Emily D. West:
Santa Anna’s San Jacinto Rose
An Essay of 2,986 Words Concerning
The Believability
Of William Bollaert’s Story about Santa Anna
And
His Revolutionary Rendezvous with Emily D. West
At San Jacinto on 21 April 1836
By
James Lutzweiler
101 Thornwood Road
Jamestown, North Carolina 27282
lutzjscn@infionline.net or jlutzweiler@sebts.edu
336-454-0828(H); 336-686-2043 (M); 919-761-2249 (O)
919-761-2150 (FAX)
On July 6, 1842, William Bollaert, an Englishman traveling throughout Texas to
evaluate the expansive new territory for a speculator friend back in Britain, made a
fascinating entry in his diary. Therein Bollaert recorded a story that Sam Houston told
him about the Battle of San Jacinto, the battle in which Houston and his ragtag army
transferred Texas territory from a Mexican state into an independent republic. The
original record of Houston’s story in Bollaert’s own handwriting is archived in the
Newberry Library in Chicago. The entry reads as follows:
I [Bollaert] left Galveston with a friend for a trip to the Trinity
River by land (for observations to Geographical Society). Buffalo Bayou
may be compared to a deep canal, its shores thickly wooded with Pine and
the Magnolias in flower. We gazed with some interest on the battle field
of San Jacinto.
The following is a copy of an unpublished letter written by G’l
[i.e., General] Houston to a friend after this extraordinary battle:
“The Battle of San Jacinto was probably lost to the Mexicans,
owing to the influence of a Mulatta girl (Emily) belonging to Col. Morgan
who was closeted in the tent with g’l [i.e., General] Santana, at the time
the cry was made, ‘The Enemy! They come! They come! and detained
Santana so long, that order could not be restored readily again.”
In the margin to the left of the quotation from the letter is the word “Private,” and it is
underlined three times.1
Bollaert’s quotation from Houston’s letter contains all that anyone presently
knows about whatever it was, certainly something sexual, that transpired within Santa
Anna’s tent around 4:30 in the afternoon of April 21, 1836.2 Numerous newspaper
articles, as well as an encyclopedia article, a few footnotes in scholarly books and even a
full-length book have been written about this Texas tryst. In spite of all the thousands of
words expended within these publications, including words that describe Emily as a
“Latin-looking goddess” who was “sampling chocolates” and “playing the piano” for
Santa Anna in his tent, no documents have yet surfaced to indicate anything about the
two of them other than what Bollaert has written in the preceding paragraph of only fiftynine
words.3
There are two other contemporaneous documents that testify to the simple
certainty of Emily’s existence, to her presence at San Jacinto, and to her employment by
Col. Morgan. But neither of these documents even hint of what went on behind closed
flaps. Not a word.4
When Bollaert returned to Britain, he wrote several essays about his travels in
Texas. Several of these were published in a journal called the United Service Magazine.
For reasons unknown, but perhaps because of his services in British intelligence and his
corresponding desire to keep a low profile, these essays were published anonymously,
having only as Bollaert’s byline “By a Traveler.” He wrote one essay about his Texas
travels that included this story about Emily in the tent with Santa Anna. But for reasons
even more unknown, this essay was never published. And so far as anyone has been able
to discover, the story never saw the printed light of day until 1948 when Joe Frantz, later
chairman of the department of history at the University of Texas, included it in a footnote
within his PhD dissertation. That dissertation was published in 1951 in a not altogether
widely circulated biography of Gail Borden, the founder of the Borden’s Milk Company.5
Bollaert’s sensational story lay buried in Borden’s biography until 1956 when
Eugene Hollon, a University of Oklahoma history professor, published what he
characterized as Bollaert’s entire diary and associated papers archived at the Newberry
Library.6 However, Hollon did not publish all of those papers. Though he did publish
the story about Emily and Santa Anna, he, like Frantz before him, consigned the story to
an obscure footnote, when it was actually in the main text of Bollaert’s diary and essay.
