DUANE
Duane's take
The official marker's got the story, and here's my telling of it. Now, I want you to picture Waco, Texas, November the nineteenth, eighteen ninety-seven. The air is already thick with a grudge that's been building, the kind that starts with ink and ends with iron.
James W. Harris, editor of Waco's Time-Herald, born in eighteen sixty-three, had himself a dispute with Judge George Bruce Gerald — born way back in eighteen thirty-six, a man who'd been around long enough to know better. The argument was over an article the Judge had written.
What kind of article, you ask? One that supported William Cowper Brann's controversial magazine, The Iconoclast — a publication that had made itself famous, or maybe infamous, for denouncing, among other things, Baptists and Baylor University. You can imagine that didn't sit quiet in a town like Waco.
So Harris and Gerald argued. And then, well, they stopped arguing with words. They had a fist fight.
Harris won that one. Now here's where a smarter man might've let it lie. But Judge Gerald was not in a lettin'-it-lie mood.
He printed up a handbill — distributed it around town — branding James W. Harris, in plain black and white, as, quote, a liar, coward and cur. And if that wasn't enough, he challenged Harris to a duel.
Harris didn't face it alone. He and his brother met Judge Gerald near this very intersection. What happened next was a pistol battle, short and final.
Both of the Harris brothers were killed. The Judge was wounded. James W.
Harris, born eighteen sixty-three, died on that November day in eighteen ninety-seven. And Judge George Bruce Gerald? He recovered from his wound, went right on living until nineteen fourteen, and — here's the detail that'll either impress you or unsettle you depending on your disposition — Judge Gerald won reelection in nineteen hundred.
Waco had heard the whole story, and it voted anyway. That intersection right there carries all of it — the handbill, the pistols, and the particular Texas calculus of what a town decides to forgive.
What the marker says
(November 19, 1897) James W. Harris (1863-1897), editor of Waco's "Time -Herald" and Judge George Bruce Gerald (1836-1914) argued over an article the Judge wrote. It supported William Cowper Brann's controversial magazine, "The Iconoclast", which denounced, among other things, Baptists and Baylor University. After a fist fight which Harris won, the Judge distributed a handbill branding Harris "a liar, coward and cur" and challenged him to a duel. Harris and his brother met Judge Gerald near this intersection in a pistol battle. The Harrises were killed and the Judge wounded. Judge Gerald won reelection in 1900.