Part I
1.
THE FIRST FEDERAL AGENT HIRED TO PATROL THE BORDERS of the United States was named after the president of the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis Milton was born during the first year of the Civil War on November 7, 1861, and his father, John Milton, chose to honor his close friend, Jefferson Davis, by naming his son after him. John Milton, named after the famous poet who was also their ancestor, led the effort for secession in Florida. The Florida legislature voted to secede from the United States on January 10, 1861, becoming the third state to join the separatist movement to protect the institution of slavery after South Carolina and Mississippi.1 John Milton became the Confederate governor of Florida a month before his son was born and remained in that role throughout the Civil War. He served until his death on April 1, 1865, the day before Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, fell to Union forces. Milton’s family and local media called it a hunting accident, but The New York Times reported that he committed suicide.2
After the war, the Milton family struggled to reestablish their prominence. As a young man of fifteen, Jefferson Davis Milton moved out west in search of a fresh start. He found work as a ranch hand, but soon realized his calling lay in the rough-and-tumble world of frontier law enforcement. In 1878, he joined the newly revived Texas Rangers by pretending to be eighteen.
The Rangers were first established when Texas was an independent republic and remained in periodic use as a frontier patrol during its early years as a state. The Rangers were disbanded after the Civil War as the federal government occupied the former Confederate states and implemented Reconstruction. Texas was readmitted to the Union in 1870 and it reestablished the Rangers in 1874. Ostensibly, their purpose was to protect citizens from attack by Mexican or Native American raids, but in practice they often harassed and displaced Native Americans and Mexicans who lived in the region.3 The Rangers operated in open lands with little oversight, which led to frequent excesses, including intimidation, torture, and executions. A history of the Rangers explains, “The earliest rangers were frontiersmen—and frontiersmen were never noted for obedience to anybody.”4
With a handlebar mustache and piercing eyes below his cowboy hat, Milton was restless and rarely remained in a job for long. He left the Texas Rangers after a couple of years and roamed the wild lands of the desert Southwest. He found a job as a U.S. Marshal in New Mexico before arriving in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1886, only a few years after the infamous shootout at the O.K. Corral. Milton would tell people in saloons, “I never killed a man who didn’t need killing, and I never shot an animal except for meat.”5 Once a rattlesnake got in his bedding while he was camped in the desert. Instead of killing it, he simply shook out the bedding and shooed the snake away in appreciation for it not biting him.
In Tombstone, Milton had landed in a town where his moral judgments about who should be killed fit in just fine. Cochise County, in the southeastern corner of the Arizona Territory, was the archetype of the Wild West, with snowcapped mountains in the distance and tumbleweed flats as far as the eye could see. The boomtown of Tombstone grew up overnight after the discovery of silver in 1879 by a prospector named Ed Schieffelin. By the early 1880s, the town swelled to over 10,000 people as adventurers, fortune seekers, entrepreneurs, and thieves descended on the area. Within a few years, Tombstone’s dusty streets boasted a bowling alley, an opera house, and three newspapers as well as several Chinese restaurants, a French restaurant, and even an ice cream parlor.6 It also had over one hundred saloons along with numerous gambling halls and brothels. The town was close to Mexico and became a conduit for cattle rustlers who stole from across the unmarked border.
From the start, there was tension between the industrialists from the northern states who ran the silver mines and the cattle rustlers and bandits, collectively called the cowboys, who were mostly Confederate veterans from the Civil War. The famous gunfight in 1881 grew out of this conflict, as simmering personal disputes boiled over between the cowboys and U.S. Marshal Virgil Earp and several of his deputies, Wyatt Earp, Morgan Earp, and Doc Holliday.
In frontier territories, the idea of the rule of law was fragile, and many wealthy individuals employed hired guns to protect their interests. In this case, the hired guns of the industrialists had the authority of the law behind them, while the hired guns of the cowboys did not. Nevertheless, both sides engaged in violent and lawless behavior as the conflict escalated. Doc Holliday, thin and sickly from tuberculosis, was accused of robbing one of the cowboys a few months before the shootout. The cowboys were blamed for a rash of stagecoach holdups around the town.
Despite the famous name, the gunfight on October 26, 1881, did not occur at the O.K. Corral, but a few doors down at an empty lot beside a photography studio. The U.S. Marshals unexpectedly stumbled across a group of the cowboys, and guns were quickly drawn. As the dust settled, thirty shots had been fired in thirty seconds and three of the cowboys were dead. The Earps and Doc Holliday were accused of murder but were found by a judge to have acted within the law. The cowboys nevertheless carried out their vigilante revenge, severely injuring U.S. Marshal Virgil Earp and killing his brother Morgan in 1882. Wyatt Earp and Holliday formed a posse that killed several more of the cowboys before fleeing the Territory of Arizona after warrants were put out for their arrests.
