On the morning of the 9th of November, 1807, a party of Spanish officials proceeded to the barracks where the Americans were confined and an officer read the King’s barbarous decree. A drum was brought, a tumbler and dice were set upon it, and around it, blindfolded, knelt the nine participants in this lottery of death. Some day, no doubt, when time has accorded these men the justice of perspective, Texas will commission a famous artist to paint the scene: the turquoise sky, the yellow sand, the sun glare on the whitewashed adobe of the barrack walls, the little, brown-skinned soldiers in their slovenly uniforms of soiled white linen, the Spanish officers, gorgeous in scarlet and gold lace, awed in spite of themselves by the solemnity of the occasion, and, kneeling in a circle about the drum, in their frayed and tattered buckskin, the prison pallor on their faces, the nine Americans—cool, composed, and unafraid.

Ephraim Blackburn, a Virginian and the
oldest of the prisoners, took the fatal
glass and with a hand which did not
tremble—though I imagine that he whispered
a little prayer—threw 3 and 1		 4
Lucian Garcia threw 3 and 4 7
Joseph Reed threw 6 and 5 11
David Fero threw 5 and 3 8
Solomon Cooley threw 6 and 5 11
Jonah Walters threw 6 and 1 7
Charles Ring threw 4 and 3 7
William Dawlin threw 4 and 2 6
Ellis Bean threw 4 and 1 5

Whereupon they took poor Ephraim Blackburn out and hanged him.

After Blackburn’s execution three of the remaining prisoners were set at liberty, but Bean, with four of his companions, all heavily ironed, were started off under guard for Mexico City. Any one who questions the assertion that fact is stranger than fiction will change his mind after hearing of Bean’s subsequent adventures. They read like the wildest and most improbable of dime novels. When the prisoners reached Salamanca a young and strikingly beautiful woman, evidently attracted by Bean’s youth and magnificent physique, managed to approach him unobserved and asked him in a whisper if he did not wish to escape. (As if, after his years of captivity and hardship, he could have wished otherwise!) Then she disappeared as silently and mysteriously as she had come. The next day the señora, who, as it proved, was the girl wife of a rich old husband, by bribing the guard, contrived to see Bean again. She told him quite frankly that her husband, whom she had been forced to marry against her will, was absent at his silver mines, and suggested that, if Bean would promise not to desert her, she would find means to effect his escape and that they could then fly together to the United States. It shows the manner of man this American adventurer was that, on the plea that he could not desert his companions in misfortune, he declined her offer. The next day, as the prisoners once again took up their weary march to the southward, the señora slipped into Bean’s hand a small package. When an opportunity came for him to open it he found that it contained a letter from his fair admirer, a gold ring, and a considerable sum of money.

Instead of being released upon their arrival at the city of Mexico, as they had been led to expect, the Americans were marched to Acapulco, on the Pacific, then a port of great importance because of its trade with the Philippines. Here Bean was placed in solitary confinement, the only human beings he saw for many months being the jailer who brought him his scanty daily allowance of food and the sentry who paced up and down outside his cell. Had it not been for a white lizard which he found in his dungeon and which, with incredible patience, he succeeded in taming, he would have gone mad from the intolerable solitude. Learning from the sentinel that one of his companions had been taken ill and had been transferred to the hospital, Bean, who was a resourceful fellow, prepared his pulse by striking his elbows on the floor and then sent for the prison doctor. Though he was sent to the hospital, as he had anticipated, not only were his irons not removed but his legs were placed in stocks, and, on the theory that eating is not good for a sick man, his allowance of food was greatly reduced, his meat for a day consisting of the head of a chicken. When Bean remonstrated with the priest over the insufficient nourishment he was receiving, the padre told him that if he wasn’t satisfied with what he was getting he could go to the devil. Whereupon, his anger overpowering his judgment, Bean hurled his plate at the friar’s shaven head and laid it open. For this he was punished by having his head put in the stocks, in an immovable position, for fifteen days. When he recovered from the real fever which this barbarous punishment brought on, he was only too glad to go back to the solitude of his cell and his friend the lizard.

