Outlaws Benjamin Bickerstaff and Josiah Thompson

Duane's take

The official marker tells it this way, and I'm just the one passin' it along. Near Alvarado, Johnson County, there's a cemetery called Balch. Old Alvarado Cemetery, some folks know it by, and two men buried in it arrived there the hard way.

This is the story of Benjamin Bickerstaff and Josiah Thompson, and how April 5th, 1869 became their last day on earth. Bickerstaff had a history that followed him like a shadow. A former Confederate veteran and prisoner of war, he came out of the Civil War with blood already on his hands; wanted for the murder of an African American man in Louisiana, not long after the war ended.

A man running from that kind of past doesn't exactly settle down and take up farming. He drifted toward trouble, and trouble had a name in Alvarado: Josiah Thompson. Thompson was a business owner right there in Alvarado, also a Confederate veteran, and together the two of them are believed to have cut a wide swath across that part of Texas.

Numerous robberies and murders in the area, including incidents in Alvarado itself. Right there in the town where one of them did business. That takes a particular kind of audacity, or maybe just a particular kind of recklessness.

Now here's where the story pivots. At some point, the citizens of Alvarado had simply had enough. Organized.

Decided they weren't going to wait on outside help. And on April 5th, 1869, Bickerstaff and Thompson rode into town together. They rode right in.

And what met them was not a warm welcome; it was organized citizens who shot them numerous times. Near that very site, it was over. They buried them both in Balch Cemetery.

Two outlaws, two Confederate veterans, two men believed responsible for no small amount of suffering in that region, laid in the same ground they'd terrorized. The marker doesn't editorialize much. It doesn't have to.

Sometimes the facts line themselves up and do all the work. Two men rode into Alvarado on a spring day in 1869, and the town made sure they didn't ride out.

What the marker says

Near this site in 1869, Alvarado citizens ended the lives of outlaws Benjamin Bickerstaff and Josiah Thompson. A former Confederate veteran and prisoner of war, Bickerstaff was wanted for the murder of an African American man in Louisiana shortly after the Civil War. He later joined Alvarado business owner Josiah Thompson, also a Confederate veteran, and the two are believed to have participated in numerous robberies and murders in this area, including incidents in Alvarado. When they rode together into town on April 5, 1869, organized citizens shot them numerous times. They were buried in Balch (Old Alvarado) Cemetery. (2006)