Brownwood, Texas has more Old West shoot-em-up classic Western history than Deadwood, South Dakota. Deadwood just got more press because it had the word “dead” in the name, and because Wild Bill Hickock had the marketing forethought to be shot dead there.
Deadwood had Calamity Jane and Wild Bill and a few interesting fables and anecdotes here and there, but most of it is overblown mythology. Deadwood had a gold rush and silver too. Brownwood had the real Old West, and a lot of it, and some gold and silver to boot.
Our area had earlier pioneers, Indian wars, military battles, and Robert E. Lee. Later on, if you’re interested in the intrigue behind the deep state and even the Kennedy Assassination, we had the stripper Candy Barr and her ties to Mickey Cohen, Jack Ruby, the CIA, and even the Warren Commission.
Whoever edits the Deadwood Wikipedia page has a marketer’s penchant for bloodshed, legend, myth, and how history makes a place more interesting. TV shows get made about Deadwood, a town whose history is maybe four decades shorter than Brownwood’s (and less interesting.) Whoever edits the Brownwood Wikipedia page enjoys the cold and boring data about the census, climate facts, and the state of public education. Whitewash. Almost none of Brownwood’s very ample and interesting history is on the Wikipedia page. At some point, it seems that Brownwood decided to purge itself of its fascinating, but bloody, Old West past.
Think of Brownwood as a very fascinating and interesting old building that someone wants to remove or tear down.
Brownwood and the area had pioneers, military forts, Comanches, cattle rustlings, jailbreaks, Texas Rangers, hangings, scalpings, fires, Nazi prisoners, train robberies, bank heists, brothels, saloon gunfights, shootouts, pistoleers, Sheriffs murdered, and kidnappings. Gold legends galore.
Outlaw John Wesley Hardin and his gang stole cattle in Brown County, broke his men out of the Brownwood Jail, and even gunned down the Brown County Sheriff in Comanche in 1874. A “Captain James,” cousin to Jesse James, was a Texas Ranger stationed in Brownwood. This James was involved in a famous shootout with two wagon thieves in which James was wounded. Those are just a few of the most famous stories, but there are hundreds more.
There’s a pretty good story with substantial interesting support that got a lot of nationwide attention, that John Wilkes Booth – the alleged killer of Abraham Lincoln – wasn’t killed escaping after the assassination but lived for a time in Brownwood and ran a grocery store under the name Ravenwood.
We’ve had our share of world-famous writers from the area, more than Deadwood by a lot, but Brownwood isn’t that interested in its own literature or writers, and nobody reads anymore.
I have an idea for a Time Travel story series all centered in Brownwood. The protagonist uses a local building to travel back to different eras in Brownwood’s past to witness true events in Brownwood’s history. Like the Hardin jailbreak, the oldest bank robber in history, the last train robbery, the murder of a Brown County Sheriff here in the city, Candy Barr hiding out in her apartment in the bank building on Center and Baker and her telling the story of her relationship with Jack Ruby. Our protagonist would meet with Robert E. Howard at the Brownwood Hotel, and, on another visit, swing dance to the Glen Miller Band up in the ballroom. The Elvis concert in 1955 would be a great episode, including the soon-to-be King riding with Coleman’s own Dean Beard, two Sun Records potential rockabilly superstars, in Elvis’s Cadillac, and how their lives diverged after that fateful night.
There are a lot of stories to be told, I reckon, if someone were around to write them.
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.