can be good guys, too.

I copied the following text from a newspaper clipping I found in a photo album at my Mammy's (grandmother's) ranch. I scanned the actual article and was going to put a link to it here, but some of the text was not legible, so I just typed the whole danged thing. :)

If I understand correctly, The Wylie brothers were my Mammy's grandfather and great uncle, the little boy mentioned in the story was her Daddy's brother. This took place during the "range wars" in Texas. I had heard of this "cattle rustler/gunfighter", but had never seen anything written on him till this... I think it's interesting and I don't care if you don't think so. :)

Palo Pinto County Star, Thursday, January 22, 1981, p. 9

An excerpt from:
Vanishing Texas
By CL Yarbrough

A Texas Gunfighter

He touched the chords of history seldom and lightly, leaving few clear impressions on his turbulent passage through life.

His legend, held in trust only by the sons and grandsons of those he served, has grown dim. James Highsaw came with his parents and brother to Eastland County, Texas, about 1855. By 1860, Indian depredations had all but emptied that frontier country and the Highsaws moved back a few miles into Erath County. The family name was perpetuated there by Highsaw Cove and Highsaw Creek.

The Wylie Brothers, prominent Texas cattlemen, got their start in Erath County, and the Highsaws went to work for their neighbors.

After the Civil War, organized mobs, started to combat Reconstruction government and the hated state police, gained control of several Texas counties. As happened with many another such organization, the actions of the mobs were often diverted to personal vendettas and to arbitrary, violent enforcement of right by might.

Many decent men who had at first subscribed to the mob disassociated themselves, and many others, more cautious or better able to forecast the future, never joined at all. As time passed, some of these men openly opposed mob rule. Highsaw had not stolen, robbed or done anything else except be a passionate young man of his violent times. Yet, he found himself headed west to the safety of New Mexico, then a haven for hundreds of men wanted in Texas.

Many of these wanted men were real outlaws, and Highsaw thus entered into an association with the worst kind of people. A Hamilton County historian, writing sometime after the facts, called him “as unholy a thug as ever wrote a chapter in Texas criminology.”

The Wylies, highly respected in a dozen or more Texas counties, didn’t think so. They regarded Highsaw as a friend and as a valuable ally. When their ranching interests spread to the Pecos River country, rustlers were so bold that they took several herds away from Wylie cowboys in broad daylight.

The Wylies sent for Jim Highsaw.

Highsaw knew the people who were doing the rustling: He had been living among them.

When the next herd was taken, he, at the head of a small army of cowboys, caught up with the rustlers. Being acquainted, neither side immediately fired on the other. The rustler leader suggested that they kill a beef and discuss the matter over fresh steaks. The plan was, apparently, that the man designated by the rustler leader to shoot the beef would swing the rifle around and kill Highsaw instead. Highsaw, however, saw the gun start around to his quarter, was able to draw his pistol and get the first shot which was fatal to the rustler.

The Wylies were anti-mob, but they were careful and diplomatic. Young Jim Highsaw, on the other hand, was strongly influenced by the views of his employers and he was fiercely protective of those views.

When the Witcher and Clary families in neighboring Hamilton County demonstrated their defiance of the mob, Highsaw was one of several young men attracted to their style. The Witchers and Clarys found a place in history as outlaws, but a great many important facts are missing: they may have been guilty of nothing more than opposition to the mob.

Be that as it may, Jim Highsaw was one of a half-dozen men with James Witcher, Adam Witcher and Bill Clary when they attacked a church in Hamilton on the night of September 21, 1872.

The meeting inside the church that Saturday night may or may not have been for religious purposes: it was the wrong time of year for revivals, but the assumption since has been that it was religious, and no investigation of the question has ever been made.

It was afterwards reported that Clary and the Witchers wanted to kill at least two of the men inside the church, but no one recorded their reason. It is difficult now to condemn their actions except to say that they apparently started a gunfight in a situation that could have proved fatal to innocent bystanders.

They fired about fifteen shots into the church, and those inside fired perhaps ten shots back at them. Only Adam Witcher was hit in the exchange, and his wound was not serious.

The Witchers and two unidentified associates were captured and placed in the Hamilton County jail. On the following Thursday, the mob rode into town, overpowered the guard, and shot both Witchers to death. The body of the younger Witcher, Adam, showed the signs of personal hatred; it was shot seven times, while only one shot was used to kill James Witcher.

Jim Highsaw was now an outlaw. He had not previously killed, but when he killed two thieves a short time later, and threw their bodies into the Pecos Canyon, the stories that made the rounds made it seem that he had killed numerous men.

The indictment against him in Hamilton County, and his growing reputation as a gunfighter, made Jim Highsaw a wanted man who could never afterwards remain in one place more than a few weeks at a time. He drifted, and the Wylies lost contact with him.

Dick Wylie, a small boy on his father’s Erath County ranch in the 1890’s, had never seen Jim Highsaw, but he had been raised on the Highsaw legend.

One day, an old, tired-looking man wearing a brace of heavy pistols appeared in the Wylie yard. Dick, peering around the corner of the house, thought at first that he must be a lawman. His father seemed almost joyous to see the man, and invited him into the house, where he told his awed family that here was Jim Highsaw, come home at last.

Dick ran under a table in fear. Highsaw unbuckled his pistols and laid them aside. Then he pulled Dick gently from under the table and assured him that he had nothing to fear.

The visitor had not been there long when three riders appeared at the Wylie gate, where they stopped and seemed uncertain of their actions. Jim Highsaw, without speaking, put his pistols on again.

Dick Wylie’s father went out and talked with them for a few minutes, then came back into the house and sadly told Highsaw that it was the Erath County sheriff and two deputies. They were trailing Highsaw, but they didn’t want to close in on him while he was in the Wylie home.

Highsaw quietly said that he would ride out the back way so there would be no trouble on Wylie land.

Dick Wylie was never certain, but it looked to him like his father had tears in h is eyes as Jim Highsaw rode away toward the northwest. He was never seen or heard of again.