When Jeff Milton arrived in Cochise County four years later, the Earps and Doc Holiday were gone but the chaotic conflict between law enforcement and the cowboys remained. There had been dozens of stagecoach robberies in the county, and several gangs roamed the wild lands near the Mexican border. In 1886, John Slaughter, a slim and upright man, was elected the new sheriff of the county, and Milton became one of his deputies. Together they worked to eliminate the gangs that operated in the wilds around Tombstone. Slaughter and Milton doggedly pursued the Jack Taylor Gang through the winter of 1886 and 1887, even tracking the gang into Mexico, where they raided another bandit’s hideout. They killed several bandits that day but missed Taylor. He was captured a few weeks later in Sonora.
After several years as a sheriff’s deputy in Tombstone, Milton moved to El Paso, Texas, where he became the police chief. In the 1890s, he continued to move every few years to new law enforcement jobs in New Mexico and Texas, including time as a customs agent. In 1895, Milton arrested a well-known cattle rustler named Martin McRose, who died mysteriously in Milton’s custody before he got him back to the county jail. Another bandit bragged for years in the saloons across Texas that he paid Milton to do the killing.
On February 15, 1900, Milton filled in for a sick friend on a shift as a railroad guard for a payroll train headed west. When the train stopped to unload cargo in Fairbank, Arizona, just a few miles outside Milton’s old stomping grounds in Tombstone, it was ambushed by “Three Fingered” Jack Dunlop and his gang of train robbers. Milton shot Dunlop, who died a few days later from his wounds, and killed another robber. However, he was outnumbered, and Milton was gravely injured when he took a bullet to his left arm. With blood gushing out of his wound, Milton tossed the keys to the train’s safe into a pile of boxes at the far end of the car and played dead just as the remaining bandits dismounted their horses and climbed onto the train. Without the keys, the thieves could not crack the safe and left with only a few dollars instead of the $10,000 ($310,000 in 2022, adjusted for inflation) payroll on board. Before they rode off, one of the bandits was going to finish Milton off, but the train conductor told him to save his bullets because Milton was already as good as dead.7
After the bandits left, Milton tied a tourniquet around his bleeding arm and the railroad employees sent a special engine to transport him to Tucson for treatment. Tucson was a small outpost at the time, and they did not have the proper equipment, so they sent him on to San Francisco. After the long journey to the Pacific Coast, the doctors there thought the only option was to amputate the arm, but Milton refused and found another doctor who patched it up as best he could. Milton never regained use of it, but never had it amputated either. Within a few months, he was back to work in law enforcement.
With a quick draw and a reputation for fearlessness, Jefferson Davis Milton was an obvious choice to be hired in 1904 to patrol the borders of the United States as a “mounted Chinese inspector,” a precursor to the U.S. Border Patrol.
Racial Immigration Laws
Although Milton was the first federal officer hired to patrol the border, he was not the first to enforce racial boundaries in the United States. From the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619, the English colonies in North America were a laboratory for organized policing. As the colonies became dependent on slave labor, the slave population grew to outnumber the free white population in parts of the South, creating the potential for rebellion. The slave owners relied on violence and menace to prevent rebellions through organized militias of local men and, later, more formal slave patrols.
The first official slave patrol was created in South Carolina in 1704; Virginia followed in 1726. They became common across the South in the decades that followed.8 Slave patrols tracked down runaway slaves, sowed fear to prevent revolts, and enforced plantation rules, which were not formal laws.9 By the time the United States won its independence from England, these local militias were crucial to maintaining control over the slave populations across the South. Militias also contributed to the Revolutionary War effort. Consequently, the need to maintain citizen militias was formalized in the founding documents of the country. The Second Amendment of the Constitution says, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The Second Amendment has become controversial in the modern era, but part of the original purpose of the right to bear arms was to allow civilians to participate in slave patrol militias in the South.10
Slave patrols often worked at night, walking the borders of plantations as well as the streams and paths that led away from them in search of curfew violators and runaways. Free Blacks had to carry passes at all times that proved they had the right to move around. The slave patrols became expert trackers who looked for signs in the landscape of human beings fleeing to the free northern states or Mexico for freedom and opportunity. Slave patrols were also union busters, tasked with breaking up unauthorized slave meetings at night and preventing insurrections. The slave patrols could enter slave quarters without a warrant and search for contraband, such as weapons and means of communication like paper and writing instruments. They also did headcounts to determine if anyone was out breaking curfew. After the end of slavery, many of the same tactics became common with the emergent Ku Klux Klan. Like the slave patrols, the KKK was a local militia that rode at night and terrorized the Black population of the South, preventing them from organizing in a way that could challenge white supremacy.11
Through the early 1870s, the United States did not have any federal limits on immigration, although there were some state-level restrictions. Massachusetts and New York had rules barring the poor, the infirm, and the insane, but many other states had no immigration regulations at all.12 The U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1849 in the Passenger Cases that immigration rules were a federal concern, which invalidated these local restrictions and left the task of regulating immigration with Congress. The Supreme Court again invalidated state-level restrictions in 1875 in Chy Lung v. Freeman and Henderson v. Mayor of City of New York. Even after it was established that only the federal government could limit immigration, Congress did not pass any limits on immigration until non-white immigrants started to arrive on America’s shores.
