06/02/2026
Fifty years ago today, a one-of-a-kind story unfolded in the canyons of Coke County in West Texas. The incident would inspire my novel “When Cowboys Die,” but it would also have tragic consequences.
On the Divide southwest of Robert Lee on June 2, 1976, a man walked up to a remote line shack, took a horse without permission, and rode away into rugged canyons. Who would have done such a thing in this day and time? Astronauts had walked on the moon, and even now satellites hurtled unseen across the sky.
I was 25, a reporter for the San Angelo Standard-Times, and when I was dispatched to the scene, I found a manhunt underway. The Coke County sheriff told me they were looking for 31-year-old Charlie Walls. Then a rancher mentioned an intriguing motive: “He’s always said he was born too late, that he should’ve lived a hundred years ago.”
For four days the search continued, as a cowboy-out-of-time challenged more than 20 law officers who scoured the jungled canyons by horseback, jeep, and helicopter. It was a mismatch, but not in the way one would expect.
The cowboy got away.
Ten days later and a thousand miles distant, a body was found beside the railroad tracks in San Bernardino, California. Charlie Walls had been struck and killed by a freight train under suspicious circumstances. The investigating Texas Ranger told me that he believed Charlie had been murdered—pushed into the train—but he couldn’t prove it.
Charlie’s unique saga led to my 1994 novel “When Cowboys Die,” which Western Writers of America named a finalist for its prestigious Spur Award. More recently, Texas Christian University Press reprinted the novel with a 50-page afterword recounting the true-life manhunt.
Today I remember Charlie and the impact that his death had on his four young children who grew up without a father.
