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The
Battle
of San Jacinto, the short-lived but decisive engagement that assured Texas
independence from Mexico, took place more than a decade before the development
of photography.
Because of that, subsequent generations of Texans and
others interested in history have had to rely on written accounts of the battle
to develop a mental picture of what it must have looked like that spring afternoon.
In 1886, a half-century after the April 21, 1836 battle, Virginia-born artist
William Henry Huddle greatly enhanced Texas’ collective image of the aftermath
of the fight with the large oil painting which hangs inside the south entrance
of the Capitol in Austin.
Born in 1847 more than a decade after San
Jacinto, Huddle served for two years in the Confederate Army. After the war,
he moved to Paris (the city in Lamar County,
not the one in France). A gunsmith by trade, he became interested in a softer
medium and left the state to study art in Nashville and later New York. Huddle
returned to Texas in 1877, settling in Austin.
Five years later, he went to Munich for two more years of art schooling. He returned
to Austin in 1886 and shortly undertook
his San
Jacinto paints.
Though cameras had yet to be invented by the time
of the Texas Revolution, Huddle did use photographic portraits of San
Jacinto veterans to add some degree of realism to the 72 by 114 inch canvas
he titled “The Surrender of Santa Anna.” Unfortunately, he did not use his brush
to subtract the years from the images of the veterans he featured, making them
look older in the painting than they would have been at the time of the battle. |
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| Photo
of painting courtesy of Texas State Library |
Even
so, Huddle’s painting – which the Legislature purchased for $4,000 in 1891 – is
the prime image associated with the military victory that changed American history.
The oil, done in a formal style Huddle learned in Germany, depicts the then
43-year-old Sam Houston lying on a colorful Mexican serape beneath a moss-hung
oak, his wounded right leg bandaged. Texas scout Deaf
Smith is shown sitting nearby, his hand cupped around his ear. Houston is
nobly extending his right hand to the recently-captured Mexican general.
The big transplanted Tennessean, born in Virginia, probably did extend his
right hand in Santa Anna’s direction at some point, but historians now believe
it wasn’t his right ankle that caught a Mexican bullet that eventful day.
An exhibit at the Sam Houston Museum in Huntsville
features a life-size diorama of the same scene, correctly portrayed for the first
time. A faux blood-stained bandage is affixed to Houston’s left leg.
Houston descendants have long believed it was his left leg, not the right that
sustained a gunshot wound in the battle. But everyone else, dating all the way
back to Huddle in 1886 always has assumed it was the right leg. |
James
L. Haley of Austin, author of “Sam Houston,” the latest and arguably best biography
of Texas’ George Washington, agrees with the Houston relatives on the left versus
right leg issue. But he came to that belief after the publication of his book,
which has Houston’s wound on his right leg.
“When they reprint the book,
I’ll make the change,” Haley said. “I think it was his left leg, but the only
way to know for sure would be to exhume Houston, and no one’s interested in doing
that.” | |
Other than suffering a painful wound, April 21 had been a lucky day for Houston.
His ragtag Army prevailed over a larger force of Mexican soldiers. But that luck
almost went the other way.
At one point in the battle, which was more
of a rout than a true contest of arms, Houston had charged 30 yards ahead of his
men, urging them on, when he came close to getting much more than an ankle wound.
Ben McCulloch had already fired several volleys of grapeshot from the
two cannons known as the Twin Sisters. He was
just about to touch off another round when he noticed that Houston had ridden
directly into the line of fire.
“One more second and there would have
been a change in Texan command before the battle ever started,” Haley wrote in
his biography.
© Mike Cox - "Texas
Tales"
March 27, 2008 column |
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Announcement
Mike Cox's "The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821-1900," the first of
a two-volume, 250,000-word definitive history of the Rangers, was released by
Forge Books in New York on March 18, 2008
Kirkus Review, the American
Library Association's Book List and the San Antonio Express-News have all written
rave reviews about this book, the first mainstream, popular history of the Rangers
since 1935. | |
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