Creative smuggling when Texas was a republic

If there’s one thing the Texans of the early republic never lacked, it was imagination – especially when it came to dodging tariffs and taxes. Texas Standard commentator W.F. Strong explains. The full transcript of this episode of Stories from Texas is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available […]

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
If there's one thing Texans of the
early Republic never lacked,
it was imagination,
especially when it came to dodging
tariffs and taxes.
There's an old story that comes from
the Sabine River country.
In those days, that river was more
of an inconvenience than a barrier.
It was hard to patrol.
Smugglers ran whiskey, coffee,
tobacco and weapons upriver

(00:21):
under every kind of disguise you
can think of.
But the most inventive was the
coffin trick.
The story goes that a certain trader
who went by the name of Colonel
Jones, ran a ferry and
operated a funeral business on the
side.
He offered full burials for
settlers who died far from home.
One day he brought a wagon

(00:42):
to the customs post near San
Augustine, hauling
three pine coffins.
The customs officer tipped his hat
and stepped aside.
No one wanted to poke around where
the dead were involved.
Too much risk of bad luck,
but here's the kicker.
Two days later, one of those coffins
was spotted by someone official in
the back of a general store in
Nacogdoches.

(01:03):
It was open and surprise.
It was filled with barrels of
molasses, sacks of sugar, and crates
of cigars.
Not a corpse in sight.
Colonel Jones had figured it out.
No one inspects a coffin.
He ran the scam for months, maybe
years, changed the names on the
headboard, sometimes used real
funerals as cover, slipping
contraband into the second third

(01:24):
casket in cases of a
family tragedy.
Eventually, the ruse was uncovered,
but again, no charges.
By then, he had friends at high
places, including a judge who
supposedly owed him a favor, or
maybe he simply awaited
his shipment of Havana cigars.
In a land where law was still
finding its boots, cleverness

(01:45):
was currency.
And if you could haul in a little
untaxed comfort under the guise of
funerals or the cross, well,
who's to say the Lord didn't
understand?
The line between the solemn and the
sly was a little blurred.
Smuggling wasn't always about
greed.
Sometimes it was about skipping
paperwork, saving time, or
just doing what needed to be done

(02:06):
when the rules couldn't keep
up with reality.
This brings us to the legend of the
missionaries who packed heat.
It started with a schooner arriving
in Galveston.
It's manifest as innocent as
a church bulletin.
Bibles, hymnals, lamp oil,
wool blankets.
All marked for a Presbyterian
mission out west.

(02:26):
The customs officer, seeing no
contraband in scripture and wool,
waved them through.
After all, religious supplies were
rarely taxed and certainly not
inspected.
But when the crates got to the
mission near San Antonio, the local
folks noticed something odd.
These missionaries were unusually
muscular.
Their crates unusually heavy.
Turns out the boxes weren't full of

(02:47):
Bibles. They were full of flintlock
rifles, powder horns and lead
shot.
Now you might ask weren't firearms
exempt from tariffs?
Yes, but the arms had to be
declared. And if in bulk needed to
be for official use by military
or the Rangers, declaring
them also took time and with
dangers loose on the frontier, time
was a luxury.

(03:07):
They couldn't afford.
The so-called missionaries were
actually Rangers, but unofficial
ones, volunteers loosely
organized, but officially
overlooked, arming themselves
quickly the only way they could by
sailing under the banner of the
Lord.
No one was arrested, no reprimand
was issued.
In fact, president Houston
supposedly said, I'd rather have
a ranger with a rifle than a

(03:29):
preacher with a sermon, unless the
preachers got both as
good as that is, I can't certify
that Houston said it, even though he
wouldn't have shied away from such
a sentiment.
I'm W.F.
Strong.
These are Stories from Texas.
Some of them are
true.