In the spring of 1877, my great-uncle John Calvin Bailey, Jr. was arrested and held in the Austin jail. Bail was set at $500.
To secure the $500 dollars, his family had to put up the 200-acre homestead along the Colorado River, a second property in Llano, and two cattle horses. The entire family fortune would be taken and sold by agents of Burnet County if JC did not appear in court to answer the charges.
The heinous crime of which he was accused? That he had taken a two-year-old heifer. One cow.
I came across this intriguing tale in 2021 as I was tracing the family’s migration across Texas, a journey that started from Tennessee circa 1848. The final homestead of the patriarch that brought us to Texas, John C Bailey, Sr., was built in Hoover’s Valley, along the Colorado River, a corner of the world that was, and still is, beautiful.
It pained me to think that they might have lost such a gem in such an ugly way. Still, JC, Jr. was only 19 years old at the time and Burnet County in 1876 was a rough, hard place. Federal Reconstruction had not gone well, poverty lurked one bad season away, and lawlessness was rampant. His father had passed away when he was 15, and his mother quickly remarried a nearby widower. He did one stroke of good fortune was finding his cheerful, young bride, Mary Alice.
JC rode into the village of Burnet on September 15th, 1876, leading the cow that was clearly close to calving. He arrived at his friend Joe Vineyard’s home and put the cow in the barn. JC then rode back across the Colorado to the ranch where he worked in Llano County, A calf was born soon thereafter and Joe branded it as his own.
The next spring, in April, the owner of that Llano ranch came to Burnet to look at a bull at the Vineyard’s ranch and to his surprise saw his own cow in the lot. Old Man Fry had Joe thrown in the Burnet jail, who quickly pleaded that it was JC Bailey who had brought the cow to town. Fry had enough clout to get a Burnet County grand jury convened and they indicted JC for taking the cow, valued at ten dollars.
I printed another copy of the property description at the county courthouse. Yes, the county had a complete, new deed record done to make sure they would get the land should the bond be forfeited.
From there, I was directed to the Courthouse Annex out on Hwy 29. Clearing the security desk and metal detectors (why?) I entered the county clerk’s office and approached the glass partitions. All three clerks turned to look when I announced I was looking for information on a criminal trial from 1876.
The staff was first and foremost very professional, followed closely by competent and cordial, which quickly enough turned to friendly but throughout held a healthy dose of skepticism about our chances. Just about every county clerk’s office feels compelled to digitize as many records as the budget will allow. Burnet County is no different, having already worked through most of their vital records and land records, and they are quick to point customers to the self-help kiosk.
But I was probably the first, and only, person to take an interest in these records in well over 100 years. Even in a small county there are tens of thousands of records that, like mine, frankly do not justify the expense of scanning.
The search began in a large, leather-bound ledger straight out of Hogwarts. It purported to contain an index of every county court proceeding since its inception in 1852. And the ledger contained no dates— just names and a cause number.
Running a finger down each page, speed-reading for my last name, it took us 45 minutes to find a likely entry: Cause 1169, The State of Texas v John C. Bailey. Entered in Book B, supposedly found in Box 5.
I doubt Burnet County was using cardboard boxes in 1876. And who knows when Book B began. Consider how many times these records were filed, stored, boxed, re-boxed, shelved, consolidated, sorted- and yet the document may still exist? Over the many decades, how many times must the question have been asked- Why don’t we throw this old stuff away?
The clock read 4:30, it was 104 degrees in August and the “old records” were kept “out back in some sheds”. I agreed completely when she offered, “I will look tomorrow and give you a call.” I put the odds at fifty-fifty that anything would come of the visit.
When she called, she offered few details other than, yes, the record had been found and that it included several documents. When I arrived, I understood why: It was a small rectangular paper folder, brown with age, with fading titles on the flap. It appeared to have been kept in a book press for centuries, very flat considering it contained eight pages. Box 5 had been packed very tight, with several hundred of the 4×8 inch folders, still miraculously in numerical order. We agreed it had probably been over 100 years since anyone had try to open or removed the pages.
I was glad to hear the instructions: Handle them gently, do not try to straighten the creases, do not try to put them back into the folder, the staff would handle that. I wished I had brought a pair of gloves.
Everything was written in a florid cursive, using the most formal legalese one could imagine. The papers included arrest warrants, charges from the grand jury, motions to quash from the defendant’s lawyer, subpoenas ordering five people to testify and the bail bond certificates that started my search. And then, written on the front of the grand jury charges, almost as an afterthought,
was the truth: ‘We the jury find the defendant not guilty,’ signed by the foreman.
My smile was certainly for the content, but equally for the joy of the find. Too often in historical research the trail runs cold and the brick wall cannot be overcome. This one counted as a true find; a real win. I took the last of too many pictures and watched the staff carefully return them to their paper coffin. We then gently re-buried them in the “shed out-back.”
JC had try to explain to Old Man Fry, to his lawyer, to the sheriff, that they needed to talk to Alexander Wills. Alex could explain everything. Wills worked as a foreman on one of Fry’s many ranches. Wills was the one who had agreed to let Joe Vineyard have the calf as payment for a month’s wages. It was Wills who told JC to take the cow into town. Unfortunately, Will was also in high demand as a trail boss- and he did not return from Kansas until October of 1877, just in time to be the star witness at the trial.
After the trial episode, the family moved on, though it is hard to say why. Either they figured it was just too hard to stay, or more likely, they saw greater opportunity elsewhere. As a group they agreed to sell the homestead along the Colorado and the property that is now downtown Llano, to fund their relocation northward towards Wichita Falls. JC and Mary Alice had 11 children and are mentioned fondly in several local historical narratives.
A generation after that, my Baileys were in Amarillo. Then the next generation brought us back through Waco to Austin, where we grew up water-skiing in the lakes that surround Hoover’s Valley, totally unaware that we once had an accused cattle rustler in the family.
All that was left behind in Burnet County was the early pioneer John Calvin Sr., who remains in Hoover’s Valley, buried beneath a huge cedar tree, near a tidy white church, not a mile from the homestead. Well, that and, somehow, Box 5.
Wandering Pointedly 