In addition Hollon, as had Frantz, omitted the critically important source of Bollaert’s
story, namely Sam Houston.7
From 1956 until the present day, the story about Emily and Santa Anna has grown
with the telling of it. Embellishments began in earnest as early as 1961 when Frank
Tolbert, a Dallas Morning News columnist, saw Emily as an anonymous songwriter’s
inspiration for “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Soon others, lemming like, began to see the
same thing (and many more things as well), even though not a single shred of credible
evidence connected Emily, the real girl on the banks of the San Jacinto, with the
unnamed and probably fictitious female on the banks of the Rio Grande celebrated in the
song.8
Such egregious embellishments as Tolbert’s and others in his train even began to
overshadow the substance of the tryst itself until serious historians like Stephen L. Hardin
in his scholarly, prize-winning Texian Iliad, a book rooted in the imagery of Homer’s
classical Iliad, erupted in exasperation and disbelief:
There is not a scintilla of primary evidence to support the oft-repeated
myth that Santa Anna was engaged in a tryst with the mulatto slave girl
Emily Morgan. For a thorough debunking of the tale, see Kent Biffle,
“Yellow Rose Story Loses Its Bloom,” Dallas Morning News, November
17, 1985, sec. A, 45.9
Hardin was technically correct because there was and is no such person as “Emily
Morgan” known to Texas revolutionary historians. However, historical evidence
confirms the existence of Emily D. West; and the other two documents that have surfaced
make it clear that Bollaert’s simple “Emily” is identical to Emily D. West.10
A story such as Bollaert’s that has only one witness, i.e., himself, for its
dependability is automatically a story that invites suspicion. At the same time, suspicion
is not tantamount to uncertainty or improbability. In the last analysis, the reliability of
this story depends upon the believability of Bollaert, not upon the testimony of Joe
Frantz, Eugene Hollon, Frank Tolbert, Stephen Hardin, Kent Biffle, or the present writer.
Therefore, what kind of a witness was Bollaert? Was he susceptible to believing Pecos
Bill-ish barroom banter and campfire fabrications? Or was he a nuanced listener,
observer, and recorder?
Bollaert was clearly the latter. Back in Britain he worked as an assistant chemist
to Sir Humphrey Davy, professor of chemistry at London’s Royal Institution, and to
Davy’s successor, Michael Faraday, both among the most famous scientists in British
history. Davy discovered the anesthetic effects of nitrous oxide (laughing gas), and
Faraday’s discoveries in electromagnetic induction made possible the development of the
electric motor, earning him a ranking of 28th in Michael Hart’s book The 100: A Ranking
of the Most influential Persons in History.11
Bollaert’s own scientific achievements were not confined to Britain or to Texas.
His outlook was global. It was Bollaert who in 1837 had proposed to London’s Royal
Geographical Society the idea of crossing Africa from east to west before David
Livingstone actually did it almost twenty years later. And at one time he served as the
official government surveyor of Peru’s Tarapaca Province, his work there resulting in
development of that country’s nitrate industry.12
Endorsement of Bollaert’s believability had been demonstrated for American
readers long before Joe Frantz and Eugene Hollon first published their now famous
footnotes. In a massive four-volume scientific set entitled The U.S. Naval Astronomical
Expedition To The Southern Hemisphere During the Years 1849—‘50—‘51—’52, which
was published for the United States Congress in 1853—54, an American naturalist by the
name of John Cassin provided an assessment of Bollaert that is both revealing and
reassuring. But before considering Cassin’s belief in Bollaert, it would be good to
question Cassin’s credibility.
Cassin (1813-1869) was the premier ornithologist of his day and America’s first
taxonomist. As explorers trekked the western regions of the United States, Cassin drew,
printed and hand-colored many resulting illustrations in the magisterial 13-volume
Pacific Railroad Surveys commissioned by then Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis. In
1842 Cassin became curator of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, an
institution that possessed a larger bird collection at the time than the Smithsonian
Institution. With Spencer Fullerton Baird (1823-1887), Secretary of the Smithsonian and
one of the founders of the Marine Biological Station in Woods Hole, Massachusetts
(from which associated enterprises Robert Ballard later launched his discovery of the
Titanic), Cassin co-authored Birds of North America in 1860. He succeeded J.T. Bowen
as the lithographer of John James Audubon, even though Cassin did not particularly
admire the technical skills of Audubon whom, he once noted, was “no naturalist.”
Nevertheless, when Cassin published his own book, he characterized it as a “supplement
to Audubon’s Birds of America.” His book is entitled Illustrations of the Birds of
California, Texas [emphasis mine], Oregon, British and Russian America. In short,
Cassin was a scientist of the first order; and he knew something of Texas and he knew
Bollaert.13
It was in connection with Peru, however, not Texas, that Cassin brought up
Bollaert’s name in the U.S. Government document. For the purpose of evaluating
Bollaert’s believability, it does not really matter where on earth Cassin characterized the
qualifications of the Englishman. Commenting on the subject of the zoology of the
Southern Hemisphere, especially that of birds, Cassin wrote:
“P.S. –After having written this notice, there fell in my hands an account
of the Province of Tarapaca, by Mr. William Bollaert, read at a meeting of
the Royal Geographic Society of London. In this paper the author states
that he found on lakes of the cordilleras of that province ‘flamingoes with
red breasts,’ and on the map accompanying the memoir there is a lake
called Las Parrinas, in latitude 19 [degrees] south.
