Alva Review-Courier -

After the American Civil War, John Shirley sold his war ravaged business in Carthage, Missouri, and purchased an 800-acre ranch southeast of Dallas, Texas. In Missouri before the war, he had been a true southern gentleman, refined and well educated.

But after moving his family to Texas, it wasn’t long before former southern friends and associates who had been soldiers and guerrillas for the South started showing up on the Shirley ranch seeking a place to stay. Several of the drifters stayed indefinitely at the Shirley ranch, and the added expense of furnishing additional food and sleeping quar...