A young Texas Ranger watched the beans carefully as each man drew one from the clay pot. Most men grabbed the first bean their fingers touched. He did not. William Alexander Anderson Wallace, known as Big Foot, was about to face a life-or-death lottery that would decide which prisoners lived and which would be executed.
The story began seven years earlier, in the spring of 1836, when a letter arrived at his family’s home in Lexington, Virginia. Wallace was 19 years old then, working in his father’s orchard. The letter brought news from a place called Goliad in the young Republic of Texas, where a Mexican army had captured a force of Texas volunteers. Despite surrendering under what they believed were prisoner-of-war terms, the men were executed by firing squad on March 27.
Two of the men in that line were Wallace’s relatives: his older brother Samuel and a cousin. When Wallace finished reading the letter, witnesses said he did not speak a word. He left the house, saddled a mule, rode into town, and sold what he owned. He told his father he was going to Texas, in his own words, to take revenge on the Mexicans.
He was 19 years old and had never fired a shot in anger. By the time he crossed into the Republic of Texas in the spring of 1837, the war was already over. Sam Houston had defeated Santa Anna at San Jacinto, and treaties had been signed. Instead of war, Wallace found a harsh frontier country with about 40,000 English-speaking settlers, alongside Comanche, Kiowa, Wichita, Tonkawa, and other tribes.
He settled near La Grange, tried farming, then beekeeping. Neither worked. In the spring of 1840, he moved to Austin and decided the area was becoming too crowded. He pushed west and south toward San Antonio.
It was during these early years that he earned his nickname. One account holds that his feet were genuinely enormous, requiring custom-made boots. Another version, which Wallace himself told in old age, was that a Waco chief named Big Foot was raiding settlements around Austin. The Waco’s footprints were so similar to Wallace’s that settlers could not always tell them apart, so they began calling the tall young man Big Foot after the raider he was chasing.
He hated the name at first but could never shake it. By the time he settled in San Antonio, Big Foot Wallace had earned a reputation among old settlers as a tracker who could read a broken branch the way most men read a newspaper. He fought in the Battle of Plum Creek in the summer of 1840, when Comanches swept through settlements and were intercepted on their way back north with wagons full of plunder. He fought in a half dozen smaller skirmishes and learned lessons men only learn when they have looked another man in the eye across a rifle barrel and both survived.
In 1842, trouble with Mexico resumed. Mexico had never accepted Texas as an independent nation, and in March of that year, a Mexican general named Rafael Vasquez crossed the Rio Grande with about 700 soldiers, marched to San Antonio, raised the Mexican flag over the plaza for two days, then withdrew. In September, the Mexicans returned in greater numbers. General Adrian Woll, a French-born Mexican officer, crossed the border with about 1,200 men, captured San Antonio again, and took the entire district court prisoner, dragging about 60 lawyers, judges, and jurors toward Mexico.
Wallace was with the Texas force under Matthew Caldwell and Jack Hays that met the Mexicans east of San Antonio at Salado Creek on September 18, 1842. About 220 Texans faced 1,600 Mexican regulars and Cherokee allies. The Mexicans launched three attacks, and the Texans shot them down from behind trees along the creek. Woll lost 60 killed and hundreds wounded.
The Texans lost one man. That same day, a relief company of about 53 Texans under Nicholas Dawson tried to join Caldwell. They entered a cornfield about a mile from the battle site, where Mexican cavalry and artillery surrounded them. They fought as long as they could, but when they raised a white flag, the Mexican cannons kept firing.
When it was over, 36 of them were dead and 15 were dragged toward the Rio Grande in chains. The Republic of Texas was bankrupt, and President Sam Houston did not want a full-scale war. He authorized Brigadier General Alexander Somervell to gather volunteers and cross the Rio Grande, but only if there was a reasonable chance of success. Somervell reached San Antonio on November 4, 1842, and looked at his volunteers.
By Wallace’s later description, these were reckless men who feared nothing under the sun: old Ranger companies, farmers seeking revenge, land speculators, and Kentucky boatmen who had drifted south looking for adventure. About 750 of them in all, including Wallace. They marched out of San Antonio on November 25 into cold northerly winds, and from the first mile, discipline collapsed. Companies split off and went home.
By the time they reached Laredo on December 8, their numbers had shrunk to a few hundred. They looted the town, and Somervell nearly had to draw his pistol to stop them. They moved down the Rio Grande toward Guerrero, which they captured on December 15. On December 19, Somervell looked at dwindling supplies, falling temperatures, and growing chaos, and ordered the men to turn around and go home.
