Written in Blood: The History of Fort Worth's Fallen Lawmen, Volume 1, 1861-1909

CHAPTER 1 Sheriff John B. York (1861-1888)

20 CHAPTER 1 According to received lore in the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office, this is Sheriff John York, although the daguerreotype is not actually identified as such. (Courtesy of the Genealogy, History and Archives Unit, Fort Worth Public Library) 21 CHAPTER฀1฀ Sheriff฀John฀B.฀York฀ August 24, 1861 Felled by “an assassin”? Tarrant County’s first sheriff was Francis Jourdan (sometimes Anglicized to “Jordan”), elected in the first countywide elections on August 5, 1850. Since the little community of Fort Worth would not get its first town marshal for another twenty-three years, the sheriff shouldered all the responsibility for local law enforcement. Jourdan was just a part-time lawman, which was normal in those days. He was a farmer first and peace officer second, spending more time on his homestead near Johnson’s Station than at the county seat in Birdville. His two-year term passed without incident, and he gladly turned the office over to his successor in 1852.1 That successor was twenty-seven-year-old John York, who before being elected sheriff worked as a farmhand for Jourdan. York was a big man who could manhandle a heavy moldboard plow through the tough prairie sod or wrestle bales of hay onto a wagon singlehandedly. He was Tarrant County’s second sheriff.2 Actually, he was more anointed than elected because no one else wanted the job. His tenure could have been as unremarkable as Jourdan’s had he not been the first local peace officer to die in the line of duty. John B. York was born May 13, 1825, in Tennessee, birthplace of many nineteenth-century Texans, but he did not come directly to Texas from the Volunteer State. His family was part of a vast tide of Americans looking for the promised land, first in Illinois, then Missouri, before finding their way to north Texas. He married Julia Ann Gilmore, daughter of Seaborne Gilmore, on January 26, 1846, 22 CHAPTER 1 in Springfield, Illinois. The capital of Illinois was a small burg of fewer than two thousand people at the time, with three churches, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Episcopal. Abraham Lincoln was soon to become its most famous resident, but the Yorks and Gilmores did not stay around that long. They were off to Missouri. Then in June 1848 they came by covered wagon to north Texas to stake a claim on a parcel of land in the Peters Colony, three miles north of the Trinity. The two families built their cabins on adjacent homesteads, each comprising a 640-acre “headright” that represented more than one man could work profitably. To make ends meet, York hired himself out as a farmhand to Francis Jourdan. Soon after John and Julia arrived in Texas, they started a family, and that family grew steadily in the years that followed.3 John York’s family history is vague due to an absence of official records and family papers. Even the records and papers that exist conflict on some important points. Strong oral tradition says that Julia gave birth to their first child, a boy, a few months after they arrived in Tarrant County. They named him William only to see him die of unknown causes, a sad start to their new life in Texas. They buried him in a small plot of ground near their homestead, which later became known as the Mitchell-Gilmore Cemetery. A second son was born in 1850 to whom they also gave the name William, a legacy baby so to speak. Through 1856, Julia produced a new child every other year—Antonia in 1852, Oliver in 1854, Texana in 1856—then a sixth child, John B., Jr., came in 1860. Julia was pregnant with the couple’s seventh child in the summer of 1861.4 The Yorks and Gilmores were among a handful of families already in the area when Major Ripley Arnold and elements of the Second Dragoons came to the confluence of the West and Clear forks of the Trinity River in the summer of 1849 to establish an outpost . The presence of the troops at that location brought a measure of security to the isolated frontier, bringing others to the area. Running for sheriff in 1852 was not an impulsive decision by John York. He had already shown an affinity for law enforcement by getting elected the county’s first constable in 1850. The fact that he...