CONTENTS
Map of Texas, 1836
Map of the Battle of San Jacinto
Prologue
1 Ranger Life
2 Seeds of Rebellion
3 “Come and Take It”
4 “The Day Was Soon Ours”
5 The Raven
6 Revolutionary Rangers
7 “You May All Go to Hell and I Will Go to Texas”
8 “I Shall Never Surrender or Retreat”
9 The Fall of the Alamo
10 Fannin’s Battle at Coleto Creek
11 “Damned Anxious to Fight”
12 The Fork in the Road
13 “Daring Chivalry”: The First Duel
Illustrations
14 Slaughter at San Jacinto
15 Texas Rising
16 New Challenges for a New Nation
17 Lamar’s Cherokee War of Extinction
18 War with the Comanches
19 Captain Devil Jack
20 Triumph at Walker’s Creek
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Also by Stephen L. Moore
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Battle of San Jacinto
Gary Zaboly, illustrator, from Texian Iliad: A Military History of the Texas Revolution, courtesy of Stephen L. Hardin
PROLOGUE
STEPHEN SPARKS COCKED THE hammer on his rifle as he moved stealthily forward.
The seventeen-year-old had left his schooling months earlier to join an uprising that had consumed his homeland. Sparks’s Irish great-grandfather had perished in the Revolutionary War when America secured its independence from Great Britain. Now young Stephen Franklin Sparks was participating in his own war of rebellion—the efforts of Texas settlers (known as Texans or Texians) to secure their freedom from the reign of Mexico and its tyrannical leader, General Santa Anna.
It was just after 4 P.M. on April 21, 1836, and the moment of truth was at hand. Sparks and a little more than nine hundred Texians and tejanos (Hispanic residents of Texas) were advancing on the campground of the formidable Mexican Army. The Texans had endured six weeks of great hardships, mostly retreating before another army that had everything they did not: true uniforms, government-issued weapons, formalized training, and superior numbers.
But revolutionaries like Sparks possessed a unifying desire for vengeance that could scarcely be contained. The Mexican Army in recent weeks had overrun and slaughtered all the defenders of the Alamo presidio in San Antonio and had proceeded to capture more than four hundred Texans near Goliad. Instead of holding these men prisoner until the raging Texas Revolution could be decided, Santa Anna had ordered them marched out from the fort to be shot down like wild dogs.
The self-equipped and largely non-uniformed Texas Army was led into battle on April 21 by General Sam Houston. This hard-drinking and quick-tempered officer was more prone to foul language and long marches away from the enemy than he was to instilling any confidence in his troops. Houston had been unable to contain the bloodthirsty desires of many under his command. Colonel Sidney Sherman, the fiery Kentuckian who now led a regiment of infantry, had very nearly stirred up a full-scale battle the previous afternoon—in defiance of Houston’s orders. At the head of the Texas cavalry was a valiant Georgia poet named Mirabeau Lamar. A day ago, Colonel Lamar was a mere buck private but he knew how to work a crowd to make his wishes known. This afternoon, he held senior command of more than five dozen of the ablest gunslingers and scouts who had ever graced the wild frontiers of Texas.
Captain Juan Seguín, commander of a company of tejanos who had been performing mounted frontier defense duty in Texas for generations, was equally driven for revenge. His Mexican Texans wore playing cards in their hats and sombreros to help prevent them from being mistaken as enemy Mexican soldiers by their fellow Texians. Noble scout Deaf Smith, the cavalryman considered to be the eyes of the army, raced across the plains to announce that his men had successfully destroyed the only bridge over the nearby bayou. No more Mexican troops would be able to join the fight. Conversely, there would be no quick escape from the battlefield for either army’s combatants. The stage was set.
Stephen Sparks noted an odd quiet over the Mexican Army’s campground as his company advanced. He would be stunned to soon learn that many of the enemy’s soldados were taking siestas, recovering from a forced overnight march. Other infantrymen lounged about, munching tortillas, while the cavalry had turned their horses loose to graze. Even General Santa Anna showed little concern for his guard detail. He was last seen retiring to his command tent in company with a beautiful captured mulatto servant girl.
