Colonel Trousdale

Source 

The Mexican War And Its Heroes...

See a biography of William Trousdale (my 1st cousin 7x removed). 

Caught By Hays' Texan Rangers

View From The Rio Grande River Looking At Mexico

Notes of the Mexican War, 1846-47-48...:

 

"He (a guerilla) was caught by Col. Jack Hays' Texan Rangers, coming up from Vera Cruz (where he was captured)...let go on parole of honor, and again captured leading a guerilla band...".

A Strongly Entrenched Santa Anna

Notes of the Mexican War, 1846-47-48:

"Gen. Santa Anna was strongly entrenched around his loved and boasted capital, surrounded by his splendidly-uniformed staff, his glittering lancers and the flower of his army; he was sole master of the city of Mexico.  Straight for that ancient city our army marched... ."

An Artifact At The Illinois National Guard Museum, Springfield, Illinois

From The First Gun At Palo Alto

Notes of the Mexican War, 1846-47-48: Comprising Incidents, Adventures and Everyday Proceedings and Letters While with the United States Army in the Mexican War; Also Extracts from Ancient Histories of Mexico, Giving an Accurate Account of the First and Original Settlers of Mexico, Etc.; Also the Names and Numbers of the Different Rulers of Mexico; Also Influence of the Church

Source

"...from the first gun at Palo Alto to the surrender of the city of Mexico...we made our advances, without one defeat, without one retreat.  There is not a paralell in all the pages of history."

Bowie And His Association With Jean Lafitte

From Lots of Land:

In that year [circa 1830] Jim Bowie appeared in Texas with a colorful reputation behind him and considerable means as the result of his association with Jean Lafitte (Bowie and his brother were reportedly agents of the pirate king in disposing of his stolen "black ivory."

In one year they are supposed to have netted $65,000 in commissions.) After having fought alligators barehanded, killing a man with a knife fashioned by his brother, searching for gold among the Lipan Indians, and marrying the daughter of a wealthy Spaniard in San Antonio, Bowie turned to land traffic. In 1830 he purchased sixteen such eleven-league grants from Mexican citizens who filed for them and released them to Bowie.

How Much That Sword Looked Like A Baton

Jim's Photo Of Alamo Display

And Wait For The Night by JohnWilliam Corrington (published ca 1964)

Because it struck me how much that sword looked like a baton, and how I had been the bandmaster without knowing it. I don’t know why—I never figured why—but all the fight was gone out of me in an instant. I had come to Mexico to kill as many of ‘em as I could shoot, stab, or ride down. For Travis and Bowie and Bonham. I came to burn or devastate, it didn’t matter who or how. But there I was with a clean sword in my hand and twelve of my own men turning in the hot wind, and the words of politicians and landgrabbers elbowing each other in my memory.….and because anyhow there probably hadn’t been ten men in the Mexican army we were facing who had fought at the Alamo or murdered at Goliad.

Daring Chivalry And High Adventure

Source

"...President Houston issued a proclamation inviting volunteers for a retaliatory expedition across the Rio Grande, and designating the 25th of October, at San Antonio de Bexar, as the time and place for their rendezvous. Near eight hundred of the most gallant spirits of western Texas responded to the requisition with whom the author found himself associated in an enterprise which, however disastrously it afterwards terminated, wore at its outset the most attractive hues of daring chivalry and high adventure." 

A Rotten Fight

Rio Grande River Looking Towards Mexico

And Wait For The Night by JohnWilliam Corrington...

"He remembered the long tortured negotiations that summer before the war with Mexico, the equally tortured logic of the administration, the coarse gleeful representatives in the Louisiana legislature who wanted a war that would net not only Texas to the Rio Grande, but the whole of the subcontinent down to Central America if the Mexicans gave trouble."

"Mexico was a rotten fight, and you were right on top of the heap. You fought ‘em from the border to the City of Mexico itself. You saw Scott ride in, and you were part of what went on before he made that ride. I bet you remember Chapultepec."

Since Our Flag Was Raised In California

Source (U.S. Flag would have had fewer stars in the 1840's)

Three years in California [1846-1849] ̈ by Rev. Walter Colton, U. S. N...

Thursday Feb. 11: Two of the officers of Gen. Castro sent through me to day to Com. Shubrick, applications for permission to return to Mexico. They are very poor, having received no pay since our flag was raised.

There has been, I apprehend, quite as much love of country in the Californian as the American, in the storm of battle which has swept over this land. 

Annexed Texas....

From The New Nation Grows, Volume Two:

"Exuberant, bumptious, the young republic annexed Texas, picked a quarrel with Mexico, and then sent thousands across the plains and mountains to the newly discovered gold fields."

"By 1850, California had entered the Union, and the United States had preempted the whole vast territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Lake of the Woods to the Rio Grande." "And in the federal census of that year, it counted 23,191,876 inhabitants."


An 1850 letter from Wm. Carey Jones.