The painter of this work is Michael Ome Untiedt, a contemporary Western artist, and this work, entitled On the Nueces Strip: Rangers and Another Heye Saddle, is relatively recent (2014). A lot of Untiedt’s work falls in the western genre. Some of them have historical figures such as Charlie Goodnight and Quanah Parker. Sometimes he repeats the story, as
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| Unteidt: Lads Ride Lightly a Heys Saddle (Private Collection) |
he did here with Lads, Ride Lightly, a Heys [sic] Saddle, with a darker palette, the figures more centered, and small trees to left and right. Sometimes two almost identical compositions have divergent backstories, for example, On the Nueces Strip is very similar to another of his works, When Faith Takes a Fast Mount, where there is only one pursuer, the weather is stormy rather than nocturnal, and a crucifix is on a low hill to the right. On his website, the painter comments on many of his works, accompanied by photographs of them. Quite a number are night scenes; he gives tribute in these to earlier Western painters in the genre: Frederic Remington and Frank Tenney Johnson. Many of them are general nostalgic scenes of cowboy life, others are pure but recognizably western landscapes, and all appear to narrate something, identifiable or not. The title “On the Nueces Strip: Rangers and Another Heye Saddle” as well as its sister composition, and their mood of pursuit and anxiety certainly implies a specific story being told here, but unless you happen to be a die-hard Texas history buff, you are probably asking “Nueces Strip? Where is that?” “Heye Saddle—is it a type of saddle, or does it refer to one owned by somebody named Heye, or made by Heye? As for Texas Rangers: Walker? That ball club in Arlington?
The particular incident referred to is a real one: a robbery of a general store on the Nueces River, the theft of eighteen valuable saddles among the loot, and the story of their recovery in 1875. The Nueces River, which flows from Edwards County in central Texas to Corpus Christi Bay, was considered the boundary between Mexico and Texas, until Texas, the winner of the Mexican American war of 1846-1848 definitively fixed this border southward at the Rio Grande with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. But there were many Mexican citizens who had had ancestral land grants in the “Nueces Strip”—the area between the two rivers. They still considered these holdings their own, even as Anglo-American settlers began to populate the territory and appropriate property for themselves. Conflict in the region raged for another thirty years or more. One of the biggest Mexican land-grant leaders, Juan Nepumaceno Cortina, lost a considerable amount of family property north of the Rio Grande in the vicinity of Brownsville. He became the leader of disenfranchised Mexicans in the region and fought two local wars during the period 1859-1861 before he was driven back over this newer border.
From the end of the Civil War and later, as Anglo-American ranches were being established, great numbers of feral longhorn cattle were rounded up, claimed by the
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| Juan Nepumaceno Cortina |
ranchers, and branded with their brands. After 1870 Cortina became active again, directing raids into the Nueces strip area, stealing cattle and looting Anglo-American settlements and ranches, taking all of it across the Rio Grande to Mexico. To Mexicans, he was Robin Hood. To many Anglo-Americans, he was more like Attila the Hun.
This is not the place to talk about the Texas Rangers, a sort of Texan “Special Forces” with a long and checkered history; just to mention one short part of it. A company of Rangers was commissioned by Texas Governor Edmund J. Davis to settle a long-standing feud between the Sutton and Taylor families in south Texas in 1874. It was commanded by 30-year-old Captain Leander McNelly, a Civil War veteran and former state policeman. Though they were only partially successful, McNelly was called to action.*
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| Captain McNelly |
again in 1875 to try and establish some law and order in the Nueces Strip. He recruited forty men, and for the next two years, often using brutal and unorthodox methods (McNelly was a disciple of the “take-no-prisoners-school), they succeeded. For a detailed account of their activities at this time from the Rangers' point of view, I recommend the account of the youngest member of the company, George Durham called "Taming the Nueces Strip.”
Untiedt’s paintings invoke this campaign. The San Antonio Daily Express sounded a general alarm about the threatening situation on the Nueces Strip on May, 20, 1875. Cortina sent out four groups of marauders consisting of Mexicans and some allied Anglo American over the border five days later. Three were soon repulsed, but the fourth group charged north, heading towards Corpus Christi. On the way, they destroyed ranches and homesteads, raided a store run and owned by George Franks, and took some prisoners of both genders, driving them in front as human shields and/or bargaining chips.
