About these pages

Texans' fear of being invaded by the larger forces of Mexico did not abate after the battle of San Jacinto. The following years saw continuing threats and incursions from both sides. Mexicans wanted their Texas territory back and some Texans wanted to expand the Texas southwestern frontier to the Pacific Ocean. A civil war and a brief war with France during this period distracted the Mexican government, providing Texas opportunity to gain strength and cope with a depleted treasury.

Historian Joseph Milton Nance explores the post San Jacinto period, a story of spies and secret agents, political maneuvering and daring action along the southwestern frontier. An important part of this story concerns the Mexican civil war and Texas' involvement with the rebel Federalist forces of Yucatán and northern Mexico. See Epilogue for an overview of the period covered by the book.

These pages are an online version of Nance's published work:

Nance, Joseph Milton, AFTER SAN JACINTO: The Texas-Mexican Frontier, 1836-1841, University of Texas Press, Austin, xiv, 642 p., 16 illus., 4 fold. maps, 15x23 cm, 1963.

Quoted material is presented verbatim. J. M. Nance's words are verbatim except for correction of a few obvious proofing oversights, such as "ben" for "been" and "Sante Fé" for "Santa Fé". (No doubt this online version will have some errors also, even though having been carefully proofed against the book).

Pagination is preserved so that existing citation will be valid. The index entries have been regrouped alphabetically in single pages, for ease of access. The book's index does not list all occurrences of a name so electronic searching may be helpful.

Some of the Bibliography sources are now available on the Internet, such as Gammel's Laws of Texas and early volumes of the Texas State Historical Association's Southwestern Historical Quarterly.

The sums of money mentioned in the book would be about 18 times greater now. One dollar in 1836 would be equivalent to about $18 now[1].

A more detailed map of Mexico of this period is "A Correct Map of the Seat of War in Mexico, 1847", #0131, Map Collection, Archives and Information Services Division, Texas State Library and Archives. Available online. (Map is based on General Mariano Arista's map, captured during the U. S. war with Mexico.)

Viewing the online pages

Selecting "Times New Roman" for the browser font will more closely replicate the look of the printed book. Also it may be helpful to open a second copy of the browser just for viewing the maps.

At the top and bottom of each page are navigation bars with the following links:

• Go to Page   provides tables of page numbers for going directly to a page if the page number is known.
• Index   goes to a choice of the first letter of the name of interest, then to that section of the index.
• Contents   goes to the online contents page which lists chapters and major sections.
• Enlarge   provides a larger version of a map to make small details readable.
• Biblio.   goes to the Bibliography where an Alternate Alphabetical List of bibliography entries has been added.
• Page-   moves backward by one book page number.
• Page+   moves forward by one book page number.  The entire text-portion can be sequentially viewed using these Page links.

Within the Alternate Alphabetical List of bibliography entries:

• List-   moves backward by one page.
• List+   moves forward by one page.

Additional Material

The online Contents page provides links to all major sections of the book. The reader may use the chapter links on the Contents page or the original two-page Table of Contents.

To aid the reader, a few editor's notes have been added to the online version, in the format "[Ed: ... ]" to distinguish them from Nance's comments, also within square brackets.

Alternate bibliography.  The book's bibliography lists sources alphabetically in nine categories over 28 pages, requiring considerable searching by most readers. To improve access to the bibliography, an Alternate Alphabetical List is provided on the Bibliography entry page. All sources are combined into the one list, with a note on each source specifying Nance's category.

Chapter subjects.  Chapter titles have to be too brief to be very descriptive of the chapter contents. The link on the Contents page, Chapter subjects, goes to a summary of the chapters' contents.

Chronology.  The Chronology link on the Contents page goes to a list of important dates during this period of history.

Acknowledgment

On behalf of the public, our thanks to the University of Texas Press, Austin, and the family of Joseph Milton Nance for permission to make this important work available. The book will join an increasing number of freely available reference works on the Internet. Even small rural schools are getting Internet service which eventually will give them a virtual library much larger than they could otherwise afford.

Appreciation is due the librarians of the Texas State Library and Archives for checking suspect quotes against the original materials. Thank you.

Web page maintenance

The safest way to correct an online work is to use a plain-text editor (e.g., Windows Notepad^tm) that can change a page's content without altering the HTML. Commercial web-preparation programs insulate the user from HTML details, but often rewrite the original HTML to their current proprietary level without the user's knowledge. Also, commercial programs may substitute current absolute link addresses in a page

(e.g., <a href="https://www.tsha.utexas.edu/fannin/hd_014.html">)

for the original relative link addresses

(e.g., <a href="hd_014.html">),

without the user being aware. The changed page is fine until the online work is moved to another server where the absolute links no longer function.

Simply uploading a corrected web page from a personal computer to a server can be damaging. The safest way is to use a file-transfer program that provides a "raw ASCII" option (e.g., WS_FTP^tm) that does not alter the HTML. Some Internet browsers provide an upload option, but may reformat the page in their proprietary HTML in the process without the user's knowledge. The uploaded web page then looks fine on the same browser, but may not look the same on other browsers.

H. David Maxey - 2006

1. Inflation calculator at https://www.westegg.com/inflation/ by S. Morgan Friedman, based on Historical Statistics of the United States, colonial times to 1970, Washington: U. S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1975.