Captain J. A. Brooks, Texas Ranger

Endnotes

Introduction 1. “Brooks Surname of Bourbon County, Kentucky.” The Shawhan Genealogy, p. 3, www.shawhan.com; Audry, “Early Bourbon Families ,” Kentuckian Citizen, June 20, 1944. The Brooks family was relatively well off throughout the ensuing generations, right up to the Civil War. Aside from the Kentucky Breckinridges to whom he was distantly related, Jim Brooks’s best known kin was Rev. Phillips Brooks (1835–1893), a Bostonian Episcopal minister and composer of the Christmas hymn, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” 2. Dora N. Raymond, Captain Lee Hall of Texas, 197. 3. W. W. Sterling, Trails and Trials of a Texas Ranger, 316. Ranger and later legislative records, and the family, confirm the captain’s name as James Abijah Brooks. 4. Richard Harding Davis, The West From a Car-Window, 11–13. 5. San Antonio Daily Express Austin Bureau, January 11, 1911. 6. November 22, 1935 interview, Corpus Christi Caller Times. 7. Sterling, 307. Sterling devotes an entire chapter to Brooks in addition to several references throughout his memoirs. 8. Walter Prescott Webb, The Texas Rangers, 460. 213 ENDNOTES 9. Ellis Davis and Edwin Grobe, eds., The New Encyclopedia of Texas, 2905: “[Brooks’s] record as a county judge bespeaks work efficiently handled, in a spirit of cooperation, and has been stamped by the approval of the public, as is attested to by his consistent reelection to office.” 10. Sterling, 367. In his last will and testament, written in 1939, Brooks again thanks his dearly departed mother for praying for him while she was alive. 11. Interview with Beverly Brewton, Captain Brooks’s granddaughter, summer 2004. The family has no reservations in admitting that the captain was no family man, and cared little if at all for his daughter . Beverly Brewton recalls her grandfather peeling an orange for her when she was a child, but using a rusty pocket knife to do it! There are photographs of the old judge romping in the yard with Beverly, but it seems even to the family to be anachronistic. 12. Sterling, 333. 13. Family interview with Mrs. Brewton and her daughter Suzanne Montgomery, August, 2004. Corrinne condemned her father for his drinking, another cause for the permanent rift between the two. 14. Robert M. Utley, Lone Star Justice: The First Century of the Texas Rangers, 254. Chapter One 1. Bourbon County, Kentucky, 1850 United States Census; “Bourbon County, Kentucky, Biographies, Hutchinson Precinct,” 1–20; Bourbon County Clerk records; Langsam and Johnson, Historical Architecture of Bourbon County, Kentucky. There remain several buildings standing from that era, including the old Presbyterian church. The Brooks homestead would today be located on HarpInnes Road just up from the main highway and at the edge of the county. 2. Brooks Memoirs, Brooks Family Papers, Pasadena, Texas. Throughout this book, Brooks’s own words tell his story in an Endnotes 214 especially personal way. During the year 1935 Brooks wrote several versions of his memoirs, some organized and others on scraps of old desk calendar sheets. They are all collected as his “Memoirs” for this biography and are quoted extensively here. 3. Bourbon County, Kentucky, United Sates Census, 1860; Bourbon County Clerk records. There is a reproduced photograph in the family papers, unsubstantiated, of two people who may have been Old Ned and Mary. 4. Interview in Corpus Christi Caller Times, Nov. 20, 1938. 5. “Historical Scrapbook; 175th Anniversary of Bourbon County, Kentucky” (1981); Hutchinson, Bluegrass and Mountain Laurel: The Story of Kentucky in the Civil War. 6. “The Battle of Cynthiana, Kentucky,” www.americancivilwar. com/ky. Morgan was killed in 1864 but his legend lives on in central Kentucky. 7. Estates Settled Book G, Reference #2694, Bourbon County, Kentucky , dated Jan. 25, 1864, 104–7. James’s mother was by all accounts a remarkably strong woman, able to rebuild her family’s homestead to at least a comfortable level once more while fighting off the vagaries of Reconstruction. 8. Pitts and Champ, Collin Co., Texas, Families, 96–97, 524–25; Roy Hall, Collin County, Texas: Pioneering in North Texas, 93, 108; Biographical Souvenir of the State of Texas, 231. 9. Interview in Corpus Christi Caller Times, Nov. 20, 1938. The “pretty girls” were almost always first among his priorities. 10. Collin County, Texas, Tax Rolls of 1878, 26; Collin County and Wise County, United States Census, 1880. That land in Collin County is still open farm land, and the source of that spring can...