James Buchanan Burrow, the fifth and youngest son, was born in 1858, and was, therefore, four years the junior of his brother Rube, to whose fortunes his own were linked in the pursuit of train robbing, and which gave to the band the name of the “Burrow Brothers” in the earliest days of its organization.
The facilities for acquiring education in the rural districts of the South, half a century ago, were limited, and Allen Burrow grew to manhood’s estate, having mastered little more than a knowledge of the “three R’s,” and yet talent for teaching the young idea how to shoot was so scant that Allen Burrow, during the decade immediately preceding the late war, was found diversifying the pursuits of tilling the soil with that of teaching a country school. Among his pupils was the unfortunate postmaster of Jewell, Ala., Moses Graves, who was wantonly killed by Rube Burrow in 1889. Many anecdotes are current in Lamar County, illustrating the primitive methods of pedagogy as pursued by Allen Burrow. It is said that the elder Graves, who had several sons as pupils, withdrew the hopeful scions of the Graves household from the school for the reason that after six months’ tuition, he having incidentally enrolled the whole contingent in a spelling bee, they all insisted on spelling every monosyllable ending with a consonant by adding an extra one, as d-o-g-g, dog; b-u-g-g, bug.
Allen Burrow served awhile in Roddy’s cavalry during the civil war, but his career as a soldier was brief and not marked by any incident worthy of note. Soon after the close of the war he made some reputation as a “moonshiner,” and was indicted about 1876 for illicit distilling. He fled the country in consequence, but after an absence of two years he returned and made some compromise with the Government, since which time he has quietly lived in Lamar County. While possessed of some shrewdness, he is a typical backwoodsman, with the characteristic drawling voice and quaint vernacular peculiar to his class. Martha Terry, the wife of Allen Burrow, claims to be possessed of the peculiar and hereditary gift of curing, by some strange and mysterious agency, many of the ills to which flesh is heir, and had she lived in the days of Cotton Mather she might have fallen a victim to fire and fagot, with which witchcraft in that day and time was punished. There are many sensible and wholly unsuperstitious persons in northern Alabama, where old Mrs. Burrow is well known, who believe in her occult powers of curing cancers, warts, tumors and kindred ailments, by the art of sorcery. Capt. J. E. Pennington, a prominent citizen, and the present tax collector of Lamar County, tells of two instances in his own family in which Dame Burrow removed tumors by simple incantation. The witch’s caldron “boils and bubbles” on the hearthstone of the Burrow home, and whether the dark and fetid mixture contain
“Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog;
Adder’s fork and blind worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing,”
or what not, many good but credulous people come from far and near to invoke the charm of her occult mummery, despite the fact that our latter-day civilization has long since closed its eyes and ears to the arts of sorcery and witchcraft. Here, amid the environments of ignorance and superstition, evils resulting more from the inherent infirmities of the rugged pioneer and his wife than the adversities of fortune, the family of ten children was reared. It is from such strong and rugged natures, uneducated and untrained in the school of right and honesty, that comes the material of which train robbers are made.
CHAPTER II.
RUBE LEAVES LAMAR COUNTY, ALABAMA—HIS EARLY LIFE IN THE LONE STAR STATE—HIS BROTHER JIM JOINS HIM—THE BELLEVUE, GORDON AND BEN BROOK, TEXAS, TRAIN ROBBERIES.
Rube Burrow’s old companions in Alabama recall distinctly the day he left Lamar County for Texas in the autumn of 1872. He left the old and familiar scenes of his boyhood, full of hope and eager to test the possibilities that Texas, then the Eldorado of the southern emigrant, opened up to him. He was but eighteen years of age when he took up his abode with his uncle, Joel Burrow, a very worthy and upright man, who owned and tilled a small farm in Erath County, that State. In 1876 Rube was joined by Jim Burrow, his younger brother, who remained in Texas until 1880, when, returning to Lamar County, Alabama, he married and resided there until 1884, when he rejoined his brother Rube in Texas, taking his wife thither. Jim Burrow was a “burly, roaring, roistering blade,” six feet tall, as straight as an Indian, which race of people he very closely resembled, with his beardless face, his high cheek bones and coal-black hair. He was in every way fitted for following the fortunes of Rube, and had he not succumbed to the unhappy fate of imprisonment and early death he would have been a formidable rival of his brother Rube in the events that marked his subsequent career.