Editor's Note

Miller's paper reports some results from a three year study of military land grants in Texas, results pertaining to Bounty and Donation land grants awarded for service in the Goliad Campaign of the Texas Revolution. Miller compares his list of grantee names with the following published lists:

• The Telegraph and Texas Register roll of Fannin's men, 1836, reprinted in the Texas Almanac, 1860. (Online, this site.)
  
  
• "The Men of Goliad", Harbert Davenport, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. XLVII, No. 1, Texas State Historical Association, Austin, July 1939, pp.1-41. (Online, this Appendix A.)

and finds twenty-seven names that possibly should be added to or changed in the earlier lists. There are some problems in doing so.

"The Men of Goliad" (Davenport 1939) was based on Davenport's 1936 manuscript containing biographical sketches of most of the men (Davenport 1936, online, this site) plus three years subsequent research. Davenport acknowledges use of abstracts of Headright, Bounty and Donation files furnished to him by the historian Louis Wiltz Kemp, who did an earlier study of the Texas General Land Office records. Also, Davenport 1939 concentrates on men Davenport believed were in Fannin's final command, leaving out names of men in the earlier command and men for whom he had convincing evidence that contradicted the Bounty and Donation file information. The Texas government granted bounties and donations to more than just the men in Fannin's final command.

Miller seems not to have consulted the Davenport 1936 manuscript, at least he does not argue against Davenport's reasons for excluding some names. So we have a difference of expert opinion that can not be resolved without a modern study of all surviving records of a man. Republic records continue to surface from time to time. The Goliad Massacre victim William S. Brown was identified in 1999 as William Silvan Brown of Montreal, Canada (see biographical sketch added to Davenport 1936.)

In 1967 Miller published his complete study of the Land Office records (see Bibliography) which contains four additional names that differ from the lists in the Davenport works. A list of all men from the Goliad Campaign in Miller's Bounty and Donation land grant abstracts is online, this site.

All this Editor can do is offer the following simple comparison of additional names in Miller 1958 and 1967 and the names in Davenport 1936 and 1939. The reader can make a detailed comparison from the online sources. The Land Office Muster Rolls (LOMR) are online also (see Bibliography.)