Texas Rising

by Stephen L. Moore

  Walker soon had his chance to prove the value of his trusty Colts.

  JACK HAYS DECIDED HIS men had ridden far enough.

  It was June 8, 1844, and his rangers had been in the saddle for a week. They had moved north from San Antonio to scour the country between the Pedernales and Llano rivers for Indian activities. They found plenty of signs but had made no significant contact. Captain Hays thus turned back for San Antonio, led his fifteen men across the Pedernales River, and made camp for the night on a stream he named Walker’s Creek.

  Hays, Ben McCulloch, and several others were in the process of unsaddling horses when a warning cry was given.

  “Comanches, Cap’n!”

  Kit Acklin and Alexander Coleman galloped into camp with the news. Their four-man patrol, stationed well back from camp to cover the company’s rear, had been collecting honey from a bee tree. From his high vantage point, Coleman had spotted Comanche horsemen approaching. They wasted no time in alerting their comrades.

  “To your saddles, boys!” shouted Hays. “Prepare to fight!”10

  Captain Hays and his rangers rode out from camp and soon spotted their opponents—later determined to be about sixty Comanche, Kiowa, and Shoshone Indians under the leadership of Chief Yellow Wolf. The Comanches turned away and rode at a slow pace as the rangers approached. They clearly had no great fear of such a small bunch of Texans, only one-quarter of their own number. The Indians drifted toward a wooded area, where Hays presumed they might have other forces waiting to ambush them.11

  Yellow Wolf made every effort to get the veteran ranger captain to commit to chasing his Indians. “They, however, did not succeed in their design,” wrote Hays. The Indians resorted to shouting insults at the Texans in Spanish. Not to be outdone, Hays unleashed his own tirade of cursing at Chief Yellow Wolf. The rangers walked their horses slowly up Walker’s Creek until the Comanches finally darted into the forest and disappeared. They soon reappeared to gather on the crest of a nearby slight hill, apparently joined by at least ten other Indians.

  The game of taunting resumed. Several Comanches at a time rode down the slope, shouting challenges at the rangers as they waved their shields and lances. They obviously hoped to entice the Texans to discharge their rifles at longer range, from which distance their padded shields would likely deflect the lead balls fired at them. Devil Jack was too wise to take the bait, however, and he prepared his men for a little surprise for their adversaries.

  The rangers, plainly visible to the Indians, slowly advanced up the gentle slope of the hill. Once they reached the steeper base of the rise, they momentarily fell out of sight of Yellow Wolf’s force. Hays then immediately spurred his horse and motioned his company to follow him full speed around the hillside. They then galloped over the top of the hill and surprised the Comanches and their allies from their flank.

  Each of the rangers unleashed a round from his rifle. Several Comanches were blasted from their horses. Captain Hays had his men race back down the hill to level ground. Yellow Wolf rallied his Indians and soon led them in a charge down the hill to assault the badly outnumbered rangers. There was insufficient time for the Texans to reload their rifles.

  “Drop your rifles, men!” Hays shouted.

  The Comanches rushed in, fully intent on slaughtering the sixteen rangers. Their rifles had all been emptied, leaving them with only Bowie knives and pistols. Yellow Wolf’s Indians found out too late that they had been drawn into another deadly trap: each ranger sported a pair of Colt five-shooter pistols. Although outnumbered four-to-one, the “helpless” Texans sported 160 ready rounds.

  The lower hillside came alive with war whoops, cracking pistols, and the acrid smell of gunpowder as the rangers unleashed round after round of .36-caliber pistol bullets. Hays saw many Indians tumble from their saddles as his “five-shooting pistols did good execution.” Yellow Wolf’s men wheeled away, giving the Texans enough time to swap cylinders on their Colts.

  Hays boldly led his men in pursuit. The opponents exchanged two more rounds of close-action pistol fire. The Comanches made the most of their opportunities each time the rangers stopped to change cylinders. Ad Gillespie was knocked from his horse, his body pierced through with an arrow. Andrew Erskine took an arrow in the thigh and Ranger Peter Fohr was killed outright. James Lee was incapacitated with several severe arrow wounds.

