HARD LUCK, FOOLISHNESS A CURSE ON CITY AND COUNTY

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, they say, 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 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 fort's 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 bounced harmlessly off the earthen walls of the fort. Firing continued from the Mexican side sporadically, and 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 (filibusters) who raided northern Mexico of  July 1842. This was four years before Zachary Taylor was ordered to the mouth of the Rio Grande by President James Polk.

After a battle December 26, 1842 that left 650 Mexican townspeople dead and 200 wounded, they 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 the luck of the draw, blindfolding them and have them draw 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.

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 at least 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.

Cameron County is now named in his honor and we, as its residents, are left to wonder why.

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.