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. Rube worked awhile on his uncle’s farm, but soon drifted into that nondescript character known as a Texas cowboy. Meantime, in 1876, he married Miss Virginia Alvison, in Wise County, Texas, and from this marriage two children were born, who are now with their grandparents in Alabama, the elder being a boy of twelve years. This wife died in 1880, and he again married in 1884 a Miss Adeline Hoover, of Erath County, Texas. These events served to restrain his natural inclinations for excitement and adventure, and it may be truthfully said that from 1872 to 1886 Rube Burrow transgressed the law only to the extent of herding unbranded cattle and marking them as his own. In this pursuit he traversed the plains of Texas, enjoying with an excess of keen delight a companionship of kindred spirits, whose homes were in the saddle, and who found their only shelter by day and by night under the same kindly skies. As he grew to manhood he had given full bent to his love for the athletic pursuits incident to life upon the then sparsely settled plains of the Lone Star State. Taming the unbridled broncho, shooting the antelope, and lassoing the wild steer, under whip and spur, he soon gained fame as an equestrian, and was reckoned as the most unerring marksman in all the adjacent country. With a reputation for all these accomplishments, strengthened by an innate capacity for leadership, Rube ere long gathered about him a band of trusty comrades, of which he was easily the leader.