While being taken back to prison, Bean, who had succeeded in concealing on his person the money which the señora in Salamanca had given him, suggested to his guards that they stop at a tavern and have something to drink. A Spaniard never refuses a drink, and they accepted. So skilfully did he ply them with liquor that one of them fell into a drunken stupor while the other became so befuddled that Bean found no difficulty in enticing him into the garden at the back of the tavern on the plea that he wished to show him a certain flower. As the man was bending over to examine the plant to which Bean had called his attention, the American leaped upon his back and choked him into unconsciousness. Heavily manacled though he was, Bean succeeded in clambering over the high wall and escaped to the woods outside the city, where he filed off his irons with the steel he used for striking fire. Concealing himself until nightfall, he slipped into the town again, where he found an English sailor who, upon hearing his pitiful story, smuggled him aboard his vessel and concealed him in a water-cask. But, just as the anchor was being hoisted and he believed himself free at last, a party of Spanish soldiers boarded the vessel and hauled him out of his hiding-place—he had been betrayed by the Portuguese cook. For this attempt at escape he was sentenced to eighteen months more of solitary confinement.

One day, happening to overhear an officer speaking of having some rock blasted, Bean sent word to him that he was an expert at that business, whereupon he was taken out and put to work. Before he had been in the quarry a week he succeeded in once more making his escape. Travelling by night and hiding by day, he beat his way up the coast, only to be retaken some weeks later. When he was brought before the governor of Acapulco that official went into a paroxysm of rage at sight of the American whose iron will he had been unable to break either by imprisonment or torture. Bean, who had reached such a stage of desperation that he didn’t care what happened to him, looking the governor squarely in the eye, told him, in terms which seared and burned, exactly what he thought of him and defied him to do his worst. That official, at his wits’ end to know how to subdue the unruly American, gave orders that he was to be chained to a gigantic mulatto, the most dangerous criminal in the prison, the latter being promised a year’s reduction in his sentence if he would take care of his yokemate, whom he was authorized to punish as frequently as he saw fit. But the punishing was the other way around, for Bean pommelled the big negro so terribly that the latter sent word to the governor that he would rather have his sentence increased than to be longer chained to the mad Americano. By this time Bean had every one in the castle, from the governor to the lowest warder, completely terrorized, for they recognized that he was desperate and would stop at nothing. He was, in fact, such a hard case that the governor of Acapulco wrote to the viceroy that he could do nothing with him and begged to be relieved of his dangerous prisoner. The latter, in reply, sent an order for his removal to the Spanish penal settlement in the Philippines. But while awaiting a vessel the revolt led by Morelos, the Mexican patriot, broke out, and a rebel army advanced on Acapulco. The prisons of New Spain had been emptied to obtain recruits to fill the Spanish ranks, and Bean was the only prisoner left in the citadel. The Spanish authorities, desperately in need of men, offered him his liberty if he would help to defend the town. Bean agreed, his irons were knocked off, he was given a gun, and became a soldier. But he felt that he owed no loyalty to his Spanish captors; so, when an opportunity presented itself a few weeks later, he went over to Morelos, taking with him a number of the garrison. A born soldier, hard as nails, amazingly resourceful and brave to the point of rashness, he quickly won the confidence and friendship of the patriot leader, who commissioned him a colonel in the Republican army. When Morelos left Acapulco to continue his campaign in the south, he turned the command of the besieging forces over to the ex-convict, who, a few weeks later, carried the city by storm. It must have been a proud moment for the American adventurer, not yet thirty years of age, when he stood in the plaza of the captured city and received the sword of the governor who had treated him with such fiendish cruelty.[A]

When the story of the treatment of Nolan and his companions trickled back to the settlements and was repeated from village to village and from house to house, every repetition served to fan the flame of hatred of everything Spanish, which grew fiercer and fiercer in the Southwest as the years rolled by. From the horror and indignation aroused along the frontier by the treatment of these men, whom the undiscerning historians have unjustly described as filibusters, sprang that movement which ended, a quarter of a century later, in freeing Texas forever from the cruelties of Latin rule. Thus it came about that Nolan and his companions did not suffer in vain.