Sparks’s infantry company pushed through waist-high coastal prairie grass that helped conceal their advancement. They eased into a little thicket of moss-draped live oaks, striding silently but quickly forward. Their captain had ordered the men to hold their fire until they could see the whites of their enemies’ eyes. Three hundred yards from the Mexican Army camp, they approached a gulley. In plain view beyond it was a tightly packed defensive breastworks, built by Mexican soldiers with crates, saddles, and brush to afford them some protection.
Colonel Sherman turned toward his Second Regiment of Infantry and barked the long-awaited order: “Charge!”
Sparks dashed toward the mounded barrier. Beyond it, stunned soldiers were leaping to their feet. He raised his Kentucky rifle, and touched his trigger. Flames and sparks erupted from the barrel and flintlock pan with a healthy roar and a swift kick to his shoulder. Only one other man of the Texan army had gotten off a shot ahead of him. Stephen grabbed his powder horn and ramrod to prepare his next shot, and snatched another molded lead ball from his shot pouch.
In the twenty seconds it took him to prime his weapon to fire another round, the world around him had erupted into chaos. Acrid black smoke climbed above the mossy trees. A cacophony of screams, shouts, curses, and the rippling cracks of black powder muskets, rifles, and pistols filled the air. To the right, the throaty roar of cannon fire shook the earth as the artillery came into play. All hell had broken loose. There would be no quarter.
“Remember Goliad!” shouted one Texian.
Another hoarse voice bellowed, “Remember the Alamo!”
Ramón Caro, personal assistant to General Santa Anna, found that his army had been taken by “complete surprise. The rest of the engagement developed with lightning rapidity.”
The intense action erupting near the banks of the San Jacinto River, too close for the proper reloading of rifles and muskets, turned to hand-to-hand combat in many cases. To the victor would go proper claim to the newly proclaimed Republic of Texas.
Victory or death was the only order of the day.
1
RANGER LIFE
THIS WAS NOT WHAT George Erath had signed up for.
Since childhood, the twenty-two-year-old had dreamed of participating in a real military campaign. He had once marveled at the spectacle of passing masses of soldiers, properly uniformed and equipped with the finest firearms, trailing behind powerful cannons as they marched in step with martial music. He fancied it as “military glory”—regular meals, steady pay, and the enterprising life of an army on a dangerous expedition against a treacherous opponent. Erath’s first opportunity to partake in such an armed expedition was playing out in late July 1835 at a frontier fortification in the eastern extremes of the Mexican territory called Texas.
The scene was less than majestic. Erath and his fellow men wore no formal uniforms with glittering epaulets and shiny brass buttons with gilded finish. They were instead adorned with primitive frontiersmen garb—homespun cotton shirts, buckskin pants, moc
casins, and caps made from the furs of various mammals. His company had no imposing iron cannon nor had they been issued the latest quality percussion cap musket rifles. Each man carried his own hunting knife, long rifle or flintlock musket, smaller-caliber belt pistol, and shot pouch filled with molded lead musket balls.
Erath’s company was not regular army but instead composed entirely of volunteer rangers. Such units operated in the fashion of early English colonial rangers, groups of self-armed men who served for short periods of time with no formal attachment to any organized military command. His company had been hurriedly assembled two weeks earlier in response to a call to help defend the frontier against Indian depredations. When Erath’s company and three other volunteer units moved out, they had not marched in disciplined, picturesque columns. They instead rode some eighty miles north toward a remote frontier fort on their own farm horses or mules or on steeds borrowed from neighbors. There were but few promises that had enticed most to join the campaign: adventure, revenge against marauding foes deemed to be “savages,” and healthy wages.
Erath and his fellow volunteers had been offered $1.25 per day served. He did not think to question whether anyone truly had the bankroll to compensate him for time served. The promised per diem was more than twice what the young man had been earning per month as a common laborer in the Mexican-ruled territory of Texas. The frontier on which he served was part of the Mexican state called Coahuila y Tejas (Coahuila and Texas)—one of the nineteen states and four territories that had been formed fourteen years earlier when the republic of Mexico fought for and won its independence from Spain in 1821.
