Thanks Greg.
Anyways, Lorenzo De Zavala might have been selected as interim Vice President because he WAS different.
Somewhat overlooked in the main flow of events is the remarkable career of the guy they chose as Interim President; David G. Burnet.
Originally from a well-to-do family in New Jersey, by the time he was 24 years of age Burnet had fought in revolutions against Spain in Chile and Venezuela alongside Simon Bolivar.
(Simon Bolivar is another guy we forget about now, he was quite famous in his day. One of the most unexpected things I found on my 2014 bicycle expedition, in Salamanca on the Seneca Indian Reservation in Western New York State, was a nineteeth century monument to Simon Bolivar. Gotta be a story behind that.)
He returns in 1812 and moves to join his brothers in the then-recently settled city of Cincinatti OH. Of the three brothers, David is the prodigal. His one brother stays put and becomes a Senator, the other mayor, David moves to Natchitoches LA and sets up a mercantile business. There he develops tuberculosis and heads for Texas seeking a better climate.
In what seems like one of the great misguided acts of generosity of all time, a band of Comanches finds the ailing Burnet on the Colorado and take him in. He lived with them for two years, no word on how many subsequently died of tuberculosis although that disease would take an enormous toll among all the western tribes in the coming decades. While he was with them, by hos own account he prevailed upon them to peaceably return several Mexican captives to their families
His health restored, Burnet returns to Cincinatti to practice law but is back in Texas and settles in Austin's colony in 1826, age 38, travels to Mexico with De Zavala the following year and receives a grant but cannot recruit enough settlers back in Ohio to follow through.
He gets married to a New Jersey girl at age 43, and returns to Texas in 1830, this time with a steam engine to operate a sawmill, sets up shop on the San Jacinto River in the area of present-day Houston. He loses the land the mill sits on because of his refusal to convert to Catholicism, but is able to become a Judge at San Felipe.
Judge Burnet was not an elected delegate, but stopped in at the Convention of 1836 after it was underway on his way to join the Alamo defenders. The contentious delegates are trying to pick an interim President for the new republic. Sam Houston is off in East Texas ostensibly meeting with the Cherokees, Stephen F. Austin I believe was in New Orleans, Judge Burnet, who arrives on the scene and is not part of any opposing faction, gets elected.
Among his first actions was to prevail upon the Convention to remain at Washington on the Brazos to finish the process of creating the Republic instead of fleeing northeast to Nacodoches as many had wanted to do when word of the Fall of the Alamo came. Instead the Texas government would move to Harrisburg adjacent to the coast opposite Galveston Island eleven days later.
It was this move that drew Santa Anna down there the following month far ahead of his main force, as it turned out setting the stage for San Jacinto. As it was, Burnet's subsequent escape from Harrisburg was so close that it was he and his wife among others that were in that famous rowboat within rifle shot when the lancers under then Col. Juan Nepomucino Almonte arrived on the shore to apprehend them.
To protect the others as best he could, Burnet stood up separately in the boat to draw their fire. For his own part Almonte, who is credited by some with saving Susanna Dickinson at the Alamo, refused to open fire as there were women in the boat. Almonte survived San Jacinto, ironically in part because he commanded the men least inclined to flee in disorder when the unexpected Texian attack came, and so was still alive when order was being restored later in the battle. He surrendered to Texas Secretary of War Thomas J. Rusk, pretty much Second in Command after Houston.
Worth noting that David Burnet despised and distrusted Sam Houston from the outset and the two men would remain bitter political and personal enemies their entire lives.
Birdwatcher
