What about Miss Jessie’s sporting house? The historical record confirms that Miss Josie Bennet operated her sporting house, a three story brick structure, at the corner of Washington and Orman’s Alley until it burned in 1893, just as Harley discovered. While it was rebuilt and served as a female boarding house thereafter, Miss Jessie Rose’s name is missing from any record of its operation. Curiously, the Bawdy House Register for 1894, now in the archives of the Texas Collection at Baylor University, fails to record her thriving business. Photographs taken in the early 1900’s provide conclusive proof to doubting readers that such a place as Miss Jessie’s existed.
The Waco Evening News of April 16, 1894 proves that Georgia evangelist Sam Jones preached a powerful sermon to the five-thousand in attendance at the Tabernacle and uttered most of the words attributed to him by Catfish and Brann, including these: “If you can block off a place, call it a Reservation, and license licentiousness, why don’t you reserve a few blocks where a man can commit murder and go unpunished?”
Baylor University still proudly graduates thousands of young men and women. The campus building known in 1894 as the main building, where President Rufus Burleson met Catfish, Jasper, and Henry Sweet, is now known as Old Main, and Burleson’s statue still stands out front. Baylor’s law school, the first in Texas, counts among its graduates Cicero Jenkins (Class of 1860) as well as such notables as Charles E. Travis (Class of 1860), son of William Barret Travis; Temple Houston (Class of 1878), son of Sam Houston; and Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworksi (Class of 1925). It counts among its professors John Sayles, who taught Cicero Jenkins. Though this student’s name is somehow missing from Baylor records, Sayles also taught Catfish how to try cases. About one-hundred sixty years later at this writing, Catfish’s chronicler still teaches law students there to try cases as Baylor lawyers.
Oakwood Cemetery guards the memory of scores of the people mentioned in this book. Some tombstones, especially Brann’s, bear witness to their stories. One may still find the Confederate memorial and Cicero Jenkins’ grave, where Catfish gathered the inspiration for his closing argument. The markers for the Calloway family, all seven who died in Waco, have sadly vanished.
In the new courthouse, erected in 1901 on Washington Avenue to replace the old, noisy one, Catfish, Harley, and Miss Peach represented clients. There, in the Justice of the Peace Court, Catfish’s chronicler tried his first jury case. Today one may still hear lawyers beseech judges or juries to hear the other side. Audi alteram partem. As long as it is so, the rule of law is safe.