Militia companies had operated in Texas since the first Anglo colonists had begun to settle but longer-term ranger companies had rarely served in Coahuila y Tejas. Erath was actually participating in the first-ever organized battalion of Texas Rangers to go on campaign against the Indians. None of the volunteer gunmen of his company—farmers, merchants, land speculators, men from all walks of life—were native to this region. All had been born in the United States or overseas. The company commander, Captain George Washington Barnett, was a forty-one-year-old doctor who had moved his practice from Tennessee to Texas only a year before. Twenty-eight-year-old First Lieutenant William Warner Hill, who made his living trading horses and mules, had only been in Texas for seven months. Private Isham G. Belcher, originally from Missouri, had settled ten years earlier, making him one of the oldest “Texians” of the unit.
Such was the mixed bag of settlers serving with Private Erath on the first of August 1835 when they rode into the little stockade and blockhouse fort recently constructed by the Parker family. Brothers James and Silas Parker had overseen the project and their results were impressive. The four-acre complex was surrounded by twelve-foot-high log walls, with the tops hewn to sharp points. On two corners, wooden blockhouses were built both as lookout posts and as bastions for firing upon attacking Indians. Six tiny cabins were attached to the inside walls of the fort. Each cramped cabin had a fireplace, a bed, a homemade meal table, and bare dirt floors. Thousands of acres of fertile croplands sprawled in the prairies surrounding Fort Parker. Their land lay in Robertson’s Colony, and three of the married men—James Parker, Silas Parker, and their brother-in-law, Luther Thomas Martin Plummer—had each received a league and labor of land, amounting to forty-six hundred acres. They built the fort near present Groesbeck near the headwaters of the Navasota River.1
George Erath noted the recuperating members of the volunteer ranger company of Captain Robert Morris Coleman, who had been at the Parker compound for several weeks. The young children of the outpost had become accustomed to the sights, sounds, and smells of dirty, rugged frontiersmen who now used the family’s settlement as their temporary staging area. Nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker scurried about, trying to keep her younger siblings John, Silas Jr., and Orlena out of the way of the rangers. Tragedy had already fallen on her brother James, who was killed en route to Texas when the family’s wagon lost a wheel and he was impaled through the chest by splintered wood. Erath was more captivated by his first sight of victims of Indian attack—three members of Coleman’s company whose arrow and musket ball wounds were still being tended to by the Parker family.
It was a strange and deadly new world—being called forth on expedition against Indians—for George Bernard Erath. He had been born on January 1, 1813, in Vienna, Austria. His father, a tanner by trade, wanted more for his son than to be a hidesman. George studied both English and Spanish in his early school years, languages that he hoped would serve him well if he was to carry out his early dream of sailing to America one day. Erath had little desire to be pressed into the Austrian army for a lengthy service period. The Eraths had friends of influence who helped smuggle young George into the Polytechnic Institute at age twelve, two years before legal enrollment could occur.2
Erath managed only two years at the university before his father died, leaving him to return to help work with his mother and younger sisters to maintain the family business. His mother sent him to live with his uncle Jacob Erath in Rottenburg, Germany. His uncle died in April 1831, and with the help of relatives, he worked out his passage to America in 1832. He sailed on a U.S. brig bound for New Orleans. It was a perilous voyage plagued with a cholera epidemic and a hurricane that turned the seas into towering mountains. “The ship was dismantled to her lower joints, and the rigging, falling overboard on the leeward side, dragged the ship nearly on her side,” recalled Erath.3
He arrived in New Orleans on June 22, 1832. Erath traveled via riverboat to Cincinnati in search of employment and was there forced to return to his hated family profession of tanning, making seventy-five cents per day. He worked long enough to save the money needed to reach Florence, Alabama, where he went to work for another tanner he had met in New Orleans. His pay was better and he liked Alabama but Erath had no intention of making a career out of tanning animal hides to produce leather. “By this time I had heard much of Texas, a land barely known in Europe,” he wrote.4
He made his way to New Orleans in 1833 and secured passage on the schooner Sabine to Texas. He arrived at Velasco and then sailed on up the Brazos River. Erath moved toward Cole’s Settlement, the highest settlement of any note on the Brazos, with the family of John W. Porter. When he arrived at the little settlement of Tenoxtitlan, only about a half dozen Mexican families occupied the area, along with another half dozen American families. Porter’s family settled on a stream crossing the San Antonio Road, and Erath helped them build pens and shelters at their new place.
