In March 1843, a Texas Ranger named William Alexander Anderson Wallace stood barefoot in a dusty yard at Hacienda Salado in northern Mexico, watching his companions reach into a clay jar. Inside were 176 beans, 159 white and 17 black. The men were prisoners of war, survivors of a failed invasion into Mexico, and their captors had just informed them that the color of the bean they drew would decide whether they lived or died. Wallace, twenty-five years old, stood six feet two inches tall.

His hands, calloused from years of labor, hung at his sides as he watched the men ahead of him. He watched their fingers close around the beans. Quietly, without drawing attention to himself, he began to notice something. Something that would save his life in roughly four minutes.

Wallace was a Virginian, born on April 3, 1817, to a family of Scots-Irish descent. He was working in his father’s orchard when a letter arrived in the spring of 1836. It brought news from the young Republic of Texas, of a place called Goliad, where a Mexican army under General José de Urrea had captured a force of Texan volunteers led by Colonel James Fannin. The Texans had surrendered under what they believed were the terms of prisoners of war.

Weeks later, on Palm Sunday, they were marched out in three columns and executed by firing squad. Two of the men in that line were Wallace’s older brother, Samuel, and a cousin. Wallace did not speak when he finished reading the letter. He walked out of the house, saddled a mule, and rode into town to sell what he owned.

He told his father he was going to Texas to avenge the Mexicans. He was nineteen years old and had never fired a shot in anger. By the time he crossed into Texas in the spring of 1837, the war was over. Sam Houston had defeated Santa Anna at San Jacinto.

The treaties had been signed. Instead of a war, Wallace found a harsh, nearly empty country. He settled near La Grange, tried farming, failed, tried beekeeping, and failed at that too. In the spring of 1840, he moved to Austin, then a raw new capital, but found it too crowded for his taste.

He moved on to San Antonio. During these years he earned the nickname Big Foot. One story held that his feet were genuinely enormous, requiring specially made moccasins. Another, which Wallace himself told in old age, was that a Waco chief named Big Foot had been raiding settlements around Austin.

When settlers found tracks in the mud after a raid, they sometimes could not tell whether they belonged to the Waco or to Wallace, so they started calling the tall quiet ranger Big Foot after his namesake. Wallace hated the nickname at first, but he could never shake it. In 1842, trouble with Mexico resumed. Mexico had never accepted Texas as an independent nation.

That March, a Mexican general named Rafael Vásquez crossed the Rio Grande with about seven hundred men, occupied San Antonio for two days, and withdrew. In September, a French-born Mexican general named Adrian Woll returned with roughly twelve hundred men, seized San Antonio again, and this time carried off the entire district court, about sixty lawyers, judges, and jurors, as prisoners. Wallace was with the Texan forces under Matthew Caldwell and Jack Hays that met the Mexicans east of San Antonio at Salado Creek on September 18, 1842. Two hundred and twenty Texans held off sixteen hundred Mexican regulars and their Cherokee allies.

The Mexicans launched three attacks. They lost sixty dead and hundreds wounded. The Texans lost one man. On the same day, however, a relief company of about fifty-three Texans under Nicholas Dawson was surrounded in a cornfield a mile away.

They raised a white flag when they could fight no longer. The Mexican artillery kept firing. Thirty-six of them were killed, and fifteen were marched toward the Rio Grande in chains. Those dead in the cornfield, the court taken from San Antonio, and the men already rotting in Mexican prisons all pushed the Texans toward retaliation.

The Republic of Texas was bankrupt. President Sam Houston did not want a full-scale war. He wanted a limited punitive raid, a slap across the face, nothing more. He authorized Brigadier General Alexander Somervell to gather volunteers and cross the Rio Grande only if there was a reasonable chance of success.

Somervell arrived in San Antonio on November 4, 1842, looked at his volunteers, and realized he was in trouble. These were not soldiers. They were reckless frontiersmen, old ranger companies, farmers seeking vengeance, land speculators, and drifting adventurers. Big Foot Wallace was among them.

