DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Brann-Davis Shootings in McLennan County. Now settle in, because Waco in the 1890s was not a quiet town. Not even close.
The city had split itself clean down the middle — two armed camps, neighbors eyeing neighbors — and the man who lit that particular fuse was William Cowper Brann. Born in 1855, died in 1898, and in between those two years he made more enemies per paragraph than most men manage in a lifetime. Brann ran a magazine called The Iconoclast, and the name tells you everything you need to know about his intentions.
He was a gifted writer, the marker says so plainly, and he used every bit of that gift to attack. Baptists felt it. Baylor University felt it especially.
His words were caustic — that's the marker's own word, caustic — and in 1890s Texas, caustic words had a way of finding their way to the end of a barrel. The tension had already drawn blood once before. In 1897, right in this part of Waco, a controversy sparked a duel between Judge George Bruce Gerald and James W.
Harris. That fight hadn't settled anything. If anything, it seasoned the ground for what came next.
A Baylor partisan named Tom E. Davis met Brann here — within a half block of that earlier fight, the marker is precise about that — and Davis shot him with a Colt .45 revolver. Now Brann was a writer, not a soldier, but he returned the fire.
Both men went down. And both men died the following day from their wounds. Two men, one street, one half block from a duel that had already happened, and both of them gone before the next sundown.
Waco's two armed camps didn't settle things with a debate. They settled things the only way that kind of tension ever really settles — and even then, it didn't feel settled at all.
What the marker says
The city of Waco in the 1890s divided into two armed camps over the caustic criticisms of William Cowper Brann (1855-1898) in his magazine, "The Iconoclast". A gifted writer, Brann attacked many organizations, especially Baptists and Baylor University. This controversy sparked a duel in 1897 between Judge George Bruce Gerald and James W. Harris. A Baylor partisan, Tom E. Davis, met Brann here, within a half block of the earlier fight, and shot him with a Colt .45 revolver. Brann returned the fire. Both men died the following day from their wounds.