Memoirs of Mary A. Maverick: A Journal of Early Texas

This new edition of the Memoirs of Mary A. Maverick, until now unchanged since the first in 1921, is carefully reedited, has new illustrations and, for the first time, an index and extensive annotations to put the leading characters and subjects in perspective for present-day readers. As the young wife of Samuel A. Maverick, a Yale-educated landholder whose name has entered the English language, Mary Adams Maverick came to Texas less than two years after the fall of the Alamo. In her diary she recorded her eyewitness views of the tumultuous decades that followed. She also described the joys and heartbreaks of raising a growing family in the uncertain shadow of Indian raids, military invasions and deadly diseases. A youthful sense of wonder comes through in her wide-ranging accounts of fleeing an invading Mexican army, of making do with living quarters in a corncrib, of meeting generals and presidents—even a German nobleman, Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels, who serenaded her group from a boat near her home on the Texas coast. Sprinkled throughout are other memorable vignettes--of a grand procession to San Antonio's church of San Fernando behind "twelve young girls dressed in spotless white" and a platform-borne statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe; of a dance in which the president of the Republic of Texas, Mirabeau B. Lamar, has trouble getting his arm around the waist of the rotund wife of San Antonio's mayor, Juan Seguin; of the deathbed vigils for two beloved daughters. Indeed, as historian Paula Mitchell Marks writes in the foreword, these memoirs form “a valuable record of Texas history and a personal story of endurance and grace.”