In the anecdotal history of Los Ojuelos recounted by our Guerra grandfathers and fathers, we heard the story of “a bad man who menaced women and children, a squatter, a rustler.” He remained nameless in the story handed down through generations, but he is now known to us as Theodore M. Sanders, a murderer and a thief who lived and died in a haze of gunsmoke.
I came across his name a couple of years ago in an 1891 court opinion recorded in The Southwestern Reporter. Research over the last several months — arrest warrants, court opinions, lawsuits, and newspaper stories — have shaded in the life and times of Theodore Sanders.
The random glancing of lives can linger time enough to bring blessings, or conversely to ricochet violently with ours, insinuating themselves into the fabric of family history before spinning off wildly as their own unraveled threads.
I write here of the latter, of the chance ricochet of the life of Theodore Sanders upon the lives of the residents of Los Ojuelos.
Sanders did not live long enough to know his second-born child, Teodora, but I have made her acquaintance in the writing of this story.
In April of 1891 Theo Sanders upended the tranquility of Rancho Los Ojuelos and its inhabitants, including its owners, my great grandfather, José María Guerra, and his brothers, José Dionicio and Juan Nepumoceno, the settlers who established Los Ojuelos on the vice-regal land grant made by the Spanish crown to their grandfather Isidro Gutierrez, a native of Guerrero Viejo.
The brothers developed a prosperous sheep and cattle operation on the 8,856-acre expanse of land that had the benefit of natural springs — ojos de agua. Rancho Los Ojuelos was on the Corpus Christi/Laredo trade route and grew into a small town that had a school, a church, and a mercantile.
The distribution of labor among the brothers was thus: José Dionicio managed the development of housing on the ranch and ensured the operation of the school. Juan Nepumoceno’s area of expertise was ranching and safety. José Maria managed the store and water delivery to the houses, orchard, and livestock.
The Guerra land was in what was then known as Encinal County, which later was incorporated into Webb County.
Sanders was not unknown to the Guerras prior to 1891. Even in newsprint he was considered a “bad man” — a description of character that appeared in newspaper stories about a lucky criminal who could slip through the rule of law, even for arrests and indictments for murder. Changes of venue and all-Anglo surnamed grand juries and petit juries appear to have been especially helpful if his murder victims had been Mexican.
One Sanders-Guerra encounter in particular — the one documented in an 1891 arrest warrant, voluminous trial testimony, news stories, a civil lawsuit, and written opinions by justices of the Texas Court of Civil Appeals and the Texas Supreme Court — began on April 26, 1891, the day Sanders elected to steal a head of Los Ojuelos cattle.
The matter escalated the next day when my great grandfather, my great uncle José Dionicio, and José María’s son Margarito rode out in an 11-man posse to nearby Aguilares to serve Sanders with an arrest warrant for theft.
The warrant was based on the testimony of a witness named Pedro Martinez who had reported to Justice of the Peace José María García that two of Sanders’ employees had driven a hobbled Los Ojuelos cow onto the Sanders property in Aguilares. The same witness said he had later seen Sanders and the two employees slaughter the cow.
The Guerras and other members of the posse — including JP García, deputy sheriff Tiburcio Guerra, Cayetano Ochoa, Antonio Zapata, and Porfirio Laurel — met at the stone block (sillar) building that housed the general store at Los Ojuelos. Under cover of the last hours of the star-pricked sky, the posse rode into the brush to Sanders’ ranch.
Arriving just before daybreak, they spotted Sanders’ employee Pablo Longoria about 100 yards from the Sanders gate. Longoria’s clothing was stained with blood, the result of killing a deer, he initially said. Further questioned by JP García, Longoria admitted he had helped move, kill, and butcher the rustled cow the day before. He was arrested and placed in the custody of two members of the posse.
Alerted by another of his employees, Pedro Servin, that an armed party was approaching the Sanders gate, Sanders called out for the help of a third employee, Victor Perez, to join him.
It would be improvident at this point in the story to omit that Sanders’ face-to-face encounter with the posse dealt him a mortal blow. The 29-year-old whose entire name was Theodore Manuel García Sanders would die of gunshot wounds 13 days later. A Grand Jury indicted Theodore Sanders for cattle theft on May 8, 1891, the day before he died.
