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The San Jacinto Monument; a portrait from about 1860 at the Sam Houston Memorial Museum

On The Road

Houston arrived in Texas in 1832—part ambitious settler, part political operative. Thirty-nine years old, he was already famed as a War of 1812 veteran, congressman, Tennessee governor, and protégé of President Andrew Jackson. With commanding charisma, Houston was as famous for his tribulations as his accomplishments. Back in Tennessee, his first wife, Eliza Allen, left him after only 11 weeks. For the rest of his life, Houston would never explain why. Under a cloud of shame, Houston resigned the governorship and dropped out of society. He found his way to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), where he lived with the Cherokee for three years and garnered the nickname “Big Drunk.” He ran a trading post, married a Cherokee woman named Diana Rogers for a brief time, and advocated for the Native Americans, combating corruption among government agents. That issue led to a Washington, D.C., street fight in which he beat up a congressman from Ohio. Though he was reprimanded after a trial in the U.S. House of Representatives, Houston’s spirited self-defense rekindled his political career just as Texas was bubbling with action.

Houston crossed the sandy Red River in December 1832 at Jonesborough, a town claimed by both Arkansas Territory and Mexico at the time. Historical markers on Farm-to-Market Road 410 recall the village, which in today’s terms was northeast of Paris near the State Highway 37 bridge at Albion. But Jonesborough itself washed away long ago. Cattle pastures and soybean fields blanket the bottoms down to the river, a rippled course framed by cream sandbars, bluffs of red mud, and wispy green willows.

“Sam Houston spent his first night in Texas at my ancestors’ house in Jonesborough, so the story goes,” says Jim Clark, a history buff and banker in nearby Clarksville. Jim’s great-great-great- grandparents James and Isabella Clark ran the Jonesborough ferry, and their son Pat Clark published a history of the region in 1919, North Texas, 100 Years Ago. It includes an account of Houston’s visit: “When Houston was helped to venison the next morning, he said, ‘I believe this very deer crossed the river with me yesterday; for an Indian with a deer that he had killed came over in the boat that carried me.’”

Redlands rambler

Such travel must have required a buoyant spirit to overcome the weather, the beasts of burden, and the perpetual dependency on strangers—whoever was willing to help push a cart through the muck or host a boarder for the night. When he first crossed into Texas, however, Houston made his way to Nacogdoches, where he already had a friend in Adolphus Sterne, a German merchant and the town’s top civil official. At the time, the town of 1,300 was the hub of the restless Redlands, a frontier outpost simmering with opportunists and end-of-the-liners.

Sterne and his wife, Eva Catherine Sterne, built their dogtrot home in 1830 from pine wood, using bois d’arc stumps for piers. In the 1980s, Nacogdoches restored the home with its red-brick chimney, long porch, and wood-shingled roof. Houston’s fingerprints are all over the Sterne-Hoya House Museum and Library, including in a parlor that’s maintained as the Sternes would have kept it. The displays include an 1833 merchant account book showing Houston’s purchase of six grogs (a sugary rum cocktail) and reproductions of letters he wrote in the “criss-cross” style. Paper was in short supply, but with horizontal and vertical lines of script on each side, Houston could squeeze four pages of writing onto one sheet.

In about 1833, the Sternes’ parlor hosted Houston’s baptism into the Catholic Church. In The Raven, biographer Marquis James notes Houston was known as a “Muldoon Catholic,” one of many Americans inducted into the faith in Texas by an Irish priest named Miguel Muldoon. Why all the converts? Mexico required landowners to be Catholic.

About two years later, as the Texas Revolution commenced, Houston returned to the Sternes’ home for a treaty conference with Chief Bowles, who lived in a nearby Cherokee settlement. In exchange for peace and neutrality during the revolution, Houston promised Texas would grant East Texas land to the Cherokee.

The museum keeps a marble table in the center of the parlor to tell the story of the meeting. “Chief Bowles walks into the parlor to sign this document, and he sees all these white men sitting around the room, and he sees the big marble centerpiece table,” explains Morgan Tingle, a tour guide. “He assumes it’s the seat of honor for him because he’s the guest at these talks. And so he climbed on top of the table and sat there.”

Once Texas became a republic, the government reneged on the treaty in spite of Houston’s objections, leading the Cherokee to fight Texas soldiers in 1839 at the Battle of the Neches, where Bowles was killed. Houston argued for policies of coexistence with the native population, but his political adversaries repeatedly acted otherwise. Still, the historical memory of “The Raven”—Houston’s Cherokee name—garners respect among native descendants.

In the early 1860s, Houston successfully lobbied to exempt men in the Alabama and Coushatta tribes from Confederate conscription. At the Livingston-area reservation of the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas, a monument to those warriors stands on a lawn within sight of the tribe’s headquarters and casino. The marker occupies the spot of an old “treaty oak” where Houston and tribal leaders would meet to discuss current affairs, says Bryant Celestine, the tribe’s historic preservation officer. “We refer to Houston as ‘grandfather’ to this day,” he adds.

At home in Huntsville

Further south, in Huntsville, Native Americans once camped on a hill overlooking the Houston residence during Sam’s tenure as a U.S. senator (1846-59). A gazebo occupies the old campsite among the pines near 19th Street, above the Sam Houston Memorial Museum on the campus of Sam Houston State University.

“As he would come home, he would make his way through East Texas and visit with various people,” says Michael Sproat, the museum’s curator. “And there would be an encampment of Native Americans who had set up their tents and waited for him to keep track of news from the national scene.”

Houston’s spirit suffuses the 15-acre complex, which protects structures from when Sam and his third wife, Margaret Lea, lived here from 1848 to 1858. The Houstons had lived on a 2,000-acre plantation east of town, but with Sam frequently gone to D.C., Margaret opted to move to what was then a 200-acre property on Huntsville’s outskirts. Houston was famously deferential to Margaret, a refined Alabamian whom historians credit with coaxing Houston off the booze and into the Baptist church. Visitors can poke their heads into the Houstons’ two-story dogtrot home, where four of their eight children were born; Houston’s law office; and the Steamboat House, a Houston residence that was relocated from its original site elsewhere in town. Its parlor is set up just as it was for Sam’s funeral in 1863.

In the museum’s rotunda, exhibits chronicle Houston’s life and times with a collection that gives the impression you’ve stepped into the Houstons’ personal storage vault. In one display, the saddle Santa Anna rode at San Jacinto; in another, Margaret’s pocket hymnal; in another, Sam’s signature jaguar-skin vest, a gift he received from the Cherokee. Houston intentionally mislabeled it a leopard-skin vest because, he said, “A leopard never changes its spots.”

The Houstons’ old home comes alive each May during the General Sam Houston Folk Festival, when visitors can watch as blacksmiths pound out molten steel nails and seamstresses spin yarn from wool on a wooden wheel. The event charges the current of historical imagination that inhabits the museum and the whole of Huntsville. Touring the Sam Houston museum is a rite of passage for Huntsville-area students—roughly 10,000 visit annually on school field trips. In fact, both Sproat and his colleague Mac Woodward, the museum director, visited as children.

“It had a great influence on me,” says Woodward, who served as Huntsville mayor and on the City Council. “I didn’t know much history at that time, but I knew Sam Houston lived here. I knew he was a big deal and that he was a part of this community. So it made him a real person rather than a mythical figure or a hero.”