The most reproduced photograph of the Hora de Sangre is 3 Rangers on horseback with ropes run to 3 dead men on the ground at Norias. It is in museums now, usually with the bodies cropped out. In 1915 you could buy it at a counter in Brownsville, write a note on the back and mail it home. The man behind the counter had taken it.
A widower with a lunch counter
Robert Runyon was born on July 28, 1881, on a farm near Catlettsburg in Boyd County, Kentucky, the son of Floyd and Elizabeth Runyon. His schooling stopped short of high school. He married Nora Young in 1901, had a son, and lost her in December 1908. Early in 1909 he turned up in Brownsville selling fruit, candy and cigarettes to passengers on the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway, and within months he was managing the lunchroom and curio shop in the depot.
In 1910 he opened a photography studio across from the station. He taught himself the trade the way he taught himself everything, and for 16 years he photographed whatever Brownsville and Matamoros would pay for: portraits, bullfights, street scenes, the brush, the river.
The river goes to war
On June 3, 1913, General Lucio Blanco's Constitutionalist troops took the federal garrison at Matamoros. The next morning Runyon was in the streets with his camera, photographing the victors, the federal dead and the executions that followed. A month later he married Amelia Lenor Medrano, a Matamoros native. They had 5 children.
Then came 1915. When the raids described in Hora de Sangre began, Runyon was the only professional photographer who got to the scenes. He went to Norias after the fight of August 8 and photographed the raiders' bodies with the Rangers posed over them, 3 men on horseback holding the ropes, and he went out to the wrecked train north of town in October. He sold the pictures as postcards to the soldiers pouring into Fort Brown and to anyone else who wanted one. The Briscoe Center's caption on the Norias picture reads October 8, 1915; the fight was August 8. One recent study of the Norias series counts 13 corpse images and argues the bodies were moved and reposed between frames to make a better picture. He was a commercial photographer. That was the product.
By 1916 he had made more than 2,000 photographs of the Fort Brown buildup alone. In 1926 he closed the studio and went into the curio business with his brother in law in Matamoros.
Second and third careers
The camera went into a closet and the plant press came out. With no training but correspondence and reading, Runyon spent the rest of his life on the flora of the lower Rio Grande Valley. He wrote "Texas Cacti" with Ellen Schulz Quillin in 1930 and "Vernacular Names of Plants Indigenous to the Lower Rio Grande Valley" in 1947, campaigned for years to save the native sabal palm, and built a herbarium of more than 8,750 specimens. Several species carry his name.
Brownsville made him city manager in 1937 and elected him mayor in November 1941; he served through 1943. He ran the county Democratic committee in the early 1950s, lost a race for the Legislature in 1952, and sat on the planning and zoning board at the end of the decade.
After
He died in Brownsville on March 9, 1968, at 86, and is buried in Buena Vista Cemetery. In 1986 his family gave the whole archive, more than 11,000 glass and nitrate negatives, prints, lantern slides and postcards, to the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, which published a selection in 1992 as "War Scare on the Rio Grande." His herbarium went to the university's Plant Resources Center in 2021.
So the visual record of 1915 that historians lean on is his, and so is the postcard that made the dead into a souvenir. Both came out of the same darkroom.
Sources: Handbook of Texas, Robert Runyon; Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, Robert Runyon Photograph Collection and the online exhibit "The South Texas Border, 1900 to 1920"; Frank N. Samponaro and Paul J. Vanderwood, "War Scare on the Rio Grande: Robert Runyon's Photographs of the Border Conflict, 1913 to 1916" (Texas State Historical Association, 1992); Not Even Past, "The Man Who Sold the Border," University of Texas Department of History; The Portal to Texas History, "Texas Rangers with Dead Mexican Bandits," Cattle Raisers Museum; University of Texas Plant Resources Center, Runyon Herbarium.