The Notch Cutters

On Christmas Eve of 1883, forty or fifty armed men walked into the Rock Front Saloon at McDade, took three men out of it, and hanged all three from a single tree somewhere in the brush. The dead were said to belong to a gang of cattle and horse thieves the country knew as the notch cutters, and no source explains how the gang got that name. They were Thaddeus Kosciuszko McLemore, who was about thirty eight, his older brother Wright McLemore, who was crippled by arthritis, and Henry Pfeiffer, charged with stealing horses. The bodies were cut down on Christmas morning. The men who took them were a vigilance committee, and they had been at work for years: two suspected outlaws hanged in 1875, two cattle skinners shot where they stood in 1876, four men taken out of a dance and lynched in June 1877. What set off the Christmas killings was the murder of Deputy Sheriff Isaac Heffington on the third of December, shot while investigating two killings at Fedor. Jeff Fitzpatrick was indicted for it and escaped. Christmas Day settled nothing. At George Milton's store, Milton and Thomas Bishop faced five men including three Beattys, and between sixty and a hundred shots were fired. Jack and Asa Beatty died, and so did Willie Griffin, a young townsman who had come to help and took a bullet through the head. Six people were dead across the two days, and ordinary gunfighting went on in McDade until about 1912. An eyewitness thought the hanging tree was a blackjack oak. Nobody wrote down where it stood. The Rock Front Saloon is still there, a recorded Texas historic landmark, and it holds the McDade Historical Society's museum.