JACK HAYS AND HIS Texas Rangers changed the nature of frontier warfare. His 1844 Walker’s Creek battle with Yellow Wolf’s Comanches was later depicted as an engraving on the cylinder of about one hundred presentation model pistols produced by Samuel Colt’s company in 1847. Colt called his new .44-caliber, six-shot revolver the Walker Colt in honor of Ranger Sam Walker, who was killed during the Mexican War that year.1
Colonel Hays and his Texas Mounted Riflemen gained a national reputation during the Mexican War. The much fabled frontiersman married his sweetheart, Susan Calvert, in 1847 and raised six children. Hays later pioneered trails through the Southwest to California, where he became a prominent citizen and was elected sheriff of San Francisco County in 1850. John Coffee Hays died in 1883 and is honored as the namesake of Hays County, Texas.
Numerous other Texas counties—such as Burleson, Caldwell, Coleman, Crockett, Dawson, Deaf Smith, Eastland, Erath, Fannin, Gillespie, Hockley, Houston, Karnes, Kimble (Kimbell), Lamar, McCulloch, Milam, Robertson, Rusk, Sherman, Travis, Walker, and Williamson—are named after heroes of the rising republic years.
Sidney Sherman, one of the most brazen leaders of the Battle of San Jacinto, died at home in Galveston—a short distance from the battlefield—in 1873. His commander in chief, Sam Houston, served as a U.S. senator after Texas became a state and his name was even mentioned as a possible presidential candidate. He returned as governor of Texas in 1859 but was removed from office when he refused to take the oath of office to the newly formed Confederate States of America. He died of pneumonia at the age of seventy in 1863 in his Steamboat House in Huntsville, Texas—where the world’s tallest American hero statue, a sixty-seven-foot-tall granite, concrete, and steel frame rendition of the Raven, stands near the city in his honor.
Santa Anna, Houston’s chief antagonist during the revolution, was president of Mexico five times. He was ultimately banished by the country’s liberals in 1855, and he spent years living in exile in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Nassau in the Bahamas writing his memoirs. In 1874 Santa Anna was finally allowed to return to Mexico City, where he lived in obscurity until his death in 1876.
Emily West, the fabled “Yellow Rose of Texas,” was eager to return to New York after the Texas Revolution but her papers showing her freedom had been lost on the San Jacinto battlefield. Major Isaac Moreland, commanding the local garrison at Galveston, vouched for Miss Emily in her application passport and she made her way back to New York in March 1837.
David Burnet, the ad interim president of the Republic of Texas during the San Jacinto campaign, remained a bitter opponent of Sam Houston. He died penniless in Galveston in 1870 and was buried by friends. Former president Mirabeau Lamar led mounted volunteers during the Mexican War and served in the Second Legislature of the state of Texas. Anson Jones, the final president of the republic, became a prosperous planter and established the first Masonic lodge in Texas at Brazoria. He was bitterly disappointed when his hopes of being appointed to the U.S. Senate in 1846 were dashed by the election of Sam Houston and Thomas Rusk in his place. He eventually sold his vast plantation for a quarter of its value and traveled to Houston in January 1858 in deep depression. Jones sequestered himself there in the Old Capitol Hotel for four nights before putting a pistol to his head on the morning of January 10.
THE PASSAGE OF THE Republic of Texas and the commencement of the twenty-eighth state of the Union was witnessed by many who had participated in the rebellious uprising that helped birth the Lone Star State.
The climatic moment was centered around an aged wooden flagpole. It stood near the capital building in Austin, with the defiant red, white, and blue Texas banner snapping in the breeze from its peak as a crowd gathered on February 19, 1846. They were there to witness the end of the proud republic and the inauguration of the first governor of the new state of Texas, James Pinckney Henderson.
Judge Robert Baylor and outgoing president Anson Jones delivered addresses to the crowd of legislators. Members of the House and Senate were seated in chairs removed from their chambers and placed on the east side of the capital building. Many of those partaking in the proceedings had sacrificed their own bodies and families during the prior decade of battles with foreign armies, the U.S. government, and marauding bands of Indians. There was former president Sam Houston, whose left leg still bore the scars of San Jacinto. There was Congressman William Sadler, the former ranger captain whose first wife and child had been slain by Indians. Ed Burleson, whose own brother had had his heart removed by Comanches in 1839, had seen more than his fair share of fights in both legislative chambers and on the embattled frontiers. Benjamin McCulloch—an artilleryman at San Jacinto, a ranger under Jack Hays in the Mexican War, and veteran of numerous expeditions—had served his republic in noble fashion. Three-Legged Willie Williamson, the peg-legged lawyer who once commanded one of the first Texas Ranger battalions, was also on hand for the passage.2
Emotions ran high as the Texas colors were lowered. A fresh new pennant boasting the U.S. stars and bars was readied. “The final act in this great drama is now performed,” Anson Jones said in concluding his speech. “The Republic of Texas is no more.”
Jones then lowered the Lone Star Flag from its pole as a brass cannon on President Hill boomed a salute to the newest American state. Jones delivered the proud flag into the waiting arms of the general who had achieved the greatest victory in the history of Texas—Sam Houston.