Part 8, Note 57

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State Police Roster, Seventh Police District, p. 422, Adjutant General's Records (RG 401); City Officials Appointment Book, City of Columbus, p. 36, Colorado County Election Returns, both in Secretary of State Records (RG 307) Archives Division, Texas State Library, Austin; Statements of Bartley Harbert, Westley Burford, and Andrew Pickens, December 12, 1871, Letter of Camillus Jones, December 13, 1871, Governor's Papers (RG 301), Edmund J. Davis, Archives Division, Texas State Library, Austin; Fayette County New Era, December 19, 1873; Colorado Citizen, March 21, 1872, January 14, 1875; Colorado County District Court Records, Criminal Cause File No. 1277: State of Texas v. Joseph P. Harris; Criminal Cause File No. 1368: State of Texas v. Joseph P. Harris. Before his first stint as city marshal, Harris had worked for the county as a jailor (see Colorado County Police [Commissioners] Court Minutes, Book 1862-1876, p. 154). At the time of their assault on Harbert, Harris and McDowell were good friends. That friendship lapsed in mid 1872. McDowell married Harris's sister, Sarah, on February 11, 1872, without telling her, or anyone else, that he already had a wife, who was living, abandoned, in Alabama. When the Harris family found out, McDowell fled, apparently to Tennessee. Joe Harris wanted to pursue him, but was hindered by the fact that he had to support his poor, widowed mother. She was Dilue Rose Harris, who would later become well known as the author of reminiscences of her life in early Texas and the traumas of the Runaway Scrape, and as the subject of a number of biographical efforts. Sarah Harris later married George S. Ziegler, the important local Republican politician who spent the latter part of his adult life in Eagle Lake. It was at his home that Dilue Harris wrote her reminiscences, and at which she died. Another of her daughters, and of Joe Harris's sisters, Mary Victoria, was married to Johann Baptist Leyendecker, the one-time Republican sheriff of Colorado County. That family connection may partially explain why Joe Harris kept receiving appointment after appointment despite his many difficulties (see Colorado County Marriage Records, Book E, p. 258; Letter of Joseph P. Harris, September 2, 1872, Governor's Papers (RG 301) Edmund J. Davis, Archives Division, Texas State Library, Austin; Colorado County District Court Records, Criminal Cause File No. 974: State of Texas v. James McDowell; Harris Family File, Archives of the Nesbitt Memorial Library, Columbus. Dilue Rose Harris's reminiscences appear in Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, vol. 4, no. 2, October 1900, vol. 4, no. 3, January 1901, vol. 7, no. 3, January 1904. Publications about Harris include: Jeanette Hastedt Flachmeier, "Dilue Rose Harris," in Evelyn M. Carrington, ed., Women in Early Texas (1975. Reprint. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1994), Ann Fears Crawford and Crystal Sasse Ragsdale, "Texas’s Rose," in Women in Texas Their Lives Their Experiences Their Accomplishment. (Burnet, Texas: Eakin Press, 1982), Flachmeier, A Rose in Texas (n. p., 1986), and Rita Kerr, Texas Rose (Austin: Eakin Press, 1986).