Gonzales must have been a remarkable place in 1840, or maybe the sort of people that first settled frontiers were remarkable.
Residing in the little town itself you had people ranging from the likes of the McCulloch brothers all the way down to the lethal Rueben Ross. Texas was a rough neighborhood for a long time, the Indians being but a part of the problem and an increasingly insignificant one as time went by.
By the numbers, the biggest threat to Texians was other Texians, a lot of rough characters running loose. Four years earlier, right before the siege of the Alamo, Captain Almeron Dickinson had brought his young wife Susanna and their infant child Angelina to the Alamo for her own safety from Gonzales after a band of American outlaws had roughed her up and plundered their farmstead.
One of the notable Gonzales men, a good guy, was Mathew “Old Paint” Caldwell. The relative youth of the Texas population at that time might be inferred from Caldwell’s “Old Paint” moniker, applied to a guy who was just 42.
In the same way, if there had been a Moses Rose who was the only guy to opt to escape from the Alamo, it was likely one Louis Rose, a French guy in his fifties, called “Moses” by the others on account of his age.
It seems likely that Caldwell was afflicted with vitiligo although we are told the nickname came from his unusually colored beard. He must have been a dynamic character, his name comes up as the “go to” guy in the accounts of his peers.
On Monday the 10th, Caldwell was west of Gonzales leading 32 men, having assumed like most everyone else that the Comanches would follow usual practice and escape by a different route from where they came in. Riders sent out to recall him would find him that day in Seguin.
Caldwell was one of those guys who’s life demonstrates the precariousness of a life in those days even without Comanches or outlaws. He lost his first wife, mother of his three children, when he was thirty five. Caldwell himself passed away at home in 1842, at just 44 years of age, cause of death not given.
Last edited by Birdwatcher; 09/22/22.
"...if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we would take great care in their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them." Canasatego 1744
