DORA HUNTSMAN BROOKS was born February 28, 1862 in Emerson, Iowa. to William Huntsman and his wife, Almira Wirick. She married William Brooks on March 31, 1904, in Plattsmouth, Cass, Nebraska. They lived in Mills, Iowa, in 1905 and Seldovia Recording District - No. 26, Third Judicial District, Alaska Territory, United States in 1940.
The story of Dora’s husband William’s last day, October 30, 1924, is recounted in a two-part story, written by Clark Fair and published in the Kenai Alaska “Peninsula Clarion” in May 2022.
Details of William Brooks’s early life are scarce. According to the Anchorage Daily Times, he was a “Kentuckian,” but the few census records in which he appears indicate an Ohio birth in about 1872. He moved to Emerson, Mills County, Iowa, by at least the early 1900s and met Dora, who was 10 years his senior and still unmarried. On March 31, 1904, Dora and William slipped across the state border into Plattsmouth, Nebraska, where they were wed by a judge. Prior to their marriage, Dora had been living with her elderly father, William Huntsman, who had been widowed since 1880, when Dora was 19. Dora also had two younger siblings and may have been helping to care for them after her mother died.
By 1910, the Brookses were residents of Bonners Ferry, Idaho, just south of the Canadian border, but they may have lived briefly in South Dakota before that. In 1907, a man named William Brooks — a homesteader who “recently arrived in South Dakota from Iowa,” according to the Sisseton Weekly Standard — was arrested for illegally harvesting timber on the Cheyenne Indian Reservation.
The next move for William and Dora appears to have been to Alaska. By 1918, they were in Ketchikan, where William worked as a fisherman. He had a commercial permit for the Kasaan District and purchased an 8-ton fishing vessel called the Hiawatha at this time.
In March 1921, the Brookses were on the move again. The Anchorage Daily Times reported that they had come to Anchorage and expressed an interest in buying a house there and settling down. Regardless of their intentions, however, they didn’t stay long.
Later that same year, the Alaska Daily Empire reported that William Brooks had filed on 80 acres on the north side of Kachemak Bay, and about the same time he and Dora acquired the 35.26-acre Mickie Doyle property along the slough in Seldovia. Likely, success in Seldovia, including a greater ease of access, prompted William to relinquish his claim across the bay.
Meanwhile, Alaska baseball star and World War I veteran James “The Daylight Kid” Hill had become a United States deputy marshal in Seldovia in 1922 and he attempted to “clean up the town.” On Oct. 30, 1924, he and Robert Jacobson, a roustabout at the local jail, were searching for illegal liquor-making equipment on the property of William and Dora Brooks when the Brooks dog bit the marshal. Hill fired numerous shots with his pistol at the fleeing animal, and down at the Brooks home, William picked up a rifle and threatened to go kill the marshal if the marshal had killed his dog.
Robert Jacobson, a roustabout at the Seldovia jail and the only witness to the killing on that Oct. 30, submitted to investigators an affidavit concerning the tragic event. He said that he and Marshal Hill, along with jailer Milo Hurlburt, had headed to the homestead of William Brooks to search for evidence related to the suspicion that Brooks, along with some other men, were running an illegal still.
The 52-year-old Brooks and his wife Dora had acquired the Mickie Doyle homestead — near the current site of the city airport — after Doyle and his wife moved out of state. Their property lay across the Seldovia slough from the main part of town.
Near a creek on Brooks’s place, the lawmen encountered a canvas wall tent, with two men standing outside and one man inside. After Hill entered the tent to search, Brooks himself wandered up from his house and approached the scene.
Inside, Hill discovered a hydrometer used for testing mash, three empty or partly empty barrels, a gallon jug, a pint bottle with some liquor in it, a siphon hose smelling of liquor, and several funnels. The officers placed the three men in and near the tent under arrest, and Marshal Hill ordered Hurlburt to escort the prisoners to the jail while he and Jacobson continued to search the premises.
Before the search resumed, Hill questioned Brooks about his involvement. Brooks became angry and uncooperative; he then turned away and headed home down a woodland trail.
Marshal Hill told Jacobson that they needed to search the surrounding area for the still he assumed must be nearby. He ordered Jacobson to head upstream and search both sides of the creek, while he did the same heading downstream.
They met up again about 30 minutes later, with neither man having found any sign of a still in the heavy brush. They reentered the canvas tent, and, said Jacobson, the marshal picked up a cup and was about to pour himself some water when Brooks’s “little black dog” bit Hill on the hand.
“Jim chased the dog outside and pulled out a [pistol], emptying it at the dog as it ran down the trail” toward the Brooks home. Hill then turned to Jacobson and said, “I think Brooks is in with the bootlegging gang.”
Down at the Brooks house, meanwhile — according to a written affidavit from Dora Brooks — the intensity of the situation escalated quickly. Referring to her husband by his last name, Dora Brooks testified: “Brooks came into the house…. We then heard shots coming from the direction of the tent and heard the dog yelp. Brooks said, ‘If [the marshal] has killed that dog, I will kill him.’ “He went in another room and got his rifle and I told him he had better not go up there,” Dora Brooks continued. “He went out of the house and did not answer me. After he got out of the gate he ran up the road and I heard five or six shots.”
“When I came to the corner of the house,” she said, “there he lay.” William Brooks had put a gun to his own head and committed suicide.
The body of U.S. Deputy Marshal James Hill was found, lying face down, about 275 feet from the tent. He had been shot through the right shoulder, the bullet severing arteries near the heart before exiting from the center of his chest. Investigators determined that Hill had been struck first about 125 feet from the tent, had fallen about 75 feet later, then risen and struggled forward only to fall again a final time.
Despite all its yelping, William Brooks’s dog had not been hit by a single bullet from Marshal Hill’s pistol. In fact, when investigators arrived a couple days later, Claude Shea said the dog “was running about, as lively as ever.”
Brooks’s three bootlegging accomplices, all of whom had been taken to the Seldovia lock-up by jailer Milo Hurlburt, pleaded not guilty at their trial, but a jury determined otherwise. All three were sentenced for Prohibition violations. Hurlburt, the town jailer, was sworn in to replace Hill as deputy marshal.
From Night Falls on the Daylight Kid by Clark Fair, Peninsula Clarion May 7, 2022 and May 1, 2022
Dora Brooks, in 1927, received patent to her homestead and lived there until her death, at about age 83, in 1944. She is buried in the Seldovia City Cemetery in Plot #177.