By the time this broadside appeared in New Orleans, potential recruits to the Texas cause were aware that the Alamo had fallen. But there was still time to fight and, if victorious, acquire “a fortune in land.”
AFTERMATH
IN 1955, I WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD AND LIVING IN THE mid-size West Texas city of Abilene. That spring, I saw a movie called Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier when it came to the Paramount Theater downtown. The movie had begun life the year before as a three-part serial on the ABC series Disneyland. We only had one TV station in Abilene, and it didn’t show ABC programs, so I was unaware of the Davy Crockett madness that had overtaken the country until I walked into the theater one Saturday afternoon and became one of millions of kids to be jolted alert by the movie’s insanely catchy theme song, bewitched by its buckskin-clad hero, and haunted by his unfathomable death at the Alamo. The experience made such a deep impression on me that when I happened to be in Abilene recently and walked into the still-extant Paramount Theater, I was able to identify the seat I had sat in sixty years earlier.
I bring this up because after reading over the last several chapters, I see that like many other writers before me I have been seduced again, now as an adult, by the high drama of the Texas Revolution. It’s almost impossible for someone who grew up white in the Anglo-dominated Texas of the mid-twentieth century to put aside the idea of the revolution as being not just a crucial historical event but also a creation story, even the fulfillment of some sort of unstated prophecy. Viewed through that lens, the victory at San Jacinto reduced everything that preceded it—the years of contentious Mexican rule, the centuries of Indian adaptation to Spanish ambitions, the mysterious millennia of prehistory—to a birth struggle. The Texas that was destined to be had finally emerged. The binary fight between Texians (now known as Texans) and Mexicans was over and won. But the fight was never just between Texans and Mexicans. It was between centralists and federalists, between big-time speculators and small-scale homesteaders, between established colonists with everything to lose and rootless volunteers with sudden fortunes to make, between those Indian nations whose influence was on the rise and those who were on the rocks, between rival Masonic lodges, and between pragmatic philosophers with starkly different opinions about who was a human being and who was not.
By the time this broadside appeared in New Orleans, potential recruits to the Texas cause were aware that the Alamo had fallen. But there was still time to fight and, if victorious, acquire “a fortune in land.”
And for many of these people, the outcome at San Jacinto was not a concluding triumph or the clear dawning of a new age—it was just something else to adjust to or exploit. For the members of a Comanche band known as the Nokonis (“Wanderers”), the chaos of 1836 presented new opportunities to expand their range and improve their fortunes. Sam Houston had been much concerned about having to fight the Comanches as well as the Mexican Army during the revolution, but no such alliance ever developed. For years, though, Anglo settlers had regarded the growing reach of the Comanches with existential alarm. “Every last one of us,” their 1832 petition for separate statehood within Mexico declared, “is probably threatened with total extermination by the new Comanche uprising.”
But in reality, there was probably as much trading as fighting going on between the Texians and the Comanches. The new arrivals from the United States had access to goods—including weapons—from American markets. The Comanches in turn had horses and mules to barter, many of them taken in raids against settlements and ranchos on the other side of the Colorado, in the Old World parts of Mexican Texas, where the conflict between Comanches and Tejanos had been very bitter for a very long time. But now the Comanches were probing east, toward the isolated homesteads of men and women who were pushing the boundaries of American expansion into Texas.
* * *
IN MAY 1836, JUST A FEW DAYS SHORT OF A MONTH AFTER THE Battle of San Jacinto, a Nokoni raiding party approached an imposing, solitary structure rising from the prairie grasslands along the middle stretch of the Navasota River. The structure was a fort, built by the family labor of its inhabitants. The Parker clan had arrived from Illinois in 1833—five brothers, their wives, in-laws, and children. One of them, Daniel Parker, was a fervent preacher, the founder of the Pilgrim Predestination Regular Baptist Church, and a man who made it his business to distance himself from anything that “should bring reproach on the tender cause of God.” But he was also a man of affairs, a former state assemblyman in Illinois, and more recently a member of the Consultation and of the Texas provisional government during the revolution. He was rooted enough in society to stay behind when his younger brothers decided to range far beyond the safety of the townships and build their farms and their fort at the edge of the Cross Timbers, the immense belt of sandy-soiled gnarly oak forests that stands between the savannas and piney woods of East Texas and the open plains to the west.