Though during the years immediately following Nolan’s ill-fated expedition all Mexico was aflame with the revolt lighted by the patriot priest Hidalgo, things were fairly quiet along the border. But this was not to last. After the capture and execution of the militant priest one of his followers, Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara, after a thrilling flight across Texas, found refuge in Natchez, where he made the acquaintance of Lieutenant Augustus Magee, a brilliant young officer of the American garrison. Gutierrez painted pictures with words as an artist does with the brush, and so inspiring were the scenes his ready tongue depicted that they fired the young lieutenant with an ambition to aid in freeing Mexico from Spanish rule. Magee was of a daring and romantic disposition and accepted without question the stories told him by Gutierrez. His plan seems to have been to conquer Texas to the Rio Grande and, after building up a republican state, to apply for admission to the Union. Resigning his commission, he threw himself heart and soul into the business of recruiting an expedition from the adventurers who made New Orleans—now become an American city—their headquarters and from the freebooters of the neutral ground. A call to these men to join the “Republican Army of the North” and receive forty dollars a month and a square league of land in Texas was eagerly responded to, and by June, 1812, Gutierrez and Magee had recruited half a thousand daredevils who, for the sake of adventure, were willing to follow their leaders anywhere. Most of them were “two-gun men,” which means that they went into action with a pistol in each hand and a knife between the teeth, and they didn’t know the name of fear. In order to secure the co-operation of the Mexican population of Texas, Gutierrez was named commander-in-chief of the expedition, though the real leader was Magee, who held the position of chief of staff, an American frontiersman named Reuben Kemper being commissioned major.

In the beginning everything was as easy as falling down-stairs. The time chosen for the venture was peculiarly propitious, for the Spaniards had their hands full with the civil war in Mexico, which they supposed they had ended with the capture and execution of Hidalgo, but which had broken out again under the leadership of another priest, named Morelos. As a result of the demoralization which existed, the Americans were almost unopposed in their advance. Nacogdoches fell before them, and so did the fort at Spanish Bluff, and by November, 1812, they had raised the republican standard over La Bahia, or, as it is known to-day, Goliad. Three days later Governor Salcedo—the same who had attacked Nolan’s party a dozen years before—marched against the town with fourteen hundred men. Though the Americans were outnumbered more than two to one, they did not wait for the Spaniards to attack but sallied out and drove them back in confusion. Whereupon the Spaniards sat down without the town and prepared to conduct a siege, and the Americans sat down within and prepared to resist it. It ended in a peculiar fashion. During a three days’ armistice Salcedo invited Magee to dine with him in the Spanish camp, and the American commander accepted. What arguments or inducements the astute Spaniard brought to bear on the young American can only be conjectured, but, at any rate, Magee agreed to surrender the town on condition that all of his men should be sent back to the United States in safety. To this condition Salcedo assented. Returning to the town, Magee had his men paraded, told them what he had done, and asked all who approved of his action to shoulder arms. For some moments after he had finished they stared at him in mingled amazement, incredulity, and suspicion. It was unbelievable, unthinkable, preposterous, that he, the idol of the army, the hero of a dozen engagements, a product of the great officer factory at West Point, should even contemplate, much less advocate, surrender. Not only did they not shoulder arms, but most of them, to emphasize their disapproval, brought their rifle butts crashing to the ground. For a few moments Magee stood with sunken head and downcast eyes; then he slowly turned and entered his tent. An hour or so later a messenger under a flag of truce brought a curt note from Salcedo reminding Magee of their agreement and demanding to know why he had not surrendered the town as he had promised. The message was opened by Gutierrez, who ordered that no answer should be sent, whereupon Salcedo threw his entire force against the town in an attempt to carry it by storm. But the Americans, though sick at heart at the action of their young commander, were far from being demoralized, as the oncoming Spaniards quickly found, for as they reached the outer line of intrenchments the Americans met them with a blast of lead which wiped out their leading companies and sent the balance scampering San Antonio-ward. Throughout the action Magee remained hidden in his tent. When an orderly went to summon him the next morning he found the young West Pointer stretched upon the floor, with a pistol in his hand and the back blown out of his head.