Shepherd saw me and then raised his hand to enlist. He took a step toward the soldiers, who looked so clean and sharp and precise—so alive— and I found myself raising my own hand.
We didn’t know then that the soldiers, or irregulars, had stopped the day before and bathed in the river and scrubbed their hair and washed their uniforms; they had hung them out to dry in the late-autumn sun, and had brushed and curried their mounts and filed their hoofs in preparation for the next morning’s recruiting. We didn’t know that they needed only forty more volunteers to attain their desired goal of five hundred, which was what they had ascertained was the ideal strike force, able to travel fast and far and light, yet also sufficient, when under focused discipline, to present formidable, lethal force against the enemy.
Neither did we know that the night before at their encampment the two captains had debated—not quite arguing—about whether to go searching for those final forty in LaGrange, or to veer northwest to Bastrop.
“We only need forty,” Fisher had said. “Surely we can find forty in LaGrange.”
“But Bastrop is larger,” Green said. “And if we don’t get forty, then we have to go on up to Bastrop anyway, losing two extra days.”
They debated some more, out of earshot of their men, and finally decided by Fisher’s choosing one of two twigs from Green’s fist. The short twig meant they would take the near path to LaGrange, while the longer twig meant traveling directly to Bastrop, bypassing LaGrange. The men, women, and children—the farmers and teachers, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters—slept peacefully in Bastrop, never knowing, never being asked to die, spared, as I would be—but without the choice and the challenge.
In LaGrange, Fisher and Green secured forty-two volunteers. They came from a mix of society: the unschooled and the well educated, the poor and the elite, the sons of ne’er-do-wells, of politicians, of farmers, clerks, and grocers. What burned brightest in us all was a love of the land, with its wild pecan groves and deer and turkey, and the fertile river bottom and endless timber and grasslands.
Surely we would not have had so many wars, had our land not been so beloved—fighting the Indians to the west, and Mexico to the south, as the flow of Appalachian emigrants continued to filter down from out of the highlands.
What our town was like then was the calm in the eye of a storm. We lived in bucolic idyll, and knew it; each morning, dawn’s rising found us already out in the fields, working. And paradoxically, it was the pastoral existence, this peace within the whirlwind, that compelled many of us to leave the calm and venture out into the storm. Looking back, I can see clearly the irony and wrong-headedness of it, but back then it seemed to make perfect sense: almost as if such decisions and such notions had been foreordained.
My own family were farmers, Gores and Lowrys from Tennessee, whose ancestors had come down from Wales, pausing for a generation in County Cork before traveling across the Atlantic. Like the other forty-one new recruits, I told my parents goodbye and said that our commanders promised we would be back in two weeks, or three at the most.
We gathered our weapons—a rifle or a pistol, or both—and ammunition, with which we were never wasteful, and packed a lunch, and rode out that afternoon.
Not all of us were young. The eldest was Claudius Toops, a blacksmith of sixty, who enlisted with his son Buster, who was forty, and Buster’s own son Andrew, who was twenty. But regardless of rank or age or station in life, that first evening, with the mass of us camped on the banks of the Brazos, we were all in high spirits, conjoined in a new brotherhood.
In the days before our march, the newspapers had been quoting Texas’s president, Sam Houston, as saying that regrettably there was no budget for arming militias and bands of patriots such as ours—that “the government will promise nothing but the authority to march, and will furnish such supplies of ammunition as may be needed for the campaign. Volunteers must look to the Valley of the Rio Grande for remuneration,” he told reporters, and surely he meant from the other side of the river—the Mexican side. “Our government promises to claim no portion of the spoils,” he told the press; “they will be divided among the victors.” He finished with one caveat: “The flag of Texas will accompany any such expedition.”
And camped there on the Brazos that first night, Captain Green produced with a flourish a tattered paper that he said was our personal marching orders from President Houston himself. The letter was dated October third of that year and addressed not the bandits whom Green and Fisher said we would be chasing, but Mexico’s General Woll’s surprising attack (with two thousand men) on the southern outpost of San Antonio.
In those early days of the march, bur fiddles had not yet been abandoned; a few of the recruits had shoved them into their saddlebags or rode with them tied to their saddles, bouncing and sometimes squealing with a single stray note. And that night, as Green produced and then began to read from his letter, they fell silent, and we listened as intently as if he were President Houston himself.
“Captain Green, my fellow patriot,” he read. “You will proceed to the most eligible point on the southwestern frontier of Texas, concentrate with the force now under the command, all troops who may submit to your order, and if you can advance with the prospect of success, into the enemy’s territory, you will do so at once. You will receive no troops into your command but such as those who will swear to march across the Rio Grande under your orders, if required by you to do so.
