Salla Colorado County judge granted Jesse Robinson a divorce on Mar. 6, 1843, from his headstrong wife after ten tumultuous years of marriage.
Eleven days later, the former Mrs. Robinson tied the matrimonial knot with a San Jacinto veteran who gave the fiercest female on the Texas frontier her legendary last name – Scull. For dramatic effect, storytellers would often change the spelling to “Skull.”
The future Sally Skull started out as Sarah Jane Newman, the fifth child born into a “good” Illinois family in 1817. When her maternal grandfather announced in 1823 that he was moving to Texas, the Newmans tagged along and with the patriarch became charter members of the Old Three Hundred, Stephen F. Austin’s original group of colonists.
Rachel Newman set a brave example for her little girl. On one memorable occasion, the frontier housewife chopped off the toes of an Indian trespasser when he stuck his foot under the front door of their cabin. Another time, she stopped a red intruder from coming down the chimney by throwing a burning pillow into the fireplace.
Sally was a fast learner, as she showed a couple of years later during a neighbor’s visit. Paralyzed with fear by the sight of several Indians, the full-grown adult whined, “I wish I was two men, then I would fight those Indians.”
Sally did not hesitate to chastise the coward. “If you were one man, you would fight them! Give me that gun!”
It was not long afterward that Sally met her future husband under perilous circumstances. Jesse Robinson rode with a company of volunteers that patrolled the perimeter of the Austin colony. The day he helped to drive off a war party of Wacos and Tawakonis, the Kentuckian won the young girl’s heart.
The fact that Robinson was twice her age did not keep 16 year old Sally from marrying her hero in 1833. Three years later, he fought in the final battle of the Texas Revolution, and the couple settled on the land grant near Gonzales that Robinson received for his military service.
Their rocky decade together produced a son and a daughter. When Robinson filed for divorce, Sally told the judge that she too wanted to dissolve the unhappy union. What she did not get was custody of their children.
Sally was single less than two weeks before getting hitched to her second husband, a survivor of the massacre at Goliad. By 1849 George Scull was out of the picture – dead according to Sally, who offered no details regarding his demise.
Sally was a woman of independent means, thanks to her success as a horse trader, when she took John Doyle as her third lawfully wedded mate in October 1852. This marriage had an even shorter shelf life with Doyle either drowning during a river crossing or by his wife’s lethal hand.
Sally was never seen without her bonnet, rifle and prize pair of pistols always at the ready on her hips. She was from all accounts an amazing shot with both hands.
Rip Ford might well have been an eyewitness to Doyle’s demise. In his memoirs, which he wrote in the third person, the Texas Ranger recounted an incident at the Corpus Christi Fair in the early 1850’s:
“He heard the report of a pistol, raised his eyes, saw a man falling to the ground and a woman not far from him in the act of lowering a six-shooter. She was a noted character named Sally Scull. She was famed as a rough fighter, and prudent men did not willingly provoke her into a row. It was understood that she was justifiable in what she did on this occasion, having acted in self defense.”
Sally replaced the recently departed Doyle with Isaiah Wadkins sometime in 1855. It is anybody’s guess how this fourth marriage ended. The “Handbook of Texas” claims the parting was peaceful without loss of life, while other sources insist Sally drowned Wadkins in a barrel of whiskey or shot him in the head for waking her from a sound sleep.
The Civil War and Union blockade of Texas ports provided Sally with a new business opportunity. With her band of obedient vaqueros or cowboys, she switched from trading (some said stealing) horses to smuggling contraband cotton across the Rio Grande.
Busy as she was, Sally still found time for one more marriage. Husband number five was 18 years her junior, a “scoundrel without redemption” by the name of Chris Horsdorf. His detractors called him “Horse Trough,” which spoke volumes about his reputation as a despicable low-life.
No one knows for sure what happened to Sally Skull. The last confirmed sighting was in Goliad, where she was acquitted of perjury in 1866. After that, the most notorious woman in frontier Texas vanished from the historical record.
A popular theory peddled by various writers and folklorists is that “Horse Trough” murdered Sally for her gold and buried her body in an unknown location between Corpus Christi and the Mexican border. But an alternate explanation has her living out her days in quiet seclusion in El Paso with plenty of money and not a husband in sight.

Visit barteehaile.com for Bartee’s books “Murder Most Texan” and “Texas Depression-Era Desperadoes” plus bound collections of his Texas history columns from the past 32 years.