Special Order 306, December 30, 1869, File 861-11, Special Order 21, January 27, 1870, File 862-8, Special Order 28, February 5, 1870, File 862-9, Special Order 78, April 9, 1870 File 861-19, all in Adjutant General's Records (RG 401), Archives and Records Division, Texas State Library, Austin; Colorado County Police [Commissioners] Court Minutes, Book 1862-1876, pp. 160, 168. One might wonder why Dodd rather than one of the recently elected officials, was appointed to complete Malsch's unexpired term. However, because the existing government called for four county commissioners and the future one for five justices of the peace, there was no clear successor among the electees to Malsch. Dodd was a sixty year old, small-scale farmer who had been born in Georgia (see Ninth Census of the United States (1870), Colorado County, Texas, Schedule 1). The attitude of their successors toward the new county officials, and Yates in particular, is reflected in a series of pencil notes made in the margins of the commissioners court minutes, probably within ten years of the events chronicled. In the margin at the place where Yates is first mentioned as a commissioner, the anonymous notemaker wrote "the first nigger." In 1997 or 1998, someone erased that note. As of this writing, the other notes remain. They do not contain racial slurs.