Rustling cattle already had earned Vidal’s head a dead-or-alive bounty. (Taylor later would be one of the participants in the Sutton-Taylor Feud, a bloody, years-long running gun battle that rivaled the better-known fracas between the Hatfields and McCoys.)
One of the ranches belonged to Texas Ranger Creed Taylor, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence and a man not inclined to forgive his enemies. In the summer of 1850, a Mexican bandito by the name of Vidal made an egregious error: He and several compadres rustled a sizable herd of horses from several ranches south of San Antonio. Unlike Irving’s unforgettable spook, however, Texas’ decapitated caballero rode among the living once upon a time. South Texas has its own gruesome headless horseman legend. German, Irish, Scandinavian, and English legends all offered versions of the ghoulish phantoms, who usually were said to appear to proud, arrogant people as a warning. Though the tale of a hapless schoolmaster’s midnight gallop through the New York woods made the phrase “headless horseman” a household term in America, by the time Irving’s story appeared, headless horsemen had been staples of European folklore for centuries. First published in 1820, Washington Irving’s short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” has been frightening children for generations.
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