Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers

by Brian Kilmeade

  THE PRESIDENT AND HIS PRODIGY

  After his withdrawal from polite society, Sam Houston reappeared, in January 1830, in Washington, D.C., arriving as a member of the Cherokee delegation to the American government. Unsure how he would be received, he wanted his arrival to be a surprise. “Don’t say to any one,” he had instructed a cousin, “that I will be in tomorrow.”6

  He took a room at an old haunt, Brown’s Hotel. But he did not dress in the formal tailcoat of stylish Washingtonians. Wearing buckskin pants and a brightly colored blanket draped around his shoulders, he looked like the Cherokee he had become. Shiny metal decorations sewn loosely to his coat jangled when he walked.

  Houston quickly became the talk of the town. Both old friends and entrenched enemies held their breath as they waited to hear how the general would respond to the return of his disgraced protégé, who was representing Cherokee interests, no less. Jackson’s reaction, whatever it might be, would be public at a diplomatic reception at the president’s house, to which the Cherokee delegation had been invited.

  Even when dressed conventionally, Houston’s height made him unmistakable. He stood at least six feet, two inches tall, though some claimed he stood six-four or even six-foot-six. At the reception, a turban wrapped around his head added to his height, making it easy for the president to spot his former lieutenant from across the room.

  When the president called out to him, the crowd parted. Jackson approached. To the relief of many, the aging, rail-thin president pulled Houston to him, wrapping the younger and taller man in a bear hug. The message was clear: Whatever he had done, and wherever he had been, the general’s affection for Sam Houston was undiminished.

  For much of the next two years, Houston would remain with his adopted Native American family. In his sober moments, he served as a council leader. He married again, in 1830, this time taking for his wife a Cherokee woman, Tianh, known in English as Dianah Rogers. (Although they were not formally divorced until 1833, Houston and Eliza had already ceased to be man and wife under Cherokee law because they had “split the blanket.”)7 Houston traveled deep into the Arkansas Territory, acting as a Cherokee ambassador, a peacemaker negotiating with the Osage, Creek, and Choctaw. He and Tianh operated a trading store, selling kettles, blankets, soap, and rope to their Native American brethren. Houston represented the Cherokee on trips to Washington, too, arguing that government agents had consistently cheated his adopted people. His former standing in the nation’s capital helped him win some small victories. Then, early in 1832, his Cherokee association entangled Houston in a legal case that almost ended Houston’s career once again.

  During a debate on the Jackson administration’s Indian policy, on March 31, 1832, Ohio congressman William Stanbery suggested Houston had been part of a scheme to defraud the government. When Houston read about Stanbery’s speech, he was furious. He tried to confront the man who had slandered both him and General Jackson, but for two weeks Stanbery managed to avoid the seething Houston. Then, by chance, Houston spied him as he strolled along Pennsylvania Avenue after dark.

  Stanbery was armed with pistols, but Houston was undaunted. After politely inquiring, “Are you Mr. Stanbery?” Houston lit into him with a cane that he had carved from a hickory tree growing at the Hermitage.8 As Stanbery told the story, “Mr. Houston . . . struck me with the bludgeon he held in his hand . . . repeatedly with great violence.”9

  Stanbery tried to run, but Houston, despite a nearly useless right arm from his Horseshoe Bend wounds, leapt on Stanbery’s back and dragged him to the ground, still battering him with his cane. Stanbery tried to fend off his attacker with a pistol, but it misfired. Houston tore the firearm from Stanbery’s grip, then delivered a few more licks with his cane. According to one witness, the last blow, aimed below Stanbery’s belt, “struck him elsewhere.”10

  At Stanbery’s insistence, Houston was arrested and, a month later, tried in Congress on charges of battery and contempt of Congress. Frank Key, a Washington attorney (and the man later remembered by his full name, Francis Scott Key, and as the author of “The Star Spangled Banner”), helped Houston argue his case on the House floor. General Jackson paid for the fashionable suit Houston wore and welcomed Houston to the president’s house for updates on the proceedings during the month-long trial. When the case finally drew to a close, Houston, suffering from a brutal hangover after a long night of drinking, gave his own summation. The long speech won the gallery over; it was met with tumultuous applause and calls of Bravo! and Huzzah! Yet, despite the defendant’s persuasive words, the House, after deliberating four days, found him guilty.

