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Wednesday, March 12, 1997

Researcher discovers new twists in saga of 'Yellow Rose of Texas'

By BOB TUTT Houston Chronicle

HOUSTON - Sam Houston was not only Texas' greatest hero but was also the alleged source for what is arguably the juiciest story in its history - the saga of "The Yellow Rose of Texas."

Historical researcher James Lutzweiler made this revelation in a paper presented Saturday at the annual meeting of the Texas State Historical Association in Austin.

According to this salacious tale, Texan forces won the decisive Battle of San Jacinto and ultimately achieved Texas' independence from Mexico largely because a beautiful mulatto, Emily D. West, was distracting Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, the Mexican commander.

It strongly suggests that when the Texan forces launched their attack on the afternoon of April 21, 1836, Santa Anna, instead of tending to his military responsibilities, was in his tent enjoying West's sexual favors.

Enhancing this story is a much challenged contention that West provided the inspiration for the song "The Yellow Rose of Texas."

Delving into historical archives, Lutzweiler discovered that Houston was named as the source for this story by William Bollaert, a British traveler who visited the then-Republic of Texas in 1842-44.

This finding is significant because the first published report of Santa Anna's alleged distraction appeared in a memoir of Bollaert's Texas visit published in 1956.

Lutzweiler says Bollaert appeared to have received the story from Houston on a confidential basis and seemed to have tried to conceal that Houston was his source.

Written in the margin of a page in Bollaert's narrative, next to his transcription of what he said Houston told him about Santa Anna's alleged sexual escapade, was the word "private" underlined three times.

The University of Oklahoma Press published an edited version of Bollaert's narrative under the title William Bollaert's Texas. Its editors, W. Eugene Hollon and Ruth L. Butler, chose to reduce his reference to the alleged Emily West caper to a footnote.

But what a footnote: "The Battle of San Jacinto was probably lost to the Mexicans, owing to the influence of a Mulatta girl (Emily) belonging to Col. Morgan who was closeted in the tent with G'l Santana, at the time the cry was made, 'The enemy! they come! they come!' & detained Santana so long that order could not be restor'd again."

Santana, of course, was Santa Anna, and Col. Morgan was James Morgan, a land speculator who had established the New Washington settlement near where La Porte is now located.

Emily on occasion has been misidentified as Emily Morgan. That's incorrect because she wasn't Morgan's slave. Rather, she was a free individual who had contracted with Morgan to come to Texas from New York to work for him for one year as an indentured servant.

Lutzweiler, 50, a Philadelphia native, is a former real estate developer and broker who manufactures microfilm products for research libraries. He also is a graduate student at North Carolina State University and has written a master's thesis on the alleged involvement of Santa Anna and Emily.

He says he had a hunch "there had to be some additional documentation" of this Emily West matter in Bollaert's papers. These have been archived at the Newberry Library in Chicago since 1911.

In those archives Lutzweiler made astounding discoveries about Bollaert's account of the alleged incident in Santa Anna's tent.

First, he found that Bollaert had cut it out of some other document and pasted it in the narrative that came to be edited and published more than a century later.

Then, in a separate, never published narrative he found the remainder of the page from which the account of the incident had been snipped.

Here, just above the cut, Bollaert had noted the source of his information about Emily, stating: "The following is a copy of an unpublished letter written by General Houston to a friend after this extraordinary battle."

Lutzweiler also discovered that the editors had omitted a new explanation Bollaert gave about his source for the Emily story. Without mentioning Houston, he wrote that it came from "an officer who was engaged in it (the Battle of San Jacinto), in his own words."

The scholar chiefly responsible for crafting the footnote, W. Eugene Hollon, now 83, is a retired history professor living at Gilmer in Northeast Texas.

He says almost 50 years later that he doesn't recall the basis for his decision to put the Emily incident in a footnote. Neither does he recall seeing the reference to Sam Houston that Lutzweiler found in Bollaert's papers.

Time hasn't diminished the mystery surrounding Emily West. No known accounts reveal what she actually looked like, whether she really was a mulatto, how old she was, what her personality was like, what work she did in Texas or what became of her after she left Texas.

In addition to Bollaert's reference to her, Lutzweiler notes, the only documents mentioning her were her indentured servant contract with Morgan, and a letter by Isaac N. Moreland, an officer in Houston's army and later chief justice of Harris County. Moreland said he met her in April 1836 and she told him she had lost the papers attesting to her free status on the San Jacinto battlefield. He requested a Texas passport for her, which she apparently used to return to New York in 1837.

Many Texas history scholars have argued that too little evidence exists for the purported liaison.

Santa Anna didn't admit to any hanky panky. In his autobiography, he wrote, that at the time of the battle, "I lay sleeping in the shade of an oak tree, hoping for cooler weather. The filibusters surprised my camp with admirable skill, and I opened my eyes to find myself surrounded by their rifles."

In reality, Santa Anna escaped from his camp on a horse as Texans routed his troops, but he was captured the next day.

After the bombshell footnote in the Bollaert memoir appeared, some inventive writers began making the story better. Together they tell a tale many Texans clearly relish and want to believe. Here are some examples Lutzweiler cites:

Frank X. Tolbert, a Dallas Morning News columnist and author, "first explicitly identified the activities in Santa Anna's tent as sexual intercourse or the associated acts thereof."

He also made Emily "a very comely, 'Latin-looking' woman of about 20.' "

Henderson Shuffler, a great Texas raconteur, imagined that Emily's "deliberately provocative amble down the street (in New Washington) on a hot afternoon was probably the most exciting thing in town."

More recently, James Michener got into the act. Striving to achieve an "honest blend of fiction and historical fact" in his 1986 novel Texas, he wrote that Emily looked forward to "the prospect of spending another siesta with the general." He has her arriving in his tent precisely at "three-fifteen" and by "three-fifty" performing services for which she had been hired.

Martha Ann Turner, an English professor at Sam Houston State University, concocted a story that Emily, after being seized by the Mexicans at New Washington, spied on the Mexican army for the Texans.

Turner also joined others in championing the notion that Emily was the scrumptious mulatto celebrated in the 19th-century song "The Yellow Rose of Texas."

That is disputed by Texas folklorist Francis E. Abernethy, who participated with Lutzweiler on Saturday in the Texas history conference.

"Even in the realm of Texas legends, one has to draw a line somewhere," says Abernethy, an English professor at Stephen F. Austin State University and executive secretary and editor for the Texas Folklore Society.

"There is absolutely no way anybody can tie this art song to Emily West," he advises. Although its tune possibly came from some folk tune, "it's not a folk song."

Abernethy says it was written as a minstrel song by someone never identified except by the initials J.K. and copyrighted in 1858 for Charles H. Brown of Jackson, Tenn., a bookman and publisher.

For Santa Anna, "Emily may well have been the Yellow Rose of Texas," he says, but it is farfetched to believe she "was the one who showed up every time Mitch Miller struck up the band."

Lutzweiler's revelation about Sam Houston raises questions such as: To whom was the Houston letter Bollaert said he saw addressed? Why would Houston share the letter with Bollaert? How and when could Houston have learned the story?

Despite such questions, Lutzweiler says he respects Bollaert's scholarship. "I personally believe the story about Emily and Santa Anna is true," he says, "but I would not argue with other scholars it is true on the basis of one account."

Rather than saying it "is true or not true," he says, "I describe it as possible, plausible and not improbable."

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