Colonel Antonio Canales, whose pleas for reinforcements would finally be answered by General Pedro Ampudia, commander of the Matamoros garrison. At no time was Somervell's army in any danger of meeting the combined forces of the Army of the North. Haynes, Soldiers of Misfortune, 67.

     9. A veteran of the Battle of New Orleans and the Black Hawk War, Samuel Bogart was a resident of Washington County at the time of the Somervell Expedition. Bogart and his men had almost quit the campaign when Somervell, who had initially granted them the privilege of serving as a spy company, changed his mind and ordered the unit to march with the army. Webb, Handbook of Texas 2:181; Haynes, Soldiers of Misfortune, 49-50.

     10. Antonio Canales was a nationalist who resented Anglo-American territorial aggrandizement at the expense of Mexico, and yet whose commitment to republican federalist principles at times led him to seek American aid against the centralist government. Trained as a lawyer, Canales had been a leader of the short-lived Republic of the Rio Grande, a confederation of northern Mexican states that declared its independence from Mexico City in January 1840. Later that year he traveled to Texas to obtain support for his cause, but in November, after a series of setbacks, Canales signed a peace treaty with the centralist regime. Thereafter, he served as a colonel of militia forces, defending the towns on both sides of the lower Rio Grande. In July 1842 he led an attack on Texas forces that had gathered at Lipantitlan, on the Nueces River. With the outbreak of the Mexican War four years later, Canales sought once again to enlist American support for a federalist republic in northern Mexico. When U.S. military leaders expressed little interest in the plan, he continued to serve loyally in the Mexican army until the end of the war. Webb, Handbook of Texas 1:288, 2:460.

     11. Ben McCulloch was a member of John C. Hays' ranger company on the Somervell Expedition. A native of Tennessee, he had journeyed to Texas in 1836 and commanded one of the cannons known as the "Twin Sisters" in the Battle of San Jacinto. McCulloch became a prominent leader of the Texas Rangers in the Mexican War, performing reconnaissance operations for Zachary Taylor's army. As a Confederate brigadier general in the Civil War, he was killed in the Battle of Elk Horn in 1862. Webb, Handbook of Texas 2:106.

     12. In all, 189 men marched back to the Texas frontier, most of them drafted militiamen from the eastern counties. Nance, Attack and Counter-Attack, 565.

     13. On the march home, many disgruntled soldiers refused to be led by Somervell, attaching themselves to other commanders. For all intents and purposes, the Southwestern Army of Operations disintegrated. One hapless soldier recalled: "The provisions of many gave out, and to add to our perplexity, no one knew where we were or to what point we were moving, - all were lost, and our march was somewhat like that of the Children of Israel through the wilderness of old." Sterling Brown Hendricks, "The Somervell Expedition," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 23:138

     14. Somervell's official report to the Houston administration of his ill-fated campaign was published in the Telegraph and Texas Register on February 22, 1843.

     15. The question of whether the Houston administration formally recalled Somervell has been the subject of considerable debate. An express rider from the capital, then located at Washington-on-the-Brazos, had reached the army on the banks of the Nueces two weeks earlier, and quite a few members of the expedition believed their commander had received new orders to return to the Texas frontier. Many years later, George Lord stated that he had overheard a conversation between Somervell and Colonel James Cook in which the Texas general revealed his instructions to call off the the expedition. To avoid a mutiny, Cook, according to Lord, instead advised his commanding officer "to fling every impediment in its way and let it break itself up." No evidence exists that Houston called off the campaign, and it is unlikely that he would have done so, given the public outcry against his administration that such a decision would have caused. Privately, however, he had been trying to impress upon Somervell for quite some time the inadvisability