There are two versions of what ensued at Sanders’ gate that morning.
THE TESTIMONY OF PATROCINIA VILLASTRIGO SANDERS
Sanders’ widow would testify that her husband “about sunrise was standing outside the door making a cigarette” when Servin advised him “that a great many armed people were coming.” She said Sanders retrieved his carbine from the house and walked onto the gallery about the time the armed men had arrived at the yard gate, “which was only a few steps from the gallery.”
She said that JP García told Sanders, “We want to speak to you as friends,” whereupon Sanders, carbine in his left hand, opened the gate with his right hand.
She continued: Victor Perez, to whom Sanders had earlier called, passed through the crowd, the gate, and into the yard, whereupon JP García had said, “Kill him,” and they took Sanders by the arms and shot him — a great many shots fired by the posse, she averred, but none by Sanders.
She said that when Perez passed through the gate, Margarito Guerra pointed a pistol at him.
Mrs. Sanders said no cow had been killed on the Sanders ranch the night before and that Sanders had none to kill. She said that on the night in question, Sanders and his employees were working on the ranch.
Her testimony regarding the rustled, slaughtered cow was controverted by the evidence the posse discovered after the exchange of plomazos had ceased — the large bloody mancha on the ground where the beef had been slaughtered the night before, Longoria’s bloodstained clothing, the beef quarters found hanging in a nearby jacal, the bloody trail left by the hide being dragged into the brush, and the hide found in the weeds with the brand of Los Ojuelos Ranch.
THE POSSE’S VERSION
Sanders, armed, came to the gate and yelled, “Get away, you sons of bitches!”
Deputy Sheriff Guerra advised Sanders of the warrant, and JP García told him they had come as friends and asked Sanders to restrain himself.
Sanders called Perez to join him at the gate.
The warrant had not yet been served.
Sanders fired first, taking aim and firing at posse member Margarito Guerra. Sanders turned his aim at the rest of the posse and a posse member named Laurel tried to disarm Sanders, whereupon Sanders fired at him and Laurel fired back. An exchange of gunfire commenced with Sanders firing into the posse.
AFTERMATH
The Laredo Times reported on April 30, 1891, three days after the shooting, that Sanders’ brother Mauricio had filed affidavits on April 29, charging the posse members with assault to murder. “Warrants were issued for their arrest,” the brief story informed.
Four months after the death of her husband, Patrocinia Sanders filed a civil suit styled Patrocinia Sanders et al. v. J.M. García et al., the widow suing all members of the posse for the wrongful death of her husband. The suit entered district court in Webb County on August 22, 1891 but the venue was changed to Nueces County on June 3, 1892 and was tried by jury in Corpus Christi on Nov. 29, 1894.
The district court trial resulted in a verdict that favored Patrocinia Sanders with an award of $9,000 — $4,000 for herself and $2,500 each for her two children, one born and one in gestation.
When members of the posse appealed the district court’s verdict in the Texas Court of Civil Appeals In February of 1896, (García et al. v. Sanders et al.), the court upheld the district court’s judgment for the widow Sanders.
The written opinion of Court of Civil Appeals Justice C.J. Garrett was sometimes dismissive as he pointed out perceived flaws in the arrest warrant for the original rustling event. He wrote, “The word intended to indicate the offense is ‘thiebs’” and “the offense reads ‘is charged with thiebs.’”
He noted of the posse, “All of the party were Mexicans, and the warrant was written by a person that understood the English language imperfectly.”
Though Justice Garrett’s opinion characterized Sanders as “a hardworking man” who provided all his family needed and “was kind to them,” he also acknowledged that the “preponderance of the evidence shows that Sanders had stolen and slaughtered a cow that belonged to a person living on Los Ojuelos Ranch.”
To support his belief that Sanders was a hardworking man, Justice Garrett noted that Sanders’ income stream included having delivered 300 cords of wood to Fort Macintosh in Laredo.
