Captain John Grant Tod, Texas Sailor in the Heart of Sin City Mexico, 1848
Born in 1808 near Lexington, Kentucky, John Grant Tod, the youngest of nine children born to pious immigrants from Scotland, left home at seventeen.
Read More
Colonel Alexander Doniphan’s Epic March in Mexico, 1846-1847
Alexander William Doniphan is well known among Mormons for his saving Joseph Smith from certain death in the 1838 Mormon War, but his Mexican-American War expedition covering swaths of the Southwest was hailed at the time as a military achievement. In the fall of 1846 Doniphan, an attorney-turned-colonel in the expansionist war, led the 1st Regiment of Mounted Missouri Volunteers out of occupied Santa Fe, New Mexico, into hostile lands of the Navajo and northern Mexican states including Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Nuevo Leon.
Read More
Davy Crockett’s “Autobiographies”: The Life and Legend in Literature
In 1923 Charles Scribner’s Sons, the famous New York-based publishing company founded in 1846 by Charles Scribner at the start of the Mexican-American War, released The Autobiography of Davy Crockett (1786-1836) – a work about the famous Tennessee frontiersman-turned politician who died in Texas at the Battle of the Alamo.
Read More
When the Colt Revolver came to Texas: The Life of Swante Magnus Swenson
According to the esteemed historian of Texas, Walter Prescott Webb, Colonel Swante Magnus Swenson (1816-1896), an immigrant from Sweden to the United States, was the first person to introduce the Colt revolver to Texas.
Read More