About seven hundred and fifty men marched out of San Antonio on November 25. From the first mile, discipline fell apart. Men wanted to fight, not drill. Companies split off and went home.

By the time they reached the border town of Laredo on December 8, their numbers had shrunk to a few hundred. They looted Laredo and forced Somervell to draw his pistol to stop them. They took the town of Guerrero on December 15. Four days later, Somervell looked at his dwindling supplies and the growing chaos and ordered the men to turn around and go home.

About 189 obeyed. More than three hundred refused. They elected a former Texas Ranger named William Fisher as their commander and voted to cross the river and seize the Mexican town of Mier. Wallace was among those who stayed.

The Texans believed Mier was guarded only by a small militia. They did not know that a Mexican general named Pedro de Ampudia was already marching north with more than three thousand veteran regulars, cavalry, and artillery. The Texans crossed the Rio Grande on December 20. They reached Ciudad Mier two days later.

The town was empty. The mayor came out with white flags and promised supplies, food, and cattle if the Texans would wait two days on the north bank of the river. They waited. Nothing came.

On Christmas Day, 1842, about 261 Texans crossed the river again at dusk, leaving about forty men behind to guard camp. They found Ampudia waiting for them. The Battle of Mier began at nightfall and lasted nearly eighteen hours. The fighting ran through narrow streets and stone houses, room to room, roof to roof.

The Texans were among the finest marksmen in the Western world. By dawn, according to Mexican reports, Ampudia had lost roughly six hundred and fifty dead and two hundred wounded. The Texans had lost about ten men. But they had run out of powder, lead, and water.

Ampudia sent a flag of truce and offered terms: surrender and be treated as prisoners of war. Some men, including Wallace, voted to break out at dark. Most voted to accept the terms. They laid down their guns.

Ampudia quietly changed the terms. They were no longer prisoners of war. They were bandits, criminals, and rebels. Two hundred and forty-three of them were taken and marched south toward Mexico City, over seven hundred miles of mountain and desert, chained in groups of ten.

In every town, crowds came out to see them. Some threw stones. Others threw bread. In Monterrey, a Mexican woman saw the state of Wallace’s bare feet and pressed a pair of old sandals into his hands.

By February 1843, the prisoners reached Hacienda Salado in the state of Tamaulipas, a sprawling stone estate with a walled courtyard, an old church, and a well. Their guards, commanded by a Mexican general named Arreaga, numbered about three hundred men, nearly twice the number of Texans. In the early morning of February 11, the escape plan the prisoners had been shaping for weeks came together. Their leader was a Scottish captain named Ewen Cameron, a thirty-one-year-old Highlander with a reputation as a fighter.

On the signal, the Texans rose at once, rushed the guards, and tore the guns from their hands. The struggle in the courtyard was brief and brutal. Five Texans died and several were wounded, but the guards were overwhelmed. One hundred eighty-one Texans broke out, many barefoot and ragged, mounted on whatever horses they could catch.

Wallace rode out on a bad-tempered mule with a single canteen. What followed over the next seven days turned the escape into a catastrophe. It was February in the mountains of northern Mexico, dry limestone hills with no rivers and few springs, and the Texans did not know where the water was. Within two days, most had emptied their canteens.

Within three, they were splitting into small groups, hoping the next hill would reveal a stream or a village. There were none. Men began to die, not from Mexican bullets but from thirst and exposure. Some cut open cactus and squeezed the pulp into their mouths.

Others sucked pebbles to ease their thirst. One survivor later wrote that he saw a man drink the blood of a horse that had been shot. Mexican cavalry under General Francisco Mejía had ridden out the morning after the escape. They did not need to chase.

They only had to wait for the desert to do the work. One by one, the ragged bands stumbled out of the hills and surrendered. Only three of the 181 made it back to Texas on foot. The other 176 were rounded up and returned to Hacienda Salado in chains.