While Justice Garrett’s esteem of Sanders became part of the court’s record, the court of public opinion memorialized Sanders thus the day after his death in a news story in the May 10, 1891 issue of The Fort Worth Gazette:
Datelined Laredo, the story recounted that Sanders was “a noted character on the Río Grande, having been born and raised here. He was a man who had always lived such a life that it would naturally be expected that he would die with his boots on. He could count several notches on the handle of his pistol and was considered a bad man. Although quiet in outward appearance he never allowed anyone get the drop on him, and had he not missed his man in the Los Ajuelos (sic) affair would have scored one more victim. Affidavits have been filed against the twelve men composing the posse.”
Undaunted by the rulings of the district (trial) court and the Texas Court of Civil Appeals, García et al. (the posse) took the case to the Supreme Court of Texas.
On October 29, 1896, the Supreme Court reversed and remanded the judgments of both the lower court and the Court of Civil Appeals.
Associate Supreme Court Justice Denman’s opinion stated that the posse had reasonable grounds to seize stolen property and the thief; that “it reasonably appeared” to members of the posse “that they were in danger of their lives or serious bodily harm;” and that the Court of Civil Appeals erred in not holding that the District Court committed error in the exclusion of evidence admissible as substantive evidence.
Fort Worth Gazette, April 28, 1891
After reading Supreme Court Associate Justice Denman’s 1896 opinion to reverse the decisions of the lower courts and to remand the case, this writer’s search for the original lawsuit of Patrocinia Sanders et al. v. J.M. García et al. (the posse) and the case’s return to the district court hit a dead end. A request was made for further information from the District Clerk of Nueces County for any documents relative to the original case, but at this posting none had been received.
Leaving no stone unturned for the possibility of income from a settlement, Patrocinia Sanders — now versed in the machinations of the courts — filed Patrocinia Sanders et al. v. Eusebio García, et al. on January 29, 1895, suing the brother of posse member JP J.M. García.
Her demands included the naming of a receiver to manage what she wished to take from Eusebio García and his brother:
- Half the merchandise and wares in the store he and his brother owned in downtown Laredo;
- 1,500 head of cattle and other livestock known to be on the pastures of J.M. García;
- 500 head of horses and mules;
- 1,000 sheep; and
- 500 goats
[News stories about Theodore Sanders and the opinions of Texas Court of Civil Appeals Justice Garrett (Vol. 35) and Associate Supreme Court Justice Leroy Gilbert Denman (Vol. 37). can be read at the end of this story]
PART II – TEODORA
Patrocinia Sanders gave birth to her second child, Teodora, on Nov. 11, 1891, about seven months after Theodore’s death.
According to U.S. Census records, Teodora grew up in Laredo with her mother and her Villastrigo grandparents at 220 Matamoros and later with her aunt Emilia Sanders at her home at 915 Santa Ursula.
Teodora’s grandfather, Tomás Villastrigo, once a Confederate soldier who served with Col. Santos Benavides, later served as a Laredo City Council member.
No child should bear the stain of her father’s sins, and Teodora did not. What mother would pass onto an innocent child the lawless legacy of her father? It is not known what she did know of her father’s life, but what it is known is what she would say of him and was repeated by her friends — a) that Theodore Sanders had been a prominent international politician slain in a quarrel with Mexicans when he was 29 years old, and b) that Theodore had been a prominent pioneer rancher who had met his death at the hands of Mexican bandits when Theodora was only four years old.
Those myths would find a life in news stories of the time about Theodora, myths perpetuated today in digitized newspaper archives.
If Teodora had a sin, it may have been to have been a bit of a fabulist.
It was written of Teodora that she was well-educated and that she had been appointed to a teaching position and also that she had worked as a secretary to L. J. Christen, superintendent of Laredo schools. Her death certificate reports her occupation as “military translator,” which reflects perhaps that she had translated for the federal government at Ft. Mcintosh.
Far from the dry dust of the ranchlands of Aguilares and Los Ojuelos, Teodora’s life as a young woman in Laredo was socially active, according to notes in The Laredo Weekly Times — a guest for Thanksgiving dinner in the best homes, a regular at elaborately-themed bridge games attended by la nata of Laredo society, and riding on a float called “Spanish Cavalier” in the 1916 WBCA parade in which she portrayed a Spanish maiden “in an exquisite Spanish costume.”
