of frontier life once the United States won the war with Mexico, and it suited him as nothing else could do. Soon he was freighting mail six hundred miles from San Antonio to El Paso, and it was the wildest stretch in the Wild West! Wallace was the only man who could do it. Anyone else who tried was scared off by attacking Comanche and Apache warriors or killed outright. It took a month of hard riding to make the trip, which ran right through the old Comanche Trail. Indians and Army soldiers all knew him as a reckless, fearless man. Any warrior who killed or wounded �Captain Wallacky� was sure of a heroes welcome in his tribe. But none ever succeeded, though there were times that Wallace would ride into an Army outpost with his mail coach so shot up he had to lie over for a few days to repair it.

When he wasn�t running the mail, Bigfoot still worked with the Texas Rangers, taming the untamable and keeping the peace. Took him another twenty years of busting desperados and dodging Indians before he decided to retire. Wallace lived out the rest of his days in the company of his good friends, the Bramlette family, and as an old man he lived with their daughter Fran and her husband, Doc Cochran, telling tales of his frontier exploits and and outwitting the antics of Fran�s very active boys.

Bigfoot Wallace died in 1899 and his final resting place was the State Cemetery in Austin. But the stories of his exploits live on to this day, and somewhere on the road to El Paso, the spirit of El Muerto still rides.

Turns out, Well, the rough and tumble life of a Texas Ranger wasn�t enough to satisfy Bigfoot Wallace. No sir! He hungered for adventure, and he found it. First he fought against Mexican General Adrian Woll's invasion of Texas in 1842, then he volunteered for the retaliatory raid across the Rio Grande. When the raid ended, he joined the Mier Expedition organized to penetrate further into Mexico. Got himself into a mess of trouble then. The Texans in the expedition were surrounded and captured by a force ten times their size. They managed to escape a short while later, but were rounded up in the desert and Santa Ana ordered a decimation of the escaped prisoners � meanin� that one man in ten would be executed. The Mexican soldiers put a mess of beans into a covered crock -- 159 white and 17 black -- and each Texan had to draw a bean in alphabetical order, starting with the Texan officers. Anyone who got a black bean was shot, and the ones who got a white bean went to prison. �Course Wallace had to draw near the end of the line, not good odds. And being a rebel, he ended up with a gray bean. Lucky for him the officer in charge decided the bean was white, so he didn�t get shot with the rest. Spent a couple years afterward doing hard labor in a Mexican prison before being released.

You�d think ol� Bigfoot would have settled down after that last episode, but not him. He joined the other Texans in the Mexican-American War and fought with gusto, since he had so many scores to settle with the Mexicans who�d killed his brother and treated him so bad. At one point, he came face-to-face with that ornery coyote who held the crock from which the Texas Prisoners had drawn the white and black beans. Unfortunately, he was under a white surrender flag at the time, but it still took several fellows to restrain Wallace from shooting the man.

After getting the lay of the land, so to speak, Bigfoot Wallace moved from Austin to San Antonio, which was considered the extreme edge of the frontier, to sign up as a Texas Ranger under Jack Hayes. In them days, Texas was as wild as the west could get. There was danger from the south from the Mexicans, danger to the wet and north from the wild frontier filled with Indians and desperados, and to the east the settlements still had problems with the Cherokee Nation. General Sam Houston himself had appointed young Captain Hays, a hero from the battle of Plum Creek, to raise a company of Rangers to defend San Antonio. Hayes had high standards for his men. They were the best fighters in the west, and they had to be, considerin� the fact that they were often outnumbered fifty to one. A man had to have courage, good character, good riding and shooting skills and a horse worth a hundred dollars to be considered for the job. Captain Hayes knew all about Bigfoot Wallace and signed him on the spot.

So armed with Colt pistol and a Bowie knife, Texas Ranger Bigfoot Wallace once more took on the Wild West, and quickly made his mark on Texas folklore. In them days, the Rangers tended to handle stock theft at the end of the rope, so to speak, stringing up the bandits, forcing a confession out of them, and then leaving the bodies swaying in the wind to deter other outlaws. Only it didn�t work, and the bandits kept right on stealing, sometimes passing right under the bodies of their fellow outlaws to do it.

Now Bigfoot�s fellow Ranger, Creed Taylor, had a big spread lay west of San Antonio, in the cedar hills clear on the edge of Comanche territory, and he was constantly losing stock to bandits and Indian raids. The last straw came for Taylor the day famous Mexican raider and cattle thief Vidal and his gang rounded up a bunch of horses from his ranch and took them south toward Mexico. Most of the Rangers were heading north to pursue some Comanche�s out on a raid, but Taylor and a friend went immediately in pursuit of the thief, and when they bumped into Wallace just below Uvalde, he joined them.

Bigfoot was always ready to hunt horse thieves and desperados, especially those of Mexican descent, never forgetting what happened to his brother at Goliad. Bigfoot decided it was time to put an end to Vidal�s gang once and for all. He would track the wiry Mexican bandit to earth. The three men located the camp where the horse thief and his gang lay sleeping, and snuck in from downwind, so as not to alert the horses. Vidal was wanted dead or alive, so all the thieves were shot and killed in the gunfight that followed.

That was when Wallace got an idea. Obviously, hanging horse thieves hadn�t gotten the message across to the outlaws raiding the ranches of the good folk of Texas. Perhaps a more drastic example of frontier justice would do the trick. Severing Vidal�s head from his body, Bigfoot and his fellow Ranger tied the body to the saddle of the wildest mustang in the stolen herd and secured the severed head to the saddle horn so that it would bounce and flop around with every step taken by the mustang. Then Wallace gave a shout and sent the horse running away with its headless, dead rider, hoping the gruesome sight would deter future cattle thieves.

What he managed to do was frighten everyone in South Texas. Folks would be peacefully walking down the road of an evening when a terrible headless rider would gallop pass on a midnight black stallion with serape blowing in the wind and severed head bounding on the saddle horn beneath its sombrero. Nothing could deter the terrible specter � not bullets, not arrows, not spears. It was years before a posse of cowboys finally grew brave enough to bushwhack the horse and release the withered corpse from its back.