  The punishment decreed was more symbolic than real—a reprimand from the Speaker of the House—but at Stanbery’s insistence, a court case soon followed. Houston was fined the tall sum of $500, along with court costs. But the bizarre events had made him the talk of the town and even the nation, thanks to the newspapers, and he found the attention energizing and redemptive after his long years of obscurity.

  “I was dying out,” he remembered much later, “and had they taken me before a justice of the peace and fined me ten dollars it would have killed me.” Instead, though his reputation was again tarnished, the very public congressional proceeding gave Houston new standing and gained him new confidence. “They gave me a national tribunal for a theatre,” he remembered later, “and that set me up again.”11 He was a public paradox, a ruined man and a proud hero more famous and admired than ever.

  Though reinvigorated, Houston did not try to revive his political career. For one thing, there was little chance of him going beyond his earlier achievements. For another, he needed to come up with the $500 he owed the government. He had been granted a year to pay his fine—to a typical laborer it amounted to roughly a year’s wages—and he had an idea of where he might find the money. Texas was a place where a man could make his fortune. But it was a place for adventurers, for men like Houston, who might also be called second-chance men.

  Some of those who headed for Texas looked to leave past misdemeanors—or worse—behind. Others wanted success and to accumulate wealth. Some were running away; some were seekers, just looking for a chance to prove themselves. Texas had become a place for new beginnings, for men on the make and for families—and for Sam Houston. In Texas, everyone lived in the present and nobody cared about your past.

  THE TEXAS ENTERPRISE

  “I will ride to the Hermitage this evening, and see the old Chief,” Houston wrote to an acquaintance in August 1832.12 General Jackson was taking refuge from the pressures of Washington politics for a few months back home in Tennessee when Houston arrived on his doorstep. Sadly, “Aunt Rachel” would not be there to join them. Jackson’s beloved wife had passed away almost four years before.

  On this visit, Houston hoped to secure Jackson’s support for his trip. He knew that his mentor’s interest in Texas was still strong, that he believed owning it was essential if America was to expand. During Houston’s visit to the Hermitage, their conversation inevitably turned to Texas.

  This wasn’t the first time Houston had proposed to go to Texas. At the time of his first exile three years before, he had boasted of his ambitions for “breaking [Texas] off from Mexico, and annexing it to the United States.”13 This brag had been foolhardy, coming while Jackson and his ambassador to Mexico were in the middle of negotiations. On hearing that Houston, in a drunken state, had claimed “he would conquer Mexico or Texas, and be worth two millions in two years,”14 Jackson rebuked him. Writing to Houston, the general expressed wonder that Houston would even contemplate “so wild a scheme” and demanded then that Houston pledge “never [to] engage in any [such] enterprise.”15

  In the years since, the two men had corresponded—sometimes on the record, at times off in private letters—and periodically they had met in Washington and Nashville. During that time, diplomacy had produced little progress regarding the acquisition of Texas. Ambassador Butler ha
d suggested to Jackson that they again offer to buy Texas, raising the price from $5 million to $7 million. Jackson had refused, thinking the price too high at a time when he worried about the national debt. When Butler later proposed another tack—a half million dollars or more in bribes—Jackson ran out of patience. He rejected the notion of bribery, writing sharply back to Butler that he must make a deal if he was capable of it. If not, he confided to Colonel Butler, the time might come when circumstances “compel us in self defense to seize that country by force and establish a regular government there over it.”16

  Only a few months later, Houston arrived on the scene. A bankrupt man looking to remake his fortunes, his confidence renewed and his military and diplomatic skills still strong, he was eager to head to Texas. Perhaps he could help win it for America, he thought. In any case, he planned to act upon a deal he had negotiated with New York financiers to acquire lands in the Mexican territory. He believed a Texas venture might prove profitable, confiding in a cousin, “My business in Texas is of some importance to my pecuniary interest, and as such, I must attend to it.”17 But his journey would put him in a place where he could do much more than advance his own finances.