Wallace was among them. He later said he spent six days without food before he was captured and taken to a village, where an old Mexican woman gave him a bowl of thin soup, a tortilla, and washed his feet with warm water. He said it was the best meal of his life. On March 25, 1843, word reached Santa Anna in Mexico City.

He wrote an order. Every man who had escaped from Hacienda Salado was to be executed. The order was carried back to Salado, where the governor of Coahuila, Francisco Mejía, read it and refused to carry it out. He would not shoot 176 men in cold blood.

If Santa Anna wanted it done, he could send someone else. The refusal gave the American minister in Mexico City, Waddy Thompson, and the British minister, Percy Doyle, time to protest. They pressed Santa Anna hard. They argued that the execution of 176 unarmed prisoners would be repellent to the courts of Europe.

Santa Anna held out for a while. Then he reached for an old Roman punishment known as decimation, from the Latin word for ten, in which one man in ten is put to death. A Mexican colonel named Domingo Huerta was given the task. He arrived at Hacienda Salado on the evening of March 24, 1843, with the order in his saddlebag and a plan already prepared: beans.

That night, one of Huerta’s men took a clay jar and filled it with 176 beans, 159 white and 17 black. He stirred them by hand and covered the mouth of the jar with cloth. The next morning, March 25, 1843, the Texans were brought into the courtyard. They had been told what was coming.

They had been given the night to think about it. Officers were called first, then the men in alphabetical order. Each man had to step forward, close his eyes, put his hand in the jar, and draw one bean. A white bean meant life.

A black bean meant death by firing squad at dusk. Some men prayed. Some cracked jokes. Some stared at the ground.

Each man in line was doing the arithmetic in his head: seventeen out of 176, roughly one in ten. Ninety percent odds of drawing white. Ten percent odds of being dead within eight hours. The first officer drew a white bean.

His shoulders sagged. The second drew white. The third drew black. He looked at the black bean in his palm and said, quietly, that the Mexicans had killed his brother at Goliad, so they might as well kill him too.

His name was Captain William P. Eastland. He was thirty-seven years old. A county in west Texas would later bear his name.

The drawing continued, name by name, men stepping forward, reaching in, pulling out their fate. Some who drew white turned and vomited from the released tension. Some who drew black showed no reaction at all. Wallace was near the front at some point during the drawing.

Accounts differ on exactly where. But every account agrees on what he noticed. He had been watching the beans as they came out of the jar, watching the black ones pause in the palms of the men who drew them. What he saw was that the black beans seemed slightly larger than the white ones.

Not by much, perhaps the width of a thumbnail, but enough. The mixing had been careless. The beans were not all the same size. The black beans were of a different variety, marginally bigger.

When his name was called, Wallace stepped forward. He put his hand in the jar. He did not close his eyes. He did not grab quickly.

He moved his fingers slowly among the beans, unhurried, looking for the smallest one he could find. He gathered several in his palm, rolled them under his fingertips, picked the smallest, and drew his hand out. The bean was white. He returned to the line without a word.

He watched the rest of the men draw. He watched some of them, who did not know the trick, close their fingers around the first bean they touched. He watched them draw black. When the drawing ended, seventeen men had drawn black.

Their names are preserved in the historical record: James Decatur Cocke, William Mosby Eastland, Patrick Mahan, James M. Ogden, James N. Torrey, Martin Carroll Wing, John L. Cash, Robert Holmes Dunham, Edward E.

East, Robert Harris, Thomas L. Jones, Christopher Roberts, William N. Rowan, James L. Shepherd, J.

N. M. Thompson, James Turnbull, and Henry Walling. They were taken to a separate courtyard, unshackled, given paper and ink, and told they had a few hours to write letters home.

Every one of them wrote. Those letters survive in the Texas archives today. At dusk, the seventeen were bound to a wall. A firing squad lined up.

When the volley sounded and the smoke cleared, one of the seventeen was still breathing. His name was James Shepherd. A bullet had ricocheted off a rib, and he had fallen with the first volley and lain completely still while the others were finished off. The guards thought he was dead.

