Historic Tales: The Romance of Reality. Vol. 02 (of 15), American (2)Morris, Charles
History
Historic Tales: The Romance of Reality. Vol. 02 (of 15), American (2)
Morris, Charles
United States -- History
A few words more and we have done. Of the pirates, two only made any
future mark. Dominique Yon, the captain who had shared imprisonment
with Pierre Lafitte, now settled down to quiet city life, became a
leader in ward politics, and grew into something of a local hero,
fighting in the precincts instead of on the deck.
Jean Lafitte, however, went back to his old trade. From New Orleans he
made his way to Texas, then a province of Mexico, and soon we hear of
him at his buccaneering work. For a time he figured as governor of
Galveston. Then, for some years, he commanded a fleet that wore the thin
guise of Columbian privateers. After that he threw off all disguise and
became an open pirate, and as late as 1822 his name was the terror of
the Gulf. Soon afterward a fleet of the United States swept those waters
and cleared it of all piratical craft. Jean Lafitte then vanished from
view, and no one knows whether he died fighting for the black flag or
ended his life quietly on land.
_THE HEROES OF THE ALAMO._
On a day in the year 1835 the people of Nacogdoches, Texas, were engaged
in the pleasant function of giving a public dinner to one of their
leading citizens. In the midst of the festivities a person entered the
room whose appearance was greeted with a salvo of hearty cheers. There
seemed nothing in this person's appearance to call forth such a welcome.
He was dressed in a half-Indian, half-hunter's garb, a long-barrelled
rifle was slanted over his shoulder, and he seemed a favorable specimen
of the "half-horse, half-alligator" type of the early West. But there
was a shrewd look on his weather-beaten face and a humorous twinkle in
his eyes that betokened a man above the ordinary frontier level, while
it was very evident that the guests present looked upon him as no
every-day individual.
The visitor was, indeed, a man of fame, for he was no less a personage
than the celebrated Davy Crockett, the hunter hero of West Tennessee.
His fame was due less to his wonderful skill with the rifle than to his
genial humor, his endless stories of adventure, his marvellous power of
"drawing the long bow." Davy had once been sent to Congress, but there
he found himself in waters too deep for his footing. The frontier was
the place made for him, and when he heard that Texas was in revolt
against Mexican rule, he shouldered his famous rifle and set out to take
a hand in the game of revolution. It was a question in those days with
the reckless borderers whether shooting a Mexican or a coon was the
better sport.
[Illustration: THE ALAMO.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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