The Last Sheriff in Texas: A True Tale of Violence and the Vote

by James P. McCollom

"A true-crime story centering on a South Texas lawman who became a law unto himself . . . Of interest to students of Texas history as well as aspiring law enforcement officers, who should read it as an example of how not to conduct themselves." —Kirkus Reviews



Beeville, Texas, was the most American of small towns—the place that GIs had fantasized about while fighting through the ruins of Europe, a place of good schools, clean streets, and churches. Old West justice ruled, as evidenced by a 1947 shootout when outlaws surprised popular sheriff Vail Ennis at a gas station and shot him five times, point-blank, in the belly. Ennis managed to draw his gun and put three bullets in each assailant; he reloaded and shot them three times more.

Time magazine’s full-page article on the shooting was seen by some as a referendum on law enforcement owing to the sheriff’s extreme violence, but supportive telegrams from all across America poured into Beeville’s tiny post office. Yet when a second violent incident threw Ennis into the crosshairs of public opinion once again, the uprising was orchestrated by an unlikely figure: his close friend and Beeville’s favorite son, Johnny Barnhart.

Barnhart confronted Ennis in the election of 1952: a landmark standoff between old Texas, with its culture of cowboy bravery and violence, and urban Texas, with its lawyers, oil institutions, and a growing Mexican population. The town would never be the same again.

The Last Sheriff in Texas is a riveting narrative about the postwar American landscape, an era grappling with the same issues we continue to face today. Debate over excessive force in law enforcement, Anglo-Mexican relations, gun control, the influence of the media, urban-rural conflict, the power of the oil industry, mistrust of politicians and the political process—all have surprising historical precedence in the story of Vail Ennis and Johnny Barnhart.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Crime, True Crime, Biography

272 pages, Paperback

Published November 13, 2018

Reviews

[Lucie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A micro history of the 1952 election for sheriff in Bee County, Texas and what led up to it. A fascinating look at the struggle to move from the old west mentality to a more modern outlook in law enforcement and politics. Some national figures, like LBJ, are mentioned in passing.

[Russell Sanders · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t want to be too negative about James P. McCollom’s The Last Sheriff in Texas: a True Tale of Violence and the Vote because I think it is an earnest, fairly well-written tale of a moment in Texas politics that some will find enlightening and perhaps entertaining. I don’t want to scare them off. I bought the book because I saw a bit about it, and I like books about Texas, I like the title, and I liked that it was set in a town I have driven through many times. Then the book arrived and I put in on my “to read” shelf. By the time I picked it back up, I had forgotten the premise, did not read the back blurb nor the subtitle. So it was curious to me that only after reading more than a third of it did I get a sense of what the book was about. McCollom introduces—endlessly—his setting, his protagonist, his antagonist. Every story, whether true or made up, has to have a hero and a villain. Trouble is, with this book, I never got a clear sense of which of the two men was the hero and which was the villain. McCollom, under the guise of reporting “Texas” ways, doesn’t give us a clear-cut picture of either. Fact: I didn’t like either one of them. Why? Because the author apparently doesn’t want to come down hard on one and easy on the other. He waffles. One minute he tells us details that make us like one of the guys, the next he is reporting qualities that make us not like that same guy. Yes, people are complex, but a book has to make us feel, and I didn’t. I kept reading, but only to find out what eventually happens. And even that was not told with much excitement. There is a wishy-washy dream sequence for one character (which probably happened) and a reaction from the other that is totally unemotional. So if the former character is the hero and the latter the villain, why do we care? The book meanders, and that’s not a good thing, especially when the meandering leads to so little.

[Angelica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written and captivating. I just wish they’d have included the proper citations given that it is a true story.

[James Kingman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps because I have spent time in public service and law enforcement in small towns and in South Texas, I found this story riveting and, in some ways, reassuring. Barnhart's efforts to remain true to himself were perceived as a slight to his upbringing in the exact way that I have seen my own home treat my efforts to improve it over recent years. It is a thankless, saddening, and sometimes frightening labor. I am glad that Mr. McCollom told this story of the courage of normal people facing petty tyranny. It is in the small acts of courage, the unknown ones, that hope must be found.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

TEXAS HISTORY
James P. McCollom
The Last Sheriff in Texas: A True Tale of Violence and the Vote
Counterpoint
Hardcover, 978-1-6190-2996-5, (also available as an e-book), 272 pgs., $26.00
November 14, 2017

My dad, former deputy sheriff of Mitchell County, Texas, always said everything that happens in the big city happens in small towns, just not as often. The small towns in Bee County, Texas, were presided over by Sheriff Vail Ennis from 1945 until 1952. Ennis was a legend in his time, and his most dramatic exploit is also the beginning of this true story. Shot five times by an ex-con at a Magnolia station in Pettus, a wide spot in the road, on a cold November night in 1947, Ennis managed to empty his gun, reload, and kill both attackers before the ambulance arrived to speed him to a hospital.

