Her name was Emily Morgan, and she was the sweetest little
rosebud that Texas ever knew. She was, in fact, the Yellow Rose
of Texas. That song is not, as you may have thought, simply a
celebration of a rather blah ideal of Lone Star womanhood. It is
an homage to the accidental heroine of Texas independence. Our
story begins in April 1836, a panicky time for the nascent
Republic of Texas. The Alamo had fallen, the garrison at Goliad
had been massacred, and the newly elected government was in
flight. Sam Houston, in command of a restive volunteer army
heavily outnumbered by Santa Anna’s seasoned troops, was busily
conducting a combination strategic retreat and basic training
program. There lived at that time, near a settlement called New
Washington, at the mouth of the San Jacinto River, an indentured
servant girl named Emily Morgan. She was, as Martha Anne Turner
writes in her seminal work The Yellow Rose of Texas: Her Saga
and Her Song, a “comely mulatto . . . exceptionally intelligent,
as well as beautiful.”