USA > Texas > Indian wars and pioneers of Texas, Vol. I > Part 26
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He was a splendid specimen of manhood -six feet and one inch high, straight as an arrow, of full but not surplus flesh, fair complexion, fine mouth, well-chiseled features and keen blue eyes -- with grace and dignity in every movement. So far as known this was his first and last public speech.
Stepping inside the railing, still hat in hand, with a graceful and dignified bow, he addressed himself to the president and council, for nearly an hour, in a vein. of pathos, irony, invective and fiery eloquence, that astonished and enraptured his oldest and most intimate friends. He reviewed the salient points of his life, hurled from him with indignation every floating allegation affecting his character as a man of peace and honor -- admitted that he was an unlettered man of the Southwest, and his lot had been cast in a day and among a people rendered necessarily, from political and material causes, more or less independent of law ; but brave, generous and infinitely scorning every species of meanness and duplicity ; that he had honorably cast his lot with Texas for honorable and patriotie purposes ; that he had ever neglected his own affairs to serve the country in the hour of danger ; had betrayed no man, deceived no man, wronged no man, and had never had a difficulty in the country, unless to protect the weak from the strong an | evil-intentioned. That, yielding to the dictates of his own heart, he had taken to his bosom as a wife a true and lovely woman of a different race, the daughter of a distinguished " Coahuil-Texano; " yet, as a thief in the night, death had invaded his little paradise and taken his
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father-in-law, his wife and his little jewels, given to him by the God his pious mother had taught him to reverence and to love as ' Him who doeth all things well," and chasteneth those he loveth ; and now, standing as a monument of Omnipotent mercy, alone of all his blood in Texas, all he asked of his country was the privilege, under its ægis, of serving it in the field, where his name might be honorably associated with the brave and the true in rescuing this fair and lovely land from the grasp of a remorseless military despotism.
The effect was magical. Not an indecorous or undignified word fell from his lips -not an un- . graceful movement or gesture - but there he stood, before the astonished council and specta- tors, the living exemplification of a natural orator.
He tarried not, but left, satisfied that in the more perfeet organization of the government he would receive generous consideration, and returned to San Antonio, soon to be immured in a sick room - a dark, little, cell-shaped room in the Alamo -- and there, after a siege of thirteen days, to be perhaps the last of the hundred and eighty-three martyrs to yield up his life for his country.
It was never my fortune to meet Col. Bowie, but I enjoyed close associations, in youth and early manhood, with many good men, who knew him long and well. Their universal testimony was that he was one of nature's noblemen, inflexible in honor, scorning double-dealing and trickery - a sincere and frank friend, kind and gentle in in- tercourse, liberal and generous, loving peace and holding in almost idolatry woman in her purity. He tolerated nowhere, even among the rudest men, anything derogatory to the female sex, holding them as " but a little lower than the angels." In the presence of woman he was a model of dignity, deference and kindness, as if the better elements of bis nature were led captive at the shrine of true womanhood. But, when aroused under a sense of wrong, and far more so for a friend than for him- self, "he was fearful to look upon," and a dan- gerous man to the wrong-doer. In 1834 Capt. Wm. Y. Lacey spent eight months in the wilderness with him, and in after years wrote me saying: "He was not in the habit of using profane language and never used an indecent or vulgar word during the eight months I passed with him in the wilder- hess."
I could multiply testimonials to his great worth, including the exalted opinion of Henry Clay, but space forbids. Many interesting incidents are omitted.
One estimate, however, is added. Capt. Wm. G. Ilunt wrote some years ago that he first met
Col. Bowie and his wife ( then en route to Louis- .iana) at a party given them on the Colorado, on Christmas day, 1831; that " Mrs. Bowie was a beautiful Castilian lady, and won all hearts by her sweet manners. Bowie seemed supremely happy with and devoted to her, more like a kind and tender lover than the rough backwoodsman he has since been represented to be."
Is it not a shame that such a man, by the merest fiction and love of the marvelous, should, for half a century after his glorious death, be held in the popular mind of his country as at least a quasi- desperado - brave, truly, but a rough, coarse man, given to broils and affrays? The children of Texas, at least, should know his true character, and, in some important aspects, emulate it. By doing so they will make better men than by swal- lowing much of the sensational literature now cor- rupting the youth of the land. No boy taking Bowie as a model will ever become an undutiful son, a faithless husband, a brutal father, a treach- erous friend or an. unpatriotic citizen.