The Last Sheriff in Texas: A True Tale of Violence and the Vote by Beeville native son James P. McCollom is told through the actions of two men, Sheriff Ennis and Beeville’s hometown-boy-made-good Johnny Barnhart. In the beginning it’s not clear what Barnhart’s part in the drama will be; we meet him as a yell leader and fraternity boy, then a law student, at the University of Texas at Austin. Barnhart returns to Beeville with his juris doctor, hangs out a shingle, and is promptly elected to the Texas lege, where his principles and idealism get him branded a subversive and smeared as a Commie during McCarthy’s Red Scare. Barnhart returns home to practice criminal-defense law, which is how he discovers Sheriff Ennis’s pervasive power. Ennis is arrester, jailer, bondsman, probation supervisor, judge, jury, and—this is where things get really hairy—executioner. Before Ennis leaves office, he will kill eight men.

Barnhart, reckoning the sheriff and the town complicit in the reign of a homicidal menace, wages a campaign against Ennis in 1952. “Sheriff Vail Ennis, the protector of our wives and mothers and sisters and daughters,” McCollom writes, ”was under attack by Johnny Barnhart, the Mexican lover, the communist, the protector of deviants.” Barnhart finds himself battling “peripheral codes, imprecise but understood, that gave Texas its character, that kept Texas free from Yankee squeamishness.” If Ennis is wrong, then Texas is wrong. Before the election is over, Barnhart will fear for his life.

With a cover that’s half sepia and half the black-and-blue of storm clouds and bruises, the design of The Last Sheriff in Texas echoes McCollom’s style, a hybrid of old-timers sitting on the front porch telling tales and true crime. The book is consistently entertaining and a valuable chapter of South Texas history, the patron system of vote fraud (think box thirteen and LBJ), and the nascent struggle for Mexican American civil rights.

McCollom’s tone occasionally drips with derision, usually with good cause. The narrative is sometimes repetitive, the sequence of events not always easy to follow, but it’s difficult to say whether this is the author’s fault or the result of byzantine South Texas politics. A couple of geography mistakes stand out.

However, McCollom skillfully conveys the personalities of his large cast of fascinating characters. He conjures a visceral sense of foreboding as the election approaches, and evokes the time and place with rich detail and personal experience. In the author’s note, McCollom claims the background of his book as memoir—he knew many of the people he writes about. His grandfather was Bee County sheriff prior to Ennis who “it was said never [fired] his gun.” McCollom has a dog in this hunt.

In the end, against the backdrop of a rapidly modernizing and urbanizing Texas, Sheriff Vail Ennis failed to recognize his time had passed, becoming a walking anachronism. The Last Sheriff in Texas takes place in the middle of the last century and remains sadly relevant today.

Originally published by Lone Star Literary Life.

[Klobetime · Rating 3 out of 5]

This chronicles the changes the state of Texas underwent after WWII, moving from mostly rural to mostly urban, and seeing the cowboy fade from a real profession to a role in the movies. Sheriff Vail Ennis of Bee County was a violent, uncompromising man with a flair for violence—he shot and killed eight men while in office between 1944 and 1952. Johnny Barnhart was raised in Bee County, but while attending the University of Texas uncovered a passion for civil rights that set him apart from his conservative neighbors. These two icons clashed during the election of 1952, forcing citizens to choose between frontier justice and law and order, changing Texas politics forever.

The story is told primarily via interviews and reminiscences with a healthy amount of historical context thrown in for good measure. I found it to be compelling (if very repetitive), although I can easily see how someone that isn't familiar with life on the Texas Costal Plain might find it slow and meandering. The book is part true crime, part political history, part biography, and part memoir resulting in a style that is a bit offbeat. On one page there will be a excerpt from a newspaper article, and on the next conversational dialogue from people long since dead. I found this see-sawing between fact and fabrication hard to get used to at first, but eventually settled down and enjoyed the story.

First Sentence:

The man who shot the sheriff was Roy Hines, thirty-four, ex-con, a grifter on his way from Oklahoma to Mexico.

[Viccy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great read which covers an interesting time in Texas history. Vail Ennis was the sheriff of Beeville TX from 1943 to 1952. He killed eight men during that time. This book focuses on two killings which took place on November 10, 1947, when Ennis was shot in the stomach by Pat Hines, a grifter. Ennis survived that shooting and wound up in an article in Time magazine. When Johnny Barnhart, a favorite son of Beeville, returned with his law degree. Ennis might have continued his reign of terror, except he killed Frederico Gutierrez and Barnhart launched a campaign to remove Ennis from office. It split the town into two camps and, in the bigger picture, was a conflict between the old Texas, of Wild West fame, and the new, modern, urban Texas. Excellent reading from anyone interested in Texas history from that era. It discusses many iconic figures from that period, including the infamous Box 13 scandal that elected Lyndon Baines Johnson to Congress. I do not normally read NF, but this author was on my panel at TLA, so read it for that and I thought it was quite good.