That night he crawled out of the yard on his hands and knees and hid in a ditch. He walked for two days. On the third day, a Mexican patrol caught him, returned him to Hacienda Salado, and shot him again. This time it worked.

Eighteen men died, although history counts only seventeen. There was one more death. Captain Ewen Cameron, the Scottish Highlander who had led the escape, drew a white bean. Under the terms of the drawing, he was supposed to live.

But Santa Anna sent a separate order. Cameron was to be executed regardless. He was the leader of the escape, the man Santa Anna wanted. On April 26, 1843, they took Cameron to a place on the road called Huehuetoca, near the fortress of Perote.

He refused the confession offered by the priests who came to him, saying he had already made his peace with God. Standing before the firing squad, he refused to be blindfolded. He opened his shirt at the collar to expose his chest, and called out the order to the Mexican soldiers himself. Fuego.

Fire. They fired. The survivors, the men who drew white beans, were returned to their chains and marched south to the fortress of Perote, officially called San Carlos, a stone stronghold of the eighteenth century built on the slope of an old volcano, with walls thirty feet thick and cells carved directly into the rock. The floor was wet all year.

The air stank of mold and old fires. Big Foot Wallace and the other survivors were imprisoned there through the summer of 1843, joined by the dozen or so Texans already held from the Santa Fe expedition and the Dawson fight. About 150 Texans were in Perote that summer. They spent thirteen months there.

By day they were forced to repair roads outside Mexico City in chain gangs, moving rocks under the tropical sun. Wallace lost about fifty pounds. By night they were locked into the wet cold cells, where men died of sickness and despair. A few escaped.

Most stayed. Wallace kept a scrap of paper hidden in his shirt and wrote letters whenever he could. In one, published later in New Orleans newspapers, he wrote to his father in Virginia. He told him about the meager food and the bitter weather.

He told him about his comrades and called them the bravest men he had ever seen. He ended with a single sentence that outlived him: my bad treatment while in Mexico compels me to return, for I am determined to fight the Mexicans as long as I live in Texas. Diplomatic pressure mounted through 1843 and into 1844. Santa Anna began releasing prisoners in stages.

On August 25, 1844, Wallace and four other survivors of the bean drawing walked out of the main gate of Perote as free men. He was barefoot, hatless, and shirtless. He had traded what little he had for food. The five men walked east toward Veracruz, down the volcanic plateau through cloud forest and heat, about 125 miles to the Gulf of Mexico.

Their feet bled on the volcanic rocks. They begged food from villagers, and in most cases, they got it. Wallace remembered for the rest of his life that the poorest people they met were the most generous. An American merchant paid their passage on a ship.

That autumn, Wallace stood on the deck of a schooner in New Orleans, looking at the American flag above the customs house, and sat down on a coil of rope, covered his face with his hands, and did not move for a long time. He was back in Texas by the end of 1844. He was twenty-seven years old. He was thin, lame, and scarred by the shackles.

He rested for a few weeks in San Antonio, then did exactly what he had promised his father in that letter from Perote. He saddled a horse and went looking for the Texas Rangers. They were being reorganized that spring under a law passed by the Texas legislature. A young captain named John Coffee Hays, known to the Texans as Jack and to the Comanches as Devil Jack, was authorized to form a company of about seventy-five mounted volunteers for the region between the Nueces and the Rio Grande.

Hays was the best fighting officer in the republic. He was twenty-seven, the same age as Wallace, and he took one look at the tall quiet man who rode into his camp and accepted him into the company. For the next two years Wallace rode with Hays’s Rangers, chasing Comanche raiders across the high plains and hunting Mexican bandits along the Nueces strip. In the spring of 1846, the United States formally annexed Texas and declared war on Mexico.

The Mexican-American War lasted from 1846 to 1848, and Big Foot Wallace was in it from nearly the first month to nearly the end. He served as a first lieutenant under Hays and fought at the Battle of Monterrey in September 1846, through the same narrow streets where he had once been marched in chains. By his own admission, he was not always a restrained soldier during that war. He had a personal account to settle.

