Captain J. A. Brooks, Texas Ranger

10. Batson Prairie Oil

The assignment given Captain Brooks on March 18, 1903, must surely have opened a festering old wound in his soul. Even as he was making preparations to complete the move of Company A out to Laredo, Brooks was ordered to Yoakum to assist Atascosa County Sheriff Matthew Avant and two Rangers from Captain Hughes’s company in escorting Gregorio Cortez Lira to his trial in Pleasanton. Gregorio , the man who had killed Brooks’s friend Brack Morris two years earlier, had been in a San Antonio jail most of that time awaiting this next turn in the judiciary system. His stay in a Yoakum jail resulted from one of many changes of venue. Brooks reports only that he met the Rangers and Avant at the depot in Floresville where they headed to Yoakum, and that Cortez was safely brought to Pleasanton.1 The story of Gregorio Cortez’s many trials and acquittals stretched on into the next decade. In a personal letter, Capt. John Rogers, the Ranger who captured Gregorio, recalled seeing the just released defendant walking along a San Antonio street some years later, noting the revulsion he felt. One of Cortez’s several trials was presided over by Judge Stanley Welch, a key figure in South Texas politics who had also presided at the Baker trial in early 1903.2 Captain Brooks was ordered to Zapata County on May 20 by General Scurry to investigate the murder of a Dr. A. D. McCabe. 151 BATSON PRAIRIE OIL There is no way of holding a prisoner here except to chain him to a tree with chain and lock 10 McCabe had a mysterious past when he moved to Zapata in 1899, but he quickly befriended A. P. Spohn, the county boss, and was appointed county physician. The two outspoken men soon parted company over political differences: McCabe quit his position and bad blood between the two boiled over into open confrontation. The doctor organized a reform party to defy Spohn’s political machine, and took to wearing a six-shooter on his hip when in public. On the night of May 19, McCabe was gunned down in his own home by an unknown assailant. The Rangers’ investigation turned up no leads and no arrests were ever made.3 Brooks’s trek to Zapata was one of Scurry’s last orders as adjutant -general: Ten days later he retired, accentuating his pride in the Ranger Force and its commanders in his letter to the new governor Samuel W. T. Lanham. Lanham appointed John Augustus Hulen to succeed Scurry in Austin. The thirty-two-year-old Hulen, born in Missouri and raised in Gainesville, Texas, had already enjoyed an adventurous life. A military academy graduate, he became a successful agent for the Missouri, Kansas and Pacific Railroad Company, organized a volunteer state guard unit, and served as lieutenant colonel of the First Texas Cavalry (U.S. Volunteers), in which Brooks had served, during the SpanishAmerican War. He was awarded the U.S. Army’s Silver Star medal for his action in the Philippine insurrection in 1900–1901, and upon his return to Texas was rewarded with the adjutant general appointment.4 On June 2 Captain Brooks received a telegram from General Hulen ordering him to send two men to Carrizo Springs to investigate a crime. Brooks decided to go himself and spent ten days there before returning to the Laredo camp. It is possible that Brooks met Carl Groos during his stay in the small Dimmit County town. Groos and his partner E. J. Buckingham were surveying land north of the town and would soon purchase the 100,000-acre Cross S Ranch in Zavala County (misspelled “Zavalla” until 1928), one of the largest ranches in the Southwest , subdivide it, and sell lots to create the town of Crystal City. One of those buyers would be J. A. Brooks.5 Captai n J. A. Brook s, Te xas Rang e r 152 On August 20, Brooks learned that his eldest brother-in-law, Annie’s husband James Henry Kerr, had died in Kentucky at the age of seventy-three. Kerr was buried the next day in the Lexington Cemetery where many of the Brooks kin would find their final resting place in the years that followed. Brooks went to Bourbon County to visit with his surviving siblings who had gathered for Kerr’s funeral, but it does not...