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Ben McCulloch was a dynamo of energy when it came to countering this raid. Twenty-nine at the time, he first came to Texas four years earlier. Back in Tennessee his large family had been neighbors of the Crocketts and he had been planning to join that former Congressman’s entourage.

A timely attack of the measles saved him from sharing Crockett’s fate, McCulloch was back in action in time to crew the Twin Sisters cannons at San Jacinto.

Prior to arriving inTexas McCulloch had rafted timber and trade goods downriver to New Orleans and in 1833 arrived too late to join a party of trappers headed to the Rocky Mts.

In Texas Ben and his younger brother Henry had been employed as surveyors along with the likes of Jack Hays. Ben McCulloch’s story speaks volumes about society in early Texas.

1839 McCulloch had been elected to the Texas House of Representives for Gonzales, apparently displacing one Alonzo Sweitzer. Sweitzer took offense and challenged McCulloch to a duel.

McCulloch declined on the grounds that Sweitzer “was not a gentleman”. Not a whole lot appears to be known about Sweitzer prior to his Texas years, but two years later he would be shot and killed by Texas Indian Agent Robert Neighbors. Most likely he had it coming, Neighbors weren’t a bloody-handed individual.

When McCulloch refused the duel, the “noted duellist” Reuben Ross pressed the issue. As with Sweitzer, details of Ross’s life prior to Texas are unclear. Ross among other things was a Ranger Captain operating out of Gonzales, likely rival political factions came into play.

Most immediately prior to the October duel Ross had been commanding 200 men “most of whom were outlaws” along the Rio Grande, participating in the ongoing Mexican Civil War. Not all the cutthroats along the Border were Mexican.

The duel was fought with rifles, likely McCulloch’s first, not so Ross. McCulloch received a permanently crippling wound in his right arm.

Two months later, Ben’s younger brother Henry, five years younger than Ben and likewise not a “noted duellist”, under circumstances that are poorly recorded, shot and killed Rueben Ross in Gonzales with a pistol. If Rueben Ross were widely mourned it ain’t recorded. Sounds like it woulda made a good movie.

Ben McCulloch never married. He rangered alongside Jack Hays in the Ranger heyday of the early 1840’s, likewise served with Hays in the Mexican War, and like Hays moved to California in ‘49.

Unlike Hays, McCulloch did return to Texas and later entered Confederate service as a General Officer. Throughout his life McCulloch was noted for his ability to read a trail, a skill learned back in Tennessee from the Choctaws. McCulloch was killed by a Union sniper while scouting out the lay of the land before the Confederate lines, Pea Ridge Arkansas 1862.