During the fall of 1834, Erath went to work for an elderly surveyor named Alexander Thomson. He was to be the chain carrier as they surveyed into leagues a section of the country twenty-file miles square, west of the Brazos and north of the San Antonio Road. Surveying work was scarce during the winter so Erath earned income on Thomson’s farm at the rate of seventeen dollars a month. He also located his own headright of one-quarter league of land from the Mexican government. On July 20, 1835, he gathered with sixteen other men in the town of Tenoxtitlan in Robertson’s Colony and enrolled in the volunteer ranging company of Captain George Barnett.5
Their mission: to ride into Indian territory and help chastise a band of Indians who had recently fought a battle with another frontier company.
THE VOLUNTEERS AT PARKER’S Fort needed a leader.
Five ad hoc companies had rendezvoused by August 5, and there were even more opinions among the assembled farm boys, merchants, lawyers, and entrepreneurs as to who should properly lead their expedition. In the true spirit of rangers, a popular vote was cast and the men elected Colonel John Henry Moore into command. The thirty-five-year-old farmer and stock raiser from Tennessee had been among the Old Three Hundred original settlers of Texas. Moore made his home on the Colorado River, laying out the town of La Grange in 1831, where he owned a twin blockhouse known as Moore’s Fort. He was a natural leader of men who had made a previous expedition against Huaco (Waco) and Tawakoni In
dians on the upper Brazos River the previous year.
Moore turned command of his company over to a twenty-seven-year-old Michigan native, Captain Michael R. Goheen. The other three most recent ranging companies to reach Fort Parker were those of Captains Barnett, Philip Haddox Coe, and Robert McAlpin Williamson. Captain Coe, thirty-five, had been born in Georgia and later moved to Texas in 1831 from Alabama. Captain Williamson, known as “Three-Legged Willie,” was a feisty lawyer and former editor of one of the first newspapers in Texas. He had been crippled by a bone infection known as white swelling at age fifteen that left his right leg drawn back at the knee and forced him to be fitted with a wooden leg from the knee to the ground. Known to friends simply as “Willie,” Williamson was able to ride and fight with the ablest of men.
The fifth company gathered at Parker’s Fort was commanded by the man who was the source of all the commotion, Captain Robert Coleman. The War of 1812 veteran had campaigned against the Indians during the past two months and was bloodthirsty for more action. The thirty-eight-year-old lawyer originally from Christian County, Kentucky, was known as a skilled horseman and marksman. Coleman had moved for a time to Alabama, married Elizabeth Bounds, and began raising his family. He returned to Kentucky in 1825 and began farming cotton. The following year, he listened to a stranger named Sterling Robertson, who had traveled from Texas with promises of a new life in a vast new territory.
Robertson said that he was recruiting settlers for his new colony, where each head of a farming family would receive 177 acres of rich bottomland and 4,428 acres of pastureland for their stock. The new residents were exempt from taxes, and the land was abundant with wild game, fruits, and a relatively mild climate. Coleman was likely interested in the pitch to settle in Texas, but another five years would pass before he made his move. During that time, he lost both his mother and his youngest daughter, Caroline, who passed away in 1830. Robert and Elizabeth Coleman arrived in Texas in May 1831 with their four surviving children and settled near the town of Mina (later renamed Bastrop). They established a homestead on the east side of the Colorado River, a mile or two from the river, on what was known as Webber’s Prairie. Robert Coleman was well respected by his peers, and he became the first alcalde, or mayor, of Mina in 1834. The biggest trouble in the early days of his community was the occasional depredations carried out by various raiding Indian parties.6
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