Leaving politics behind him, Sam Houston turned his back on a potential presidential campaign, cut connections with his Native American allies, and made his way to the wild frontier in the sparsely settled Mexican province of Texas. There, his background as a one-time war hero and Governor of Tennessee, led to his selection as "General in Chief" of a rag-tag army of American settlers willing to risk everything to overthrow Mexican rule. Despite a bloody disaster at the Alamo and mass slaughter at Goliad, the Yankee rebels hung together just long enough to confront the Mexican dictator, Santa Ana, who styled himself "The Savior of the Motherland" and "The Napoleon of the West." At San Jacinto, this vainglorious ego-maniac not only managed to lose the battle but found himself captured by Houston who, despite serious wounds in the course of leading his long-suffering troops, won a decisive, seemingly impossible victory. Within a generation, that triumph ended up increasing the land area of the United States by more than a third.

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