MARFA — Last week, the United States Border Patrol (USBP) celebrated its 100th anniversary with a parade through downtown Marfa. The “Mean Green” showed up in style for a patriotic procession led by a pair of bagpipers. City and county officials then gathered by the courthouse for performances by pipe-and-drum and rifle teams.
Today, the Border Patrol is a sub-agency of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which falls under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security. While all of these entities work closely together, last week’s centennial celebration was a chance to reflect on the Border Patrol’s unique legacy.
On May 28, 1924, the United States Border Patrol was created through the Labor Appropriation Act, which earmarked $1 million (around $18 million today) for a “land border patrol.” The original USBP agents were called “inspectors,” taking after the “mounted inspectors” — early immigration officers who kept an eye on comings and goings along the southwest border.
The creation of the Border Patrol came on the heels of waves of panic about a perceived flood of undesirables into the United States. “By 1917, the list of persons prohibited from entering the United States included all Asians, illiterates, prostitutes, criminals, contract laborers, unaccompanied children, idiots, epileptics, the insane, paupers, the diseased and defective, alcoholics, beggars, polygamists, anarchists and more,” historian Kelly Lytle Hernández writes in her book Migra!: A History of the United States Border Patrol.
Though they roamed the Mexican border, mounted inspectors’ focus was not on Mexican immigrants. Instead, these proto-Border Patrol agents were primarily looking for Chinese migrants who were no longer allowed to enter the United States legally, thanks to a series of immigration quotas that instituted limits — or outright bans — on groups of immigrants by nationality.
Asia and Eastern Europe were the hardest hit by the law. Early Marfa Sector Border Patrol Inspector Ware Hord reported apprehending “Syrians and French” in 1924; in 1926 he apprehended more Syrians as well as “Russian, Jewish, Turkish, Greek, Hungarian and Austrians” and “a Roumanian [sic] in a Ford touring car with four Mexican aliens en route to the Pecos cotton fields.”
Hord was one of the 12 first Marfa Sector Border Patrol inspectors, in addition to a clerk and a mechanic. Marfa was one of the first Border Patrol “sub-districts,” and was responsible for a huge swath of the Trans-Pecos from Sanderson to just downstream of El Paso.
Technology on hand was limited: in 1924, USBP inspectors did not have radios. Vehicles were notoriously unreliable and unfit for the rough Big Bend backcountry. Horses and mules were in short supply, so inspectors had to supply their own and apply for reimbursement from the government. In an emergency, carrier pigeons were used to signal the alarm to other stations.
In the early years, the total number of Border Patrol agents hovered between 400 and 500. USBP personnel were mostly nudged into the agency from other law enforcement entities or fresh from service in World War I.
Early Marfa recruit E.A. “Dogie” Wright, was from a long line of Texas Rangers — his father was among the Rangers on the hunt for Gregorio Cortez, a Rio Grande Valley folk hero famous for killing a sheriff in self-defense and immortalized in Americo Paredes’ With His Pistol in His Hand.
There were physical qualifications for the job: agents had to be taller than 5’ 7”, at least 140 pounds and have at least 20/40 vision and good color perception. In the early days, the patrol wasn’t too picky — Wright, who had battled typhoid as a younger man, was technically too skinny, but was still permitted to join the ranks. He was given a six-shooter, a rifle and a .35 pistol. “I couldn’t have been better armed,” he remembered.
Earl Fallis, another early figure of the Marfa Sector Border Patrol, was also young and unsure of what to do with his life when he was recruited alongside “a pretty rough bunch of cowboys.”
He recalled that the exam included a number of hypothetical scenarios: what would you do if you encountered Chinese migrants on a train? What about an undocumented Mexican crossing the river to see his daughter one last time before he died? “I didn’t even know what an alien was, to be honest,” he said.
Early Border Patrol personnel in Marfa tackled three main duties: checking farms and ranches for undocumented workers, inspecting vehicles traveling inland from the border, and “sign-cutting,” or tracking migrants and smugglers through the backcountry.
Roving checkpoints for “observation and arrest” were set up at strategic points around Presidio County: near the Ross Mine west of Shafter, near the mouth of Alamito Creek and downriver toward Redford, at Elephant Rock, and “at random crossings between Presidio and Ojinaga, especially on fiesta occasions where plenty of liquor was required,” according to Cecilia Thompson’s A History of Marfa & Presidio County.
The modern-day covered drive-through checkpoint south of Marfa was built in 1994. The earliest checkpoints were little more than small huts with painted sawhorses politely instructing motorists to stop. Still, they did the job — Marfa USBP was enlisted in the spring of 1932 to help conduct traffic checks in the aftermath of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping.
Not everyone was thrilled with the expanded law enforcement presence. “It was a new thing for the country, and quite often was found to be a source of ill feeling,” Fallis remembered.
Buck Newsome, who served out of the Marfa Station in the 1950s, wouldn’t have traded the stress or external criticism for anything. “It makes a man glad he is alive and to pity the poor son-of-a-bitch that is glued to a job in some concrete jungle, who will never live long enough to learn to know what life is or why he is here on earth,” he wrote in his memoir.