On March 26 (Good Friday), they reached Nuecestown, a small place then, and now absorbed into Corpus Christi. There, they attacked the general store owned by Thomas J. Noakes, who was also the town’s postmaster. In his words in a dispatch to The Galveston Daily News on March 30th:
"I took aim at the nearest of the cutthroats in the store. When I discovered about fifty outside, I did not shoot, knowing that I was overpowered and my only chance for life was to secrete myself in a subterranean passage.... The robbers completely sacked my store of all valuables."
A much more detailed account was written by Noakes on May 13, and reproduced in full in "The Mexican Raid on Corpus Christi" by Leopold Morris (see citation below). Noakes, knowing of the local potential for disaster, had dug a tunnel under the house, where he hid after shooting one of the robbers, and then realizing the overwhelming odds against him. His five children escaped to the river, but Noakes’s wife Martha took a stand. As the robbers attempted to set fire to the store, she managed to douse it twice before ducking inside to grab her feather comforter and sewing machine. One of the Anglo robbers, described by her with a distinctive facial scar, beat her severely with his riding quirt, but she eventually escaped, featherbed quilt and all. T.J. Noakes and all the children survived as well, but the store was not only sacked but burned before the bandits rode away.
Among their haul were eighteen luxury saddles, heavily adorned with silver in distinctive pattern and design, manufactured by Diedrich Heye of San Antonio.
This robber band was prevented by traveling further by a posse who came down from Corpus Christi, and other armed locals. Retribution was evidently very intense and violent but did nothing to stop the lawless carnage between both Mexicans and Anglos in the region over the next month.
According to George Durham, when NcNelly and his rangers arrived at Nuecestown and the site of the burned store, he gave his men very specific instructions.
"Captain seemed mighty concerned about those eighteen saddles. He got Mike Dunn [one of the prisoners the posse freed from the gang after the raid] to give him a good picture of them—length of the tapideros, if the skirts were cinched. He wanted all details…and ordered: 'Describe those saddles to the Rangers. Make sure they understand exactly. Then order them to empty those saddles on sight. No palavering with the riders. Empty them. Leave the men where you drop them and bring the saddles to camp.'”
The following month, McNelly and his rangers caught up with many of the raiders at the salt marsh of Palo Alto, north of Brownsville. He and his men slaughtered them all—and George himself killed the scar-faced man who beat up Mrs. Noakes. McNelly had the bodies brought back to Brownsville and stacked them in a public square—shocking friends as well as the unsympathetic. A tally of the loot recaptured from the battle included twenty-two pistols, twelve rifles and fourteen saddles. Durham reported:
Nine of the saddles…look to be almost brand new. they are dandies. Garnished with two-inch silver conchos, foot-long tapaderos. The first ones I’ve seen. Came from Dick Heye saddlery in Santone. Captain perked up and said, ‘Let’s have a look at them. Sounds like they’re part of the plunder taken up in Nuecestown in a raid last March.' They were. No mistaking them.
Befitting their special value, Cortina had given them to his trusted and honored lieutenants. McNelly, in the instructions to his men, practiced what art historians call “connoisseurship:” analyzing the traits of a distinctive style to determine the authenticity of a work of art. It worked for the art of saddles too.
McNelly died young at 33. He had been suffering from tuberculosis and had originally migrated to Texas from Louisiana in search of drier air. He lived long enough to conduct more skirmishes along the Rio Grande, including one over the border into Mexico itself. The Nueces Strip was eventually pacified, but the Rio Grande is, to this day as we well know, a volatile border.
T.J. Noakes got these saddles back—and eventually all eighteen—plus seven more! They were evidently prized targets. The problem was, according to Durham at least, that these particular ones had morphed from notable to notorious—no one wanted to buy them, given their history.
