Philip Nolan, a young man of Irish descent, obtained in 1797 a permit from De Nava, the Spanish commandant-general of Texas, to collect in that province wild horses for the American army. He entered the province, made friends with the Indians, and succeeded in gathering twelve hundred mustangs, which he drove across the border. He drew and brought back with him at this time a map of Texas, the first one ever made. This map he gave to Baron Carondelet, the Spanish governor at New Orleans.[11] Three years later, with the same permit and ostensibly on the same errand, he started westward from Natchez, Mississippi. He had with him seventeen white men and one negro. His second in command was a nineteen-year-old lad named Ellis Bean. The men were all young, most of them being under thirty and many of them hardly more than twenty years of age. They traveled on horseback across the wilderness, and some months later they encamped in the neighborhood of the present city of Waco, where they found “elk and deer plenty, some buffalo, and thousands of wild horses.”[12] In a short time they had caught and penned three hundred mustangs. The Indians were very friendly. At one time two hundred Comanches visited them in their camp. In return they spent a month in the wigwams of that tribe. Then they went back to their business of capturing wild horses. But orders in the meantime had come from De Nava to Musquiz, the Spanish captain at Nacogdoches, to arrest Nolan at all hazards. He had been denounced to the Spanish government as a traitor, and it was believed that he had come to Texas for the purpose of setting up a republic of his own, or to further the plans of Aaron Burr.[13] [Illustration: Ellis P. Bean.]