I immediately conjectured that this flamingo of the cordillera of Tarapaca with the red
breast was my Phoenicopterus andinus, and having had the pleasure to see
Mr. Bollaert in Santiago, and show him my mounted specimen in the
museum, this gentleman confirmed me that it is the same species; so that
we may assign for its habitation the whole cordilleras from latitude 19
[degrees] south to 27 [degrees] south” [quotation marks in the original].14
While the flamingoes of South America are far removed from a femme fatale at San
Jacinto, the credibility Cassin placed in Bollaert’s confirmation of his own views is
certainly transferable to contemporary questions about Emily D. West, Santa Anna’s own
mounted specimen of sorts at San Jacinto.
Cassin is not the only scientist of record who found Bollaert credible. Charles
Carter Blake wrote a letter to Charles Darwin on 13 January 1862 in which he called
attention to the second edition of a forthcoming work by Bollaert on Bollaert’s
archaeological and ethnological studies of South America. Bollaert had actually
preceded Darwin in traveling to South America, partially paving the way for the famed
Beagle biologist, and had even returned to London on the Beagle’s sister ship Adventure.
In his letter Blake refers to Bollaert as “my friend” and calls him “Mr. Bollaert,” instead
of “William Bollaert,” implying that Darwin already knew of him and his previous work.
Blake certainly expected Darwin to trust Bollaert’s research, which in this case did not
concern birds but Bollaert’s discovery of an elephant’s tooth in Texas.15
Booksellers, like Cassin and Blake, also hold Bollaert in the highest regard. In
the summer of 2005 at least a dozen newly discovered handwritten diaries of Bollaert
surfaced from a rare book dealer in Buenos Aires. Half of the diaries were acquired by
Bollaert’s great-great granddaughter in London for $13,000, and the other half were
acquired for $22,000 by William Reese, the alleged kingpin of rare book dealers. At this
writing Reese is offering the diaries for resale to the Newberry Library for $27,000.16
These prices alone do not testify to the credibility of Bollaert, since first editions
of fiction like The Great Gatsby have commanded over $100,000. But the catalogues of
the booksellers make it quite clear that they find Bollaert believable. E.g., the 2005
catalogue of Libreria De Antano in Buenos Aires included these words in its
advertisement for Bollaert’s South American diaries covering the years 1826-1854:
The main topics [in these diaries] are mining industry, archaeology and important
characters, although it [sic] also contains small anecdotes, making his diaries a
mosaic of South American life and customs from the point of view of a clever
observer [italics mine].17
It is clear that those who have a large financial stake in the credibility of Bollaert have
come down on the side of his believability.18
Thus, the hitherto unchallenged evidence for Bollaert’s believability remains
compelling. That by itself, however, would not make his story of Santa Anna’s tryst true,
especially if Bollaert’s source, Sam Houston, were undependable or simply spoofing.
Jack Jackson in his edited version of Almonte’s Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical
Association, 2003) has raised the specter that this story with which Bollaert has regaled
readers may be nothing more than “an example of Houston’s droll humor at the expense
of a gullible Englishman.”19 In Jackson’s hypothetical scenario, Bollaert could be
believable but not Houston. There is indeed plenty of evidence for Houston’s droll
humor. However, no credible evidence of Bollaert’s alleged “gullibility” has yet been
produced. Much of the exact opposite has been. The conclusion is evident that
Bollaert’s stories are more believable than not believable.
Bollaert’s believability is not to suggest that there remain no valid questions or
difficulties with his story. For example, from whom did Houston get the story and how
soon after the battle did he get it? How did Houston still happen to have in his possession
a letter about Emily and Santa Anna that he had written to a friend as much as six years
earlier? Furthermore, what are we to do with Santa Anna’s own testimony? He claims
he was asleep under a tree, when the battle broke out. Is that simply a minor detail,
something that resulted from sexual fatigue, or is it a major contradiction? And what
about the silence of other contemporaneous accounts of the battle, since no other
memoirist mentions this tryst?
