Steve P. Holcombe, the Converted Gambler: His Life and WorkAlexander, Gross
Religion
Steve P. Holcombe, the Converted Gambler: His Life and Work
Alexander, Gross
Holcombe, Steve P., 1835-; Methodists -- United States -- Biography
I joined his expedition in September, 1885, and arrived in Nicaragua in
October, the following month--the third day of October. There was a
civil war then in progress in Nicaragua; and the pretense of this
expedition was that we were hired by one of the parties to take part in
it. Walker was to furnish three hundred Americans, who were to get one
hundred dollars a month and five hundred acres of land, and their
clothes and rations, of course. When I first arrived there, we were to
escort specie trains across the isthmus--there are but twelve miles of
land from water to water--from San Juan del Sur to Virgin Bay. I was one
of the guard over the celebrated State prisoners, General Coral and the
Secretary of War, whose name I forget, who were both executed. I was
inside of the seventieth man who joined this expedition; when I joined
him, Walker had but sixty men. The re-enforcements that came over
made just one hundred men. He had sixty men, I think, and we numbered
forty. With this one hundred men we took the city of Grenada, which had
a population of twelve thousand, on the morning of October 13, 1855. A
small division of men was sent to the town of Leon on the Pacific coast.
The natives of that section of the country were all in favor of Walker;
that part--the western part--is the Democratic part of the country. On
our return to Grenada, on the 11th day of April, 1856, we went into the
Battle of Rivas, after marching sixty-five miles. We fought from eight
o'clock in the morning until two the next morning, by the flash of guns.
I lost my arm that morning; and was promoted from the rank of sergeant
to that of first lieutenant for taking a cannon in advance of the army.
I returned to Grenada, and lay there for several months, and then
returned to America. I went back with the re-enforcements from New York
in the following August. In October, 1856, I resigned, and came back to
America.
At the breaking out of the civil war, on the first call for troops, I
refused a commission in the Federal army, and joined the Confederate
forces.
In 1861 we formed the First Maryland regiment. The last six months of
the war I spent as a prisoner in Fort Delaware, charged with the murder
of the eleven men who were killed in Baltimore during the riot, on the
19th of April, 1861. I was court-martialed in Washington City, in the
latter part of 1864, and was sent in irons to Fort Delaware, and
remained there until May, 1865, when I was released.
From Fort Delaware I went to New York, and from there went to Virginia,
where I married the great granddaughter of the illustrious patriot,
Patrick Henry, at Danville. In January, 1866, I migrated to Texas, where
I spent the little patrimony my grandfather had given me. When I left
there, I took the position of commercial and marine editor of the
Savannah _News_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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