In the first decades after the American Revolution, the slave trade remained legal through 1808 and free immigration to the United States was not substantial. Those who came were mostly from England and Northern Europe. The first large wave of new immigrants was from Ireland in the 1840s as the potato famine forced people onto ships across the Atlantic. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the end of the Mexican–American War also gave the United States control of large swaths of the west, populated primarily by Native Americans and former Mexican citizens. After the discovery of gold in California in 1848, the United States began to see the first free non-white immigrants arriving from China. The explosive political issue of Chinese immigration was initially confined to the new states on the Pacific Coast, but by the 1870s, non-white immigration became a political issue in the entire United States.
As whites grappled with the reality of free Black citizens in the aftermath of slavery, there was a concerted effort to prevent the admittance of any more free non-white peoples. Senator La Fayette Grover of Oregon explained the problem of non-white immigration on the Senate floor in 1882. “Our ancestors,” he said, “proceeded forthwith to drive out the aborigines from the land with fire and sword, and to occupy it for themselves and for us their posterity.”13 For him, this is the evidence that the founders did not intend the United States to be anything other than a white country.
Grover acknowledged that they had to deal with the freed slaves and remaining Native Americans, but they should not take any more non-white people. “While we are to treat the poor remnant of the Indian race among us and the African who was forcibly brought here with that justice and humanity becoming to a great people,” he argued, “it is of the gravest importance to the future peace and well-being of this country that we do not voluntarily create other relations with colored foreign peoples which will force upon us complications in our civil and political relations.”
Senator Grover expressed the mainstream opinion of the country at the time, and Congress passed a series of laws to prevent Chinese immigration. In 1875, the Page Act, which sought to reduce the number of Chinese laborers, was the first national immigration limits of any kind in the United States. In 1882, Congress completely banned Chinese immigration to the country in the Chinese Exclusion Act. It was initially enforced only at ports, where the vast majority of people arrived in the United States. Throughout this era, the United States had customs officials who checked shipments at ports, but for decades there were no federal officers tasked with enforcing the new ban on Chinese immigration at other sections of the border or in the interior.
Mounted Chinese Inspectors
The mounted Chinese Inspectors were established to search for Chinese people who bypassed the enforcement at the ports by crossing from Mexico or Canada. The mounted Chinese Inspectors’ mission was based on racial profiling. They would roam border towns looking for Chinese people, then inspect their documents to see if they had the right to be in the United States. If not, they detained them and sent them back across the border. Akin to the previous generation’s slave patrols, the mounted Chinese Inspectors were tasked with patrolling the borders to look for people violating the racial social order of the United States.14
In his job as a mounted Chinese Inspector, Jeff Milton followed the same approach he used as a Texas Ranger and a sheriff’s deputy in Tombstone, bringing a “shoot first, ask questions later” attitude to the role of federal border agent. Soon after he was hired, he got a report of three bank robbers who had just crossed into the United States from Mexico. The one-armed Milton grabbed some provisions and ammunition, then jumped onto his horse and rode off alone in search of the three hardened criminals who were desperate to escape the law. His friends were not surprised, but they did begin to worry when he did not return after a few days. They eyed the horizon in hopes of seeing him riding back through the sagebrush and eventually grew concerned enough to mount a search party. As they were organizing men and discussing where to look for his body, a telegram arrived that would join the lore of the Border Patrol. All it said was “Send two coffins and a doctor. Jeff Milton.” Neither the coffins nor the doctor were for Milton.15 An early book about the Border Patrol spoke fondly of the exploits of Milton and the other mounted inspectors, saying, “the traditions they set are revered and followed by the men of the modern Border Patrol.”16
The mounted Chinese Inspectors never had more than seventy-five men working along the remote and rugged 1,954-mile border with Mexico as well as the border with Canada. In the early years, Milton and the other federal inspectors relied heavily on local and state law enforcement to help monitor the border. These state militias carried out what would today be called an ethnic cleansing of the newly conquered frontier lands of the United States as they drove out Native Americans and Mexican citizens. Milton’s former colleagues in the Texas Rangers were among the most extreme practitioners of frontier justice.
As the Mexican Revolution unfolded in the 1910s, cross-border incursions became increasingly common and deadly, often leading to brutal acts of violence. Among the most gruesome were the raid on the Brite Ranch on Christmas Day 1917 and the revenge carried out by the Texas Rangers in the town of Porvenir a few weeks later.