About forty people lived in cabins within the timber stockade of Fort Parker. It was protected by two-story blockhouses with shooting ports and a formidable front gate. The Parkers, like many others, had been caught up in the Runaway Scrape. They had been stranded on the west side of the flooded Trinity when word came that Houston’s army had defeated Santa Anna and it was safe to come home. They had gratefully returned in time for corn-planting season. Most of the men were outside the walls, working in the fields, when the Comanches came.
There were at least a hundred of them. One of the members of the party, maybe its leader, was a young warrior named Peta Nocona. They came carrying a white flag and pretended that they just wanted a cow. One of the Parker brothers, forty-eight-year-old Benjamin, decided that he had no choice but to walk out of the fort and talk to them. While Rachel Plummer, Benjamin’s niece, watched in terror, the Indians killed him with their lances, scalped him, and then stormed into the fort and killed and mutilated the rest of the men there. Rachel’s grandmother was lanced through the chest, stripped of her clothes, raped, and left for dead. She somehow survived. Rachel tried to escape through a low door in the back of the fort with her eighteen-month-old son, but as she wrote in a memoir: “A large sulky looking Indian picked up a hoe and knocked me down. I well recollect of their taking my child out of my arms, but whether they hit me any more I do not know, for I swooned away.”
The Comanches ransacked the fort and searched the surrounding countryside for the men and women and children who had managed to flee. They killed five people in all and rounded up five captives, including Rachel and her son. The last time she saw the boy was a few days later, during the Indians’ escape back to the heart of Comanchería. The Comanches kept him away from her, but she could hear his screams and that of the other captives as they were beaten. She was beaten repeatedly herself, and raped, and forced to watch her relatives’ scalps being paraded in front of her eyes. Finally, the Indians brought Rachel’s son so that she could nurse him, but when they discovered he had already been weaned they took him away again. “He reached out his hands toward me, which were covered with blood,” she wrote, “and cried, ‘Mother, Mother, oh, Mother!’ I looked after him as he was borne away from me, and I sobbed aloud. This was the last I ever heard of my little Pratt. Where he is, I know not.”
She was pregnant at the time with another child, who would be born a few months later and strangled in front of her eyes. But Rachel Plummer would live a while longer. She would be ransomed a year or so later by a group of comancheros, native-born New Mexicans who were in the trading business with the Comanches. She would be reunited with her father, who survived the attack on Fort Parker and led seventeen others to safety through the Navasota bottoms. But she would never be the same, and she predicted, as she wrote the pages of her account, “that before they are published, the hand that penned them will be cold in death.” She was right. Rachel Plummer was twenty years old when she died, after giving birth to yet another child who would not live.
Rachel Plummer’s ordeal was relatively short-lived, a brutal but not uncommon occurrence in another developing Texas war for dominance. It was a war whose borders would continue to expand, whose savagery would continue to escalate, and whose outcome—decades yet into the future—would have a great deal to do with one of the other traumatized captives who was carried away that day by Peta Nocona. She was one of Rachel’s cousins, a ten-year-old girl named Cynthia Ann Parker.
* * *
THE REVOLUTION REARRANGED THE GAME BOARD FOR EVERY Indian group in the region. The Cherokees, along with tribes like the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Delawares, Shawnees, and Kickapoos, were recent arrivals in Texas. For a generation, the Cherokees had been pushed west from their ancestral lands in the southern Appalachians to Missouri, Louisiana, and Arkansas, where Sam Houston lived among them during his Big Drunk period. Since the early 1820s, they had been in Texas in significant numbers, living north of Nacogdoches between the Trinity and Sabine Rivers. Their principal chief was a man named Duwali, called “Bowl” or “Bowles” by the Americans. He was old, in his eighties when Sam Houston visited him on February 23, 1836, the day the siege of the Alamo began. There are no portraits of Chief Bowles, but he was half Scottish, with sandy hair and gray eyes, and “his was an English head.” Assuming he was dressed in traditional Cherokee fashion, he probably wore a red sash around his waist and a turban on his head.
