Lee Bills

    Over the years, the Texas Rangers came to symbolize law and order in frontier Texas but they did much more than just fight Indians and outlaws and their work continues today as the oldest organized police force in the world.

    One Texas Ranger was De Leon’s soft-spoken Lee C. Bills.  He was a Ranger during a time when a handful of men protected the eight-hundred mile Texas border with Mexico against hundreds, if not thousands, of Mexican bandits who raided ranches and towns along the Rio Grande.

     During the entire second decade of the twentieth century, the responsibilities of the Texas Rangers centered on the Rio Grande and the border with Mexico.  The Rangers were initially called upon in late 1910, to assure the neutrality of people living in Texas during the civil war which erupted in Mexico.  Officials feared that parties along the border would use the neutrality of Texas and the U.S. to establish bases from which supplies and arms would be sent to various Mexican groups.  There was a genuine fear that such bases might cause the war to spill over into Texas.

     Just prior to World War I, the Rangers were called upon to protect the border against German interference and influence. 

    In the middle years from 1914 to 1916, Mexican bandits began to raid the towns and ranches along the Rio Grande.  The killing of Texas citizens, the rustling of livestock and the ransacking of small communities became commonplace.  When efforts to get the Federal government to act on the situation failed, it fell to the Texas Rangers to handle the problem.  It is at that time Lee Bill became a Texas Ranger.

     Lee was born on April 18, 1876 in Sylvan in Lamar County (Paris is the county seat) a full  five years before De Leon was founded.  By the time we pick him up he is a man, thirty-nine years of age with two daughters, Katherine and Pauline and a marriage that appears to have been on the rocks.  He apparently was an excellent shot and is believed to have served as a deputy to De Leon’s City Marshall, W.G. Kimball, in the early part of the century.

      Lee and his wife owned the Bills Hotel in De Leon.  Although the Bills Hotel building still stands, it was not this structure which was in use at the time of the story.  The hotel was originally called the Adams House and was located immediately to the north of the present structure and was a large two story building with a sweeping curved porch on both levels.  The current frame building was built as an annex about 1919 during the oil boom.

    Most of what we know of Lee Bills’ Ranger days took place entirely in the fall and winter of 1915.  As the rustling, murders, and gun battles increased, the Rangers began to rebuild their force.  Only 27 men including officers, sergeants and privates had been responsible for securing the entire border from El Paso to Brownsville.

    Things had become so bad that Charles Schreiner, a noted Texan and perhaps the leading citizen of Kerrville, wrote Governor Jim Ferguson that cattle, sheep and goats on his ranches in Kimball County, over one hundred miles from the border were being rustled by the Mexican bandits.  As word went out for new Rangers, Bills headed south looking for a job and a new beginning.

Mrs. Lee Bills