  Did Jackson explicitly ask Houston to be his eyes and ears on the ground? Did the two men agree that Houston should seek ways to do what both had dreamed of for years—bringing the territory back into American hands? No record of such orders remains, but the assistance Jackson offered Houston was striking. At Jackson’s instructions, the secretary of state issued Houston a new passport, intended to ease his passage through Indian territory, where, officially, Houston would represent Jackson’s government in negotiating with the Native Americans. Jackson also loaned him the substantial sum of $500, with which Houston could go much further and perhaps accomplish much, both for himself, for independence-minded settlers in Texas, and in seeking to fulfill Jackson’s vision for the United States.

  TWO

  Gone to Texas

  G.T.T.

  —A COMMON NINETEENTH-CENTURY TERM, CHALKED ON HOUSE DOORS AND NOTED IN TOWN RECORDS, SHORT FOR “GONE TO TEXAS.”

  On December 10, 1832, Sam Houston, after crossing the Sabine, planted his boot on Texas turf for the first time. He had stopped en route to bid farewell to his Cherokee wife, Tianh, giving her the trading post, farm, and wigwam they shared. He would not return to her.

  Now, entering the territory he’d dreamed of winning for America, he headed for Nacogdoches, just west of the river, where he hoped to make his new home. Perhaps the oldest town in Texas—a Native American settlement for centuries, it had become a Spanish mission town in 1716—Nacogdoches (Nak-uh-doh-chiz) seemed to Houston the perfect place to establish a law practice. He needed to find a way to support himself once Jackson’s money ran out. He also needed to set about the business of learning Spanish and becoming Catholic, since, according to Mexican law, only Catholics could own land and practice law.

  Not that everyone in Texas was a Spanish-speaking Catholic—although the state of Texas belonged to Mexico, most of those Houston encountered were settlers from the United States. As recently as a dozen years before, the territory had been home to few beyond the fierce, nomadic Comanche, other Native Americans, and wild animals. But now Texas was full of adventurous and ambitious American settlers, thanks to one Stephen F. Austin. And he was a man Houston knew he needed to meet.

  Just weeks after arriving, Houston set out from Nacogdoches to the village of San Felipe de Austin on a mission to meet the man who was organizing Texas. Finding him was worth the 180-mile journey, a journey along the old Spanish camino real, a route that Stephen Austin’s father had traveled years earlier.

  Born in Connecticut before the American Revolution, the young Moses Austin was an entrepreneur at heart. After working as a merchant, he moved to Missouri to invest in mining. Then, after losing his fortune there, he looked west again. In 1821, the fifty-nine-year-old Moses Austin obtained permission from the Mexican governor of Texas, who was eager to populate the sparsely occupied state, for three hundred American settlers to establish a colony there.

  Tragically, Moses would not live to settle the land he had negotiated. Just weeks after settling the deal, he died of pneumonia. Not willing to give up his dream, on his deathbed, he pleaded for his son to take up his cause. “Tell dear Stephen,” Moses Austin told his wife, “that it is his dieing fathers last request to prosecute the enterprise he had Commenced.”1

  When he took up his father’s role as an empresario of Texas, Stephen Fuller Austin, a slender man of twenty-seven, hardly looked like the adventurer type; gentle and genteel, he seemed better suited to the drawing room than an unsettled wilderness. But he spent months in Mexico City, gaining the required seals and signatures to grant him full authority to establish a colony, and then found a suitable site along the Brazos River, where buffalo and other wild game were abundant, the soil rich, and timber plentiful.

  Austin had set about surveying, plotting out land grants, establishing a headquarters, and fulfilling his father’s expansive vision. He wanted a port of entry, where goods from outside Texas could be imported and traded. Accordingly, he founded San Felipe de Austin, which served as a capital for his little colony.

