This tall white marble obelisk stands at the east entrance to the Fayette County Courthouse in downtown La Grange TX recalls the bravery of Fayette County men who joined Captain Dawson to fight the Mexican Army in 1842, during the Mexican Incursions.
The monument was erected here by the State of Texas in 1884 to commemorate the service and sacrifice of Capt. Dawson and his men, who formed a militia and set off to combat incursions into the Republic of Texas by hostile Mexican armed forces who amed to reconquer Texas for Mexico, after Texas had gained independence at the Battle of San Jacinto.
Some members of the Dawson Expedition died in the 1842 Battle of Salado Creek near San Antonio (which had been occupied by Mexican invaders in 1842). Others of Dawson's command were captured and marched into Mexico as prisoners, where on 24 March 1843 they were forced to reach into a bag of mixed white and black beans to see who lived (white beans) and who died (black beans). This is known as the "Black Bean Incident."
The monument reads as follows:
[East side]
Erected by the State of Texas
to the memory of her defenders
CAPTAIN N. H. DAWSON
and his command
who fell at the Battle of Salado, Texas
SEPT. 18TH, 1842.
----
(Correction)
Captain
Nicholas Mosby Dawson
and 36 other volunteers
were killed near
Salado Creek in Bexar County.
[South side]
To the Memory of
The men who drew the black bean
and were shot at Salado, Mexico
March 24, 1843."
For more on the Dawson Massacre, see the Handbook of Texas Online: (
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DAWSON MASSACRE. After the capture of San Antonio on September 11, 1842, by Brig. Gen. Adrián Woll in the second of the Mexican invasions of 1842, Texan forces gathered on Salado Creek under Col. Mathew Caldwell to repel the raiders. While Texas arms were succeeding at the battle of Salado Creek on September 18, 1842, a calamity was occurring only a mile and a half away. In response to Caldwell's call for volunteers, Capt. Nicholas M. Dawson had raised a fifty-three-man company, mostly from Fayette County, and marched down from La Grange.
Believing Caldwell's forces to be in grave danger, Dawson's men chose not to wait for Capt. Jesse Billingsley's company, which was following them, but to disregard the threat posed by numerous heavy Mexican cavalry patrols and to fight their way to the Salado.
Near Caldwell's embattled line, between 3 and 4 P.M. on the eighteenth, the company was intercepted by a column of 500 irregular Mexican cavalry commanded by colonels Cayetano Montero, José María Carrasco, and Pedro Rangel and supported by a battery of two field pieces.
According to the accounts of several survivors, the Mexican column was commanded by Juan Nepomuceno Seguín, but they were no doubt in error. Dawson dismounted his men in a mesquite thicket where Fort Sam Houston now stands and threatened to "shoot the first man who runs."
The Texans were quickly surrounded but repulsed a spirited cavalry charge and inflicted a number of casualties on the enemy. The Mexicans then fell back out of rifle range and opened fire on the Texans with their artillery. Billingsley's company, which arrived while the fight was in progress, was too weak to go to Dawson's aid, and Caldwell's men on Salado Creek were heavily engaged throughout the afternoon.
Montero once more ordered his cavalry, then dismounted, to charge. After a vigorous but futile resistance, the severely wounded Dawson sought to surrender. The Mexicans continued to fire, however, striking Dawson several more times. Seeing surrender to be impossible, he gasped out his dying words, "Let victory be purchased with blood."
Alsey S. Miller took up the white mackinaw that Dawson had waved in token of surrender and rode with it toward the Mexican lines, only to be fired upon in his turn. Miller then galloped through the enemy toward the town of Seguin.
Henry Gonzalvo Woods, after witnessing the death of his father and the mortal wounding of his brother Norman, also escaped.
Some of the Texans continued to resist while others laid down their arms. Heroic in the fight was Griffin, a slave of Samuel A. Maverick, who, his rifle shattered, fought on with the limb of a mesquite tree until he was killed. By 5 P.M. the fight was over.
Thirty-six Texans died on the field, fifteen were taken prisoner, and two escaped. The prisoners were marched away to Perote Prison in Mexico. Of these men, only nine survived to return to Texas. Thirty Mexicans were estimated to have been killed and between sixty and seventy wounded. Two days later the Mexican army retreated toward the Rio Grande, and the Dawson men were buried in shallow graves in the mesquite thicket where they fell.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Joseph Milton Nance, Attack and Counterattack: The Texas-Mexican Frontier, 1842 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964). Juan N. Seguin, Personal Memoirs (San Antonio, 1858). L. U. Spellmann, ed., "Letters of the `Dawson Men' From Perote Prison, Mexico, 1842–1843," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 38 (April 1935). William P. Stapp, The Prisoners of Perote: A Journal (Philadelphia: Zieber, 1845). Leonie L. Weyand, Early History of Fayette County, 1822–1865 (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1932)
by Thomas W. Cutrer
The Handbook of Texas also contains an article on the Mier Expedition and the Black Bean Incident of Sep 1843: (
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"BLACK BEAN EPISODE. The Black Bean Episode, an aftermath of the Mier Expedition, resulted from an attempted escape of the captured Texans as they were being marched from Mier to Mexico City.
After an escape at Salado, Tamaulipas, on February 11, 1843, some 176 of the men were recaptured within about a week. A decree that all who participated in the break were to be executed was modified to an order to kill every tenth man. Col. Domingo Huerta was to be in charge of the decimation.
The victims were chosen by lottery, each man drawing a bean from an earthen jar containing 176 beans, seventeen black beans being the tokens signifying death. Commissioned officers were ordered to draw first; then the enlisted men were called as their names appeared on the muster rolls. William A. A. (Bigfoot) Wallace, standing close to the scene of the drawing, decided that the black beans were the larger and fingered the tokens successfully to draw a white bean.
Observers of the drawing later described the dignity, the firmness, the light temper, and general courage of the men who drew the beans of death. Some left messages for their families with their companions; a few had time to write letters home.
The doomed men were unshackled from their companions, placed in a separate courtyard, and shot at dusk on March 25, 1843.
The seventeen victims of the lottery were James Decatur Cocke, William Mosby Eastland, Patrick Mahan, James M. Ogden, James N. Torrey, Martin Carroll Wing, John L. Cash, Robert Holmes Dunham, Edward E. Este, Robert Harris, Thomas L. Jones, Christopher Roberts, William N. Rowan, James L. Shepherd, J. N. M. Thompson, James Turnbull, and Henry Walling.
Shepherd survived the firing squad by pretending to be dead. The guards left him for dead in the courtyard, and he escaped in the night but was recaptured and shot. In 1848 the bodies were returned from Mexico to be buried at Monument Hill, near La Grange, Fayette County.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
John Crittenden Duval, The Adventures of Big Foot Wallace, the Texas Ranger and Hunter (Macon, Georgia: Burke, 1870). Thomas J. Green, Journal of the Texian Expedition Against Mier (New York: Harper, 1845; rpt., Austin: Steck, 1935). Sam W. Haynes, Soldiers of Misfortune: The Somervell and Mier Expeditions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). Harold Schoen, comp., Monuments Erected by the State of Texas to Commemorate the Centenary of Texas Independence (Austin: Commission of Control for Texas Centennial Celebrations, 1938). Houston Wade, Notes and Fragments of the Mier Expedition (La Grange, Texas: La Grange Journal, 1936)."