TEXAS SUPREME COURT HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Captain Lewis reported later that there were only ten armed men in the city of Austin at that time, manyhaving been called out the day before by a false alarm of Indian attack. 56 The remaining able-bodied men of Austinwere not dressed, mounted, or armed well enough to give immediate chase, and instead quickly formed an ad hocgroup to organize a course of action. Leaving the women and children in Bullock’s Hotel, guarded by only twomen, Lewis took charge. 57 He sent messengers to other outlying homes in order to gather a large enough group tohave a realistic chance of overpowering Houston’s delegation. Angelina Eberly sent her son, Alexander, and oneslave. Meanwhile, a smaller swift-mounted group under the command of John Noland, a young attorney, gavechase; they overtook the archive snatchers twenty miles away at tiny Fort Kenney, since the oxcarts of Houston’smen halted at Brushy Creek by nightfall. 58Noland’s party warned Captains Smith and Chandler that there were many more Austin area men inreserve, and agreed to negotiate the fate of the archives the following morning. All the while, Captain Lewisand a party of about fifty men from the area followed the trail with a small cannon, many of them miserablyunder-dressed or even barefoot in the bitterly cold damp weather. Slipping quietly into the camp of the archiveinterceptors early the following morning, the posse from Austin was able to conduct negotiations with the decidedadvantage of their loaded cannon, which they threatened to shoot first at the hapless Land Office clerks. Houstonhad commanded that there be no bloodshed, so his men yielded. Captain Lewis’s party took possession of therecords with minimal conflict, returning them immediately to Austin.The Austinites no longer trusted the increasingly unpopular Land Commissioner, “Peg Leg” Ward, tokeep the archive in Austin. They entrusted the records to Mrs. Eberly’s care, storing them upstairs in her dwellinghouse. 59 Afterwards came a joyous celebration of the New Year and the homecoming in which even Houston’sdelegation partook. 60Due to the staunch opposition in Austin, later attempts to regain the archives were minimal. As A.E.Skinner declared, “[o]n January 20, 1843, W.W. Holman writing from San Augustine to Isaac Van Zandt, the Texascharge d’affaires in Washington, D.C., made this revealing comment about the situation in Texas: ‘Congress isyet in session. I know not what they have done, only they have passed a law to sell all the Cherokee lands againand to remove the archives from Austin, but Mrs. Eberly wont let them go [sic]. She has them in a house gardedby a feebl piece [sic]. I don’t know how they will get them from her unless they can compromise with her…’” 61AftermathFortunately for the Republic, Mexican forces never reached Austin; nor did any Native American tribesmount an overwhelming attack upon the vulnerable little town on the frontier.Angelina continued to run her inn in Austin, but lost her son Alexander in a gunfight that indirectlyresulted from the Archive War. Captain Mark Lewis, the leader of the Austin archives-recovery faction, quarreledwith two men. According to Eberly, when one of the men fired at Lewis from the street, his bullet missed and hit56Kerr, “Embattled.”57King, Lady Cannoneer, 123, citing Hope Yager, “The Archive War in Texas” (Master’s thesis, Univ. of Tex. at Austin, 1939).58Winfrey, “Archive War,” Sw. Hist. Quart. 62, no. 4 (1959), 171, 180-81, citing Nathan Mitchell and Walter Winn, Jan. 25, 1843,MS., in “Early Letters Sent, 1840-1845” (Austin: G.L.O.), III, 313-315.59Alexander W. Terrell, “The City of Austin of 1839-1865,” Quart. of Tex. St. Hist. Ass’n. XIV, Oct. 1910, 125.60Kerr, Seat of Empire, 187.61Skinner, “Mrs. Eberly,” 5 (original spelling preserved). A “feeble piece” was a catch-phrase which was used to refer to variouslypoorly constructed items, from theatrical plays to guns.48