P. S. After the foregoing had been widely published, North and South, an attache of the Philadelphia Press sought to revive and wonder- fully add to the old slanders of desperadoism, by publishing a real or pretended interview with as vile an impostor as ever appeared in historic matters, attaching to the name of Bowie crimes and acts never before heard of.
Some years ago the Philadelphia Times pub- lished a tissue of falsehoods about the campaign and battle of San Jacinto by a pretended partici- pant, who had never been in that section, but was really a reformed gambler. I exposed the fraud in a courteous letter to the Times, which it refused to publish.
When the interview hereafter referred to appeared in the Philadelphia Press, on the 3d of October, a venerable and noble citizen of that eity sent me a copy and urged that I should send him an exposure of its falsehoods, saying he would have it published in the Times.
I did so promptly, but it was not published.
Under conspicuous head lines appeared the inter- view in question in regard to the Alamo, Bowie, etc. Of the impostor the interviewer says : -
" In 1814 Samuel G. Bastian was born in this city, at the southwest corner of Front and Spruce streets. When he was ten years of age his father, who was a gunsmith, removed to Alexandria, in Louisiana, and to-day, after an absence of sixty- three years, the son revisits his birthplace, a stal- wart man despite his seventy-seven years. His career has been a most eventful one. He is with-
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out doubt the only surviving American who wit- nessed the fall of the Alamo in the Texian revolu- tion of 1836, and his account of it will show of how little worth is popular opinion as material for history."
" ' When I lived at Alexandria,' says Bastian, 'it was a frontier town and the abiding-place of many of the worst ruflians in the Southwest. Prominent among these was Bowie. He devoted himself to forging land titles, and it is amusing to me to read accounts of his life, in which he is spoken of as a high-toned Southern gentleman and a patriot who died for the cause of Texian inde- pendence. He has come down to these times as the inventor of the Bowie knife, but my recollection is this : Bowie had sold a German, named Kaufman, a forged land title. Mr. Dalton, the United States land registrar, refused to record it, Kaufman threatened to prosecute Bowie and was promptly stabbed to death for his presumption. In a suit at law shortly after, the United States district judge complained of the endless litigation over land claims, and one of the attorneys answered sareasti- cally, ' that Bowie's knife was the speediest and surest way of settling trouble about sueli disputes,' and this, I believe, is the story of Bowie's connec- tion with the historic knife.'"
In the days referred to the brothers Rezin P. and James Bowie were quiet planters on Bayou Lafourche, 124 miles from Alexandria, and rarely in that place. This man's age was, according to his own statement, then ranging from ten to sixteen years. His statements about land titles, murders and the Bowie kuife, are notoriously false. At the time he became sixteen, Col. James Bowie, from being a casual, became a permanent citizen of Texas, married the lovely and accomplished daugh- ter of Governor Veramendi, of San Antonio, and until the death of herself and two children was a. model and devoted husband and father. A happier couple, by the testimony of all who knew them, never lived.
Of the Alamo in 1836 the impostor says: " I was in the Alamo in February. There was a bitter feeling between the partisans of Travis and Bowie, the latter being the choice of the rougher party in the garrison. Fortunately Bowie was prostrated by pneumonia and could uot act. When Santa Anna appeared before the place most of the garrison were drunk, and had the Mexicans made a rush the contest would have been short. Travis did his best, and at once sent off couriers to Colonel Fall- nin, at Gonzales, to hurry up reinforcements. I was one of these couriers, anl fortunately I knew
the country well and spoke Spanish like a native, so I had no trouble. Oo the 1st of March I met a party of thirty volunteers from Gonzales on the way to the Alamo and concluded to return with them. When near the fort we were discovered and fired on by the Mexican troops. Most of the party got through; but I and three others had to take to the chaparral to save our lives. One of the party was a Spanish creole from New Orleans. He went into the town and brought us intelligence. We were about three hundred yards from the fort concealed by brush, which extended north for twenty miles. I could see the enemy's operations perfectly."
After the fall, March 6th, he says: " Disguising myself, and in company with Rigault, the creole, we stole into the town. Everything was in confusion. In front of the fort the Mexican dead covered the ground, but the scene inside the fort was awful."
