Captain J. A. Brooks, Texas Ranger

11. Keeping the Peace in the Valley

It must have been an interesting assignment for Captain Brooks in the middle of the summer of 1904, ordered to Minera to halt a violent railroad strike. Twenty-two years earlier as a too-often drunken laborer, the Kentucky wanderer had spent the miserable part of a year working in those same coal mines, loading rail cars and helping with the transport to Cotulla and San Antonio. Perhaps the bourbon -induced fog of those early days prevented the Ranger captain from remembering any of those moments now; perhaps a sense of pride welled up within him for the successful career he had managed since. Either way it made for interesting serendipity that Brooks would purchase “retirement property” the same month that he would return to the scene of the sordid days that propelled him into the Texas Rangers. In between his many treks to Batson Prairie that summer, then, Brooks was in Minera June 28 and 29, and the violence quickly came to an end. Minera boasted a population of just over one thousand mostly Mexican immigrants, almost of all of whom worked in the mines. A deadly outbreak of yellow fever four years earlier had trimmed the labor force dramatically for a time, but soon more desperate men came across the Rio Grande looking for a paying job, no matter how dangerous or debilitating. Organized briefly by labor leaders , the subsequent strike produced violence and little improvement of 163 KEEPING THE PEACE IN THE VALLEY My private business being such that I could not do justice both to myself and the state, I tendered my resignation. 11 their conditions. “The men returned to their work,” Brooks reported. “The agitators were discharged and ordered to leave the mines.”1 Minera’s future was to be short-lived. In 1912 the mine shafts flooded, and three years later the town was abandoned and the small village of Santo Tomas sprung to life nearby. The railroads, the coal companies, and the laborers went elsewhere, and the ghost town that was Minera vanished but for leftover heaps of clay and slag.2 It is only speculation that Captain Brooks may have factored in his visit to Minera in his considerations of retirement. Over two decades had now passed since his joining the Frontier Battalion in Cotulla in 1883; this next year he would turn fifty years of age. He hardly knew his immediate family living in Alice, and there are some indications from his recorded leaves of absence in 1904, and fifteen more days in 1905, that his closest partner, Kentucky bourbon, continued to haunt him. He owned land now and would be purchasing more, and the thought of ranching a small spread may have seemed more and more appealing, especially after the exhausting scouts and the trips to and from Batson in East Texas. One of his absences had nothing to do with “liquoring up,” and only marginally related to his duties as a Ranger commander. In Alice, Brooks had joined the Woodmen of the World, a fraternal organization and insurance company. Begun in 1890 by Nebraskan Joseph Cullen Root, the Woodmen spread quickly through communities in Texas, even electing Texan Morris Sheppard as its national treasurer. (Sheppard would serve Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives and as a powerful political voice for four decades.3) In August 1904, the St. Louis Exposition and World’s Fair opened with great expectations and international fanfare, and attracted thousands of Texans to its gates over the next five months, including Captain Brooks. It is unclear exactly what prompted Brooks to head for St. Louis in early September, but one guess might be the calendar of events: the Woodmen fraternity held parades and a national conference there from Sept. 5–14; Texas Day was celebrated at the fair on MonCaptai n J. A. Brook s, Te xas Rang e r 164 day, September 12; and a large cattle auction took place that same week.4 Whatever prompted the trip—it does not appear initially to have been for any official reason—Brooks arrived at Ft. Sill in Indian Territory on his way to Missouri, whereupon his journey became more official than he may have planned. A very important resident of the Ft. Sill Indian reservation was preparing to visit the St. Louis Exposition as a special guest. The Apache Chief Geronimo had lived at Ft. Sill under “house...