So who knows which incident in this border war involving Heye saddles, if any, is the specific pursuit depicted in Untiedt’s painting? Well, the artist himself says so, and describes the lore of the story as he heard it on his website. But neither painted versions is a direct narrative, they're more a poetic narration of pursuit—and for this writer, a lot more
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| Melvin C. Warren: On the Nueces Strip |
moving and impressive than such standard “western issue” paintings depicting Captain McNelly by Joe Grandee or Clyde Heron, or the painting entitled The Nueces Strip by Melvin C. Warren of 1973, also at the Briscoe, in the Janey Briscoe Marmion Collection. featuring two Texas Rangers in a South Texas landscape dressed in more recent western wear, with the signature Texas Ranger badge made from a 5 peso coin, These badges didn’t come into general use by the Rangers until after 1900.
Part of the irony of it all, is that no part of the saddle and its rich adornments is visible in either painting, but visitors to the gallery at the Briscoe where the painting is hung can examine a genuine Heye saddle, with all its silver concho trimmings (Durham mentions that these were particularly large), and characteristically long and silver-plated tapaderos (stirrup covers) on display in the same room.
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| The Heye Saddlery on Commerce Street |
It would be wonderful to say that this particular saddle was actually part of the Nuecestown loot, but it isn’t, for the firm of D. Heye and his sons kept the enterprise going well into second third of the 20th century. Diedrich Heye was part of a wave of German settlers who came to central Texas during the mid-19th century. Born in Holstein in 1837, he received his initial training in saddlery in his native country, then moved on to an apprenticeship in England, which had the reputation for being the best in the business. He then went to Mexico City, where he learned the art of silver-decorated saddles, the basis for the American western saddle. He came to San Antonio in 1866, where he set up a shop on Commerce Street, then the principal business street in the city. He and his workers quickly
built up a reputation for quality saddlery and prospered in the period of the cattle drives during the next two decades. The firm produced work saddles too, but the Heye saddle became the darling of wealthy stockmen, with their distinctive concho pattern and quality leather work (Durham called them “the Cadillac of Saddles).”
Heye died in 1896, but he had taught his trade to his sons, and later the business was continued by his grandson. Among other projects, the Heye enterprise made many of the saddles for Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, who trained in San Antonio. Later they became saddle makers to Hollywood cowboy stars and wealthy ranchers, and as automobiles displaced horses as transportation, they branched out into all sorts of luxury leather goods, including fancy luggage.
Over their long business operation, the enterprise moved several times to larger quarters, but the upper facade of the original workshop is marked by a commemorative sign that still reads “G. Heye, Est. 1867” (it is now occupied by the Coyote Ugly Saloon).
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| Heye's Rex Stuart Saddle |
The saddle on exhibition at the Briscoe Museum was made for Rex Stuart, a now-forgotten country singer who was popular in the mid-20th century, and so was presumably custom made at that time. It has the characteristic conchos and silver-adorned tapaderos. I can’t say how closely it resembled the Diedrich (or Dick) Heye saddles of the 1870’s, but I think it’s great that it occupies the same gallery as Untiedt’s painting, so you can really understand what the painter’s reference is.
But it gets even better: the D. Heye original San Antonio saddlery site, nicely marked, is just one block north of the Briscoe Museum—you could even see it from a window in the gallery if it weren’t blocked by a parking garage. For Art Historians, it is completely rare for a work of art, its iconographical source and the location of its origins are all in the same place. We should all go to Coyote Ugly after a Briscoe Museum visit and raise a glass to Heye, McNelly, Untiedt and brave Martha too!
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| Heye Saddlery- Now Coyote Ugly Bar |
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Michael Ome Unteidt's Personal Website: https://michaeluntiedt.weebly.com
There are numerous recountings of the attack on the Nuecestown Store. Though it was written down nearly 50 years after it happened, there is an eyewitness account by former "Little McNelly" George Durham made in 1934, and finally published in 1962:
George Durham (told to Clyde Wantland), The Story of McNelly's Rangers, Austin, University of Texas, 1962.
Other accounts include:
*Leopold Morris, "The Mexican Raid on Corpus Christi,"The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association," Vol.4, #2 (October 1900), pp. 128-39.
*William A. Hager, "The Nuecestown Raid of 1875: A Border Incident," Arizona and the West, #3 (Autumn 1959, pp. 258-270.
Noakes's account in the Galveston News: "Statement of the Postmaster at Nueces: A Narrow Escape From Death," March 30, 1875, p.1.
The Salt Marsh Battle: "Letter from Brownsville, San Antonio Express, May 29, 1875, p. 16.
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