The idea of the fellow being concealed as stated, with thousands of Mexican troops camping on the ground, is in any and every sense preposterous ; but when we consider that at that time there was no chaparral or thicket as stated by him, nor for miles in that direction, it was absolutely impossi- ble. Moreover, neither he nor any one else was cut off from the Gonzales band. There were thirty-two of them, and every one of them died in the Alamo. He falsifies about bearing an express to Fannin at Gonzales. Fannin was at Goliad, a hundred miles nearer the coast, with a wilderness and no road between them.
Here is another sample of his gifts. After claiming to have spent some time in the Alamo - long enough to see the dead - he says : --
" We now thought it time to look after ourselves, and made for the chaparral, where our companions were. We had nearly reached the wood when a mounted lancer overtook us. Rigault awaited and shot him dead, and so we made our escape. Our good fortune did not end here, for we had to make a detour to reach Gonzales and learned in time that the place was invested, and so were spared the fate of the garrison, for they and their commander, Colonel Fannin, were massaered by the Mexicans."
Gen. Houston did not leave Gonzales till seven and a half days after this man claims to have started for that place. Fannin had not been there. The place was never invested. The Mexicans did not arrive till seven days after Houston left.
The fame of Bowie as a soldier, a patriot, a gen- tleman, and as a husband and father, will pass from father to son and mother to daugliter, so long as honor, justice and truth abide in Texas.
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Maj. James Kerr, the First Pioneer in Southwestern Texas.
Many noble pioneers who have wrought for the settlement and civilization of Texas sleep in their graves never to be resurrected in memory except at the bar of God, with the welcome, " Well done, thou good and faithful servant." Some left kindred or friends to assert their merits and shield their reputations in the record of the history of their times. Many did not. There has been a tendeney to concentrate the entire honor and the glory of settling Texas - with some, on one man- with others on a handful of men. The truth is, that near the same time half a dozen Americans conceived substantially the same idea, among whom stand the names of Moses Austin and Green De Witt of Missouri, Robert Leftwich of Tennessee and several others. To the Americans of the first quarter of this century, while Texas was a terra incognita in fact, it was a paradise in the imagina- tion of many. Its beauties and fertility had been portrayed by traders and trappers and the adven- turers under Toledo, in 1812-13. Moses Austin received his right to introduce American immi- grants just before the final fall of Spanish power in 1821. He returned home, sickened and died. His son assumed his responsibilities and was ac- corded his privileges, the whole being finally perfected on the 14th April, 1823. From this (begun in 1821) sprang the first American colony of Texas. The applications of DeWitt and others, almost simultaneously made, were delayed on account of the rapidly changing phases of political events in Mexico, till the spring of 1825, although DeWitt's grant was promised contemporaneously with that of Austin. De Witt, assured of success, did not await the final consummation by the newly organized government of Coahuila and Texas, but proceeded to his home in Missouri to perfect ar- rangements for the settlement of his colony, through which ran the beautiful mountain rivers, Guadalupe and San Marcos, while the limpid Lavaca formed its eastern boundary. Yet he was again present at the final consummation of his plan in April, 1825.
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De Witt, in Missouri, secured the co-operation of James Kerr, then a member of the senate of that State, who became the suveyor-general of the colony, its first settler, and for a time its chief manager. Mr. Kerr was born near Danville, Ky., September 24, 1790, removed with his father to St. Charles County, Missouri, in 1808, was a gallant soldier in the war of 1812-15 - a lieuten-
ant under Capt. Nathan Boone - had been sheriff of St. Charles County, a representative in the legislature and then a senator. He had a wife, three little children and eight or ten favorite negro servants. With these he arrived at the mouth of the Brazos in February, 1825. Before the first of July his wife and two of his little children had died - the first in a camp, the others on the road- side. During July he reached the present site of Gonzales, accompanied by five or six single men and his servants. He erected cabins, laid out the town site as the capital of the future colony and began the survey of its lands. On the 1st or 2d day of July; 1826, in his absence, Indians attacked his houses in the temporary absence of most of the inmates, killed one man and severely wounded another, robbed the establishment and then retired. Thereupon Maj. Kerr removed nearer the coast, to the Lavaca river, in what is now Jackson County, but continued his labors as surveyor of De Witt's colony, and subsequently, also, as surveyor of the Mexican colony of De Leon, next below on the Guadalupe. To his laborious duties, in January, 1827, were added the entire superintendence of the affairs of Col. Ben. R. Milam, in his proposed Southwestern colony.
