09/25/2026
The gray horse Sam Houston rode through most of the Battle of San Jacinto was not his. It belonged to a nineteen-year-old private who was out ahead of him somewhere on that prairie with a bullet through his lung.
His name was Alfonso Steele. He was born in Hardin County, Kentucky, on the ninth of April, 1817, and at seventeen he left home and floated down the Mississippi on a flatboat, falling in with a company of volunteers bound for Texas in the fall of 1835. He reached Washington on the Brazos on New Year's Day of 1836 and was still there that spring, helping keep the delegates fed while they gathered to sign the Declaration of Independence. By April he was a private in Captain James Gillespie's company, in Colonel Sidney Sherman's regiment, and his gray horse was under the general. Houston rode it through much of the engagement, until it went down beneath him.
Steele was hit in the opening volleys, shot through the lung. The muster roll of the Republic of Texas lists him as severely wounded. He did not leave the field. Men around him offered to stop and carry him out, and he remembered telling them no, to go on and take them. He lived, which for a lung wound in 1836 was not the way to bet. Two years later he married Mary Ann Powell, and they raised ten children and farmed and ran cattle in what became Limestone County. The land grants he drew for his service came to more than eleven thousand acres.
Then he did the rarest thing a soldier can do. He outlived the whole thing. On the tenth of February, 1909, the Thirty-first Legislature honored him in Austin as one of the last two men living who had been there, and he was invited into the Senate chamber to speak. A life-size portrait of him hangs near that chamber in the Capitol today.
There is a distinction in his story that deserves to be kept straight, because it is the better version. William P. Zuber outlived him by two years, but Zuber had been detailed to guard the baggage across from Harrisburg and was not in the fight. Steele was the last man alive who had actually fought at San Jacinto. He died on the eighth of July, 1911, at a grandson's house near Kosse, aged 94, and he lies in the city cemetery at Mexia. Seventy-five years after that afternoon, he was the only one left who had stood in it.
