Ranger Walker’s early Texas History

The last Grains from the Sandbar column was about Texas Ranger Samuel Walker’s meeting with Samuel Colt in New York that gained positive revisions for the Colt pistol. The new gun became known as the famous Walker Colt pistol. However, there is much more to be known about Ranger Walker’s early Texas career.

Walker, born in Maryland in 1817, enlisted in May of 1836 with the Washington City Volunteers for the Creek Indian campaign. He was stationed in Florida. When his enlistment ended a year later, Walker continued to stay in Florida as a scout until 1841. In early 1842, Walker arrived at Galveston joining Captain Jesse Billingsley’s company against Mexican’s Adrian Woll entry into San Antonio. Following that he enlisted in the Somervell Expedition fall of 1842 that drove the Mexican invasion back across the Rio Grande River.

With bad weather curtailing the Expedition at the border and Somerville ordering the Expedition home it was then that Colonel William Fisher split the group taking about 300 Texans into the infamous Mier Expedition crossing the river into Mexico in December of 1842. They met an overwhelming Mexican force with most being captured, including Walker.

When a sizeable number of Fisher’s group attempted an escape during the forcible march of the more than 650 grueling miles to Mexico City to be recaptured, it prompted the “Black Bean” drawing episode. Walker fortunately drew a white bean. The surviving group was then marched on to imprisonment at the infamous Castle Perote Prison.

It would be two years later when the Mier expedition’s surviving prisoners of the inhumane treatment would all be freed. Walker immediately returned to Texas to join Colonel John “Jack” C. Hays’ Texas Ranger Company. Walker, imbued with the Mier prisoner abuse, had apparently become vindictive and became known as an officer who “seldom brings in prisoners.”

The timeline then leads to the successful fight with the Comanche Indians near Pedernales that prompted Walker’s early 1846 mission to meet Colt in New York.

Walker arrived back from New York to Vera Cruz, Mexico in late 1846 armed with the newly designed revolver where he met up with Colonel Hays’s Texas Ranger Company. By then the Mexican War was well underway with Walker, over the next year, fighting extensively in Mexico, until the fateful day of Oct. 9, 1847 when his company reached Huamantla. Here they met Santa Anna’s forces head on in a street battle. During the hand-to-hand battle, Walker was killed. Historical reports vary as to whether he was shot in the back or killed by a man on foot wielding a lance, or both.

Walker was first buried in Mexico at Hacienda Tamaris. His remains were carried to San Antonio in 1848. Eight years later, April 21, 1856, he was reburied in the Odd Fellows’ Cemetery in San Antonio as a part of a San Jacinto Day celebration.

According to author/historian Walter Prescott Webb in The Texas Rangers, when Walker arrived at the Castle Perote during the Mexican War in May of 1847 he relived the suffering of he and the other Mier survivors. Webb states that during Walker’s imprisonment he had declared to fellow prisoners that the American flag would one day fly from the turret of the castle.

Webb continues that “when the Mexicans made him and the other (Mier) prisoners dig a hole in the yard and erect a flagpole, Walker placed an American dime under the pole, promising to return as a victor and claim it.” He would fulfill his prophecy but only a short time before his death.

Written by Betty Dunn, Two Rivers Heritage Foundation. See www.tworiversheritagefoundation.org.