From 1825 till 1832, Maj. Kerr's house was the headquarters of Americanism in Southwest Texas. Austin's colony on the one side, and De Witt's and De Leon's on the other, slowly grew, and he stood in all that time, and for several years later, as a wise counsellor to the people. When the quasi-revolution of 1832 occurred, he was elected a delegate to that first deliberative body that ever assembled in Texas, at San Felipe, October 1, 1832, and was on several of its com- mittees. That body of about fifty-eight repre- sentative men, so strangely overlooked by the historians of Texas, laid the predicate for all that followed in 1833-35-36, and eaused more sensa- tion in Mexico than did the better known conven- tion of 1833, which did little more than amplify the labors of the first assembly.
Maj. Kerr, however, was a member of the second convention which met at San Felipe on the first of March, 1833, and was an influential mem- ber in full accord with its general scope and desigu. He presided, in July, 1835, at the first primary meeting in Texas, on the Navidad river, which declared in favor of independence.
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He was elected to the third convention, or gen- eral consultation, which met at San Felipe, Novem- ber 3d, 1835, and formed a provisional government, with Henry Smith as Governor, and a legislative council. Being then on the campaign in which the battle of Lipantitlan was fought, on the Nueces, he failed to reach the first assembly, but served about two months in the council, rendering valuable ser- vice to the country.
On the first of February, 1836, he was elected to the convention which declared the independence of Texas, but his name is not appended to that doeu- ment for the reason that the approach of the Mexican army compelled him to flee east with his family and neighbors, and rendered it impossible for him to reach Washington in time to participate in that grave and soleinn act. . But rightfully his name belongs there.
Returning to his desolated home after the battle of San Jacinto, he stood as a pillar of strength in the organization of the country under the Republic. It may be truly said that no man in the western half of Texas, from 1825 to 1840, and especially during the stormy period of the revolution, exerted a greater influenee for good as a wise, conservative counsellor. His sound judgment, tried experience,
fine intelligence and candor, fitted him in a rare degree for such a field of usefulness.
In 1838 he was elected to the last Congress that assembled at Houston and was the author, in whole or in part, of several of the wisest laws Texas ever enacted. From that time till his death, on the 23d of December, 1850, he held no official position but con- tinued to exert a healthy influence on public affairs.
Nothing has been said of his perils and narrow escapes from hostile savages during the twelve years he was almost constantly exposed to their attacks. Many of them possess romantic interest and evince his courage and sagacity in a remarkable degree.
While no dazzling splendor adorns his career, it is clothed from beginning to end with evidences of usefulness and unselfish patriotism, presenting those attributes without which in its chief actors Texas could not have been populated and reclaimed with the feeble means used in the achievement of that great work. His name is perpetuated in that of the beautiful county of Kerr, named, as the crea- tive aet says, " in honor of James Kerr, the first American settler on the Guadalupe river." His only surviving son, Thomas R. Kerr, resides in Southwest Texas, and a number of his grand- children live in South Texas.
Col. William S. Fisher, the Hero of Mier.
In the revolutionary days of Texas there were three men of prominence bearing the name of Fisher. The first and the earliest immigrant to the country was Samuel Rhoads Fisher, of Matagorda. He was a native of Philadelphia, and a man of edu- cation, who came about 1830. He was a leader in local affairs, holding municipal position, and the husband and father of one of the most intelligent and refined families in a community distinguished for refinement and intelligence. Capt. Rhoads Fisher of Austin is the junior of his two sons. He represented Matagorda in the convention of 1836, and signed the Declaration of Independence; and on the installation of Gen. Houston as President of the Republic in October, 1336, he appointed Mr. Fisher Secretary of the Navy. In 1838 he lost his life in an unfortunate personal difficulty, greatly lamented by the country. His memory was honored by the high character of his family.
John Fisher was a native of Richmond, Virginia,
and came to Gonzales, Texas, in 1833 or 1834. He was a man of education, ability and sterling char- acter, and was also a signer of the Declaration of Independence, but died soon afterwards.
William S. Fisher, the subject of this chapter, was a brother of Jolin and, like himself, a native of Virginia. He was also a man of finished education and remarkable intelligence and one of the tallest men in the country. As a conversationalist he was captivating, ever governed by a keen sense of pro- priety and respect for others - henee a man com- manding esteem wherever he appeared. His first experience as a soldier was in the fight with the Indians on the San Marcos, in the spring of 1835- sixteen men against the seventy Indians who had murdered and robbed the French traders west of Gonzales, in which the Indians were repulsed, with a loss of nine warriors.
