Rogue Soldiers: The Disaster of the Texas Mier Expedition

Among the greatest of tragedies of the American frontier was a little known but no less tragic event--the Texas Mier Expedition. Originally part of a 1,200-man invasion to retaliate against Mexican incursions on Texas soil in 1842, the Expedition unfolded when several hundred fighters stubbornly defied President Sam Houston’s orders to disband and return home at once. Fiercely independent and recently reorganized under new leadership, this motley mix of Texas volunteers and militia turned south and proceeded to invade Mexico, determined to avenge past humiliations at the hands of Mexican dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna.

Once in Mexico they engaged the enemy in a dramatic day-long battle when they were suddenly tricked into surrendering and marched 1,300 miles to Perote prison. It was a march of attrition during which many Texans were executed or died from exposure, disease, or starvation.

Drawing from over a dozen first-hand accounts, the author extracts this exciting narrative recounting in compelling detail the pathos of these fighting men--from the blood-soaked Battlefields of Mier and the subsequent surrender to their harrowing 1,300-mile forced march to Perote Prison. Once in Perote, they were forced to sleep on stone floors in chains and put to hard labor. Of the original three-hundred-and-eight members of the rogue expedition who survived, only half eventually left the prison alive. After two years in captivity, the prisoners were finally released only to be ignored and forgotten by their own countrymen upon their return home.

Ken Lizzio is an anthropology professor and author of Embattled Saints: My Year with the Sufis or Afghanistan, an ethnography of an Islamic mystical brotherhood that won the IBPA’s 2015 Ben Franklin Silver Award. He also penned Forty-Niner: The Extraordinary Gold Rush Odyssey of Joseph Goldsborough Bruff. Having written a work on the American frontier, he is conversant with the literature of the frontier and has an abiding interest in the American West. He lives in Basye, Virginia.