Behind the Scenes: 12 Real-Life Characters of Texas Rising

Try inventing a life more fascinating than the real one of Sam Houston (played by Bill Paxton in Texas Rising). Houston was of Scotch-Irish descent. He spent three of his teenage years in Tennessee living among the Cherokee, who called him “Black Raven.” He earned both a commission and the longtime mentorship of Andrew Jackson while fighting in the War of 1812. Along with stints as an Indian agent, Houston served in Congress for Tennessee and as its governor. Following a failed marriage, he returned to live with the Cherokee. All that happened before he ever set foot in Texas, which he saw as a land of promise. There, Houston commanded the victorious Texas army in its fight for independence from Mexico, served two terms as the new republic’s president, guided its annexation by the United States, represented Texas in the U.S. Senate, and, as the state’s unionist governor, tried to prevent it from seceding.

Emily West (played by Cynthia Addai-Robinson) was unquestionably real, but she likely neither inspired the classic song “The Yellow Rose of Texas” nor was the backstage heroine of the Battle of San Jacinto. According to legend, Emily, aware that Sam Houston’s Texans were about to attack, seduced Mexican commander Santa Anna in his tent, slowing his response to the attack. Embellished versions of that narrative (including fabricated descriptions of Emily’s appearance and actions) grew out of the 1956 publication of an 1842 journal by William Bollaert, in which the probably apocryphal account of Emily’s role was attributed to Houston himself. The real Emily was a free woman of color who went to Texas in 1835 from New York to work as the housekeeper for a man named Morgan (a last name wrongly attributed to her by some historians who mistakenly identified her as his slave or indentured servant). Her stay was short, and in 1837 she returned to New York with a passport from the newly founded republic.

Also very real was Antonio López de Santa Anna (played by Olivier Martinez), who boldly strode the stage of Mexican and U.S. history in the 1830s and ’40s. After serving as a soldier in Spain’s colonial forces in Mexico, he fought for Mexican independence. As an officer in the Mexican army, he supported and then helped overthrow two consecutive presidents. In 1833 he began the first of five stints as president, transforming from a champion of Mexico’s 1824 federalist constitution into a centralist dictator. Having sought to vanquish colonial Texas, he became its prisoner, forced to grant its independence. Exiled at the start of the Mexican-American War, he was sent by U.S. Pres. James K. Polk to sue for peace in Mexico and ended up leading the Mexican forces against the Americans.

Part scout, part spy, part messenger, and all hero, Erastus (“Deaf”) Smith (played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan) was the Forrest Gump of the Texas Revolution. Deaf (pronounced “Deef”), who lost his hearing through illness in his youth, fought in one of the rebellion’s first battles, at Concepcion; sparked another important battle, the Grass Fight; was wounded in the Texans’ taking of Bexar (San Antonio); was dispatched with Henry Karnes to learn the fate of the Alamo; and burned a crucial bridge at the Battle of San Jacinto. Later he was a captain in the Texas Rangers. Deaf Smith county in Texas is named for him.

Having accompanied Deaf Smith to learn the fate of the Alamo, Henry Karnes (played by Christopher McDonald) took the news to Sam Houston that it had fallen. Karnes, who served as scout and cavalry commander during the Texas Revolution, distinguished himself at the Battle of Jacinto and at the head of the five-man scouting party that defeated a Mexican force four times its size at Rocky Creek. While overseeing a prisoner exchange in Mexico, Karnes was himself taken prisoner. Learning of a planned invasion by Mexican troops, he secreted out a warning that became known as the “whip-handle dispatch.” After independence, he led the Texas Rangers in campaigns against the Comanche and other Native Americans.