At some point, Houston presented him with a military hat and a sword. That may have been this occasion, since there was much at stake. Houston had come to make a treaty, to keep Bowles and the Cherokees on the Texian side or at least neutral during the hostilities that had erupted. Bowles was receptive to Houston. The Texian general, after all, had lived with the Cherokees and understood them, and the chief’s granddaughter had once made Houston a pair of moccasins. But the Cherokees had recently been visited by emissaries from the Mexican Army as well. Both sides were actively trying to enlist not just the Cherokees, but also the Caddos, Kichais, Wichitas, and other Indian groups of East and Northeast Texas to pitch in against their enemies.
The Cherokees had been trying for years to persuade the Mexican government to give them a grant for the lands they were living on, and Bowles had been loyal to the Mexican Republic, to the point of sitting in judgment during the trial and execution of his fellow Cherokee leader Richard Fields for taking part in the Fredonian Rebellion. He had traveled to Mexico, and had even been made a lieutenant colonel in the Mexican Army. But Mexico never came through with the grant. Houston, on the other hand, was making an offer: if the Cherokees, along with the “associate bands” over which they had influence—the Shawnees, Delawares, Kickapoos, and eight or nine others—promised to remain neutral in the Texas Revolution, they would in return receive a much-reduced but guaranteed swath of the territory they already inhabited. “A firm and lasting peace forever,” the treaty read. Bowles and the other chiefs signed, hoping for the best.
Houston then rode off to fight Santa Anna, but the Cherokees were still much on his mind. At about the time when his men were completely losing faith in his leadership and his will to fight, when his army and all of Anglo Texas was in flight and interim president Burnet was writing to say that his enemy was laughing him to scorn, Houston scribbled a hasty, friendly note to Chief Bowles: “I am busy and will only say how da do, to you!”
* * *
WHEN THE RAID ON PARKER’S FORT TOOK PLACE, SANTA ANNA was still a prisoner of the Texas government, over two hundred miles to the south. He was being held in the town of Velasco, where the Brazos River enters the Gulf and where Austin’s original colonists had first set foot on Texas soil in 1821. The day after his defeat, Santa Anna had sent a letter to General Filisola. “Having yesterday evening had an unfortunate encounter,” he cringingly admitted, “I have resolved to remain as prisoner of war in the hands of the enemy.”
He ordered Filisola and the divisions under General Gaona and General Urrea to withdraw. He knew that he was a bargaining chip and that he was being kept alive only because he had the power to keep the rest of the Mexican Army at bay. The men he had commanded so ingloriously at San Jacinto were either being held prisoner on Galveston or being eaten by wolves where they had fallen on the battlefield. (“To the devil with your ‘glorious history’!” Peggy McCormick is supposed have roared at Houston when she returned to her property and heard him congratulate her on now being the owner of such a sacrosanct spot. “Take off your stinking Mexicans!”)
On May 14, Santa Anna signed a document called the Treaty of Velasco. He did so under cordial duress. Even though the agreement stood no chance of being recognized by his government back in Mexico, it had the practical effect of ending the war and helping safeguard his life from the many soldiers and officers in the Texas army who thought he should have been shot on the spot for the ruthless executions he ordered at the Alamo and at Goliad. The treaty had two parts, a public document ending hostilities and requiring all Mexican troops to retreat beyond the Rio Grande, and a secret side agreement, in which Santa Anna was to be repatriated to Mexico, where he pledged to use whatever influence he had left to bring about, among other things, a formal acknowledgment that Texas was now independent.
Sam Houston was not in Texas when the document was signed. The gunshot wound in his ankle had taken a dangerous turn, and he needed the sort of medical treatment that was available only in New Orleans. He left after a staggering display of pettiness on the part of President Burnet, whose jealousy of Houston throbbed as feverishly as the conquering hero’s wounded ankle. Houston was, Burnet claimed in an intemperate letter to Mary Austin Holley, a coward who had been forced by his men to fight. He was “universally detested,” a “military fop,” notable only for “his miserable imbecility.”
