Dilue Rose

by Jeffrey Dane

It might take some imagination to envision an 11-year-old girl making lead bullets, but this is what Dilue Rose did early in March, 1836 for the men preparing to join the Texian forces in the Alamo.

 ”The people had been in a state of excitement during the winter. They knew that Colonel Travis had but few men to defend San Antonio. He was headstrong and precipitated the war with Mexico, but died at his post [in the Alamo]. I remember when his letter came calling for assistance. He was surrounded by a large army with General Santa Anna in command, and had been ordered to surrender, but fought till the last man died. . . This letter came in February. I have never seen it in print, but I heard mother read it. When she finished, the courier who brought it went on to Brazoria. I was near eleven years old, and I remember well the hurry and confusion. . . I spent the day melting lead in a pot, dipping it up with a spoon, and moulding bullets,” she later wrote.

 Various sources give Dilue Rose’s name as Dilean, Dilene, and Deline. Confusion was only compounded when she was listed as Deliens on her marriage certificate in 1839 (standardized spelling wasn’t yet the norm). Indeed, James Bowie’s name is written in Mexican documents variously as Buie, Buey, and Buy — wrongly spelled but phonetically correct.

 Dilue Rose’s family came to Texas from St.Louis, Missouri in 1833, when she was eight years old. Even with identical and common last names, there’s no known connection between her family and that of Louis (Moses) Rose, the only member of the Alamo garrison who by tradition willingly left the stronghold before the final siege and who thusly earned a negative fame. Rose is today referred to as Moses because he was the oldest man in the garrison (except for Crockett, who was approaching 50).

Necessity dictates prudence and practicality. Dilue Rose’s family was among many who opted for discretion — through implication, the better part of valor — by leaving for safer areas at the time of the Runaway Scrape. Though many perished through privation during the episode, she not only survived but ultimately lived nearly nine decades. Having had a small but personal part in the Texas Revolution, Dilue Rose knew some of those who played instrumental roles in it, and who were leaders of the new Republic.

What we contribute and leave behind when we are gone outlives us and those who follow. Perhaps her most enduring contribution to the posterity of American history takes the form of her recollections and memoirs: written in 1899, when she was 74, they were published as “The Reminiscences of Dilue Rose Harris” in 1900, 1901 and 1904 in the Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association (Southwestern Historical Quarterly), and in the Eagle Lake Headlight. According to historian Dr. Ann Fears Crawford, author/editor of an important volume titled The Eagle — The Autobiography of Santa Anna, Dilue Rose might likely have refreshed her elderly memory a bit in the writing of those memoirs by referring to and building upon some of her own father’s recollections. Nevertheless, Dilue Rose’s remembrances are considered by many as a source of first-hand information about the early history of Texas. She did, after all, live through it in the literal sense.

Even as a 10-year-old, she could sense the bewilderment and disorder that existed even as early as November, 1835, about which she later wrote, “We had so many different reports that we did not know what to believe” — a remark that perfectly crystallizes a sentiment even the contemporary historian and researcher can easily understand and share. In a sense she was the early 19th-century counterpart of today’s “kid who doesn’t miss a thing,” as sharp as a needle and pinpointing in her recollections such observations as the personality and character (as she then perceived such traits) of the adults she encountered, daily conversations about circumstances both general and specific, personal preferences, and other matters now irretrievably beyond our reach and otherwise forever lost.

She even makes mention of Wiley Martin, credited with having drawn the only known life-made sketch of William Barret Travis as he appeared three months before the Alamo fell. She also relates how, on the last day of April, 1836, a 13-year-old American boy named James Brown was saved from being detained by Mexican soldiers for no greater “crime” than having refused to dismount from a black horse. It was only through the personal intervention of a Mexican officer that the boy was released and saved from being terrorized. That man was Col. Juan Almonte, Santa Anna’s own aide de camp and one of his more sophisticated and polished — and gallant — staff officers.

History is not composed solely of official documents and formal decisions. Often even the smallest details, about any subject, can be keys to accessing openings behind which are answers to some important questions. The era and environment in which Dilue Rose lived were dramatic enough without the need for embellishment a-la Hollywood, and though not a professional writer per se she illuminates her subjects from the real-world viewpoint.

Her remembrances range from the humorous to the heartrending. ” . . . Mr. Choate had seven daughters, three of them married. Father said his only trouble was to get a wagon to haul his daughters around” — circumstances, with modern updatings, with which many fathers today can identify.

“. . . There were men enough in Texas to have organized a large army if they could all have been concentrated at one point . . . Sister and I had been weeping all day about [the news of] Colonel Travis. When we started from home we got the little books he had given us and would have taken them with us, but mother said it was best to leave them. . . [Sunday morning, May 1, 1836 — Home]: We could not find those [little books] that Colonel Travis gave us, but did find broken toys that belonged to our dear little sister that died.” These are touching testimonies that William Barret Travis knew the Rose family at least well enough to have offered a little gift to their little girls.

“Our hardships began at the Trinity [River]. Measles, sore eyes, whooping cough, and every other disease that man, woman or child is heir to broke out among us” — an observation, borne out by other historical accounts, of just a few of the innumerable adversities experienced by the Runaway Scrape participants. “There was considerable talk of a new town’s being started on Buffalo Bayou about ten miles above Harrisburg . . . The new town . . . was named Houston, in honor of General Houston . . . There were circulars and drawings sent out, which represented a large city, showing churches, a courthouse, a market house and a square of ground set aside to use for a building for Congress, if the seat of government should be located there.” Clearly her report targets the time of conception of that now-sprawling metropolis, which today has a nearly 40-mile beltway circumventing the main part of the city.