(Poster artwork created for purpose of illustration)
In the second week of April 1919, Teodora (now Theodora) appeared in district court in Laredo, the plaintiff in a breach of promise lawsuit against banker Ben Alexander for an engagement she said he made to marry her on March 1, 1916 and reiterated on August 1,1917.The lawsuit stated Theodora had lived in Laredo for several years past, “mingling and moving in the best society circles of this city” — which is how she met Alexander, described in the suit as “a man of large wealth and high social position” and the observation that a marriage with him would have “been advantageous.”
The breach of the marriage contract, the suit contended, left Sanders “deprived of support, social position, and wealth” and that her affections had been “disregarded and blighted.”
The “mental distress and humiliation” and the “suffered loss of social prestige,” the suit stated, incurred damages to her “in the sum of $100,000.”
The morning edition of the April 20, 1919 Laredo Times reported that the hearing resumed with the reading of “more letters from the plaintiff, Miss Sanders, to defendant Alexander. Quite a large number of Laredo ladies are attending the trial of this case and much interest is manifested by them in the proceedings of this case.”
The evening edition of the same paper reported “an abrupt ending” to the case “when the jury, upon instructions from the court, returned a verdict in favor of the defendant Ben Alexander.”
The jilt-ee and the jilt-er reportedly settled their differences outside the courtroom with a monetary agreement favoring Sanders.
A month-and-a-half after the ink had dried on her settlement with Alexander, Theodora Sanders met Harry Hampton Garver on June 6, 1919. The foreign trade representative of the Chicago Association of Commerce, Garver traveled by train to Laredo with businessmen on a junket to explore investment in Mexico.
Sanders reportedly met Garver as she a.) traveled by Pullman coach on the same train on her return to Laredo from Eagle Pass; or b.) met him at a social event for the entourage of Chicago junketeers.
Introductions were made, and more keen than the aim of a Coahuilatecan warrior, Cupid — son of the love goddess Venus and the war god Mars — struck at the hearts of the rebounding Theodora and Garver, who had yet to reveal he was married, though seeking to divorce the wife from whom he lived apart and had deposited with her parents years before in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Theodora Sanders and Harry Garver at the Laredo train terminal
Garver asked Theodora to marry him, she now aware that a marriage was contingent upon Garver having dominion over the hurdle of his divorce from Clara Irene Woodridge Garver.
Had Cupid checked in, he would have told of the dizzy-dancing-way-he-felt as the Sanders-Garver courtship accelerated to a frenzy of more than 200 torrid letters and telegrams and Theodora traveling by train from Laredo to Chicago, St. Louis, and New York City.
Alas, the pace of amor de lejos proved unsustainable. Garver’s divorce was not imminent, especially after a friend ran a premature notice of the Sanders-Garver engagement in The Chicago Tribune on March 17, 1920. Clara Irene Woodridge Garver did not take the news well.
Fissures developed in the long distance relationship, a result of Sanders’ impatience with delays, her purported bad temper and jealousy, Garver’s awareness of Sanders’ “cyclonic power as an antagonist,” and Garver giving notice that the wedding would have to be postponed indefinitely.
Ardor cooled in Garver’s letters and telegrams to his “precious girl” whom he had loved with “body, soul, and being.” A December 12, 1920 story in The Washington Times would dub Garver “the Champion Western Union lover.”
When Garver advised Sanders by letter that it would be wise to stop plans for marriage, Sanders — no doubt still smarting from the public jilt of Ben Alexander and reportage of the breach of promise suit in Laredo — replied, as a Washington Post story reported, “in person.”
Why, you might ask, would The Post, The Times, and more than 50 U.S. newspapers publish accounts of this love story gone awry?
Read on.
Sanders arrived in Chicago in late October 1920, hoping to work things out with Garver and to proceed with marriage plans. She checked into the Dearborn Hotel and saw Garver nearly every day she was there. Together they visited the office of Garver’s attorney, E.A. Biggs, who advised Sanders that bigamy was a felony, and that while Garver was free by virtue of a separation from his wife, he was not free to marry until he was divorced. He advised them both that theirs was a matter of the heart and not of the law.
The idea of returning to Laredo with another broken promise for marriage may have been untenable for Theodora Sanders.