Burnet did his best to keep Houston from leaving Texas, no doubt worried about the ecstatic hero’s welcome he was sure to receive in New Orleans. He first denied him permission to board the Yellow Stone, the only steamship then plying the waters of the new republic. When the Yellow Stone’s captain refused to leave without the wounded hero of San Jacinto, Burnet intervened once again to prevent Houston from sailing from Galveston in any of the Texas Navy’s four ships. Houston booked passage on a schooner instead and disembarked in New Orleans to a frenzy of unambiguous adulation.
Santa Anna also had a rough launch. By the terms of the treaty, he was supposed to be sent home to Mexico. He boarded his ship and bade goodbye to the land pirates who had defeated and captured him, commending them as if they were his dear comrades-in-arms: “I have seen how brave you are in battle, how generous you are in its aftermath. You may count upon my friendship forever . . . please admit this most sincere farewell.”
His sincere farewell turned out to be neither sincere nor a farewell. His ship was surrounded by a mob of newly arrived volunteers who had come to Texas determined, now that the actual war was over, to find somebody to fight—or at least shoot. He was not killed, thanks to the intervention of Burnet, who, despite his enmity for Sam Houston, agreed with him that allowing their trophy captive to be executed would not be just bad manners but also catastrophic policy. “A wild and intractable spirit of revenge is abroad among the people,” he warned. But Burnet and his cabinet—“perhaps the most imbecile body that ever sat judgment on the fate of a nation,” according to one critic—were hard pressed to hold back the tide of vengeance, and for the time being the best that could be done for Santa Anna was simply to keep him alive. In violation of the secret Treaty of Velasco, he was taken off the boat and held in a room at a nearby plantation, where he spent a long summer being taunted and intimidated and dodging assassination attempts while sometimes chained to a heavy lead ball.
The war was not over—it threatened to erupt again at any moment. New volunteers kept pouring into Texas, led by hotspurs who had their eyes set on the old chimera of taking the war to Mexico by conquering Matamoros. Mexico, meanwhile, had no interest in recognizing the Velasco Treaty—whose terms had been violated in any case when Santa Anna was prevented from sailing to Mexico—and every intention of reconquering Texas at the earliest opportunity. But the Republic of Texas was a reality unless it could be overthrown or unless it collapsed into chaos on its own, and the active hostilities had been reduced for now to simmering possibilities.
Nobody had ever done anything about the dead Mexicans on Mrs. McCormick’s property, though for years sightseers picked up the skulls for souvenirs. “A perfect summer scene was presented for contemplation,” recalled a Kentucky gentleman attorney named John Hunter Herndon of his visit to the battlefield, just before noting that he “obtained many sculls.” He later met a local doctor who had picked up a skull that had washed up in Galveston and watched—in no particular horror—as the man drank whisky out of a vessel “that had yet brains in it.” The victors tended to their own dead of the Alamo and of Goliad with much more reverence. Thomas Rusk, who took over command of the army when Houston left for New Orleans, orated over the remains of Fannin and his men, whose bodies had been only haphazardly cremated and whose charred and gnawed-upon bones had been strewn by animals across a wide swath of coastal prairie.
Juan Seguín had been in the Alamo but had been sent out by Travis as a messenger soon after the siege began. He and the twenty members of his Tejano company had fought at San Jacinto. They had been ordered by Houston to affix pieces of white pasteboard to their hats so that the rest of the rebels—particularly the new volunteers, who thought all Mexicans were on the opposite side—could see that they were not part of Santa Anna’s army. Seguín was promoted to lieutenant colonel. While in command in San Antonio, he interred the ashes of the Alamo defenders in a solemn military funeral. “The spirit of liberty,” he told the soldiers and citizens of San Antonio, “appears to be looking out from its elevated throne with its pleasing mien and pointing to us, saying: ‘there are your brothers.’”
And what about Stephen Austin? After six months in the United States with his two fellow commissioners, fund raising and giving speeches from New Orleans to New York, he finally came back to Texas at the end of June. In a portrait painted of him around this time, probably while he was in New Orleans, he looks older than his forty-two years. It is the picture of someone who has been ill for a long time, his face strangely winnowed, his eyes too big. But those eyes, and the ambition in them, still shone feverishly bright.