There are reasonable answers to some of these questions, even if some of them
must remain tentatively or totally unanswerable. In his unpublished essay that contains
the story of the tryst, Bollaert also wrote:
Much has been written relative to this celebrated battle in which the flower
of the Mexican army perished and when Santana was made prisoner, but I
beg to introduce the following as given to me by an officer who was
engaged in it -- given in his own words.20
Thus, Bollaert indicates that he was well aware that much had already been written about
this battle and that he was about to introduce something new. It is clear that the absence
of this story about Emily and Santa Anna in other published accounts to which he had
access did not deter him from recording it as worthy of belief. While in his diary he
identified Houston as the source of the story, in the unpublished essay he did not mention
Houston by name but only generically as “an officer who was engaged in it [i.e., the
battle].” His silence about Houston’s identity suggests a sensitivity to the “Private”
(underscored three times) nature of the story, which certainly would explain why others
were not privy to it. Furthermore, Bollaert’s omission of Houston’s name, when he could
have invoked it to add credence to his account, suggests that he was confident enough in
his story so as not to need this additional weight. There is every reason to believe that
Bollaert had taken into account the possibility of being duped and had discounted that
prospect with the same canons for credibility with which he judged flamingoes in Peru,
elephants in Texas, or the prospects for crossing Africa.
As for Santa Anna’s testimony that he was sleeping under a tree, John Milton
Niles recalled things a bit differently in his book entitled South America and Mexico . . .
With a Complete View of Texas, which was published in 1838. In this account Niles and
his co-author, Hon. L.T. Pease, portrayed Santa Anna as being in his tent rather than
under a tree, and awake rather than asleep, when the battle broke out.21 Their account
harmonizes with Bollaert’s account. But who were Niles and Pease?
Niles was serving as United States Senator (1835-1839) from Emily’s home state,
Connecticut, when his book was published. He was reelected for the 1843-1849 term,
after having served as President Van Buren’s Postmaster General from 1840-1841. In
1839 and 1840 he ran for governor of Connecticut and also served as a Connecticut State
court judge. In addition, as its editor-in-chief, he founded the Hartford Times in 1826, a
newspaper published until 1976. These positions suggest that Niles was a responsible
tryer of facts.22
Niles’s co-author, the Honorable Lorrain Thompson Pease, a Connecticut State
senator (1830) and County Judge, wrote that portion of the book dealing with Texas.
Though Pease does not cite a source for his assertion about Santa Anna, he had good
Texas contacts. His son Elisha, later a Texas Governor, fought in the Texas Revolution,
as did another young soldier named L.T. Pease, presumably another son. Thus, Judge
Pease serves to raise a believable challenge about the Mexican General’s own
credibility.23
Accordingly, the combined elements of Bollaert’s testimony, his reputation, the
additional documents that testify both to Emily’s existence and her presence at San
Jacinto, the fact that there is no known evidence that disputes Bollaert’s account except
Santa Anna’s unsupported testimony (testimony that anyone might give under the
circumstances that Bollaert alleges), and the fact that various legitimate questions have
reasonable answers all converge toward the conclusion that while Emily D. West was not
the legendary “Yellow Rose of Texas,” she was Santa Anna’s rose and revolutionary
roommate at 4:30 in the afternoon of April 21, 1836 on the battlefield of San Jacinto.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Endnotes
1James Lutzweiler, “Santa Anna and Emily D. West at San Jacinto: Who Edits the
Editors?” M.A. thesis for North Carolina State University, 1997. See p. 5-14. I have
very slightly altered Bollaert’s abbreviations and capitalization for easier reading. A
photograph of William Bollaert appears on Appendix A hereinafter. Its appearance in
this essay marks the first time a photograph of Bollaert has ever been seen by an
American audience. A very scarces but already published engraving of Bollaert with his
horse, “Fanny Baker,” and two companions around a campfire in Texas appears in
Appendix B. Both images come from a scrapbook in the possession of Bollaert’s greatgreat
granddaughter and are used here with her permission.
2That the activity in the tent was sexual in nature is discussed in detail in Lutzweiler, op.
cit., p. 16-20, 63. Houston’s characterization of the activity is clearly a euphemism, and a
very clever one at that.
3Ibid, p. 220-221. Kent Biffle of the Dallas Morning News and Bob Tutt of the Houston
Chronicle have also kept Emily’s story in circulation for decades. Margaret Swett
Henson, former president of the Texas State Historical Association, wrote the
encyclopedia entry about Emily for The New Handbook of Texas, though her entry has
upwards of twenty errors and misstatements. Such errors have served in the past to
undermine rather than strengthen the credibility of the story about Santa Anna and Emily.
