Major William Cooke

William Gordon Cooke came to Texas with the New Orleans Greys in 1835. At San Jacinto he served on Sam Houston's staff as a major and commanded the guard over the prisoners when Santa Anna was taken and kept angry Texans from killing him. In 1840, as colonel of the First Regiment of Infantry, he laid out the Military Road to the Red River, establishing Fort Johnson, Fort Preston and Cedar Springs Post at the future site of Dallas. As a commissioner of the 1841 Santa Fe expedition he was deceived into surrender and imprisoned in Mexico until 1842.

What the plaque says

Major William Cooke Born in Virginia, March 28, 1808 - Died in Guadalupe County, Texas December 21, 1847 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

• Richard Ellis — steps away
• Robert Rankin — steps away
• William C. Crane — steps away
• Judge Edwin Waller — steps away