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In
the meantime, Carey arrived in Liberty
County and told the rancher about the murder outpost on Pine Island
Bayou, spicing his story in places with details about the alligator
slough and the skeletons that lay scattered throughout the thickets.
And as he rode on, the cattleman began rounding up a posse of friends,
a band of vigilantes that eventually would reach 150 men in size.
After arriving at the Page residence on Cedar Bayou, Carey surrendered
to Judge Moreland, who bound him over, on a $500 bond signed by Page
and Dr. Whiting, to the next session of the district court. And later,
after a dozen witnesses appeared in his defense, he won a rather easy
acquittal based on his justifiable homicide plea.
After the trial, he hurried back to Beaumont
and having located Zeke Higdon, who accompanied him back as a witness,
Carey appeared before Sheriff Robert West to state his complaint against
Yocum and seek the return of his swindled property. But he soon learned
that the infamous inn and its outbuildings had already been burned
by the 150-man posse of Regulators, led by the Liberty
County rancher.
Forewarned in some manner, Yocum's gang of cutthroats had scattered
in all directions, and his wife, children, and slaves had been driven
from Jefferson County.
Some days later, after the old murderer had been tracked to the cabin
of a relative on Spring Creek in Montgomery
County, the posse dispatched old Yocum to the lower regions with
five bullets through the heart.
Bud McClusky escaped to the Neches River bottomlands, and when last
reported, he was recognized as he rode across Calcasieu Parish, La.,
on horseback. And a few weeks later, Chris Yocum was found hanging
one morning from an oak limb on the courthouse
lawn in Beaumont. As an added token of affection, his vigilante
executioners had driven a 10-penny nail into the base of his skull.
While lynch justice was usually regrettable and always illegal, somehow
it seemed a fitting end for the murderous villains who had brought
so much grief to so many trusting patrons.
Frontier intrigue and derring-do passed from Seth Carey's life after
1841. As he had promised old Page, Carey married the daughter on her
sixteenth birthday, and later the couple reared a large family on
Cedar Bayou. Except for a couple short periods of residence elsewhere,
he spent his surviving years tending to his cattle herds and cotton
fields on the bayou, and running his sawmill. Long a prosperous farmer,
Seth Carey died, nearing his eightieth birthday, still delighted that
Providence had seen fit to deliver him from the clutches of the infamous
Yocum gang of assassins on Pine Island Bayou. |
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Jefferson
County 1907 postal map showing Pine Island Bayou and Neches
River.
From Texas state map #2090
Courtesy
Texas General Land Office |
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