HIGHLAND LAKES HISTORY: Dave Bailey chases down family ‘cattle rustler’

Spicewood resident Dave Bailey is partially retired, splitting his time between working as a consultant for fire and EMS departments transitioning from volunteer to paid staff and researching family history. He owns Professional Civic Services LLC, which he set up after 30 years in the Austin Fire Department followed by tenures as fire chief of three different county departments. 

He and his wife, Debbie, live in the family lakehouse where Dave has been hanging out on weekends and holidays since 1980. 

What he’s learned in researching his family could fill a book, he said, and it might one day. Right now, he writes stories as gifts for his family. 

“This is an ongoing pursuit I’ve been chasing for 20 years,” he said. “It will continue my whole life. Every question I answer generates two more.”

He calls his family story “a full loop that covers 100 years,” from Hoover’s Valley to Amarillo, Waco to Austin, and back to the Highland Lakes.

“I view these stories as chapters in a very long history,” he said. 

This is one of them. 

The law of the land in the 1870s

By Dave Bailey

In the spring of 1877, my great-uncle John Calvin “J.C.” Bailey Jr. was arrested and thrown in the Austin jail. His bail was set at $500. 

To secure the money, his family put up their 200-acre homestead along the Colorado River in Hoover’s Valley, a second ranch in Llano County, and two cattle horses. The entire family fortune would be taken and sold by Burnet County agents if Bailey did not appear in court to answer the charges of stealing a 2-year-old heifer. 

I came across this tale of intrigue in 2021 as I was tracing the history of my family’s migration across Texas. John Calvin Sr. set out in 1848 from Tennessee, a widower with six kids. After a few stops along the way — one where he found a new wife — the family settled in Hoover’s Valley. Today, that land is the Enchanted Valley subdivision, which sits below Inks Dam on the west side of the river channel between a fish hatchery and a winery. 

I printed a copy of the property description at the county courthouse on the town square. The county had a complete new deed record drawn up to make sure they would get control of the land should J.C. not make it to the trial. 

It pained me to think that they might have lost this gem in such an ugly way. Still, Bailey was only 19 years old, times were hard, and Burnet County in 1876 was a rough place. Federal Reconstruction following the Civil War had not gone well, poverty was one bad season away for farmers and ranchers, and lawlessness was rampant. By then, J.C. Sr. was dead and his second wife, who was J.C. Jr.’s biological mother, had quickly remarried a family friend. 

I wanted to find out what happened to young Bailey and whether his actions cost the family a prime piece of property. I knew they had moved on shortly after but not why or what happened to the land. 

In my research, I was directed to the courthouse annex on Texas 29 East in Burnet. Clearing the security desk and metal detectors, I entered the District Clerk’s Office and approached the glass partitions. All three clerks turned to me 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 their evolving demeanor, they held a healthy dose of skepticism about my chances of actually finding any information. 

Just about every district clerk’s office I know feels compelled to digitize as many records as the budget will allow. Burnet County is no different, and having already worked through most of their vital and land records, they are quick to point customers to the self-help kiosk in the entry. I learned, however, that many records over 100 years old don’t justify the expense of scanning.

I was shown a massive, leather-bound ledger that purported to contain an index of every county court proceeding since Burnet County’s inception in 1852. The ledger contained no dates, however, 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. It was entered in Book B, which could supposedly be found in Box 5. 

Considering how many times those records have been filed, stored, boxed, re-boxed, shelved, consolidated, and sorted, it seemed highly improbable the documents still existed. 

It was August, 104 degrees outside, and 4:30 p.m. when I learned the older records were kept “out back in some sheds.” I quickly agreed whenDistrict Clerk Casie Walker’s staff offered to take a look and call me when they found the box.I put the odds at 50/50that anything would come of the visit.

My phone rang the very next morning. The records had been found. When I arrived, I was handed a small rectangular paper folder, brown with age and with fading cursive flourishes on the flap. Box 5 was tightly packed with hundreds of these 4×8-inch folders, miraculously still in numerical order. We agreed it had probably been decades since anyone had tried to open or remove any of these pages. 

I was glad to hear the instructions: Handle them gently, do not try to straighten the creases, and do not try to put them back into the folder. The staff would handle that later. I wished I had brought a pair of white gloves. 

Everything was written in a florid cursive, using formal legal language. 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, on the front of the grand jury charges, written simply, as almost an afterthought, was the culmination of the story: “We the jury find the defendant not guilty.” It was 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 climbed. This one counted as a dig that uncovered true treasure. I took the last of too many pictures and watched the staff carefully return the fragile papers to Box 5, where they will remain in perpetuity. 

Here’s what I learned: 

Bailey rode into Burnet on September 15, 1876, leading the allegedly stolen cow that was close to calving. He arrived at his friend Joe Vineyard’s homeand put the cow in the barn. J.C. then rode back across the Colorado River to the Llano County ranch where he worked. Back in Burnet, the calf was born and Vineyard branded it as his own. 

The next spring, the owner of that Llano ranch, Peter Fry, came to Burnet to see one of Vineyard’s bulls. To his surprise, he saw his own cow in the same pasture. Old Man Fryhad Vineyard thrown in the Burnet jail despite his pleas that it was J.C. Bailey who brought the cow to town. Fry had enough clout to get a Burnet County grand jury convened, and they indicted Bailey for taking the cow. The value of that prized possession, worthy of a $500 bond? According to the grand jury, it was $10.

J.C. Bailey had tried to explain to Fry, his lawyer, and the sheriff that Alexander Wills could explain everything. Wills, who worked as a foreman on one of Fry’s many ranches, had agreed to let Joe Vineyard have the calf as payment for a month’s wages. Wills told Bailey to take the cow into town. Unfortunately, Wills, who was in high demand as a trail boss, was on a cattle drive to Kansas until October. He arrived back in town one week before the trial. 

A few years after that, Bailey and three of his siblings moved on, settling and building communities around Wichita Falls. J.C. and his wife, Mary Alice Bailey, had 11 children and are mentioned fondly in several local historical narratives in North Texas. 

As a group, they agreed to sell the homestead along the Colorado and the property that is now downtown Llano to fund their relocation to Paducah, Texas, about 150 miles southeast of Amarillo. 

A generation after that, my Baileys moved on to Amarillo. The next generation brought us back through Waco to Austin, where we grew up water skiing on the lakes that surround Hoover’s Valley, totally unaware that we once had an accused cattle rustler in the family — at least until now.

All that is left behind as evidence that the Baileys were in Burnet County are the remains of early pioneer John Calvin BaileySr., who is buried in the Hoover’s Valley Cemetery beneath a huge cedar tree near a tidy white church, not a mile from the old homestead. Well, that and Box 5 in a shed behind the District Clerk’s Office in Burnet