TRIXIE, TEXAS

AN UNEXPECTED ENCOUNTER
WITH A TEXAS "BAD MAN"

Hillary U. Loftis was born in Mississippi in 1872. He left home at age thirteen and eventually found work as a cowhand on the Dan Waggoner ranch in Wilbarger County, Texas. He gradually fell in with a rough crowd, and on December 24, 1895 he and three other ne'er-do-wells robbed the Waggoner company store. Other robberies followed, including the store/post office at Ronda in Wilbarger County.

A posse pursued them, caught them in a dugout home, and shot and killed one. Loftis managed to escape and he soon emerged as a new man, taking the alias "Tom Ross" and beginning a new life as a rancher in Gaines County near the New Mexico state line.

But "Ross" was a "wanted" man. A reward notice appeared in The Ranger's Bible booklet in 1900, describing him as about 32 years old (he was actually more like 29), 5'9" tall, about 160 lbs., and a "peculiarly shaped head, being very long behind with a high forehead." A cowboy associate described it as a "watermelon head." When "Ross" let his hair grow long it led one Ranger to call him "Buffalo Head." The notice offered a reward - $25 for information leading to his arrest.

News of Loftis' whereabouts eventually reached the authorities, and Captain John Harris Rogers of the Texas Rangers galloped toward the ranch to capture him. "Ross" fled into the sand dunes, then shot Rogers' horse and approached the fallen Ranger on foot with his Winchester rifle cocked. He could easily have killed Rogers, but the Ranger, pleading for his life, warned "Ross" about the consequences of killing a Texas Ranger. Then Rogers' partner, a Martin County sheriff, happened to appear on the horizon. Ross hurriedly emptied the bullets out of Rogers' pistol and fled back into the dunes.

Trouble next appeared from another front. Two Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association inspectors began to work up a powerful cattle-rustling case against him. Ross and a partner reacted violently; they boldly rode into the county seat of Seminole in 1923 and, in full view of many witnesses, murdered the two inspectors inside the Gaines Hotel. Captured and then sentenced to the penitentiary for twenty years "Ross" escaped, ultimately settling in a new country, Canada, with yet another new name, "Charles Gannon." In Canada "Gannon" killed a Chinese cook, then fled to Montana, where he got into an argument with the ranch foreman and killed him too. Now facing new murder charges, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the ranch bunkhouse in 1929. A hearse brought his remains to Lovington, New Mexico, one of his cattle-rustling haunts. The funeral service was a heavily attended event. Interestingly, his first alias outlasted him; the gravestone reads "Tom Ross."

But how does this picture post card, mailed from Trixie, Texas fit into the tale of Loftis/Ross/Gannon?

Trixie was a very short-lived post office in western Gaines County; it operated for just a little over two years, April 1908 - June 1910. That alone made the item of special interest to me. The interest turned into intrigue as I began researching the basics of the office. I discovered that the postmaster, in his application for the office, had noted that the population to be served amounted to "one family," a rather interesting admission by the prospective postmaster and one not likely to persuade the Post Office Department to readily grant the application. When I started looking into the postmaster himself the intrigue really escalated. The postmaster-applicant was none other than Hill Loftis, using his alias "Tom Ross" in applying for a post office at his ranch out in the wilds of western Gaines County. Why he chose to create a post office is unclear, as is why the POD would grant the request. In any case, further investigation revealed that "Ross" named the office for his wife Lillian "Trixie" Hardin, a Wichita Falls belle whom he had married in 1904, only four years earlier. To cap it off, the typically mundane message on the equally mundane picture post card is signed by none other than the anything but mundane Lillian. She stayed in Gaines County into the 1920s, but did not appear in the 1930 federal census. By 1940 she had moved to Lovington, New Mexico, and lived there until she died in 1953. Her gravesite does not grace her with the name of Trixie or Lillian; in the same cemetery as "Tom Ross," she is interred as simply "Mrs. Tom Ross."

Much of the fascination and lure of postal history is the history. And serendipity can play a major role; one often just stumbles onto the history. A case in point: Trixie, Texas.


© John Germann
May 14, 2014
Originally published in "Texas postal history society Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1 February 2014

Gaines County Map showing Trixie
Modification of Texas General Land Office 1920s map