The odd thing is, Jack Hays burns bright in Texas history, then just as suddenly is gone, never to return. Indeed after he left the state he never DID return, though in 1853 he travelled to Washington DC from San Francisco, among other things to attend the inauguration of President Franklin Pierce.
In his later years too (he died in 1882) he made a number of trips to Arizona, but none to Texas. A puzzle that, after all there must have been many invites in his later years for various anniversaries and other special occasions.
What he did after his return to Texas after the Mexican War is summed up here...
http://sfsdhistory.com/JackHays.htm It wasn't until May of 1848 that Hays finally left Mexico to return to Texas....
Jack Hays retired from military duty and was given the job of head surveyor of roads leading west from San Antonio. One of the men in his surveying crew was his former Ranger comrade Major John Caperton, who later became Hays� chief deputy sheriff in San Francisco. Although Hays' job was to �survey�, he and his crew were actually exploring previously unmapped areas, looking for major passages west.
The landscape and weather were brutal and exhausting. After 45 days, the party ran out of rations and subsisted by eating their own pack mules and any wild game they could find. Hays finally returned to San Antonio after 106 days in the wilderness, desert, mountains and treacherous territories both north and south of the Rio Grande. It was December 1848.It seems possible that that three month ordeal for minimal pay might have been what finally induced Hays to hang up his badge and head out for greener pastures.
More of this time period is mentioned here...
http://www.alamedasun.com/essence-of-alameda/3837?task=view After the war Hays decided to travel west with his friend (and future deputy sheriff and business partner) Major John Caperton. The pair commanded 40 soldiers who were charged with guarding a detachment of army engineers who were building the road to El Paso. The three Ranger names most associated with California are John Coffee (Jack) Hays, John Caperton, and John McMullin. Both of the other two guys had served with Hays and were about ten years his junior.
As best I can gather, McMullin and Caperton had both been in Hays' legendary Ranger unit operating out of San Antonio in the early 1840's, and had served under him in the Mexican War. Caperton's later book appears to be THE primary source on Hays, though today that 1878 book "The Life and Adventures of Jack Hays" is out of print, held in manuscript form by the University of California IIRC.
Hays and Caperton arrived in San Francisco in 1850 and together would serve as Sheriff and Deputy Sherrif of San Frnacisco for three years, working closely with the "Committee of Vigilance", an ad-hoc law enforcement body.
John McMullin was from a moneyed family back East, captured in Mexico during the Miers expedition (1842?), he had been able to endure the months of subsequent captivity in relatively high style, staying in a hotel rather than the miserable conditions most of his peers had been held under.
McMullin arrived in California that same year as Hays and Caperton, driving a herd of cattle up from Mexico to the California gold fields.
These three guys were apparently all close; Jack Hays named his first child John Caperton Hays, and after being college educated back east this John Caperton Hays married Anna McMullin, John McMullin's daughter....
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~npmelton/sfbha.htm
That marriage was surely a case of money marrying money, because what is truly remarkable about these three Rangers' later years is the bewildering speed with which they aquired real estate and money. It may be that all three, especially Hays and McMullin, were well capitalized through family connections in Tennessee.
Jack Hays would be summoned to action again during the Nevada Paiute War of 1860. Here the above link is misleading, this was not an old ranger-style series of
running gun battles with the Paiutes for several weeks, with numerous casualties on both sides but rather two major fights, the first in which seventy vigilantes made the error of seriously underestimating the Paiutes and paid for it with their lives, and the second larger fight which was a standoff.
If he was not foremost and indefagitable in the fighting, Hays did at least display his old exemplary ability to gather and lead men to combat.
Hays, McMullin and Caperton all chose to sit out the War Between the States, tho' Jack Hays' brother for one rose to the ranks of Brigadier General in Confederate service. Hays would have been 44 when the war broke out, and Cpaerton and McMullin younger yet, certainly not too old for service.
Hays' later years are summed up in the link...
Jack Hays lived another two decades, immersed in California Democratic politics and managing his vast real estate holdings. Hays was a member of the U. C. Board of Regents and a director of the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Asylum in Berkeley (precursor to the California School for the Deaf and Blind).
He was a major stockholder in the Oakland Gas Light Company, and the founder and director of Oakland's Union National Bank....So certainly, whatever the "political establishment" or "moneyed elite" was in California at that time, Hays, Caperton and Mc Mullin were right in it, from early on. Whether there is anything sinister implied in that I have no idea.
He died at the age of 66 in his Oakland home on April 21, 1883, and is buried in a crypt in Oakland's Mountain View Cemetery at the foot of Piedmont Avenue. Ah, the hazards of burial, I dunno Oakland, but here in San Antonio the graves of some of thhe foremost heroes of early Texas lie on the high ground just East of downtown, now one of the roughest low-income neighborhoods in the whole city.
For Hays' part, laying where he is yet I'm surprised he ain't been dug up and scattered yet, after all he was preeminent among the "evil White men" and likely killed a whole passel of "oppressed people of color" by his own hand. 'Course, it might be that the sort of folks who would do the digging ain't familiar enough with history to know who Jack Hays was.
Birdwatcher