Martha Anne Turner, the English teacher of future broadcaster Dan Rather at Sam
Houston State University, wrote the full length, but short, book on Emily entitled The
Yellow Rose of Texas: Her Saga and Her Song (Austin: Shoal Creek Publishers, 1976).
Ironically, Joe Frantz, the very first to resurrect Emily from Bollaert’s diary, added to the
confusion when in a later publication he referred to Emily as “Jenny.” Cited in
Lutzweiler, op. cit., p. 37-38. The most recent and responsible treatment of the story
appears in James E. Crisp, Sleuthing the Alamo (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), p. 188-194.
4The two documents are (1) a written request for a passport for Emily D. West, and (2)
her employment contract with Col. James Morgan. The request for a passport was issued
in 1837 and was made by Isaac Moreland. Moreland mentions in his request that Emily
had lost her free papers at San Jacinto, thus placing her at the battle but not specifically in
Santa Anna’s tent or in the midst of a tryst. The original of this document is in the Texas
State Library in Austin. The employment contract says nothing at all about San Jacinto or
Santa Anna, but defines Emily’s working relationship to Col. James Morgan and proves
she was a real person. The original document, which by itself has a fascinating history
and provenance, is held in the Special Collections of the University of Texas in
Arlington. Copies of the original documents and typescripts of them can be seen in
Lutzweiler, op. cit., p. 44-45.
5See Joe Bertram Frantz, “Infinite Pursuit: The Story of Gail Borden,” PhD dissertation,
The University of Texas, 1948, p. 206; and Joe Bertram Frantz, Gail Borden: Dairyman
to a Nation (Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), p. 110. In both
instances Frantz only paraphrased Bollaert. The discovery that Frantz was the first
known writer to publish the story was made by Dallas attorney and historian Jeff Dunn.
See Crisp, op. cit., p. 190. At this writing five copies of the Borden biography are
available on the web site, Advanced Book Exchange, for over $100 each, two of them for
$140.00 or more, thus making it still not widely circulated.
6W. Eugene Hollon and Ruth Lapham Butler, eds., William Bollaert’s Texas (Norman:
The University of Oklahoma Press, 1956). The original dust jacket carries the following
blurb: “A witty, perceptive Englishman’s observations on the infant Republic of Texas,
now published in full for the first time [underlining mine].” How much else Hollon and
Butler may have omitted is a matter awaiting discovery.
7James Lutzweiler, “Emily D. West and the Yellow Prose of Texas: A Primer on Some
Primary Documents and Their Doctoring,” in 2001: A Texas Folklore Odyssey (Denton:
University of North Texas, Press, 2001), p. 295-310.
8Frank X. Tolbert, An Informal History of Texas From Cabeza de Vaca to Temple
Houston (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), p. 95-96. Two years earlier in his book,
The Day of San Jacinto (Austin: The Pemberton Press, 1959), Tolbert briefly mentioned
Emily and introduced some minor embellishments (p. 76); but it was his 1961
characterization of her as “The Yellow Rose of Texas” that gave birth to a rapid and still
growing legend. The name of the songwriter is lost to history thus far. Nor is it known if
that songwriter was inspired by a real mulatto girl or by the royalties latent in a fictitious
one.
9Stephen L. Hardin, Texian Iliad: A Military History of the Texas Revolution, 1835-1836
(Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1996), p. 286 n.
10Lutzweiler, op. cit, p. 46.
11Lutzweiler, op. cit., p. 23. It was Bollaert who by his quick action once managed to save
the eyesight of Faraday after a laboratory accident nearly blinded him, thus extending the
scientific life of Faraday another forty-four years from 1823 until his death in 1867. It
was during these forty-four years that Faraday made his most famous discoveries.
Ironically, Faraday had become Davy’s assistant earlier when Davy had become
temporarily blinded in a similar situation. See W.H. Brock, “William Bollaert, Faraday
and the Royal Institution,” in Proceedings of the Royal Institution, vol. 42, 1968, p. 75-
76. The laboratory where Bollaert, Faraday and Davy worked is still preserved and is
open to visitors. It is located in London’s Royal Institution, pictured as it was in
Bollaert’s time in the following Appendix C.
12Brock, op. cit., p. 78. The nitrate industry eventually replaced Peru’s guano industry
upon which the exhausted soils of the American South had become so dependent before
the Civil War.
