elt themselves strong enough, they revolted against Mexican rule, and
declared Texas to be an independent republic. Immediately Santa Anna,
the Dictator of Mexico, gathered a large army, and invaded Texas. The
slender forces of the settlers were unable to meet his hosts. They were
pressed back by the Mexicans, and dreadful atrocities were committed
by Santa Anna and his lieutenants. In the United States there was great
enthusiasm for the struggling Texans, and many bold backwoodsmen and
Indian-fighters swarmed to their help. Among them the two most famous
were Sam Houston and David Crockett. Houston was the younger man, and
had already led an extraordinary and varied career. When a mere lad he
had run away from home and joined the Cherokees, living among them for
some years; then he returned home. He had fought under Andrew Jackson in
his campaigns against the Creeks, and had been severely wounded at the
battle of the Horse-shoe Bend. He had risen to the highest political
honors in his State, becoming governor of Tennessee; and then suddenly,
in a fit of moody longing for the life of the wilderness, he gave up his
governorship, left the State, and crossed the Mississippi, going to join
his old comrades, the Cherokees, in their new home along the waters
of the Arkansas. Here he dressed, lived, fought, hunted, and drank
precisely like any Indian, becoming one of the chiefs.

David Crockett was born soon after the Revolutionary War. He, too, had
taken part under Jackson in the campaigns against the Creeks, and had
afterward become a man of mark in Tennessee, and gone to Congress as a
Whig; but he had quarreled with Jackson, and been beaten for Congress,
and in his disgust he left the State and decided to join the Texans. He
was the most famous rifle-shot in all the United States, and the most
successful hunter, so that his skill was a proverb all along the border.

David Crockett journeyed south, by boat and horse, making his way
steadily toward the distant plains where the Texans were waging their
life-and-death fight. Texas was a wild place in those days, and the old
hunter had more than one hairbreadth escape from Indians, desperadoes,
and savage beasts, ere he got to the neighborhood of San Antonio, and
joined another adventurer, a bee-hunter, bent on the same errand as
himself. The two had been in ignorance of exactly what the situation in
Texas was; but they soon found that the Mexican army was marching toward
San An