LOCAL NAMESAKES FOR CITY, COUNTY, HARD-LUCK FELLAS

By Juan Montoya
If ever there was a curse cast upon future generations it was by the people who named this city Brownsville and the county Cameron.
Why do we say that?
Local historians love to regale us with tales of the 500 brave defenders of Fort Texas, an earthen structure with walls 15 feet wide shaped into a six-sided star built near the present-day golf course next to Texas Southmost College. The finished walls stood nine to 10 feet tall.
Zachary Taylor had ordered the fort built right across the river from Matamoros in May 1846.
Taylor left Major Jacob Brown in charge of the fort on his way to fortify Point Isabel he (as did then-Lt. Ulysses S. Grant) heard the cannonade as Mexican forces began a siege on May 3 bombarding the fort with their artillery.
The Mexican cannon ball fire was ineffective after the defenders knocked out the guns shooting from Matamoros.
Although the confrontation at Fort Texas lasted six days, only two U.S. soldiers died in the bombardment, but that toll included the fort commander Brown.
The late Bruce Aiken used to say that the Mexican Army stopped their cannon fire when they saw that their cannon balls rolled and bounced off the earthen walls of the Fort. Firing continued from the Mexican side erratically.
Aiken said that during one of the lulls three days into the siege, Brown walked out of the fort and was standing by a wall when one of the cannon balls rolled by him, bounced off a wall, and and struck him in the leg, shattering it. (The sketch above that appeared in Harper's Magazine showing an exploding shell killing Brown is fanciful, since the Mexican cannon balls did not explode)
Over the next three days, gangrene set in and he died on May 9.
Why on earth did Brown venture outside the fort on that fateful day and get himself killed? Boredom? Ignorance? Bravado?
Whatever it was, it got his fool ass killed and both the fort and then the city were named after him.
The same goes for Ewen Cameron, which the plaque above has him dying "with his face to the foe."
Actually, hard-luck Ewen was one of a gang of plunderers who raided northern Mexico on July 1842. This was four years before Zachary Taylor was ordered to the mouth of the Rio Grande by President James Polk.
The men were captured in Mier, Tamaulipas by the Mexican army and sent to Mexico City.
Not wanting to merely execute all the raiders, they were given the chance to escape death by being blindfolded and reaching into a jar of beans. If they drew a white bean, they would be spared, but if they drew a black bean, they would be executed. At Perote Prison, a jar containing 159 white beans and 17 black beans was presented to the Texan prisoners. Each man drew a bean from the jar. The 17 Texan prisoners who drew black beans were executed by Mexican firing squad.
Actually, for the Mexicans to give the prisoners such good odds of surviving speaks well of their civility. After all, these people came into their territory to plunder and kill their fellow citizens.
Cameron drew a white bean in the lottery, and he was allowed to live and serve time in a Mexican prison. But no, Cameron thought he could escape his captors and was caught in the act twice, prompting the Mexican commander to order his execution "with his face to the foe," as Texas lore suggests when he refused a blindfold and bared his breast shouting at them to fire, "fuego."
Cameron could have left well enough alone and survived. But noooo! He had to tempt fate and his luck ran out. Why?
Cameron County is now named in his honor.
Other things named after the military men who came here with Zachary Taylor also defy belief. On May 8, 1846, Major Samuel Ringgold was with the 2,400 troops were en route to Fort Texas (Ft. Brown), when they were engaged at the Battle of Palo Alto by Mexican General Mariano Arista and his force of 3,800 men.
Historic accounts indicate that Arista's army was stretched a mile wide, making an American bayonet charge, Taylor's first option, impossible.
Taylor, in an unlikely move, advanced his artillery to attack the enemy. The use of Ringgold's flying artillery tactic won the battle for the Americans. The Mexican artillery, heavy and slow, was futile in the thick steel-wool brush at Palo Alto. Arista ordered cavalry charges to flank the artillery gunners, but the American flying artillery was able to mobilize, relocate, and repel the oncoming dragoons.
During the battle, Ringgold  the "Father of Modern Artillery" that fired grape instead of cannon balls – was mortally wounded by...you guessed it, a cannon ball that mangled both his legs just below the crotch. He survived three days, during which time his legs were amputated and he died days later in Port Isabel, Texas.
Now there's a fort, as street, and before Gladys Porter took it, a park named after him.
Want some more? You know about Fritz Wilhelm Hofmokel, the first director of the Port of Brownsville and the man credited with the success of the Port of Brownsville? He was a German native who had become naturalized and became the director of the port in 1936, a few years before the Nazi invasion of Poland and the onset of WWII. Hofmokel was unjustly suspected of having Nazi sympathies and was stripped of his job as port director until things quieted down and he returned. Under his leadership for 30 years, the port became the leading port in cotton shipments, opened the Intercoastal Waterway and diversified into shrimping and chemicals.
Wouldn't you know it? On the eve of the port's 30th birthday, Hofmokel, a submariner with the German Navy in the first World War... drowned in the surf off South Padre Island.
We live in a cursed region, it appears.
With a city named after someone who did not have enough sense to stay inside a perfectly good fort and a county named after another who had been given a chance to live and still attempted to escape and got himself killed, what hope doe this area have?
The future, indeed, cheats you from afar.