Tejano revolutionary Juan Seguín (played by Raúl Méndez) was in the Alamo when the siege began, but he was dispatched with a letter to Sam Houston requesting reinforcements. Seguín and the company of Tejano troops that he organized acted as the rear guard for Houston’s army and fought at the Battle of San Jacinto. Seguín served in the Senate of the Republic of Texas (1837–40) and then as mayor of San Antonio before being accused of aiding the Mexican government in trying to recapture Texas and subsequently fleeing to Mexico in 1842. There he was also viewed as a traitor and was given the choice of going to prison or joining the Mexican army. He chose the latter, and he fought against the United States in the Mexican-American War.

James W. Fannin, Jr. (played by Rob Morrow), a Georgian, attended but did not graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. In Texas, where he moved his family in 1834, he worked as a slave trader. He became involved early in the fight for Texas’s independence and participated in the Battles of Gonzales and Concepcion as an officer. As the commander of the Texan forces at Goliad, he was initially ordered to reinforce the defenders of the Alamo but then was told to retreat toward Victoria in March 1835. Because he delayed, his troops were caught in the open and forced to surrender at the Battle of Coleto. They were imprisoned back at Goliad, where Antonio López de Santa Anna ordered their wholesale execution.

Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar (played by Chad Michael Murray) first went to Texas in 1835 via Georgia, where he had been secretary to the governor before founding the Columbus Enquirer newspaper. Having settled in Texas, Lamar returned to Georgia to finish his business there but rushed west after learning of the events at the Alamo. He entered the rebellious Texas army as a private and rose mercurially to the rank of colonel to command the cavalry at the Battle of San Jacinto. Ten days after the battle, he was made secretary of war. After serving as vice president, he was elected to a three-year term as the president of the Republic of Texas in 1838 when Sam Houston was constitutionally barred from a consecutive term. Initially, Lamar sought to prevent Texas from joining the United States, in whose army he then served during the Mexican-American War.

Though he fought in the Texas Revolution, John Coffee (“Jack”) Hays (played by Max Thieriot) is best known for his revolver-wielding exploits as a commander of the image-defining rough and rowdy Texas Rangers in their encounters with the Comanche and the Mexican army before and during the Mexican-American War. He and the Rangers won fame for their role in the assaults on Monterey, Veracruz, and Mexico City. Hays gave his name to a Texas county but spent the last 30-plus years of his life in California, where he helped found the city of Oakland.

Descended from heroic Scottish stock (William Wallace and Robert Bruce were forebears), William (“Bigfoot”) Wallace (played by Robert Baker) cut an imposing 6-foot 2-inch, 240-pound figure when he arrived in Texas from Virginia for payback following the death of a brother and a cousin in the Goliad Massacre. He was incarcerated at Perote Prison after being captured during a Texan expedition into Mexico following a Mexican invasion of Texas in 1842. He fought for the Texas Rangers under the command of Jack Hays in the Mexican-American War, and following the war he commanded his own Ranger company.

Thomas Jefferson Rusk (played by Jeff Fahey) went to Texas in pursuit of embezzlers who had fled with the funds of a Georgian gold-mining firm in which Rusk had invested. Although he never caught his prey, he stayed in Texas, starting a new life in Nacogdoches. An early advocate of independence, he led a group of volunteers that helped prevent Mexican troops from appropriating the cannon that had been given to the town of Gonzalez in the first battle of the Texas Revolution. A veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto and a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, he went on to become the commander in chief of the Republic of Texas’s army and, following annexation, represented Texas in the U.S. Senate.

Moseley Baker (played by Crispin Glover) apparently went to Texas to escape accusations of financial misdeeds in Alabama, where he had been a newspaperman, lawyer, and legislator. While serving as a member of the Consultation, which met to consider the grievances of colonial Texans against Mexico in 1835, Baker called for the body’s dissolution, infuriating Sam Houston (with whom he would feud for years and whose impeachment he would seek when Baker was a congressman and Houston the president of the Republic of Texas). Baker also claimed to have been the first to make a speech calling for independence. Militarily he contributed to the success of the revolution when the force he commanded held a position on the Brazos River that protected the rear of Houston’s army as it retreated toward destiny at San Jacinto.