Cortez fled on foot and began walking towards Austin, eighty miles away.Ī manhunt was quickly initiated and Cortez’s wife and children, his mother and sister-in-law were illegally gaoled, a tactical error frequently made by authorities during episodes of outlawry. Cortez returned fire and killed the Sheriff. According to the court evidence there were language difficulties during the questioning which led the Sheriff to draw his pistol and fire on the brothers, wounding Romaldo. The lawmen arrived at the small plot Cortez and his brother, Romaldo, rented near Kennedy. Cortez and his family had been involved in stealing horses, which explains why Sheriff W Morris and two deputies wanted to question him about a missing horse one day in June, 1901. Nor was it unlike the situation in other places, such as Australia, where stock theft was the background to many bushranging outbreaks. The incident that turned Gregorio Cortez from an obscure small farmer and vaquero was not unlike that which had set Cortinas upon his influential path. While the existing legendry of Cortinas was strong in the years immediately after the earlier bandit’s death, the discontents and tensions that originated the legend and kept it alive were also still smouldering. Action-packed though those ten days were, they would perhaps only have given rise to such a legend in a region like the Border. Perhaps the most surprising fact in the extensive folklore that surrounds the figure of Cortez is that his outlawry lasted only ten days.
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