Official histories and detailed records of the early years of the USBP are scant. In this series, The Big Bend Sentinel will compile archival records to tell the stories of a few key episodes in early Marfa Sector Border Patrol history.
What happened to Miles Scannell?
The Border Patrol was founded during Prohibition, and smuggling liquor was big business for the first decade of the Border Patrol’s existence. During the Prohibition years, a bottle of sotol ran about a dollar — about $18 in today’s money — and quintupled in value the moment that bottle crossed the Rio Grande.
Heroin, cocaine and opium were also smuggled through the sector in the ‘20s and ‘30s, but in miniscule amounts compared to the flood of liquor. Initially, the Border Patrol smashed seized bottles, but to keep better track of how much booze was coming across the border they took to dumping the liquor out into an arroyo behind sector headquarters and saving the glassware.
In the 1920s, migration patterns were much different than they are today. Human smuggling — the kind that in modern times has become increasingly inextricable from drug cartels — was not yet a booming trade. “Dogie” Wright referred to the earliest undocumented Mexican migrants as “huarache men” — in reference to the simple sandals worn by farmers along the border. The huarache men were generally peaceful; they came and went with the seasons and as the stock market rose and crashed.
The smugglers were a much different breed. Americans’ thirst for illicit liquor was unquenchable, and the price they were willing to pay attracted folks of a wide range of class backgrounds and criminal proclivities to the trade. “It was a great relief when they repealed that law,” Wright remembered.
But as Prohibition wore on, the smugglers got more creative: in one particularly stinky instance, Border Patrol agents apprehended a truck full of fish headed up toward Marfa from Redford. One of the agents noticed something peculiar about the fish and investigated further — only to discover that the fish were stuffed with bottles of liquor.
Senior Patrol Inspector Miles Scannell had a nose for contraband hooch, and perhaps wore a target on his back because of it.
Newspaper clippings suggest Scannell and his wife, Dorothy, were well-liked in the community — the Alpine Avalanche reported in its social section whenever Mrs. Scannell helped host a bridge game or traveled across Paisano Pass to visit her parents, and wished the young couple well on a romantic getaway to the Devils River.
Presidio County historian Celia Thompson writes that Scannell was one of two “mounted inspectors” — a rank held by those on border patrol before the Border Patrol earned its capital letters — who took up work in Presidio in 1921.
Scannell’s partner was Fletcher Rawls, the son of a prosperous Casa Piedra ranch family who became a Presidio County deputy in the late 1910s. In 1917, Rawls was shot on-duty 17 times in an incident at a restaurant in Presidio and survived against all odds. “Fletcher Rawls was tough as a boot and one of the best shots in the country,” the son of then-Sheriff Ira Cline recalled in a letter.
Scannell’s history apparently wasn’t quite so rough, but his obituary noted that he was a native of the Big Bend, joined the Border Patrol shortly after its inception and became skilled at sign-cutting and catching smugglers.
On the morning of September 9, 1929, Scannell and fellow inspector Charles C. Holmes were on an overnight detail at the Polvo river crossing, a low spot in the water that links the towns of Redford and El Mulato, Chihuahua. In the morning light, Scannell left his partner to walk upstream to check on a few other informal river crossings.
According to a statement given to The Sentinel by Nick Collaer, district supervisor of the Border Patrol out of El Paso, the trouble started around 7:45 a.m., when Holmes heard a series of muffled shots. “He did not attach any importance to these shots because it is not unusual to hear shooting along the river where Mexicans and others hunt rabbits all the time,” Collaer wrote.
Around an hour later, Holmes became concerned and started to walk upriver about a quarter mile, where he discovered Scannell’s body. The Alpine Avalanche reported that he had suffered “one bullet wound in the neck, three in the face, one in the side of the head and one in the right hand.”
The El Paso Herald embellished the story with a few more injuries: “Investigation revealed … Scannell had his head crushed and neck broken, his throat cut from ear to ear, and stabbed 15 times,” they wrote. “Heavy clubs, guns and knives all had their part in the slaying.”
Scannell’s handcuffs were missing, as well as the key that unlocked them. An investigation showed that the fatal wounds were made with a .45 caliber pistol — the same kind the Border Patrol carried. “Signs also indicated that Scannell put up a valiant fight for his life after having been attacked from the rear,” the Avalanche wrote.
A stream of officers from the regional Border Patrol — as well as officers from Mexico — poured into Polvo to search for more clues. Not far from the body, the searchers located sacks typical of the kind used by cotton-pickers and a set of packed lunches.
There were also three sets of tracks. The prevailing theory emerged: Scannell had apprehended two men, whom he likely handcuffed together. He was then attacked from the rear by a third man, and the three made off for the river with the handcuffs, the key and the murder weapon.
The three assailants were never identified. Theories swirled: were the men transient cotton-pickers, or were they smugglers? Were they convicts on the run?
The Sentinel took it a step further, theorizing that Scannell’s murder might have been a death by policy. In March 1929, illegal entry into the United States anywhere except a port of entry was finally made a federal crime, expanding the arrest power of the Border Patrol. “It might have just been ordinary Mexicans who took a chance on overpowering the officer realizing that they would be tried for having entered the United States in violation of the late law,” they wrote.
Special thanks to Victoria Contreras at the Archives of the Big Bend, Sul Ross State University.