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William Alexander Anderson “Bigfoot” Wallace came into the world at an incredible thirteen pounds. He grew to be six foot two inches tall and weighed 240 pounds at the height of his career as a tracker, hunter, Texas Ranger, and rancher. He became a larger-than-life character on the Texas frontier, both for his sheer physical stature and also for his reputation as a willing fighter on behalf of the Republic of Texas. It didn’t hurt that Wallace had a good sense of humor and enjoyed sharing tales of his adventures, embellishing them with each retelling.
Wallace was born in Lexington, Virginia, on April 3, 1817, and led a quiet and uneventful life while working in his father’s apple orchard. When he turned nineteen he left home, bent on entering his first battle. His family claimed descent from renowned Scottish Highlanders William Wallace and Robert Bruce, with whom Wallace shared a fierce resolve and an unflinching desire for combat. He headed for Texas in 1836, determined to join the war for independence from Mexico after learning that his brother and cousin were among the nearly four hundred men killed at the Goliard Massacre. He was set on revenge, but by the time he made his way to Galveston, the war had ceased. However, he remained in Texas for the remainder of his life, enjoying a rough frontier existence along the disputed borders that he fought hard to secure. Among his tales of adventure, he recalled surviving the hardships of a tenuous life as a farmer on the dry and brittle land, enduring venomous snakebites, outrunning a pack of “ravenous” wolves, and escaping Indian captivity before finally entering the frontier wars in an official capacity.
As a member of the volunteer militia, Wallace gained a reputation as a hardscrabble Texan. His friend and biographer, John Duvall, in securing Wallace’s legendary status, wrote that Wallace had played a role in “almost every fight, foray, and scrimmage” that had taken place in Texas (Duvall 1870, vii). Wallace arrived in 1836 and settled in the frontier town of LaGrange. Once established, Wallace tried his hand at farming, but he found little success in the endeavor and abandoned the project. He moved to Austin in 1839 to help build what would become the capital city but left the following year for San Antonio, where he finally found battle and eventually “squared his accounts” with those he held responsible for his brother’s death.
His first formal military engagement came with his participation in the decisive Battle of Plum Creek in 1840, which pushed the Comanche Indians further west and ensured the protection of white settlements along the Guadalupe Valley. In 1842, he joined the Texan Army in a fight against the advance of the Mexican Army led by Gen. Adrian Woll into the Republic. Wallace jumped at the opportunity to retaliate against the Mexicans and joined two ill-fated expeditions into Mexican territories. He first signed onto the Somervell Expedition, joining nearly 700 other volunteers in November of that year as they marched toward Laredo. But less than a month later, after reaching only as far as Guerrero, Somervell recognized the mission as a failure and ordered the men to disband.
Wallace was one of 300 volunteers so committed to the effort that they refused to return home. Instead, he joined the Mier Expedition in the invasion of Mexico, only to be captured and taken prisoner. He was part of a large group that managed to escape, but they were soon recaptured and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted, but the men were forced to participate in the “black bean lottery” to determine which of them would face execution. The prisoners were ordered to draw beans from a jar that contained white and black beans. Those who drew black would be executed, while those who drew white would survive. Wallace, who was among the last to draw, claimed to have observed that the black beans were slightly larger than the white. When his turn came, he gathered several in his hand and determined to take the smallest, which saved him from the firing squad. The surviving prisoners were taken on a grueling 800-mile march to the Perote Prison in Vera Cruz and forced to do hard labor.
Folklore has made much of Wallace’s nickname, which has been at different times listed as Big-Foot, Bigfoot, and Big Foot. Legend has it that Wallace earned the name after being mistaken for a large marauding Indian named Chief Bigfoot, who had attacked settlement homes in Austin. According to the legend, Wallace was acquitted only after his footprint was found to be smaller than that that of the Indian, whom he later tried to kill. However, it was during his imprisonment in Mexico that he was to be given the nickname that would forever “stick to [him] like Texas mud” (Duvall 1870, 221). Wallace recalled that the people in Mexico took pity on the shoeless prisoners and attempted to fit each of them with proper footwear. The people were “much astonished” at the size of his feet, which were so large no shoes could be found to fit. Eventually they gathered enough raw materials so that a custom pair could be fitted to him, but by then they had already begun to refer to him as Big-Foot. Wallace, finding nothing “dishonorable” in the nickname, was not offended and happily retained the moniker even after his release from prison in 1844. He mused that it was a far cry better than being called “Lying Wallace” or “Thieving Wallace.”
Wallace continued to be eager in his mission to serve the Republic of Texas even after the hardship of his prison experience. Upon his return, he soon joined the Texas Rangers under the command of Jack Hays but left to enlist as a Texas Mounted Volunteer in the U.S. Army, fighting in the Mexican-American War. In the 1850s, after the war had ended, Wallace rejoined the Texas Rangers and eventually commanded his own unit, fighting off border bandits and Indians. Wallace is one of thirty Texas Rangers whose “service and sacrifices” are commemorated in the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame in Waco.
Wallace had developed acute tracking skills during his years on the frontier, skills that he would use during the U.S. Civil War. After leaving the Rangers for the last time, he was hired to return runaway slaves en route to Mexico and to track Confederate deserters and Union soldiers. When all the fighting was done, he continued to demonstrate his legendary frontier skills, taking on a final but perhaps equally dangerous mission: driving a mail hack on the dangerous 600-mile route from San Antonio to El Paso. It was in this capacity that Wallace recalled coming as close as he ever got to a “scrape” that he didn’t walk away from. A band of Comanche Indians “charged them so fiercely” in three successive attacks that he believed he might lose the battle. Wallace made it to San Antonio as he had promised after a narrow escape.
Even when his adventures had ceased, Wallace, who had remained a bachelor all his life, stayed in Texas because only there could he avoid the restless feeling of being pent up. After surviving the “many hardships and perils of border life,” Wallace finally settled on land granted to him by the state of Texas along the Medina River in Frio County, where a small town was named after him. He refused to take up farming again, but instead enjoyed recounting his adventures to friends and visitors until his mouth was “as dry as a buffalo chip” (Duvall 1870, 291). He died on his property on January 7, 1899. Soon after his death, the Texas state legislature voted to appropriate funds so that Wallace could have the honor of being laid to rest in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.
Tracey-Lynn Clough
See also Alamo; Carson, Kit; Crockett, Davy; El Muerto
Further Reading
Duvall, John. 1870. Adventures of Big-Foot Wallace, the Texas Ranger and Hunter. Macon, GA: J. W. Burke.
Haynes, Sam. 1990. Soldiers of Misfortune: The Somervell and Mier Expeditions of 1842. Austin: University of Texas Press.
McCaleb, Walter Flavius. 1956. Bigfoot Wallace. San Antonio, TX: Naylor.
Sowell, A. J. 1927. Life of Bigfoot Wallace. Bandera, TX: Frontier Times.
Stout, Jay A. 2008. Slaughter at Goliad: The Mexican Massacre of 400 Texas Volunteers. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press.
Vestal, Stanley. 1942. Bigfoot Wallace: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.