MUKEWATER BILL

The earliest Coleman County settlements were in three localities: the valley of Hord’s Creek, near Camp Colorado, on the Colorado below the mouth of the Concho, and the Mukewater where John Chisum first gathered his herds of cattle to sell to the Confederate Army.

We have told of the Bartons, who lived on Home Creek north of where Whon is now: while they were away on that tragic journey to Mexico, two families came to the Mukewater from Alabama, brothers-in-law, with their wives and children. They were Bill Williams and Enoch Fiveash, whose wife and two children were massacred by Indians in 1871, and the new settler on the Mukewater was called Mukewater Bill.

Arriving soon after the Civil War, they found Chisum still holding thousands of cattle he had bought from the cowmen nearly, but now he was driving them to New Mexico where the U.S. Army bought them to feed the Indians on the reservations there. Chisum had a log store building on the creek and up and down Home, Hay, Camp and Mukewater were the herds of the Dofflemyer Brothers, the McCains, the Gordons, Joe Wright, and one source says the Manns were there, possibly including Clay Mann, whose story will be told later in this series. Chisum had two employees who operated his store, Emory Peters and Bill Franks, and they also had a part in overseeing the cattle being held across the creek and in paying and supplying the cowboys.

Mukewater Bill Williams and his wife, Elizabeth, were the ideal pioneer type which many settlement were not fortunate to have: afraid of nothing, determined and full of fun, they had vision of what this country could become. They had something that few immigrants had, a money trunk with gold and silver coin which they received for their property in Alabama, and they could affords plenty of good guns and ammunition, medicine, coffee and flour and sugar, and other small luxuries of the frontier such as writing paper, ink and tobacco.

Elizabeth joined in some fights with Indians just as a man would have done. The Indians attacked their cabin, about two miles south of the Chisum store, early one morning, probably having watched her husband ride away to the Fiveashes. The Williams children ran into the house from the cowpen.

"Ma, the Indians are coming! The horses heard them and we heard them too."

Several loaded guns were ready, and she peeped out the heavy back door, which was partly shielded by a big liveoak tree.

" Now you youngguns stay out of sight, and hand me a gun every time I shoot." she said. " Don’t you be peeping out anywhere. You might get shoot right in the eye."

The Indians rode up to the back fence and one jumped over, confident that this was an unprotected cabin, but they had not heard Elizabeth Williams.

She took dead aim and he fell with a yell. The others rode around, bent on over behind their horses, but whenever she thought she had a good target she fired. One lucky shot went through the neck of a horse and into an Indian, killing both.

William was within hearing of the guns, and he came racing home, yelling at every jump to make the raiders think that a force of men were with him. The Indians left without retaking the bodies of the two Elizabeth had killed. She was calm but exultant. "That will teach them a lesson." she said.

Among their children was Larkin, best known for his remark about a .22 pistol when he was fourteen years old. Already wearing two 45’s he had a contempt for the small caliber. "If anybody shoots me with that thing, and I found it out, I’d kill him!" he said.

Chisum sold his store to a young Alabama man, Lee Shields, the year uncertain, but probably 1874. A school had been started near the store, which Chisum had moved farther south, and near the spot where the present store is situated, and the Williams, Fiveash and other children of the valley attended, either wearing pistols or being brought in a wagon by the teacher, David McAlester. Indian raids became much worse during the early '70’s and the schoolboys sometimes ran out with their guns and chased the red raiders away.

It was the Fiveash family which was almost wiped out by smallpox in 1876, a story which will be told later in this book.