  After the third round from the deadly Colts, Yellow Wolf’s Comanches had suffered enough casualties that his men fled. Jack Hays charged after them with the balance of his able men. The Indians turned to countercharge several times when the rangers came uncomfortably close. During one of these counterattacks, Rangers Sam Walker and Ad Gillespie were suddenly caught far in advance of their comrades. One of the Comanches raced in to spear Walker, but he was quick on the draw. He coolly shot the Indian from his horse but momentarily lost track of some of his other opponents. Another Comanche barreled in and drove his lance into Walker.12

  John Carolin came to his aid, shooting the Indian in the head with his Colt just as he ripped his lance back out of Walker’s body. Carolin helped Walker into a nearby thicket while Gillespie, lying wounded on the ground, reloaded his rifle to make a longer-range shot. Hays and several others aggressively chased the other Comanches back to allow their more seriously wounded comrades to be helped away.

  The running battle stretched out over three miles. At least twenty Comanches remained able to fight, still more than double the rangers who were still mounted and in pursuit. Hays doubted his men could handle another full-scale charge as he watched Chief Yellow Wolf shouting at his Indians to garner their courage for a final attack.

  “Who has a charged rifle?” Hays shouted.

  “Right here, Captain,” the wounded Gillespie announced.

  “Shoot that damned chief!” Hays cried.

  Gillespie nodded, and rested his Yaeger hunting rifle on a large boulder. His long barrel cracked toward the distant Comanches as Yellow Wolf began to burst into a war cry. Hays proudly noted that Gillespie’s aim was dead on, as the Comanche chief was blasted from his saddle.13

  The remaining Comanches hauled clear, not even pausing to carry off their own dead and wounded. One ranger was dead, and at least four others lay wounded. In return, Hays estimated that his men and their .36-caliber Colts had killed at least twenty Indians and wounded as many as thirty others. The Texans camped on the battlefield that night, tending to their wounded. Before the rangers could head out for San Antonio the next day, four Comanches appeared near camp. They appeared to be searching for some of their own men. Hays instantly ordered Lieutenant McCulloch and five rangers in pursuit. The chase carried on for a mile; three-quarters of the Comanches perished in the fight.

  Captain Hays returned to San Antonio on June 15 to tend to his wounded and execute the will of Ranger Peter Fohr. His men had killed twenty-three men in two days of fighting and had seriously wounded about thirty more. “The Indians made a magnificent fight under the circumstances,” Hays reported. They had underestimated the power of a lethal new frontier weapon—the Colt five-shooter.

  The rules of the game had changed in Texas. Frontier warfare would never be the same.

  CAPTAIN HAYS’S BIG FIGHT on Walker’s Creek received plenty of notice in Texas. The June 29, 1844, issue of the Houston Morning Star ran a long account of the battle. Ranger Sam Walker later reflected: “Up to this time, these daring Indians had always supposed themselves superior to us, man to man, on horse. The result of this engagement was such as to intimidate them and enable us to treat with them.”14

  Jack Hays remained in San Antonio for several weeks of July 1844, bedridden with illness that had overtaken his body. Years of hard living on the unforgiving frontier had finally caught up with him. He eventually regained full health, but he allowed his company mates to handle much of the ranging duties during that time. Their most serious encounter came on August 12, when a four-man patrol sent to check on Mexican cavalrymen rounding up horses between the Nueces and the Rio
Grande was attacked by about two dozen Indians.

