Smithwick requires no defense from me, disappointing though and very telling that you would actually describe the man as "traitorous scum", about like your dismissal of all those fine Union men as "useful idiots".
A man who abandons his friends and neighbors in time of need, well, there isn't really too much that can be said about him nicely.
Ya know, its a popular fallacy that, when Santa Anna invaded Texas in '36, that all the Texians here rallied to fight him. Most actually avoided combat, a thing noted with complaint by those Americans pouring in to fight, and who would actually end up doing most of it.
Smithwick was one of a small minority of Texians that repeatedly ran towards the sound of gunfire. He was involved under Bowie in driving the Mexicans out of San Antone in December of '35, and would very probably have fallen at the Alamo except for a bout of malaria that had him laid up in Bastrop. He did go on to serve as a Texian scout at the time of San Jacinto.
If few Texians actually fought, even less ever joined a Ranging Company. The reasons for that were simple: Loss of one's horse, one's rifle and all one's gear at any given point were probable (a ruinous expense), and one ranger estimated the death rate in this service during those early years ran about 50% per annum.
Smithwick voluntarily served in Ranging Companies several times, at one point pursuing a party of Comanche horse thieves for more than two weeks deep into Comancheria.
When the Comanches requested an agent to live among them, Smithwick was about the only man in his already-select company who dared. During his six months with the Comanches he was marked for death and very nearly killed by a vengeful party of Wacos, and saved when his Comanche hosts communicated to the Wacos that they would have to kill them first.
Besides his considerable military exploits Smithwick likely made the first rifled gun made in Texas, and very possibly made the knife Jim Bowie was carrying during the siege of the Alamo.
He was one of the founders of Weber's Prairie, south of Bastrop, and built the first mill in the area of Marble Falls.
Highly respected in the State, and personally aquainted through his prior service with most of the State's leaders, he even ran for public office in an attempt to stave of secession.
When secession, and his own murder, became inevitable, he sold his possessions and formed a company of like-minded folk, urging all he could to join him. While he believed the South would lose, before the outbreak of hostilities no one had any idea as to the coming scale or duration of that violence, and indeed Texas escaped most of that, being so far West.
Most all of the violence against non-combatant civilians here was perpretrated by Confederate sympathisers.
There is no evidence Smithwick ever took military action against the Confederacy, he did stay out of the state thereafter so as to avoid righteous violence against those who had murdered his friends.
In view of all that, and considering your graceless comments here, it seems a certainty that you are a much lesser man than Smithwick ever was.
Birdwatcher