She was still in Chicago on November 9 and had asked Garver to meet her in the hotel’s mezzanine, which he did.
An un-sent telegram to her sister in Laredo would later be discovered in her hotel room. So great was her wish to reconcile, and perhaps so great was her belief that she could will it so after meeting with Garver, the telegram read, “We were married this morning. Harry and Theodora.”
Of their last encounter, Garver, who was planning a trip to Cuba, said Theodora asked that they resolve their conflicts and marry that day. He said he told her he loved her, but did not desire to marry her.
She asked if he wanted back the beribboned caché of the neatly bundled letters and telegrams he had sent her. He reportedly said no and asked if she would like hers back. She declined.
Garver sensed a scene in the making and rose from the table where they had spoken and began to leave.
Theodora reportedly swiftly pulled the long bone handled knife purported to have been her father’s and stabbed herself twice in the heart.
Twice.
She bled out in her room at the Dearborn Hotel, and as The Washington Post would tell, no doubt loaded Garver’s conscience “with a weight that would never be lifted.”
Lift though, it did, however. Clara Garver granted him a divorce, and he married his secretary three months after Sanders’ suicide.
Immediately after Theodora’s death, Garver was held by authorities in a hotel for the duration of the coroner’s inquest into the Laredoan’s death, which was ruled a suicide. The inquest was held in the chapel of the Central Undertaking Company.
The Washington Post reported that the inquest presented Garver with the public scrutiny of the most intimate details of his relationship with Theodora and the review of evidence that included her letters and bloody undergarments and clothing.
Laredo Mayor Santiago Sanchez telegraphed the Cook County Coroner’s office to request that Theodora’s remains go to the best undertakers in Chicago to prepare for her return to Laredo.
It was reported that three individuals kept vigil at Theodora’s coffin in Chicago. One, described in a news story as a heavyset Mexican, vowed Garver would pay for Theodora’s death with blood. Another, Pvt. Ray E. Cude, a medical corpsman, was a soldier who had known her while he had been stationed at Fort Macintosh in Laredo, and the third was a woman about whom nothing was known and who also espoused blood vengeance.
Theodora’s childhood best friend since the time they were “little girls in short dresses,” Ruby Ritter Campbell, accompanied Theodora’s remains — and her travel pouch of $10,000 in jewels, some reportedly her mother’s, some gifts from Garver — back to Laredo by train.
The Washington Post, December 12, 1920
THE KNIFE
News accounts of the tragedy called it a Bowie knife, a dagger, a Spanish stiletto. At the inquest, Garver said the knife was an affectation, something Theodora kept constantly at hand.
Did she carry it on dates with Ben Alexander, Thanksgiving dinner with Judge Greer or District Attorney Hamilton, or on her person to any of the soirees that sought her company?
For about 50 years the knife played a role in the lives of Theodore and Theodora Sanders.
Though she had never met her father, Theodora carried it like a talisman that was said to have been a gift to Theodore Sanders from “a Spanish person.”
The knife may have been one more tool in Theodore Sanders’ criminal arsenal—something handy with which to skin a rustled beef.
There is a first mention of Sanders and such a knife in an account in the April 26, 1897 issue of The Galveston Daily News called “LAWLESSNESS IN LAREDO.”
Its bone handle was inscribed in Spanish on one side with “Donde las dan las toman” (As you sow, you shall reap) and on the other “El lo quiere asi” (He would have it thus.)
THE PRESS
Objectifying Theodora Sanders as “la señorita from the border,” the press seized on the tragedy of her suicide with vigor, diminishing the value of her life with every half-truth and fabrication.
Sensationalized accounts of her death made the front pages of many national newspapers, some according the suicide story double truck (two facing pages) coverage.
Without a live Señorita Sanders to interview and having to write in a vacuum of sources and detail, writers and wire service editors drew upon hearsay and the embellished version of Theodora’s life that was repeated by her friends.
Some publications fabricated details from whole cloth, publishing as though a fact that the weapon of her self-annihilation had been given to her by her father when she was 4, an impossibility for he had died before her birth. That aside, what parent would have presented a small child with a dagger?
The press perpetuated the myth that Theodore Sanders had been a prominent pioneer ranchman who had been killed by Mexican bandits.
