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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 as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.
W.F. Strong [00:00:00] 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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.
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
