 | ... Sam Houston was... one of the most independent, unique, popular, forceful and dramatic individuals ever to enter the Senate Chamber... Although there are available endless collections of diaries, speeches and letters... Houston himself remains shadowed and obscured ... a mystery to the careful historian of today... sometimes spectacular, sometimes crude, sometimes mysterious, but always courageous.
JOHN F. KENNEDY, Profiles in Courage, pp. 101, 105, 106 |
| I had... Sam on his way to join the Indians after the crash of his first marriage; and there was opposed by a blank wall. About a dozen printed pages was all the reliable material I could scare up in New York or in the Library of Congress on the four years he spent in exile... {T}hat blank wall of the Indian years was what treed me.
MARQUIS JAMES, "On the Trail of Sam Houston," The Texas Monthly, VI (July, 1930), 34 |
| Sam Houston, in the minds of the American people, symbolizes the movement for independence in Texas. More than Stephen Austin, Jim Bowie, or Davy Crockett, Houston personifies the spirit of that struggle. He has become the folk hero of a romantic epoch in the westward expansion of the United States. Much of Houston's career prior to the Texas Revolution, however, remains "a blank wall" colored with legend and darkened with mystery. |
| Unquestionably, the most mysterious years are those immediately preceeding Houston's arrival in Texas. In most of the fifty biographies of Houston only slight reference is made to the years between 1829 and 1833, which Houston spent in "exile" with the Cherokee Indians. Even Marquis James in his prize-winning biography The Raven was forced to prune out "about one-third of those ... Indian Chapters" and "to kill entire episodes or compress them into sentences or |
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