A story in the November 14,1920 issue of The Sioux City Journal includes the observations of Theodora’s friend Ruby Ritter Campbell who told the press that “the hand of fate was particularly evident in the life and death of Miss Sanders. Her father, a prominent international politician, was slain in a quarrel in Mexico on his 29th birthday. He was stabbed to death with his own dagger, and this dagger taken from his body, was the same with which his daughter killed herself on her 29th birthday.”
News stories after her death called Theodora “the belle of Laredo,” and her family, “elect.” Some reported the breach of promise suit and that she had been “the ward of a prominent Laredo banker.”
The November 10, 1920 issue of The Riverside Daily Press used a good many column inches to write of Theodora’s skill at throwing a knife, “able to stick a playing card on the wall at 10 paces.” The same story narrates that a fashionable St. Louis hotel where she stayed for a month had asked her to leave after terrifying exhibits of her knife-throwing had made her an unwelcome guest.
Several publications reported that as she died, she clutched the Ace of Spades — the death card — in the hand she did not use to plunge the knife into her breast.
The headlines for some stories about Theodora’s suicide were magnets meant to rush the reader to the drama of Theodora’s suicide, to wit:
Canton Daily News, November 10, 1920
Riverside Daily Press, November 10, 1920
The Atlanta Constitution, November 10, 1920
It was impossible to ignore racism in some of the writing.
There were references to the culture from which she came, people of a hot-blooded temperament.
The lead of a story in the Nov. 14, 1920 issue of The Sioux City Journal about Theodora’s remains going back to Texas begins, “Back to the sunny southlands where blood runs warm and despair breeds quickly out of hopes, there started this evening the body of beautiful Theodora Sanders, who stabbed herself to death on the mezzanine of the Fort Dearborn Hotel at the tragic climax of a shattered romance with Harry Garver, Chicago commercial expert.”
From the December 12, 1920 Washington Post:
- “Thus Theodora Sanders, a Texas girl swayed by the romantic maternal urge of ancestors of Spanish blood…..”
- “The señorita’s capacity for starting a whirlwind ruction when her Spanish dander became heated…”
- “The father was an American who had married the daughter of a wealthy Mexican. Through the mother Theodora had inherited the Spanish traits which may be assumed as the origin of her stormy temper and the will to have recourse in the dagger when balked in her desires.”
- “What was it that impelled her to bring her life to such a tragic close, through such a horrible means? Was it the fact that she had in her veins the blood of a race notoriously given to the use of ‘the cold steel?’”
A gross overstatement for Theodora’s cultural type appeared in The Washington Times’ two-page spread on the suicide, posting the observation that “Miss Sanders was of a striking mixed-race type. She had an American regularity of feature with a Mexican richness of coloring, Her type is frequently seen in Mexico among the highest aristocrats of the town, who are not, like the peon, coffee colored and flat nosed, but betray the Castillian in their dazzling skins and Indians only in the somber, savage eye and a general tendency to excessive growth of hair.”
The article continues with quotes from an oil operator from Laredo, a “friend of the self-slain woman and her family.”
The man named I. Lykins speculated verbosely on his theory of romance in the Mexican culture. “Romance can have but one of two endings — supreme happiness or death. Miss Sanders was of a typically Latin temperament. When she realized her dreams of happiness were shattered, for her there was no alternative but death.”
The Chicago Tribune, which devoted a front page story and two inside full pages on the life and times of Theodora Sanders, recounted that just before going to her last moments with Harry Garver on the mezzanine of her hotel, Theodora had been reading her own fortune in her room, a hotel housekeeper witness to the deck of American cards Theodora had laid out next to a Mexican deck, “depicting Aztec symbols of war clubs, knives, warriors, and princesses of the reign of Montezuma.”
We who write down here on the sunny southlands where blood runs warm would have called it Loteria.
[News stories about Theodora Sanders’ suicide can be read at the end of this story.]
AFTERWORD
At the City Cemetery in Laredo Theodore and Theodora Sanders share a concrete grave marker with Theodore’s brother Alexander M. Sanders, the year of their respective deaths under each name. I came across it about a month ago, late in the research and writing of the story.