“. . . One Thursday evening . . . we heard a sound like distant thunder. When it was repeated father said it was cannon, and that the Texans and Mexicans were fighting. He had been through the war of 1812, and knew it was a battle. . . We could see a man on horseback waving his hat; . . . we thought the Mexican army had crossed the Trinity. . . when the rider got near enough for us to understand what he said, it was ‘Turn back! The Texas army has whipped the Mexican army and the Mexican army are prisoners. No danger! No danger! Turn back!’ . . .” The 11-year-old Dilue Rose hereby pinpoints, at the outset, the very day of the week on which the Battle of San Jacinto was taking place within earshot of her encampment.

One of her comments seems to encapsulate the kind of caution, born of practical life experience, for which fathers have been notorious for millennia (and which the know-it-all son or daughter will often trivialize or altogether ignore): “When [our] young men began to understand the glorious news [of the victory] they wanted to fire a salute, but father made them stop. He told them to save their ammunition, for they might need it…”

She continued, “Father asked the man for an explanation, and he showed a despatch from General Houston giving an account of the battle and saying it would be safe for the people to return to their homes. The courier [whose name was McDermot] . . . had left the battlefield the day after the fighting. He said that General Houston was wounded [in the ankle]. . .”

Rose said further, “[McDermot] was an Irishman and had been an actor. He stayed with us that night and told various incidents of the battle. There was not much sleeping during the night. Mr. McDermot said that he had not slept in a week. He not only told various incidents . . . but acted them. The first time that mother laughed after the death of my little sister was at his description of General Houston’s helping to get a cannon out of a bog.”

The notion of a general getting down and dirty with his own troops to help them free up an artillery piece may not be in keeping with our traditional concept of military protocol, but presuming this was the case we can still envision a physical giant of a man like Sam Houston engaged in the kind of activity that is in keeping with democratic principles, the kind that prompted and buttressed the struggles in which he and his troops had just engaged.

Enroute home after the Battle of San Jacinto, Dilue Rose even saw a man who, then unbeknownst to her, was another hero of the Texas Revolution: Erastus “Deaf” Smith. “Deaf Smith was very anxious to get back to the army. . . Mr. Smith could speak Spanish. He said that when he captured General Cos, whom he did not know, he asked him if he had been in the battle. On being answered in the affirmative, he asked him if he had been a prisoner. General Cos replied that he had not, but that he escaped after dark the evening of the battle, and that he abandoned his horse at the burnt bridge.”

The burnt bridge she refers to was Vince’s Bridge, which she and her family had actually crossed, and which Erastus Smith had soon afterward been ordered by Gen. Houston to destroy.

She continues, “Deaf Smith . . . said if the bridge had not been destroyed, General Filisola would have heard of Santa Anna’s defeat and would have marched to his assistance, as he was not more than thirty miles from the battleground. . . Smith then asked him if he had seen General Cos, and he said he had not. Smith continued: ‘I am Deaf Smith, and I want to find General Cos. He offered one thousand dollars for my head, and if I can find him I will cut off his head and send it to Mexico.’ When they arrived at the battleground [Smith] was very much surprised to find that his prisoner was General Cos.” — The masks of Pathos & Comedy were now worn simultaneously.

At the end of the Texas Revolution Dilue Rose moved with her family to the area called Bray’s Bayou, about five miles from what was soon to become Houston, Texas. There, she had some schooling. In 1839, at age 14, she married a New Yorker nine years her senior, Ira A. Harris, a Texas Ranger, who had arrived in Texas in 1836. One of the guests at her wedding was Thomas Rusk, the Secretary of War of the Republic of Texas and one of the signers of its Declaration of Independence. She lived in the Houston area and in 1845 moved to Columbus, Texas. Their union produced nine children and lasted until Ira Harris’ death thirty years later. The house they occupied during their time in Houston was identified with a historic plaque in the 1990s, and the house in which she lived in Columbus, Texas, located at 602 Washington, is now a museum.

Dilue Rose Harris died in Eagle Lake, Texas, between Houston and San Antonio and not far from Columbus, on April 2, 1914, at the age of 89. Her obituary in the Eagle Lake Headlight on April 10 of that year read, in part: “Her fund of historical reminiscences was varied by incidents of personal and often humorous nature, and her manner of narration was attractive and entertaining. . . No other account of the ‘Runaway Scrape’ is so full of comprehensive details, which was drawn largely from a diary kept by her father, supplemented by her own vivid recollection.”

(Author’s Bio:)

Jeffrey Dane is a researcher, historian and author whose writing is published in the USA and abroad in several languages. He’s a contributor to numerous volumes, including several books by Western writer and artist Rod Timanus; he wrote the Foreword for The Alamo Story: From Early History to Current Conflicts by J.R. Edmondson; he delivered a presentation on James Bowie at the Alamo Society Symposium in San Antonio in March, 2007; his article, Alamo Connections, appeared in the April and May, 2008 issues of Blade Magazine; and he co-authored a book (about Texas), for which he is currently seeking a publisher.