El Muerto, the Texas headless horseman, is comparable to the ghostly rider in Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, as well as to earlier European lore including Ireland’s Dullahan, a headless fairy; Scotland’s mythical Ewen, decapitated in a clan battle, who haunts the Isle of Mull; Germany’s Brothers Grimm’s legends featuring two headless horsemen; and Brazil’s sassy, headless mule. El Muerto remains distinct, however, because he was based upon a living person. His legend grew from eyewitness accounts beginning in the 1850s in the Wild Horse Desert region. Ranchers reported a lone rider on a hill silhouetted against the moon, sitting oddly upright in the saddle, decapitated. He cradled his head under a Mexican sombrero tied to the saddle horn, wearing the light tan rawhide leggings of the Mexican vaqueros (horse thieves) with a torn serape hanging loosely from his shoulders. As sightings of the horseman increased, other accounts reported Native American arrows and spears dangling from his body. For years, these sightings turned South Texas brush country into a place to avoid, associated with evils and misfortune; yet, El Muerto’s true origins remained unknown for years.
In life El Muerto was a soldier, a Lieutenant Vuvais, who fatefully met Texas Ranger Creed Taylor at the Siege of Bexar in December 1835 during the Texas War of Independence (1835–1836). Creed and his companions were hiding in a house outside San Antonio when Bate Berry, who had a penchant for scalping Mexican soldiers, captured a deserter, the dark-skinned Vuvais. In exchange for his freedom, Vuvais provided information about the Mexican Army. Creed encountered Vuvais again in 1848, now calling himself Vidal, making his living as a horse thief. Vuvais and his gang rustled horses from several San Antonio ranches, including Creed’s. Creed’s fellow Texas Rangers, William “Bigfoot” Wallace and John McPeters, tracked the Vuvais/Vidal gang near present-day Uvalde by the Nueces River. The Rangers killed the horse thieves, chopping them into pieces. To serve as a warning, they beheaded Vidal, securing his corpse upright on the back of the wildest horse. They lashed his hands to the saddle horn, his feet to the stirrups, and secured the stirrups beneath the animal’s belly. Creed tied a strand of rawhide thong through the head’s jaws and around Vidal’s sombrero, slinging the bloody bundle from the saddle’s pommel. He turned the horse loose with its headless rider, hoping to scare would-be cattle thieves.
Their plan succeeded in frightening more than thieves. Throughout the 1850s, townspeople reported a headless rider on a midnight-black stallion, his severed head bounding on the saddle horn beneath its sombrero. Creed Taylor and the others did not advertise what they had done because it effectively deterred horse thieves. As more ranchers, cowhands, and stage drivers saw the dark horse with its bloody cargo terrorizing the mesquite landscape, however, accounts took on aspects of the supernatural. El Muerto’s horse was said to spout flames from its nostrils and to send lightning bolts skyward with each clop from its hooves. The rider’s eyes gazing from under the tattered sombrero were compared to fiery coals while his body glowed with a demonic light.
Years passed before a gang near Alice, Texas, drew enough courage to capture the horse and release the mummified corpse, riddled with spears and bullets, sawing it free from the saddle. Vidal was laid to rest in La Trinidad’s cemetery at Ben Bolt with a tiny limestone marker. But El Muerto’s story did not end with his burial; his sightings continued near Fort Inge, the site of his demise, until 1917, when a San Diego couple wrote of camping at Uvalde and seeing El Muerto ride past shouting, “It is all mine!”
Creed Taylor wrote down his account of the legend, hoping to turn it into a book, followed by Wallace and McPeters, who competed in recounting their stories into old age. In 1865, Mayne Reid, an acquaintance of Taylor’s at Fort Inge, published the first El Muerto account, The Headless Horseman, or a Strange Tale of Texas. J. Warren Hunter, who interviewed Taylor, sold the manuscript to James T. De Shields, who published Tall Men with Long Rifles in 1935. Hunter’s son, J. Marvin, a journalist, also copied his father’s notes and published The Bloody Trail in Texas in 1932. Writer J. Frank Dobie again retold the story in his book Tales of Old Time Texas (1925). Contemporary writers Ed Seyers (1981), Charly Eckhardt (1992), and Joanne Christenson (2001) have revisited the legend in recent years, variously classifying it as truth or merely a tall tale. Nevertheless, El Muerto remains a consistently macabre fixture on Texas folklore websites.
Tamara K. O’Hearn
See also Headless Horseman; Irving, Washington; Wallace, William Alexander Anderson “Bigfoot”
Further Reading
Abernethy, Francis Edward, and Kenneth L. Untiedt. 2004. Both Sides of the Border: A Scattering of Texas Folklore. Denton: University of North Texas.
Schandillia, Amit. 2007. “The Headless Horseman of South Texas Brush Country.” Easiest Spanish website. http://easiestspanish.blogspot.com/2007/08/el-muerto-headless-horseman-of-south.html. Accessed July 12, 2015.
Schlosser, S. E., and Paul G. Hoffman. 2008. Spooky Texas: Tales of Hauntings, Strange Happenings, and Other Local Lore. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot.
Steiner, Henry John. 2011. “A Phantom Is Born? 235 Years Ago.” River Journal Online. October 14. http://www.riverjournalonline.com/villages/sleepyhollow/2049-a-phantom-is-born-235-years-ago.pdf. Accessed July 12, 2015.
Weiser, Kathy. 2010. “El Muerto: The Headless Horseman.” Legends of America website. www.legendsofamerica.com. Accessed July 12, 2015.