Somervell and about 189 men obeyed. But more than 300 refused. They elected a new commander, a former Texas Ranger named William Fisher, and voted to cross the river and seize the next Mexican town, Mier. Big Foot Wallace was among the men who stayed.
On December 20, 1842, the 308 Texans crossed the Rio Grande. They did not know that Mexican intelligence had been watching them, and that General Pedro de Ampudia was already moving north with more than 3,000 veteran Mexican regulars equipped with artillery and cavalry. When the Texans reached Ciudad Mier on December 22, the town was empty. The mayor came out with white cloths and promised them supplies, food, and cattle if they would wait on the north bank of the river for two days.
The Texans waited, but the supplies never came. On Christmas Day 1842, Fisher ordered his men across the river. About 261 crossed in fading daylight. They entered Mier looking for the promised provisions.
Instead, they found Ampudia waiting for them. The Battle of Mier began at dusk on December 25 and continued for nearly 18 hours. The Texans fought through the narrow streets and stone houses of the town, holing up in a group of buildings near the main plaza. Mexican regulars tried to storm them and were beaten back with heavy losses.
The Texans were among the best marksmen in the Western world at that time, and every shot counted. By dawn on December 26, according to Mexican reports, Ampudia had lost about 650 killed and 200 wounded, while the Texans lost about 10 killed and a few wounded. In pure numbers, it was one of the most lopsided battles in North American history. But the Texans had run out of powder, ammunition, and water.
Ampudia sent a flag of truce offering honorable terms if they surrendered as prisoners of war. Fisher put it to a vote. Some men, including Wallace, voted to try to break out at dark and fight their way to the river. Most voted to accept the terms, and the Texans threw down their rifles.
Ampudia quietly changed the terms. They were no longer prisoners of war but bandits, criminals, and rebels. The 243 survivors were stripped of their weapons, and on December 27, 1842, they began the long march south into the interior of Mexico. The road from Mier to Mexico City was more than 700 miles, through the mountains of Tamaulipas and Nuevo León, up onto the great central plateau, through land that was barren and desolate even in the best conditions.
The Texans marched in chains, tied in groups of ten, their feet worn and their water rations counted by the cup. They passed through Matamoros, Monterrey, and Saltillo. Crowds came out to see them. Some threw stones, some threw bread.
In Monterrey, a Mexican woman ran up to Big Foot Wallace, saw the condition of his feet, and placed an old pair of sandals in his hands. Small kindnesses that men remember for the rest of their lives. By early February 1843, they reached Hacienda Salado in Tamaulipas, a sprawling stone estate with a walled courtyard, an old church, cattle pens, and a well. Their guards, led by a Mexican general named Arrejón, numbered about 300 men, nearly double the Texans.
On the morning of February 11, 1843, the escape plan they had been preparing for weeks came together. A Scottish captain named Ewen Cameron, a 31-year-old Highland giant known as a fighter, had been chosen to lead the breakout. At the signal, the Texans rose up at once in the courtyard, fell on their guards, and wrenched rifles from their hands. The fighting was short and brutal.
Five Texans were killed and others wounded, but the guards were overwhelmed. Some 181 Texans escaped, some barefoot and most in rags, riding whatever horses they could catch, carrying whatever rifles they had managed to grab. Big Foot Wallace was among them, with nothing but a bad-tempered mule and one canteen. The escapees headed north toward the Rio Grande, toward Texas, toward home.
But this was northern Mexico in February, and the men did not know the country. They did not know where to find water. If they stayed on the roads, they would be captured, so they headed into the mountains. The hills of northern Mexico in February are dry limestone and thorn trees, cactus and lechuguilla.
There are almost no streams. The few springs were known to local herders, not to these Texans. Within two days, most had consumed their water. Within three days, they were breaking into small groups, each hoping the next hill would reveal a valley, a village, or a stream.
There were no valleys. There were no villages. There were no streams. Men began to die, not from Mexican bullets but from thirst, from sunstroke at midday, and from the cold at night.
Some cut open cactus and squeezed the pulp into their mouths. Some sucked pebbles to ease the thirst. One survivor later wrote that he saw a man drink the blood of a horse that had been shot, and could not speak for two days afterward. By the end of the first week, the escape had turned into something else.
It was no longer a flight but a scattering across 50 miles of desert, men crawling toward any smoke they could see, men lying in the shade of rocks waiting for something to happen. Mexican cavalry under a general named Mejía rode out the morning after the escape and tracked them without difficulty. The Mexicans did not have to chase them. They only had to wait for the desert to do the work.