Burnet’s interim government was scheduled to dissolve after elections were held in September for a permanent government for the Republic of Texas. There were, in the end, three candidates for president: Sam Houston; Henry Smith, who had headed the catastrophically dysfunctional provisional government; and Stephen Austin.
“My labors and exertions to settle this country and promote its welfare are well known,” Austin declared when he announced that he was running. “My object has been the general good, and the permanent liberty and prosperity of Texas. In the pursuit of this object I can say with a clear conscience that I have been honest and sincere in my intentions.“
It was the sober-sided, almost plaintive statement of a man who embodied a time that history had just surged past. Austin was the opposite of a filibustering adventurer. He was a long-game businessman for whom war had been conceivable only when it became inevitable. He was the wrong man for a Texas brimming with triumphalist bravado, and if he didn’t suspect it when he put his name forward for president, he certainly knew it by the time the votes were counted. He lost very badly. Houston beat him ten to one, and even Henry Smith outpolled him by a couple of hundred votes. It wasn’t a mindless rejection—among other liabilities, Austin was tainted by association with his good friend Samuel May Williams, a land agent who had been a key player (along with Jim Bowie) in the notorious Monclova land speculations. But it was still a breathtaking defeat, one that an early settler named James Morgan elegantly summarized. “Sam Houston,” he wrote, “who had been in Texas about three years, received 5119 votes. Henry Smith, who had made such a tragic and dismal failure of his position as provisional governor, and in a sense, had the blood of both Fannin and Travis on his hands polled a total of 743 votes, while Stephen F. Austin, who was even now dying for the Texas he loved so well and had served so long, and made every sacrifice for, mustered the grand total of only 587 votes.”
The Republic of Texas needed a capital where its new president could be sworn in and where its cabinet and congress could meet. Gonzales, San Felipe, and Harrisburg had all been burned to the ground during the Runaway Scrape, and so the seat of government was conferred upon a little clapboard house in the town of Columbia, along the lower reaches of the Brazos River a few miles north of Brazoria.
The house is long gone. The place where Houston stood to take the oath of office is now somewhere in the cold-and-cough aisles of a Walgreens drugstore. But if you want to bring the moment to life, all you have to do is read the words of his inaugural address, through which you can almost experience the president’s lingering amazement.
A spot of earth almost unknown to the geography of the age, destitute of all available resources, comparatively few in numbers, we modestly remonstrated against oppression, and, when invaded by a numerous host, we dared to proclaim our independence and to strike for freedom on the breast of the oppressor. . . . We were hunted down as the felon wolf, our little band driven from fastness to fastness, exasperated to the last extreme; while the blood of our kindred and our friends was invoking the vengeance of an offended God, was smoking to high heaven, we met the enemies and vanquished them.
Houston, standing in boots reinforced to support his wounded ankle, finished his address with a characteristic bit of theatre. He gripped his sword, meaning to symbolically surrender it now that he was the president of Texas and no longer its commander in chief. In doing so, he was dramatically overcome with emotion. “His soul,” wrote an observer, or somebody who claimed to be one, “seemed to have swerved from the hypostatic union of the body, and to dwell momentarily on the glistening blade.”
The new vice president also addressed the assembly. Thirty-eight-year-old Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar had the most presumptuous name in the new republic and the most propulsive résumé. He had relocated himself to Texas from his home state of Georgia after the Alamo had fallen and Houston’s army was retreating from Santa Anna. Lamar had been a newspaper publisher, a state senator, and a failed candidate for the U.S. Congress twice over. In 1830, his twenty-one-year-old wife, Tabitha, died of tuberculosis, and in his grief he exiled himself into the poetic wilderness, writing, among other verses, a poem called “At Evening on the Banks of the Chattahoochee” (“But all the loveliness that played / Around her once, hath fled,” lamented the bereaved poet. “She sleepeth in the valley’s shade, / A dweller with the dead”).
