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Updated: May 27, 2025
There was not a moment to lose, nor was one lost. The general addressed the men. "Friends! Brothers! Citizens! General Santa Anna is within a mile of us with fifteen hundred men. The hour that is to decide the question of Texian liberty is now arrived. What say you? Do we attack?" "We do!" exclaimed the men with one voice, cheerfully and decidedly.
With these we started for San Antonio de Bexar, a march of two hundred and fifty miles, through trackless prairies intersected with rivers and streams, which, although not quite so big as the Mississippi or Potomac, were yet deep and wide enough to have offered serious impediment to regular armies. But to Texian farmers and backwoodsmen, they were trifling obstacles.
But in the year '33 occurred Santa Anna's defection from the liberal party, and the imprisonment of Stephen F. Austin, the Texian representative in the Mexican congress, by the vice-president, Gomez Farias. This was followed by Texas adopting the constitution of 1824, and declaring itself an independent state of the Mexican republic.
He asked us what o'clock it was, as he had not a watch, and told us that a few minutes' ride would bring us to Boston, a new Texian city. This building, a naked negro informed us, was Ambassadors' Hall, the great and only hotel of Texian Boston.
It was a most ludicrous scene, and defies all power of description; so much did it amuse us, that we could not stop laughing for three or four hours. The next day, we found many mineral springs, the waters of which were strongly impregnated with sulphur and iron. We also passed by the bodies of five white men, probably trappers, horribly mangled, and evidently murdered by some Texian robbers.
"The bodies of the young women have been atrociously and cowardly abused seest thou? Thou well knowest the Indian is too noble and too proud to level himself to the rank of a Texian or of a brute." Twenty of our Comanches started on the tracks, and in the evening brought three prisoners to the camp.
The Apaches are constantly at war with the Mexicans, it is true, but never have they committed any of those cowardly atrocities which have disgraced every page of Texian history.
During the three centuries that have elapsed since the conquest of Mexico, they have increased and multiplied to an extraordinary extent, and are to be found in vast droves in the Texian prairies, although they are now beginning to become somewhat scarcer.
The consequences have been most disastrous, and it is to be questioned whether some of them will ever be removed. At the period of its independence, the population of Texas was estimated at about forty thousand. Now, if you are to credit the Texian Government, it has increased to about seventy-five thousand.
As we rode away, nothing remained of Texian Boston except three patches of white ashes, and a few half-burnt logs, nor do know if that important city has ever been rebuilt. We were now but twenty miles from the Red River, and yet this short distance proved to be the most difficult travelling we had experienced for a long while.
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