ROWDY COWBOYS, OUTLAWS, AND A BLOOD FEUD

L.R. Millican's life in Lampasas, Texas, both lucky and legendary.

- KENYON BENNETT

Lampasas, for a time, was on the edge of a lively frontier in Texas, and much blood spilled as that border exhaled dust and stampeded westward. Rowdy cowboys, outlaws and others shooting up saloons was commonplace on the frontier. Lawlessness, always ready to engage, leveled its Winchesters and six-shooters at the innocent, guilty and unwitting. Gun smoke lifted, and the targeted lay wounded or dead.

Leander Randon “L. R.” Millican lived in Lampasas as a teenager and young adult, having been born in Millican, Texas, August 27, 1853. When he became the youngest deputy sheriff in Lampasas in September 1872, he had already earned a reputation for being even-tempered, responsible and fearless. “He had a strange power over bad men. They seemed to wince and cower under the steady gaze of his unflinching gray eyes. He was afraid of no man in the flesh,” family friend Buren Sparks once observed.

Life’s circumstances shaped Millican. During the catastrophic Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1867 in East Texas, Millican’s family had fled Millican, a town established by their ancestors, and headed to Lampasas to escape death. J. W. Weaver, Millican’s stepfather, who died en route, was buried along the way. Millican’s mother, Marcella, succumbed on December 16 after reaching Lampasas, where her sister Amanda Nichols lived. Nichols and her husband, Lorenzo D., then helped raise L.R., age 14, and his younger brothers, Marcellus and Wilbur.

Millican sought employment as a teenager. He delivered mail as an outpost express rider, warily watching for Comanches on the route between Lampasas and Austin, and then worked as a young cowboy on John Sparks’s ranch in Lampasas County.