By 1835, Lamar had had enough of dwelling with the dead, and he was ready to head to Texas for all the usual reasons: to make his name, to make his fortune, to recharge his soul. On the afternoon of April 20, the day before the Battle of San Jacinto, he was a private in the Texas army. By the next day, after having saved Thomas Rusk’s life in the skirmish that preceded the main battle, he was promoted to colonel and put in charge of the cavalry that advanced along the army’s right flank. Soon after, he was named secretary of war and then commander in chief. Now, within the span of six months, he had risen from a common soldier in a demoralized and disorganized army to the vice president of a nation.
The poetic sensibilities of Texas president Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar took a back seat to his ruthlessly pragmatic empire building.
Admittedly, it wasn’t much of a nation. It had a capital one step up from a log cabin, along with another borrowed building to accommodate the fourteen members of the Texas Senate. “It made my thoughts fly quick and fast when my mind took in the facts,” Francis Lubbock marveled when he came to Columbia and found the upstart Congress in session. “This is the capital of a republic.” But among the things the capital didn’t have was a place for people to sleep. Lubbock had to camp on the ground beneath a live oak tree—“the lodging place of many.” The government was greatly in need of basic supplies like stationery and record-keeping books. And the fact that it didn’t yet have an official seal or any means of making one meant that the credentials of the ministers whom Houston sent to the United States were not accepted.
The Republic of Texas was also broke. It was over a million dollars in debt. It had wealth in the land it had seized, but no money. The land itself, at least the cultivated parts of it, had been devastated by armies chasing each other across it during the winter and spring of 1836. Juan Seguín’s experience was typical. “There was not one of them,” he wrote of the families that he escorted back to San Antonio, “who did not lament the loss of a relative and, to crown their misfortunes, they found their houses in ruins, their fields laid waste, and their cattle destroyed or dispersed. I myself found my ranch despoiled; what little was spared by the retreating enemy had been wasted by our own army. Ruin and misery met me on my return.“
The new country was also saddled with an unruly army clamoring to invade Mexico, and it would only be a matter of time before Mexico sent troops north to reclaim its territory and destroy a rebel government that in its eyes was no more legitimate than the Green Flag republic of 1813 or the Fredonia republic of 1826. It was pretty clear that in order not to share the fate of those firefly regimes, the Republic of Texas needed help. What it needed, specifically, was to disappear altogether and become part of the United States as soon as possible. There was almost unanimous agreement about this. Annexation was, Austin believed, the “one all absorbing point.” He said this in an official capacity, because Houston had recently appointed him Texas’s secretary of state.
As the chief diplomat of the republic, Austin lived and worked in Columbia. He didn’t have to sleep on the ground, but his combined office and residence was a shed attached to a small house, with neither a stove nor a fireplace to protect his fragile health against the coming winter. One of his first diplomatic initiatives was to get Santa Anna safely and productively out of Texas. He convinced the imprisoned dictator to write a letter to President Jackson and offer his help to bring about an official recognition of Texas by the United States. “Let us establish mutual relations,” Santa Anna wrote to Jackson, “so that your nation and the Mexican one may seal a bond of friendship, and together may find an amicable way of giving stability to . . . [the Texan] people.“
This was disingenuous blather, and everybody knew it, but it served to help orchestrate a meeting in Washington between Santa Anna and Jackson, with the goal of convincing the United States to formally recognize the Texas Republic. Santa Anna was escorted out of Texas so quietly that it was almost a smuggling operation, but once he and his entourage reached the United States he was welcomed as a puzzling celebrity. He was such a charming and polite villain that nobody quite knew what to think of him. “He is a Spaniard,” wrote an army officer who met him, “a slight figure, about 5 ft. 10, of very commanding, dignified appearance, graceful manner and benign countenance. He smiled at his misfortunes, and for my life I could not believe he ever gave the order for the massacre at Goliad.” The farther north he traveled, the less ambiguous his reception became. For those who believed that the real goal of the Texas Revolution had always been to add another slave state to the union, Santa Anna was not a rampaging dictator but a champion of freedom. “How can we style him a tyrant,” a Rhode Island newspaper asked, since the Mexican leader had “fought and bled to contravene the efforts of those who wished the substantial, the horrible system of slavery?”