13I have collated these biographical details about Cassin from several internet sites.
Among them are www.oldprints.com/JohnCassin.htm, the web site for Ed Kenney, a
retired United States Senate staff member who now operates Audubon Prints and Books
Limited Partnership, Vienna, Virginia. Also see www.towhee.net/history/cassin.html. On
15 December 2005 a complete 1838 edition of Audubon’s The Birds of America was sold
by a cash-strapped Providence, Rhode Island library for $5.6 million. See Greensboro’s
News and Record, 16 December 2005, p. A8.
14U.S. Congress, The U.S. Naval Astronomical Expedition To The Southern Hemisphere
During The Years 1849—‘50—‘51—’52, 33rd Congress, first session, Executive
Documents, vol. 15, Part 2, p. 200.
15Frederick Burckhardt, et. al., eds., The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 10
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 13-15. The tooth is most likely from
the mammoth Bollaert observed near San Felipe de Austin, as he records in his diary on
August 11, 1843. See Hollon, op. cit., p. 181, n7. The tooth is discussed in detail in an
essay by Charles Carter Blake entitled, “On A Fossil Elephant From Texas,” a copy of
which can be found in a bound collection of articles from Bollaert’s personal library and
identified on the spine as “S America/Bollaert/1825.63.” See “William Bollaert Collection,”
a guide prepared by Sotherans Booksellers in London for appraisal purposes. A
partial copy of Blake’s article is also in this writer’s possession, and a picture of the tooth
from that article is exhibited in the following Appendix D. Bollaert originally donated
the tooth to the British Museum, though it is presently archived in London’s Museum of
Natural History.
16E-mail memo to this writer dated 14 November 2005. Though it is strictly a
coincidence, Reese operates out of New Haven, Connecticut, the very city in which
Emily D. West originated. In addition, his business address is on the same street where
Simeon Jocelyn, a witness to Emily’s employment contract with James Morgan, had
served as the pastor of the first church for New Haven’s Negroes. It is likely, though not
yet established, that Emily had once been a Sunday School scholar in Jocelyn’s church.
17Libreria de Antano Buenos Ayres catalogue, April 2005, New Series 11, p. 49-50. See
the following Appendix E hereinafter. Note that the item immediately preceding that of
Bollaert’s is a handwritten letter of Simon Bolivar.
18This is to say nothing of the Newberry’s attempt to acquire a portion of these diaries by
calling the seller of them at home late one evening to indicate that they had a special
slush fund to acquire such materials instantly without having to go through a long process
of trustee review. Such is the grip that Bollaert holds on the minds of eminent men of
letters.
19Jack Jackson, ed., Almonte’s Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2003),
404-406.
20Cited in Lutzweiler, op. cit., p. 9.
21John M. Niles, History of South America and Mexico; Comprising Their Discovery,
Geography, Politics, Commerce and Revolutions, To Which is Annexed A Geographical
and Historical View of Texas, With a Detailed Account of the Texian Revolution and War
By Hon L.T. Pease (Hartford: H. Huntington, 1838), p. 210-211. Niles’s book is quite
rare and even more rarely quoted. Copies are on Advanced Book Exchange at this
writing for $1,140.00 and $616.00, which explains in part why the book has received
little notice.
22Information on Niles comes from the website of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Niles and “The Political Graveyard: Index to
Politicians: Niles” at http://politicalgraveyard.com/bio/niles.html. For Niles’s connection
to the Hartford Times, see www.americanpresident.org.
23For L. T. Pease’s relationship to Elisha Pease, see The New Handbook of Texas online.
His full name was Lorrain Thompson Pease. In 1850 Elisha married Lucadia Christiana
Niles, who may well have been a relative of Pease’s co-author, John M. Niles. A
different L.T. Pease is listed as a soldier in the “Index to Military Rolls of the Republic of
Texas 1835-1845 at http://www.mindspring.com/~d maxey/rep_np02.htm. This soldier
survived the Goliad massacre but died shortly thereafter. That Elisha Pease later picked
up L.T. Pease’s paycheck suggests that they were kin, possibly brothers, all of which is to
say that Lorrain Thompson Pease had access to eyewitness or at least contemporaneous
accounts for the contribution he made to Niles’s book. See also J. Hammond Trumbull,
ed., Memorial History of Hartford County, Connecticut, 1633-1884 (Boston: Edward L.
Osgood, 1886), vol. 1, p. 128.