Attached a link to The Battle of Palmito Ranch, by the looks of it, Lincoln's boys should have just headed
A GREAT read is the collected memoirs of the Commander of the Southern Forces (actually composed largely of Border Hispanics) in that fight; John Salmon RIP Ford;
http://www.amazon.com/Fords-Texas-Personal-Narratives-West/dp/0292770340As a Ranger Captain, RIP Ford likely saw more mounted combat against Comanches and Mexican bandits than any other White man who lived to tell about it
Have to also disagree with BW on this...... if he had been born in Texas before the CW, he would have fought for the South. Not a doubt in my mind.
What if I had come to Texas before the Texas Revolution at age nineteen from Tennessee? Had been one of the small minority of Texian men that actually rode out to fight Indians with a Ranging Company? How about if I had made a knife for Jim Bowie, fought against Mexico under Jim Bowie and Stephen F. Austin, and had met Davy Crockett?
Noah Smithwick did all that and more, and yet when war came he could not bring hisself to support a fight against the nation his own father had fought the British to create.
Knowing that as a pro-Union man he would be murdered if he stayed, he sold his two slaves, his smithy and his mill, pulled up and headed out for California. In the Southwest he met none other than Albert Sydney Johnson hurrying east...
http://www.lsjunction.com/olbooks/smithwic/otd26.htmIt was so hot during the day that we had to keep up our night travels, during which every cactus was regarded with suspicion. Somewhere out in that desolate region we met A. Sidney Johnston and party hastening to join the Confederate army. Upon learning that we were from Texas he said with some asperity:
"I think you are doing very little for your country."
"Well," I retorted, "it seems to me you are doing equally as little for yours." Johnston had just resigned his position as commander of the Pacific Coast Division of the United States army.Likely the two were old acquaintances, Johnson likewise had fought in the Texas Revolution twenty-five years earlier. They both knew Sam Houston personally.
Birdwatcher
