winter died Stephen Austin. Thus was President Houston deprived of two
good councillors. On Buffalo Bayou and the prairie battle-field of San
Jacinto rose the new town of Houston, and thither the capital of Texas
was removed. Thither, also, removed Sam Houston.
He served Texas three times as president, and again as Senator to
Washington; and every hour of his Texas life he served as guide and
adviser, his face always set firmly for a future and not merely for the
present. Whether the people liked what he did, he cared not, as long as
he thought that he was right.
Each time, under Houston rule, the Republic of Texas prospered; but
until formally annexed by the United States in 1845 it had a hard
road to travel. Mexico constantly threatened it; and the two attempts
that it made to invade Mexico resulted in horrid failures. Jim Hill’s
youngest brother, John, enlisted in one of these, and was captured.
As for Ernest, he was granted land as a soldier of San Jacinto, and
the day came at last when he could send for his mother. He built
her a house with a court, too, like the court into which he and Jim
had peeped, from the roof of the de la Garza house in Bejar. Here
she grandly sat, among the flowers――and occasionally fed sugar, as
a special treat, to lazy Duke, the graying old war-horse, while he
and Ernest, and Jim and Leo and Sion, and Dick, on their visits,
exchanged stories of the stirring days of ’35 and ’36; of the heroic
Travis, Fannin, Jim Bowie, Bonham, Captain Dickinson, and all; and of
“the general”――always _their_ general――patient, energetic, far-seeing
General Sam Houston.
Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Except for the frontispiece, illustrations have been moved to
follow the text that they illustrate.
――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
End of Project Gutenberg's With Sam Houston in Texas, by Edwin L. Sabin