The sight of the marker left me with an unsettling sadness that father and daughter had not known each other in life, but in death had now shared this dry, dusty spot of earth for the last century.
Coming across the marker moved me in ways I don’t always experience as a writer. The marker motivated the best organization of information I could structure, and curiously it fueled an immersive drive to write and re-write — so much so that I would at times have to walk away from the story to recalibrate my perspective.
The day I first found the Sanders marker I noticed across the way a fenced, shaded, and well-tended area where Ben Alexander is buried under a bed of green grass.
This turned my thoughts to the obvious about Theodora’s luckless misadventures in love — her human, beating broken heart and her decision to no longer contend with it —and I wondered whether or not I would succeed in making that point.
SIDEBAR
Research for this story about Los Ojuelos and the rustler Theodore Sanders took a leap in a different direction when my cousin Anna Patricia Guerra, a Houston psychotherapist, came across Teodora Sanders’ name in an online search.
There was no shortage of material to read about her, the column inches devoted to Teodora by newspapers far greater than what was written about her father Theodore.
Some of the newspaper accounts of Theodora’s life were rife with stereotyping, racism, and white lies and whoppers that flew in the face of fact. Such was the state of journalism in 1920.
Justice Garrett of the Texas Court of Civil Appeals — which upheld the district court’s verdict in a wrongful death civil suit filed by Theodore Sanders’ wife in 1891 — may have donned a white robe and a pointed hood over his head to write of the Los Ojuelos posse in his 1891 opinion that “all of the party were Mexicans, and the warrant was written by a person that understood the English language imperfectly.”
As you read in the story above, in the 1894 Texas Supreme Court opinion of Associate Justice Denman the case against the posse was reversed and remanded.
The posse members, many of them born in Guerrero Viejo, may not have been able to spell “thief” or “theft” in the warrant, but they did know how to secure excellent legal representation.
In the epoch in which Theodore Sanders worked assiduously to fill his rap ledger for murder, forgery, and theft, lawmen had Spanish surnames, but judges, grand jurors, and petit jurors did not. Changes of venue were good to Theodore. Such was justice in the 1890s.
This story is dedicated to the storytellers of the Guerra family history, who ensured that this generation of us can recount it to another. We heard stories about the hard, honest work of ranching, livestock, the self sufficiency of crops and an orchard, los ojos de agua, how sacks of Los Ojuelos wool were the currency to buy the property at 1307 Lincoln in Laredo, what was in the general store, how the Indians came at first as raiders and later in peace to set up tepees by the springs when they gathered peyote, and the school where my grandmother Leandra Castaño, a teacher, met my grandfather Pedro Armengol.
I heard these accounts on the porch of my grandfather’s house at 1020 Laredo Street, and later I heard them again from my father, who had the good fortune to add a narrative to the body of an impressive genealogy amassed by both Margarito Guerras named below.
The story keepers include my great grandfather José María Guerra (1836-1918) and his brothers José Dionicio Guerra (1830-1912) and Juan Nepumoceno Guerra (1833-1896); my grandfather Pedro Armengol Guerra (1890-1957) and his brother, the first Margarito Guerra (1874-1940); Alberto Guerra Sr. (1901-1984); my father José María Guerra (1922-2004); and the second Margarito Guerra (1931-2015).
Very special thanks to Anna Guerra; Webb County District Clerk Esther Degollado; Jeanette Hatcher and staff at TAMIU’s Special Collection and Archives; Megan Vallejo at the Webb County Heritage Foundation; and my sister, the consummate grammarian and proofreader Sandra Guerra.
Hand in hand for the occasion of this photograph are Felipe Martinez, José Dionicio Guerra, and José María Guerra at Los Ojuelos.
Anna Guerra
The final resting place of José Dionicio Guerra, one of three Guerra brothers who founded Los Ojuelos. He is buried as he wished to be, on land that was his and that he loved.
(Click here to read news stories about Theodora Sanders.)
Fascinating story!!
You are the proverbial “gift that keeps on giving.” Thanks for weaving colorful storylines together into a fabric that revels both past and present. Wonderful work.
What a wonderful eye-catching job of historical sleuthing. I found the entire story absolutely fascinating. Well done.
I love this article. Thank you.