  By the time Houston arrived in Texas a decade later, Austin’s venture had inspired a wave of immigration. Word of his project spread quickly; several hundred immigrants arrived by 1824, and by 1825, the count was over twelve hundred. The promise of more elbow room, a new land of opportunity, a place to flourish, lured some ten thousand more Americans in the late 1820s, people hungry for land. They called themselves “Texians,” and in return for taking an oath to the Mexican government, settlers were given large grants of land: 640 acres for each able-bodied man, 320 for his wife, and 160 more for each child. By the beginning of the 1830s, the roughly fifteen thousand Texians outnumbered the Spanish-speaking Tejanos five to one.*

  Though an 1830 bill passed by the Mexican congress closed the border, effectively prohibiting further American immigration, a lack of enforcement meant that the ban did less to discourage new arrivals than it did to encourage a sense of solidarity among the Anglo settlers. Immigrants—like Sam Houston—still poured into Texas.

  Now, as Houston traveled along the weedy track of the camino, he was eager to learn Austin’s plans. Did he hope for independence? Would he cooperate with Houston’s hopes? He was a conservative man, perhaps likely to favor the current state of affairs, but Houston needed to find out.

  Houston turned south at the Brazos River, then reached San Felipe, which thirty families called home. He found Austin’s homestead without difficulty, but, to his surprise, the hand he shook on the veranda wasn’t Stephen Austin’s. Austin was traveling elsewhere in the colony. Instead, Houston stood face-to-face with another Texas adventurer, one James Bowie.

  WELCOME TO TEXAS

  Jim Bowie and Sam Houston even looked like natural allies. A physically imposing six-footer, Bowie was, according to his brother, “about as well made as any man I ever saw.” Bowie was as fond of drink as Houston and had also joined Jackson’s army during the War of 1812. Born in Kentucky but raised on a hardscrabble Georgia farm, the handsome Bowie—“young, proud, and ambitious”—had, like Houston, left his humble origins behind in order to seek his fortune in Texas.2

  His light-colored hair tinged with red, Bowie was likable, with an engaging smile and an easy and open manner. His reputation, however, wasn’t all sweetness and light; when someone or something set off his hair-trigger temper, it “frequently terminated in some tragical scene.”3 One such moment, in 1827, had left Bowie nearly dead.

  In a brawl fought on a sandbar of the Mississippi, Bowie had taken a bullet to his hip and a bloody knife gash to his chest. Neither prevented him from grabbing one attacker by the shirt and pulling him down on the blade of Bowie’s long knife, “twisting it to cut his heart strings.”4 The man died quickly, but Bowie fought on, sustaining two mo
re bullet wounds and another from a knife. He survived and always after wore at his side that long and instantly legendary knife as a badge of honor.

  In Texas, he mastered Spanish, joined the Catholic Church, and accumulated vast tracts of land. He married Maria Ursula de Veramendi, the striking daughter of the vice governor of the province, and settled into a quieter life.

  Upon meeting Houston at Austin’s, Bowie volunteered to escort him to San Antonio, the next stop on Houston’s Texas tour.5 Houston eagerly accepted. Always the politician, he wanted to get to know his new place and meet its important people. They traveled in a small group and, at Bowie’s insistence, posted a guard each night to watch for Indians.

  Bowie was just one of a rapidly growing circle of Houston’s connections in Texas. In San Antonio, Bowie introduced Houston to his in-laws, the Veramendis, and other influential Texians, who showed Houston around the adobe homes of the picturesque town. By coincidence, a group of Comanche happened to be in San Antonio at the same time, and Houston fulfilled an obligation to Jackson when he got them to agree to meet with Indian commissioners in U.S. territory.

  Heading back east, he stopped in San Felipe, this time finding Austin at home. Houston saw a man of moderate height and sober habits, unmarried but dedicated to Texas (Austin was known to say, “Texas is my mistress”). As for Austin, he recognized in this tall stranger a man worthy of a major land grant in one of his colonies.