  Rangers James Dunn and John Carolin escaped the ambush in their camp, but were separated from Rufe Perry and Kit Acklin in the process. Acklin struggled back into San Antonio a week later, having survived on only beans and prairie prickly pear apples. Perry stumbled back on foot in much worse condition. He believed he had caused great injury with his Colt pistol, but he was barely clinging to life. He had been shot through the belly and had had another bullet glance off his temple. An arrow had pierced his left shoulder while a third lodged in his jawbone. Rufe Perry would spend two years recovering from his wounds before he was well enough to saddle up again.15

  By that time, the Republic of Texas had become the state of Texas. Dr. Anson Jones, the last president of the republic, had favored Texas to remain independent rather than being annexed by the United States. Thousands of U.S. troops had poured into Texas during 1845 as tensions with Mexico once again escalated toward a war. Major Jack Hays had become the chosen leader of a battalion of rangers charged with scouting and reporting for the U.S. Army while keeping Indian resistance in check. By the summer of 1846, the First Regiment of Mounted Riflemen was formed for duty in the Mexican War. The recovered Rufe Perry would see his share of service in one of the Texas volunteer companies.

  The Texas Mounted Riflemen, sworn into federal service, were headed by the one man who had seen Texas through its most trying years—Colonel Jack Hays. The punishing summer sun warmed their faces as Hays, Sam Walker, Mike Chevallie, Ben McCulloch, and their fellow rangers rode south toward Monterrey to take part in a new siege.

  A new chapter in the history of Texas and its men had begun. Its pages would be filled with tales of familiar characters who had ably served since the dawn of the former republic’s first rising.

  EPILOGUE

  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.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am indebted to many people who helped make this book possible. Some of them have assisted both in recent months and during my previous years of researching Texas Rangers and San Jacinto campaign material.

  Lisa Struthers, director of the San Jacinto Museum of History’s Albert and Ethel Herzstein Library, has helped me sift through countless files of battle participants to unearth rare gems of personal accounts. For Texas Rising, she was vital once again by quickly stepping in to help to secure quality illustrations. Dr. Stephen L. Hardin kindly shared artwork produced by Gary Zaboly in Steve’s critically acclaimed military history of the Texas Revolution, Texian Iliad. Dr. Gregg Dimmick, who has allowed me to participate in some of his state-author
ized archaeological surveys with metal detectors on and near the battleground in past years, shared testimony from Mexican soldiers that he has mined from the archives and translated.

  Other research assistance and permission for the use of illustrations came from a variety of sources. Nick Springer helped take this work to a new level with his quality cartography. From the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum in Waco, I am grateful for the help from Byron Johnson, Executive Director, Christina Stopka, Deputy Director and Head of the Armstrong Texas Ranger Research Center, and Shelly Crittendon, Collections Manager. William Adams kindly granted permission for the use of his copyrighted 1978 painting by Lee Herring, Delaying Action: The Battle of Plum Creek. Frank Horlock and Texas artist Donald Yena of San Antonio were generous enough to allow the use Don’s paintings of the Goliad Massacre and the 1839 Battle of the Neches. My thanks also go out to: Donaly Brice and John Anderson of the Texas Archives, and to Linda Peterson and Steven Williams of the Center for American History, the University of Austin at Texas. Donaly in particular has assisted me for many years in my exploration of Republic of Texas audited military claims, pension papers, army papers, and ranger muster rolls.

  From HarperCollins, I am grateful for Nick Amphlett for his assistance on the artwork, to Kaitlyn Kennedy for her tireless work on the publicity end, to Andrea Molitor for the quality layouts, and to Tom Pitoniak for top-notch copyediting. Executive editor Peter Hubbard served as my key liaison between his teams and the key advisors from A+E Networks—Kate Winn and Kim Gilmore—to keep the project moving swiftly along. My agent, Jim Donovan, served as my guide, friend, and editorial sounding board throughout the process.

  Finally, thanks go to my wife and kids for enduring the late hours I kept in order to maintain deadlines that would coincide with the History Channel series. My daughter Emily lent her musical aptitude to help me comprehend the musical qualities of the Mexican degüello music. Fortunately, my family understands my passion for Texas history and my desire to pay tribute to our revolutionary forefathers, who helped the Lone Star State rise from the seeds of rebellion.