Some accounts of what he and the other survivors of the black bean incident did during the invasion of Mexico are hard to read. Wallace himself said only, in old age, that he squared the account and did not want to talk about it anymore. When the war ended in 1848, Wallace was thirty-one. Most men his age had gone home to find wives and farms.

He did not. In 1850, he took a job no other man in Texas wanted: driving the mail wagon between San Antonio and El Paso, six hundred miles each way through some of the roughest country in North America. Water holes fifty miles apart. Comanche and Apache raiding parties roaming the road.

In one famous run, Comanches killed his mules and forced him to flee into the brush. He walked to El Paso. According to the story he told all his life, when he finally reached the first Mexican house on the edge of town, he sat at their table and ate twenty-seven eggs, one after another, before he could even say why he had come. Historians have argued about the exact number ever since.

Everyone agrees the general shape of the story is true. In the 1850s, the Rangers were reorganized again, and Wallace commanded his own company for a time, chasing thieves and raiders along the border. By then he had become a living legend in settled Texas. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Wallace was past forty.

He did not go east to fight. He stayed on the Texas frontier, protecting settlements from Comanche raids that grew worse after federal troops withdrew. By the 1870s, he moved to Frio County in the brush country south of San Antonio. He built a small log cabin, tended a little garden, and got a dog.

He stopped hunting big game, though he still went out with his rifle for deer now and then. Young men came from town to sit on his porch and listen to him talk. He was, by everyone’s account, a gifted storyteller. His stories were recorded in 1870 by a Texas writer named John Crittenden Duval, who collected them into a book called Adventures of Big-Foot Wallace, the Texas Ranger and Hunter.

The book was a bestseller in its time. For the last thirty years of his life, he was one of the most famous men in Texas. It never seemed to matter much to him. He never married.

He said, with his usual dry humor, that he was so used to solitude no woman could fix him now. The town where he lived out his last years is called Big Foot, Texas, and it still exists there today, with a small museum that holds his belongings. He died on January 7, 1899, three months before his eighty-second birthday. He had been sick for a few days with what his neighbors called a cold of old age.

He drifted off to sleep. A very small funeral was held at his cabin, attended by a few neighbors and a Baptist preacher who had known him for years. They buried him in the local cemetery. The Texas legislature later voted to move his remains to the Texas State Cemetery in Austin, on a hill overlooking the capital.

His bones lie there today beside Stephen F. Austin and the men of San Jacinto. The seventeen men who drew black beans at Hacienda Salado did not stay in Mexico forever. In 1848, with American forces occupying northern Mexico, one of the survivors who had drawn white, a man named John Dusenberry, went to the farm where his comrades had been executed.

He exhumed their bones, wrapped them in cloth, loaded them onto a wagon, and hauled them across the Rio Grande to a hillside overlooking the town of La Grange in Fayette County. There they were laid in a common grave called Monument Hill. The bones of the thirty-six men from the Dawson massacre rest beside them, in the same cemetery. Historians have disagreed for more than 180 years about one thing.

Did Big Foot Wallace really cheat the bean drawing? Did he actually feel the beans, choose the smallest one, and draw a white bean on purpose? Or did he draw white like the other 142 men that day and invent the trick later, telling the story so many times on his porch in Frio County that it grew with each retelling? The honest answer is that we cannot know for certain.

Wallace told the story consistently all his life. Other survivors of the drawing, interviewed decades later, said they heard him tell it at the time. Some said the beans were noticeably different in size. Others said they were not.

The actual beans are long gone. The clay jar is gone. The wall where the seventeen were shot has crumbled. What is known is that on March 25, 1843, at Hacienda Salado, 176 men put their hands in a jar while Mexican soldiers stood by with loaded guns.

Seventeen of them drew death. One hundred fifty-nine of them drew life. One of the ones who drew life was a twenty-five-year-old man from Lexington, Virginia, who had come to Texas to avenge his brother, and who would be buried sixty-two years later in the national cemetery of the country he helped build.