[Zach Church · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this, but without clearer sourcing, it's based on a true story at best. For the most part, that's OK. McCollom sets his subject up as the last gasp of an era of small town folklore. But there are sections where the narrative veers into assumption and other times where its not clear what is a quote or where McCollum got the information. There's a confusing and unnecessary dream sequence near the end.

It also takes a while to figure out what the story really is - you don't really find out which election the book is about until nearly halfway through. The first half is such a breezy read - and in the best parts, entertaining and funny - that I didn't mind wading through it. But don't expect a normal story arc.

All that said, if the subject matter interests you, it's worth a read. McCollom handles a serious subject with class, entertaining the reader while never making light of the deaths and violence at the center of the story. I'd gladly read another book by him, but I'd like him to guide the reader a little bit better.

[Carol Arce · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book about a fascinating subject, Vail Ennis, the Wild West I-am-the-law Sheriff of Bee County, Texas, who had shot and killed eight men, and an interesting time in history when rural Texas, individualism and the cowboy way of life was giving way to urbanization, big corporations and modern politics. Unfortunately, the potential of this story is never fully developed. For about the first half of the book there really is no organized story, the book meanders around apparently with the goal of giving the reader the flavor of rural Texas in the first half of the 20th Century. When the "story" finally begins the author does manage to build some tension, making the reader believe that something dramatic was about to happen, somebody was going to wind up dead! How anticlimactic was the ending! Spoiler Alert: Vail Ennis got voted out and a new sheriff got voted in, that's it.

[Danny Glover · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Last Sheriff in Texas is a Lasting Texas Tale

Texas characters in a Texas story. Anyone who was born and raised in Texas knows one or more stories like this, and characters like these. Characters who lived outside the lines. Whether the lines are political, financial, social, Texans play their own angles. There’s always another Texan ready to tell the story … in distinctively Texas style!
That’s as it should be. That’s as it is, and that’s what this book is. Enjoy it!

[Betty Ball · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting read for those interested in the south Texas history and politics of the ‘40’s and ‘50’s. I read it because my grandparents were from Beeville, but apparently before these events. To me, it was very hard to get into as there were many characters and events described and not chronologically at first. A lot of time is devoted to one single event in this time frame. About half way through, however, I couldn’t put it down till I finished.

[Denise Gentry · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was a slow read for me, but I found the story very interesting. A small piece of Texas history, shining a light on the violence that has always been a part of our fabric. I am not a big political person, but seeing the wheels spinning behind the election in this book gave me some insight to what, regardless of what anyone says, goes on in our political world in Texas. Dirty politics was (still is?) prominent in Texas mid 20th Century.

[Suzan Pease · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truth

Wow.. Memories...true life in Texas. I grew up in nearby Victoria and lived in Duval and Refugio Counties. I could actually "feel" Beeville...know a lot of ancestors of the characters in this story...wondering about the author. He looks so familiar...remembering a friend of my dad's...Red McCollum....thank you for this great history!!

[S. · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting bit of Texas history I didn't know, though I did find myself wishing that the author focused less on creating an entertaining narrative and more on relating what facts were/are available (plus, the chapter that was almost nothing but a compare and contrast between UT Austin and Texas A&M? Dude, what was the point of that?).

[Sherrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting story, but this would be a better article than a book---it went into WAY too much detail and stretched out far too long. It also could have used a better editor; there was a lot of repetition, to the point that several times entire sentences were repeated verbatim.

[Diane Mueller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a book that wandered a bit and at times I got lost but still an interesting story of small town Texas and a time when Sheriff was King.

[Stephen Boiko · Rating 4 out of 5]

decent read. not what I expected.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easy interesting read

I’ve driven through Beeville before but never realized the history of it. Next time I drive through I will be searching out some of these spots.

[Kirk Davenport · Rating 5 out of 5]

Knowing South texas

If you want to live in South Texas in the mid-1940's read this book. More drama and peace than any fiction.

[Daniel Hatcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lawman

I chose this rating because the book was very interesting and was a easy read. Even though I figured out the outcome early in the book it was still a good read.

[Jennie Rosenblum · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was a lot of good historical information here however at times it seemed disjointed and hard to follow.

[Rick Perry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit uneven. Very compelling in parts, but also slow and boring in places. Gets better toward the end.

[Cathy Ehlinger]

DNF

[Susan Ennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting local and cultural history for South Texas.

[Betsy Myers]

I won this book via Goodreads First Reads. I am an ECE Administrator and I look forward to adding this book to our lending library for parents and staff at my school.

[Andrea Eckelman · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise was really interesting (though I’m from this general area of Texas, and I don’t know if you aren’t, if it would be as interesting), but the story meandered a bit. I think the author has really close ties to the story, which led him to skip over details those of us unfamiliar with the story might need. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Texas history, or the politics of a small town.