His first appearance in public life was as a mem- ber of the first revolutionary convention (com-
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monly ealled the Consultation) in November, 1835. He was also a volunteer in the first resistance to the Mexicans at Gonzales and in the march upon San Antonio in October.
In the campaign of 1836, he was early In the fieldl, and commanded one of the most gallant com- panies on the field of San Jacinto, in which he won the admiration of his comrades. He remained in the army till late in the year, when he was called into the Cabinet of President Houston to succeed Gen. Rusk as Secretary of War, thereby becoming a colleague of Governor Henry Smith, Stephen F. Austin and S. Rhoads Fisher in the same Cabinet, soon to announce the death of Austin in the follow- ing order : -
" WAR DEPARTMENT, COLUMBIA, TEX. " December 27, 1836.
"The father of Texas is no more. The first pioneer of the wilderness has departed. Gen. Stephen F. Austin, Secretary of State, expired this day at half-past 12 o'clock, at Columbia,
" As a testimony of respect to his high standing, undeviating moral rectitude, and as a mark of the nation's gratitude for his untiring zeal and invalu- able services, all officers, civil and military, are. requested to wear erape on the right orm for the space of thirty days. All officers commanding posts. garrisons or detachments will, so soon as information is received of the melancholy event, cause twenty-three guns to be fired, with an inter- val of five minutes between each, and also have the garrison and regimental colors hung with black during the space of mourning for the illustrions dead.
" By order of the President.
" Wu. S. Fammiek, Secretary of War."
The services of Col. Fisher were such that when provision was made for a regular army by the Con- gress of 1838-9, he was made Lieutenant Colonel of the only permanent regiment, of which the vet- eran Burleson was made Colonel. In this enpacity he commanded the troops engaged in the Council House fight with the Comanches, on the 19th of March, 1840, and rendered other Important Her- vices to the frontier ; but in the sunaner of 1810 he resigned to become a Colonel in the Mexican Revolutionary or Federalist army in the short-lived Republie of the Rio Grande. But the betrayal of Jordan and his command at Saltillo, in October of the same year, followed by the latter's successful retreat to the Rio Grande - an achievement which has been likened to that of Xenophon -- was fol-
lowed by the disbandment of the Federal forces and the triumph of centralism, upon which Col. Fisher and his three hundred Amercian followers returned to Texas.
Ilis next appearance was as a Captain in the Somervell expedition to the Rio Grande in the autumn of 1812. The history of that campaign is more or less familiar to the public. There were seven hundred men. From Laredo two hundred of them, under Capts. Jerome B. and E. S. C. Robertson, returned home. At the mouth of the Salado river, opposite Guerrero, another division occurred. Two hundred of the men (of whom I was one) returned home with and under the orders of Gen. Somervell. The remaining three hundred reorganized into a regiment and elected Col. Fisher as their commander. They moved down the river, erossed over and entered Mier, three miles west of it, on the Arroyo Aleantra, leaving forty of their number as a guard on the east bank of the river. They entered the town at twilight on the 25th of December, amid a blaze of cannon and sinall arıns, in the hands of twenty-seven hundred Mexicans, commanded by Gen. Pedro de Ampudia, and for nineteen hours fought one of the most desperate battles in American annals - fought till they had killed and wounded more than double their own number, and till their ammunition was so far exhausted as to render further resistance hope- less. Then they capitulated, to become the famed Mier prisoners, or " the Prisoners of Perote; " to rise upon their guard in the interior of Mexico and escape to the mountains - there to wander without food or water till their tongues were swollen and their strength exhausted, to become an easy prey to their pursuers -- then to be marched back to the seene of their rescue, at the hacienda of Salado, and there, under the order of Santa Anna, each one blind folded, to draw in the lottery of Life or Death, from a covered jar in which were seventeen black and a hundred and fifty-three white beans. Every black bean drawn consigned the drawer to death - one-tenth of the whole to be shot for an act which commanded the admira- tion of every true soldier in Europe and America, not omitting those in Mexico, for Gen. Mexia refused to execute the mhuman ediet and resigned his commission. But another took his place and those seventeen men were murdered.
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