The Road to Glory by E. Alexander Powell — Read

Had you stood on the banks of the Brazos in December of the year in which the nineteenth century became old enough to vote and looked northeastward across the plains of central Texas, your attention would doubtless have been attracted by a rolling cloud of dust. From out its yellow haze would have crept in time a straggling line of canvas-covered wagons. Iron-hard, bearded men, their faces tanned to the color of a much-used saddle, strode beside the wheels, their long-lashed blacksnakes cracking spasmodically, like pistol-shots, between the horns of the plodding oxen. Weary-faced women in sunbonnets and calico, with broods of barelegged, frowzy-headed youngsters huddled about them, peered curiously from beneath the arching wagon-tops. A thin fringe of scouts astride of wiry ponies, long-barrelled rifles resting on the pommels of their saddles, rode on either flank of the slowly moving column. Other groups of alert and keen-eyed horsemen led the way and brought up the rear. Though these dusty migrants numbered less than half a thousand in all, though their garments were uniform only in their stern practicality and their shabby picturesqueness, though their only weapons were hunting rifles and the only music to which they marched was the rattle of harness and the creak of axle-trees, they formed, nevertheless, an army of invasion, bent on the conquest not of a people, however, but of a wilderness.

Who that saw that dusty column trailing across the Texan plains would have dreamed that these gaunt and shabby men and women were destined to conquer and civilize and add to our national domain a territory larger than the German Empire, with Switzerland, Holland, and Belgium thrown in? Yet that trek of the pioneers, "southwesterly by the lone star," was the curtain-raiser for that most thrilling of historic dramas, or rather, melodramas: the taking of Texas.