One by one, the groups of Texans stumbled out of the hills and surrendered. Only three of the 181 made it back to Texas on foot. The rest, 176 of them, were rounded up and returned to Hacienda Salado in chains. Big Foot Wallace was among them.
According to the accounts he gave in his old age, he spent six days with almost no food and was captured by a Mexican rancher who took him to a village. An old woman gave him a bowl of thin soup and a tortilla and washed his feet in warm water. He said it was the best meal he ever ate in his life. The next part of the story was told less often.
On March 25, 1843, three months after the Battle of Mier, word reached the presidential palace in Mexico City and arrived at the desk of Antonio López de Santa Anna, the man who had ordered the massacre at Goliad. He wrote an order: every man who had escaped from Hacienda Salado was to be executed. The order was carried by courier back to Salado. When it arrived, the governor of Coahuila, a man named Francisco Mejía, read it and refused to carry it out.
He would not shoot 176 defenseless men in cold blood. If Santa Anna wanted it done, he could send someone else. Word of the order leaked. The American minister in Mexico City, Waddy Thompson, protested to Santa Anna.
The British minister, Percy Doyle, did the same. They pointed out how the killing of 176 unarmed prisoners would look before the courts of Europe. Santa Anna held out for a time, then reached a compromise. He drew on an ancient practice the Romans had used with legions that had disgraced themselves in battle.
It was decimation, from the Latin word for ten, meaning one man in every ten would die. Colonel Domingo Huerta, a Mexican officer of rank, was given the task. He arrived at Hacienda Salado on the evening of March 24, 1843, carrying the order in his saddlebag and a plan already prepared. That night, one of Huerta’s staff took a clay pot, the kind found in any kitchen, and filled it with beans: 176 of them, matching the number of prisoners: 159 white and 17 black.
He stirred them with his hand, then covered the mouth of the pot with cloth so no man could see inside. On the morning of March 25, 1843, at Hacienda Salado, the Texans were brought out into the courtyard. They had been told what was going to happen. They had been given the night to think about it.
Commissioned officers were called first, then soldiers in alphabetical order. Each man had to step forward, close his eyes, put his hand in the pot, and draw a single bean. A white bean meant he would live. A black bean meant he would be executed by firing squad at dusk that evening.
The Texans stood in the courtyard in a ragged line. Some prayed, some cracked grim jokes, some stared at the ground. Each man was doing the math in his head. Seventeen out of 176.
Roughly a 90 percent chance of drawing white, and a 10 percent chance of facing the firing squad within eight hours. The first officer stepped forward, reached into the pot, and drew a white bean. The second officer also drew white. The third drew black.
He looked at the black bean in his hand, and according to survivors, said in a very low voice: “Well, they killed my brother at Goliad. I suppose they can kill me too. ” His name was Captain William P. Eastland, aged 37.
A county in West Texas would later be named for him. The drawing continued, name by name. Men stepped forward, reached in, and drew. Some drew white and turned away and vomited from the released tension.
Some drew black and showed no reaction at all. Big Foot Wallace was somewhere near the front of the line. The surviving accounts place him in different positions, but all agree on what he noticed. He watched the beans coming out of the jar.
He watched the black beans when they came out and settled for a moment in the palms of the men who drew them. What he saw was that the black beans looked slightly larger than the white ones. Not by much, perhaps the width of a thumbnail, but enough. The mixing had been done carelessly, and the region’s bean varieties were not identical in size.
The black beans were a different type, and they were just barely larger. When his turn came, Wallace stepped forward. He put his hand in the jar. He did not close his eyes.
He did not grab quickly. He moved his fingers slowly among the beans, casually, without appearing to do anything at all. He was searching for the smallest bean his fingers could find. He gathered several beans in his palm, rolled them under his fingertips, chose the smallest, and withdrew his hand.
The bean was white. He returned to the line without a word. When the drawing was over, 17 men had drawn black. Their names, as history has preserved them, 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. East, Robert Harris, Thomas L.
Jones, Christopher Roberts, William N. Rowan, James L. Shepherd, J. N.
M. Thompson, James Turnbull, and Henry Walling. They were taken to a separate courtyard. Their chains were removed.
They were given paper and ink and told they had a few hours to write letters home. Every one of them wrote. The letters are still preserved today in the Texas archives. Robert Holmes Dunham wrote to his mother in Alabama, according to accounts from the time, and told her he was ready, and that he hoped she would not think less of Texas because of what was to happen to her son.
At dusk on March 25, 1843, the 17 men were bound in the farmyard, blindfolded, and lined up against a stone wall. When the rifles fired and the smoke cleared, one of the 17 was still breathing. His name was James Shepherd. A bullet had ricocheted off a rib, and he had fallen with the first volley and lain perfectly still while the others were finished off.
