The Yellow Rose of Texas: Teasing the truth from a legend

  One of the most popular Texas legends is about the Yellow Rose of Texas, a young woman who helped win the Battle of San Jacinto and then had a catchy song written about her.  Fortunately, some of the legend is true.  And some was invented in the 1960s by Texas folklore journalists.  Click here to learn all about Emily West, and about that catchy tune we still enjoy!

The Yellow Rose of Texas: Teasing Truth from a Legend 

Mapping the 1759 Parrilla Expedition

 

The Indian attack on the San Sabá mission in 1758 came as a surprise and posed a significant treat to the Spanish authorities.  They had never before seen such a large group of so-called Norteños, with firearms. A year later, a punitive expedition to punish the perpetrators of the mission massacre was led by San Sabá presidial commander Diego Ortiz Parrilla.  They traveled to the Red River and fought a bloody but indecisive battle at the village fort of Tayovayas who, with allied Comanches, were the largest of the Norteño tribal groups.  A diary of this expedition was found in 1979 by Texas historian Robert Weddle while researching in the archives at Seville, Spain.  The document below describes in detail the entire route of the Parrilla expedition, and identifies for the first time the location of a Tonkawa village at a great lake (Wichita Falls and Lake Wichita) which was the first casualty of the Spanish army before the main battle on the Red River.  

Mapping the 1759 Parrilla Expedition  

Two Famous Texas Meteorites: Red River and Wichita County Irons

  Comanches and Taovaya Indians living along the upper Brazos and Red Rivers venerated two meteorites that they knew as magic rocks that could heal illness and ensure victory in battle.  Spaniards first saw them in 1759, then French traders in 1772 and later American traders in 1808.  Ultimately both were removed by Americans.  One, named Red River Iron, was found on the Brazos near Lake Possum Kingdom.  At 1,635 pounds it was the largest known meteorite in the world for many years.  The second, named Wichita County Iron, was placed on top of Medicine Mound by Comanches and was the subject of a painting by George Catlin in 1838.  

Read the fascinating story of the cultural role these meteorites held among the tribes, their find and removal by Americans who thought they were made of valuable platinum, and the subsequent realization that they were actually meteorites and of scientific importance. 

Two Famous Texas Meteorites

Lost Cannons from the Siege of Bexar

      Eyewitness accounts, a community legend, specific artillery inventories before and after the Siege of Bexar, and a detailed count of the cannons in San Antonio on December 10, 1835 at the end of the Siege, all indicate that as many as eight Mexican cannons were rolled into the San Antonio River before daylight on the day the fighting ceased.  They were discovered by city employees in 1911 but not recovered then.  This article provides the historical context for the possibility that these guns are still buried in the river near the Alamo, probably under several feet of silt.  

      Who will mount an expedition to locate them and excavate them for exhibit in the soon-to-be renovated Alamo compound?

Click here for the details.  

Lost Cannons from the Siege of Bexar 

San Antonio Arms and Ammunition in the 1830s

     Several inventories of arms and ammunition in San Antonio at various times in 1835 and 1836 provide clues as to events that occurred with the the Mexican and Texan armies in the Siege of Bexar and the Battle of the Alamo.  Click the link below to read how these inventories can be coupled with other historical archives to tell us more about what went on during those eventful few months at the start of the Texas Revolution.

San Antonio Arms and Ammunition in the 1830s  

Taovaya: From Quivera to the Red River

     The Taovaya were a tribe of Native Americans that lived for over fifty years on the Red River between Texas and Oklahoma, and played an important role in early recorded history of the region.  Their tribal predecessors lived in central Kansas, and were the first American Plains Indians visited by Spanish explorer Francisco de Coronado in 1541.  He named their villages Quivera, having gone there in hopes of finding another province like Mexico and Peru, full of gold and silver.  Soon after moving to Texas in the 1750s, Taovaya joined Comanche allies to attack and destroy the San Saba mission in 1758, then soundly defeated a Spanish army sent to their villages the next year in an attempt at retaliation.  Decimated by European diseases against which they had no natural immunity, they merged into other Wichita tribes in 1811 and lost their distinctive tribal identity.  Today many of their descendants live on their reservation in Oklahoma.

     Click here to learn about these early Texas residents:

Tayovaya: from Quivera to the Red River 

Travels in Spanish and Mexican Texas

     Travelers have written about Texas for a long time.  Observations of the first Spaniard to sail along the Gulf Coast were recorded in 1519.  Cabeza de Vaca told of his visit in the late 1530s, as did participants in the Coronado and DeSoto expeditions in the 1540s.  More entradas into Texas came after New Mexico was settled in the 1590s.  Then came La Salle in 1685, followed by a host of Spaniards who established missions and forts throughout Texas in the 1700s.
    This document contains summaries of many of these early visits to Texas during the Spanish Colonial and Mexican occupation before 1836.  References to primary sources are given in each case, to allow the interested reader to pursue additional details.  Click on the following link to read about these accounts of Texas while most of it was still an uncharted wilderness.

Chronology of Travels in Spanish and Mexican Texas