Indépendance du Mexique

General Ignacio Zaragoza stands 10 feet tall in Goliad. His bronze countenance permanently cast, Zaragoza gazes southward from the Texas landscape of his birth, toward Mexico, the distant land of his military triumph and early demise. There, at the B

Even for those who made A’s in seventh grade Texas History, the sequence of events of the Texas Revolution can get muddled. A road trip is a hands-on way to fill the knowledge gaps, particularly if author Stephen Harrigan is in the passenger seat. No

Nearly two decades after Davy Crockett was killed in the Battle of the Alamo, his second wife, Elizabeth Crockett, moved from Tennessee to the North Texas town of Acton to claim a land grant. When she died in 1860, her relatives interred her in the A

In his 1900 memoir, The Evolution of a State, or Recollections of Old Texas Days, Noah Smithwick—a fighter in the early stages of the Texas Revolution—describes the hats worn by the ragtag army of Texan rebels marching with Stephen F. Austin to overt

The Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 was an unnecessary fight and could have been avoided if the Mexican government had agreed to reasonable terms set forth by President James Polk after Texas joined the Union in 1845. Santa Anna had agreed to the R

Word of the slaughter of the Alamo garrison filtered quickly through the Texian camp on the Guadalupe River at Gonzales in March 1836. On the morning of the 13th, frustrated by the uncertainty of intelligence brought by two Mexican vaqueros, General

Texas’ greatest ghost story is freely available to the public during the daytime but restricted to four people a night. The creaking oak gates and heavy doors all slam shut at 4:45 p.m., and you’re on your own until 9 the next morning. Accounts from

The unrest between the Mexican military and the Texas Anglo colonists was nearing war in 1834, when President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna Perez de Lebron rescinded the Mexican Constitution of 1824 that permitted Anglo colonies to settle in Texas unde

In the wake of the Dec. 6–7, 1846, Battle of San Pasqual, demoralized Mexican troops dispersed into the countryside north of San Diego, California. Seated cross-legged around a fire at a Pauma rancheria some 40 miles northeast of town, one group of 1