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One guy absent from this fight, and also indicative of the perilous nature of life in those times was Erastus “Deaf” Smith, originally from Dutchess County NY by way of Mississippi. His popular moniker (which reenactors take pains to point out was pronounced “Deef” back then) was as a result of hearing loss from a childhood infection.

Deef was a livestock guy, a stockman, who moved to Texas in 1821 at 34 years of age. Not much is known of his earlier life or his exact movements during the 15 years prior to the Alamo. It is believed in he traveled over much of Texas in advance of the Frontier. It is known that he partnered with the Ruiz clan around Mission San Jose here in San Antonio in moving livestock to trade in Louisiana.

1822 he married one Guadeloupe Ruiz Duran, a widowed daughter of the Ruiz patriarch whose late Vaquero husband have been killed in a fall from a horse. It appears to have been a love match, Smith became a stepfather to her four children and she would bear him two more.

If you’re looking for a politically correct Frontiersman, Deef is your guy. One of his adopted daughters married a free Black man named Hendrick Arnold, Deef and Arnold we’re 100 miles out of town hunting Buffalo in 1835 when the Mexican army occupied San Antonio. Being married to a Tejano Deef was politically neutral until upon his return to San Antonio he was severely beaten by a detail Mexican cavalry, at which point Deef and Arnold went over to the Texian side.

Both men were described in glowing terms by their contemporaries, William Barrett Travis himself described Deef as being “the bravest of the brave”. At the beginning of the campaign to drive the Mexican army out of San Antonio and capture the Alamo the attack was stalled because many of the men refused to begin unless Hendrick Arnold was present.

Deef was seriously wounded in this attack in November of 1835 but remained in service and of course famously burned the bridge at San Jacinto the following April, which burning resulted in the capture of Santa Anna himself.

Prior to that battle, Deef was credited with capturing the Mexican Courier bearing dispatches from Santa Anna that informed the Texians that Santa Anna was headed for San Jacinto with only 800 troops, setting the stage for subsequent events.

In the months after San Jacinto both Deef and Arnold led ranging companies down to the Rio Grande against Mexican bandits. The following year, 1837, Deef Smith died of an illness at just 50 years of age, his widow granted a home site and a pension in San Antonio.

Hendrick Arnold’s father had been a white man and his mother probably enslaved. Prior to his marriage to Smith’s stepdaughter he had fathered a child by a black woman, probably one of the family slaves. Much might be made of the fact that he held his own daughter as his slave until you consider the fact that it was illegal in the Texas Republic for free Blacks to reside there, Hendrick himself having been given special dispensation in this regard.

Arnold was granted a large tract of land north west of present day Bandera in the Texas Hill country where he settled his mother. Arnold took no part that we know of in the fight against the great Comanche raid. At that time he was operating a Gristmill at Mission San Juan south of San Antonio.

Arnold’s birthdate is unknown, but he perished in the great cholera epidemic of 1849, the same epidemic that killed off about 10,000 Comanches, most likely he would have been in his 40s at the time. Prior to his death Arnold had made arrangements for his enslaved daughter to be freed after a period of indentured servitude, said freedom being subsequently challenged by his daughter from the Ruiz family, Outcome of the case unknown.