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With
the thread of friendships running through pages of Texas history,
let's explore some of those relationships.
I've compiled a list, albeit incomplete, of Best Friends Forever
in early Texas.
Anson
Jones and Ashbel Smith
Sam Houston
and Ashbel Smith
James Spillman and David Kokernot
Mirabeau
Lamar and David G. Burnet
David G. Burnet and Sidney Sherman
Isaac Moreland and Emily
"Yellow Rose of Texas" Morgan
At
one time Sam Houston
and Anson
Jones were good friends. Jones even named one of his sons after
the hero of San
Jacinto. After he and Houston
had their falling out, he changed the son's name to Sam Edward Jones.
The oldest sons of Anson
Jones - Sam and Charles - would become Confederate Army buddies
of Sam Houston Jr. in the Bayland Guards, commanded by Ashbel Smith.
Jones
was an Army surgeon at San
Jacinto. After the war, both Houston
and Jones
would serve terms as president of the Republic of Texas. During
Houston's presidency
second time around, he picked Jones
as his secretary of state. That's when they were still talking to
one another.
When Texas entered the union, voters sent Sam
Houston and Thomas Rusk to Washington as U.S. senators. Jones
was jealous. He wanted to be a U.S. senator but the voters didn't
want him. As his jealousy grew worse, Jones
became seriously depressed and in 1858 committed suicide.
Ashbel Smith's friendship with the fellow physician never wavered,
and he presented the eulogy at the funeral for Jones.
But Smith's best friend of all was Houston.
They first bonded in the early days of the Republic when they were
roommates in the primitive capital city of Houston.
Friends
James Spillman and David Kokernot
shared a love of the sea and both were skilled sailors. Spillman,
as far back as the 1820s, knew Kokernot,
a native of The Netherlands, and he rescued him once from the island
of San Domingo where he had been stranded.
In future years the seafaring pals would live in the bay area, with
Kokernot's home located in
the present-day Baytown Nature Center and Spillman's home on an
island that one day becamed the site of the Baytown-La Porte Tunnel.
President
Mirabeau
Lamar and his vice president and good friend, David G. Burnet,
had in common an utter hatred of Sam
Houston. For a while when Lamar
was ill, Burnet ran the government for the ailing president.
An even closer friend to Burnet was Sidney Sherman, a San
Jacinto warrior who made his home in the La
Porte area before moving to Galveston.
Burnet, after his wife Hannah died at Lynchburg,
moved into the Sherman home in Galveston.
The graves of Sherman and Burnet are side by side in a Galveston
cemetery. (Mrs. Burnet's grave is in Baytown's
Lakewood subdivision near Lynchburg.)
In
the aftermath of San
Jacinto, Isaac Moreland of Liberty
and Emily Morgan of Morgan's
Point became friends. You can call her by her real name, Emily
West, or by her musical name, "Yellow
Rose of Texas."
Moreland, a lawyer and San
Jacinto veteran, arranged for the indentured servant to return
to New York in 1837. On a trip to New York in 1835, Morgan had hired
to be his housekeeper at Morgan's
Point.
Caught in the middle of the battle
at San Jacinto in 1836 - thanks a lot, Santa Anna -- Emily lost
all her papers proving who she was and where she came from. Moreland,
who manned the Twin
Sisters cannon at San
Jacinto, came to her rescue.
After all, what are friends for?
© Wanda Orton
Baytown Sun Columnist
"Wandering" June
24, 2015 columns
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