The war between Texas and Mexico never formally ended. The two Treaties of Velasco of May 14, 1836 promised an end to hostilities, but both governments broke them, and Mexico declared Santa Anna's acts as a prisoner void. Mexico did not recognize Texas independence, and the boundary stayed unsettled until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. When Santa Anna returned to the presidency in 1841, he ordered the army to harass the Texas frontier, to discourage immigration and investment. The raids that followed ended in a tomb outside La Grange.
Two captures of San Antonio
Gen. Rafael Vásquez took San Antonio on March 5, 1842 and left two days later. On September 11, Gen. Adrián Woll came with 1,400 men by an old smuggling trail and took it again, with a judge, two members of Congress and several lawyers from district court. Nicholas Dawson left La Grange on September 16 with about fifteen men. Soon the company numbered fifty-three, from Fayette, Gonzales and DeWitt counties. On September 18, while Mathew Caldwell's men fought Woll on Salado Creek, about 500 Mexican cavalry and two field guns caught Dawson's company in a mesquite thicket a mile and a half away. Thirty-six Texans died. Fifteen were marched to Perote Prison, and nine came home. Woll withdrew two days later with prisoners and as many as 200 Tejanos who feared reprisals if they stayed. Mexico promoted him.
Black beans at the other Salado
Houston finally sanctioned a reprisal. Alexander Somervell's army took Laredo on December 8, 1842, and held Guerrero. On December 19 he ordered his men home. Only 189 obeyed. About 308 chose William Fisher to lead them on, some wanting revenge, many adventure. Houston later said they had acted without authority. They surrendered after the battle of Mier, and on February 11, 1843 broke out at Salado, Tamaulipas. Within about a week 176 were recaptured. Santa Anna ordered the escapees shot, and the order was cut to every tenth man. Each man drew a bean from a jar holding 176, seventeen of them black. They were shot at dusk on March 25, 1843: James Decatur Cocke, William Mosby Eastland, Patrick Mahan, James M. Ogden, James N. Torrey, Martin Carroll Wing, John L. Cash, Robert Holmes Dunham, Edward E. Este, Robert Harris, Thomas L. Jones, Christopher Roberts, William N. Rowan, James L. Shepherd, J. N. M. Thompson, James Turnbull and Henry Walling. Shepherd feigned death, slipped away in the night, and was recaptured and shot.
The bluff above the Colorado
Both groups were reburied on September 18, 1848, six years to the day after the Dawson fight, with survivors and families attending. A German immigrant stonemason, Heinrich Kreische, built the crypt. In January 1849 he bought the 172 acres around it. When the fund for a monument never materialized, the land came back to him, and he kept the tomb without pay. He later became a brewer, third largest in Texas by the late 1870s, and died in 1882. In 1933 the Daughters of the Republic of Texas dedicated a new vault there.
The tomb and the brewery ruins stand at Monument Hill and Kreische Brewery State Historic Sites, on the bluff south of La Grange.