There were rumored to be several former members of Quantrill's guerillas among the fence cutting gangs in the 1880's Fence Cutting War in Coleman, Brown and San Saba Counties. The war between the ranchers who bought state school land and fenced it and the open range cowmen and trail herders started about 1880 after the state started offering public school lands for sale to ranchers and homesteaders. Mable Lea Day became known as the Cattle Queen of Texas and owned 90,000 acres in Coleman County which lay across the Western Cattle Trail. She fence most of the land in 1882 and it became one of the first fenced ranches in Texas. In 1885, she lobbied the Texas legislature to make fence cutting a felony. Captain Ira Aten and the Texas Rangers broke up the fence cutting gangs by 1890.

In 1879, my great grandfather Joshua D. Coffee settled on 160 acres of former school land that he leased from my grandfather John T. Coffee's father-in-law, Peyton G. Whaley. P.G. Whaley was not a stockman but raised fine produce for his store and wholesale produce warehouse in Brownwood. Whaley settled in western Brown County about 1870 after moving from Washington County Arkansas. A ten year drought started in 1885 and which prompted the invention of windmills. Most of the surface water dried up from the streams and rivers and ranchers fenced off what surface water was remaining from the trail herders. The Western Cattle Trail went north from south Texas through Coleman County to the railheads in Nebraska. Charles Franklin Coffee, owner of the Hat Creek Cattle Company in Wyoming and Nebraska, built the largest packing house west of the Mississippi River at the railhead in Chadron Nebraska. He was the classic land baron and banker who foreclosed on poor homesteaders when they could not meet their mortage payments.

The tract of land where my great grandfather settled was located directly on the Brown-Coleman county line, southwest of Bangs Texas. Neither him or P.G. Whaley were involved in the fence cutting war but they knew people that were and some that were killed. The Roberts Cemetery, which is located on the old McInnis ranch north of Brownwood, has graves of eleven men who died violent deaths in the fence cutting war.