Bailey Hardeman

At eighteen Hardeman served as an artillery officer under Andrew Jackson in Louisiana in the War of 1812. On the Missouri frontier he met William Becknell and joined the early Santa Fe trade, going with the Marmaduke expedition to New Mexico in 1824-1825; he and Becknell trapped beaver north and west of Santa Cruz and Taos and narrowly escaped starvation that winter. His profits let him finance William Scott's trading trip in 1825 and later endow Hardeman Academy at Triune, Tennessee. In 1835 he helped haul an eighteen-pound cannon from Dimmitt's Landing to San Antonio.

What the plaque says

Bailey Hardeman A signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence Secretary of the Treasury of the Republic Born in Tennessee, 1795 Died on Caney Creek, Matagorda County October 12, 1836 Erected by the State of Texas 1936

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas State Cemetery — steps away
  A hill east of the Capitol that began with one general's grave in 1851 and now holds Stephen F. Austin, governors, Barbara Jordan and more than 2,000 Confederate veterans and widows.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 0.3 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.
• George Washington Carver Museum — 0.4 mi
  East Austin's museum of Black history and culture, grown from a segregated branch library moved across town in 1933, with a permanent exhibit on Juneteenth at its core.
• Texas State Capitol — 1.0 mi
  Austin's fourth statehouse, a Renaissance Revival capitol of 1888 that stands 311 feet to its Goddess of Liberty and was restored after the 1983 fire.

More markers nearby

• Thomas Jones Hardeman — steps away
• General Moseley Baker — steps away
• William P. Hardeman — steps away
• Daniel Shipman — steps away