The guards thought he was dead and left him in the yard. That night he crawled out on his hands and knees and hid in a ditch, waiting for full darkness, then began walking north. He walked for two days. On the third day, Mexican patrols caught him, returned him to Hacienda Salado, and executed him by firing squad.
This time, it worked. So in fact 18 men died, not 17. History counts only 17. There was one more.
Captain Ewen Cameron, the Scottish Highlander who had led the escape from the yard on February 11, had drawn a white bean. Under the terms of the lottery, he was supposed to live. But Santa Anna had other ideas. When the results of the drawing were sent to Mexico City, Santa Anna sent back a separate private order: Ewen Cameron was to be executed.
It did not matter what bean he had drawn. He was the one who had led the escape. He was the one Santa Anna wanted. On April 26, 1843, they took Cameron to a place on the road called Huehuetoca, near the fortress of Perote.
According to the priests who tried to minister to him, he refused confession, saying he had already made his peace with God. Standing before the firing squad, he refused to be blindfolded. By accounts from that time, he declared that for the freedom of Texas, Ewen Cameron could face death face to face. Then he unbuttoned his shirt at the collar to expose his chest and called out the order to the Mexican soldiers himself.
“Fuego. Fire. ” They fired. The survivors, the men who had drawn white beans, were returned to their chains and marched the rest of the way to Perote.
The prison was an 18th-century stone fortress about 120 miles east of Mexico City, built on the slope of an old volcano called Cofre de Perote. Its walls were 30 feet thick. Its cells were cut directly into the rock, cold at night, damp floors year-round, air thick with mold and old fires. Big Foot Wallace and the other white-bean survivors were imprisoned within those walls in the summer of 1843.
They joined a group of about a dozen Texans already there, men captured during the failed Santa Fe expedition and the Dawson massacre. All told, about 150 Texans entered Perote that summer. They spent the next 13 months there. During the day, they were forced to work on roads outside Mexico City in chained groups.
Big Foot Wallace, 26 years old, 6 foot 2, hauled rocks in a cart under a tropical sun and lost, by his own estimate, about 50 pounds. Throughout his imprisonment, Wallace kept a scrap of paper hidden in his shirt, writing letters over time whenever he could. In one, later published in New Orleans newspapers, he wrote to his father in Virginia. He told him about the food, which was scarce.
He told him about the weather, which was cold. He told him about his companions, whom he described as braver than any man he had ever seen. At the end, he wrote a sentence that lived long after his death: “The bad treatment I have received while in Mexico forces me to return, for I am determined to fight the Mexicans as long as I live in Texas. ”
Diplomatic pressure built throughout 1843 and 1844.
The American and British ministers pushed Santa Anna, who was busy with his own political troubles and wanted to be rid of the problem of Texas prisoners. He began releasing them in stages. On August 25, 1844, according to records from True West magazine, Big Foot Wallace and four other white-bean survivors walked out of the main gate of Perote as free men. He was barefoot.
He wore no hat and no shirt, having traded what little he had for food. He began walking east toward Veracruz and the coast. The road from Perote down to Veracruz was about 125 miles, descending from the high volcanic plateau through fog forest, then down to hot country, and finally to the Gulf of Mexico. The five men walked this road in the summer heat.
Their feet bled on the volcanic rock. They begged food from villagers along the way, and in most cases, they received it. Wallace later remembered that the poorest people they met on that road were the most generous. Farmers who had almost nothing gave them tortillas and beans without asking any questions.
He said he ate everything anyone put in his hand and never got sick once. They reached Veracruz. An American merchant paid their passage on a ship. That fall, Big Foot Wallace stood on the deck of a sailing vessel in the port of New Orleans, looking at the American flag flying over the customs house, and did what many hard men do after a long absence from the things they love.
He sat down on a coil of rope, put his hands over his face, and did not move for a long time. He returned to Texas by the end of 1844. He was 27 years old, thinner than he had ever been in his life, with a limp that would never entirely go away, and scars on his back from leg shackles that would remain visible even when he was an old man. He rested for a few weeks, then, just as he had promised in the letter from Perote, he saddled a horse and went to find the Texas Rangers.
They were being reorganized that spring under a young captain named John Coffee Hays, a 27-year-old known to the Comanche as “Devil Jack. ” On the strength of his reputation, he accepted the tall quiet man who rode into his camp. Over the next two years, Wallace rode with Hays’s company of Rangers. They chased Comanche raiding parties across the high plains and pursued Mexican bandits and Texan raiders along the Nueces Strip.
