Reuben Brown asks for the court's assistance in collecting a gambling debt owed to him by Pleasant D. McNeel resulting from a wager in a one-mile horse race won by Brown's horse in April 1851 at Quintana, a Brazoria County town at the mouth of the Brazos River. Brown explains that he staked his slave Jeff while McNeel risked Gabriel, a "Negro man of yellow complexion about forty five years." The losing party agreed to surrender his slave "on demand" or pay his slave's value of one thousand dollars to the winner at the end of the race. Brown submits that McNeel has neither turned over Gabriel nor paid the thousand dollars and the slave's "reasonable hire," which he values at $30 per month.
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Repository: Brazoria County Courthouse, Angleton, Texas
