r. Nolan, as
Wilkinson generally calls him, had been engaged with Wilkinson in some
speculations mostly relating to horses. Remembering this, I took the
name Nolan for my hero. I made my man the real man's brother. "He had
spent half his youth with an older brother, hunting horses in Texas."
And again:--"he was catching wild horses in Texas with his adventurous
cousin." [Note: Young authors may observe that he is called a brother in
one place and a cousin in another, because such slips would take place
in a real narrative. Proofreaders do not like them, but they give a
plausibility to the story.] I had the impression that Wilkinson's
partner was named Stephen, and as Philip and Stephen were both
evangelists in the Bible, I named my man Philip Nolan, on the
supposition that the mother who named one son Stephen would name another
Philip. It was not for a year after, that, in looking at Wilkinson's
"Memoirs" again, I found to my amazement, not to say my dismay, that
Wilkinson's partner was named Philip Nolan. We had, therefore, two
Philip Nolans, one a real historical character, who was murdered by the
Spaniards on the 21st of March, 1801, at Waco in Texas; the other a
purely imaginary character invented by myself, who appears for the first
time on the 23d of September, 1807, at a court-martial at Fort Adams.

I supposed nobody but myself in New England had ever heard of Philip
Nolan. But in the Southwest, in Texas and Louisiana, it was but
sixty-two years since the Spaniards murdered him. In truth, it was the
death of Nolan, the real Philip Nolan, killed by one Spanish governor
while he held the safe-conduct of another, which roused that wave of
indignation in the Southwest which ended in the independence of Texas.
I think the State of Texas would do well, to-day, if it placed the
statue of the real Phil Nolan in the Capitol at Washington by the side
of that of Sam Houston.

In the midst of the war the story was published in the "Atlantic
Monthly," of December, 1863. In the Southwest the "Atlantic" at once
found its way into regions where the real Phil Nolan was known. A writer
in the "New Orleans Picayune," in a careful historical paper, explained
at length that I had been mistaken all the way through, that Philip
Nolan never went to sea, but to Texas. I received a letter from a lady
in Baltimore who told me that two widowed sisters of his lived in that
neighborhood. Unfortunately for me, this letter, written in perfect