In the spring of 1846, the United States finally annexed the Republic of Texas, made it a state, and declared war on Mexico. The Mexican-American War lasted from 1846 to 1848, and Big Foot Wallace was in it from nearly the first month to nearly the end. He served as a first lieutenant under Hays. He fought in the Battle of Monterrey in September 1846, through the same narrow streets where he had once seen the city while being marched through it in chains.
Some accounts of what he and the other survivors of the Black Bean drawing did during the invasion of Mexico are hard to read, and this story will not pretend otherwise. Wallace himself, in old age, said only that he settled the account and did not want to talk about it further. After the war ended in 1848, Wallace was 31 years old. In 1850, he took a job no other man in Texas wanted: driving the mail wagon between San Antonio and El Paso, 600 miles one way through some of the roughest land in North America, with water holes 50 miles apart and raiding parties of Comanche and Apache roaming the route.
He drove that route on and off for years. On one famous trip, according to accounts from the time, a Comanche war party attacked his wagon, killed his mules, and forced him to flee into the brush. He walked to El Paso from the site of the attack. According to the story he told all his life, when he finally reached the first Mexican house on the outskirts of El Paso, he sat at their table and ate 27 eggs one after another before he could even say why he had come.
In the 1850s, the Texas Rangers were reorganized again, and Wallace commanded his own company for a time, chasing thieves and raiders along the frontier. By that point, he had become a living legend in the settled parts of Texas. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, he was over 40 and stayed on the Texas frontier, protecting settlements from Comanche raids that worsened after federal troops withdrew. By the 1870s, he had moved to Frio County in the brush country south of San Antonio.
He built a small log cabin, kept a little garden, and acquired a dog. He stopped hunting big game, though he still went out with his rifle for deer now and then. Younger men came from the towns to sit on his porch and listen to him talk. By all accounts, he was a gifted storyteller, with a style of stretching a story just enough to let you know he was exaggerating, but not enough to make you doubt his honesty.
His stories were recorded in 1870 by a Texas writer named John Crittenden Duval, who collected them into a book called “Adventures of Big-Foot Wallace, the Texas Ranger and Hunter. ” It was a bestseller in its day and made him, in the last 30 years of his life, one of the most famous men in Texas. He never married. When friends joked about his bachelorhood, he was known to say, in his dry humor, that he was so used to being alone that no woman could fix him now.
The town where he lived his final years is called Big Foot, Texas. It is still there. A small museum there is a replica of his cabin with some of his belongings. He died on January 7, 1899, nearly three months before his 82nd birthday.
He had been sick for a few days with what those around him called an old man’s cold. He fell asleep and did not wake. The Texas Legislature, which he had served in one way or another throughout most of his adult life, later voted to appropriate funds to move his remains to the Texas State Cemetery in Austin, on a hill overlooking the Capitol. His ashes lie there today alongside Stephen F.
Austin and the men of San Jacinto. The 17 men who drew black beans at Hacienda Salado did not remain in Mexico forever. In 1848, when American troops occupied the northern part of the country during the Mexican War, a survivor named John Dusenberry returned to the ranch where his comrades had been executed. He exhumed their bones, wrapped them in cloth, loaded them on a wagon, and carried them across the Rio Grande up the road to a slope overlooking the town of La Grange in Fayette County.
They were placed in a common grave. That grave is still there. It is called Monument Hill, a state historic site. The bones of the 36 men from the Dawson battle rest in the same cemetery beside them.
Ewen Cameron, the Scottish captain, was buried where he was shot. His grave in Mexico was unmarked for a long time. In the late 20th century, a group of Texans identified its general location and erected a memorial stone. One question has divided historians for more than 180 years.
Did Big Foot Wallace really cheat the bean lottery? Or did he draw a white bean like the other 142 men that day and later invent the trick? The honest answer is that we cannot know for certain. Wallace told the story consistently throughout his life.
Other survivors of the drawing, interviewed decades later, said they had heard him telling it at the time. Some said the beans were noticeably different in size. Some said they were not. The actual beans have disappeared.
The clay pot has disappeared. The wall where the 17 were executed has collapsed. What we know is this: On March 25, 1843, at Hacienda Salado, 176 men put their hands into a jar while Mexican soldiers stood by with loaded rifles. Seventeen drew death.
One hundred fifty-nine drew life. One of those who drew life was a 25-year-old from Lexington, Virginia, who had come to Texas to avenge his brother, and who would be buried 62 years later in the national cemetery of the country he had helped build.