William Dunbar

🏛️The era

In 1842, Texas was an independent republic, and a nervous one. Six years after the Texas Revolution, Mexico still had not recognized Texas independence, and the border along the Rio Grande was disputed and dangerous. That year Mexican forces twice entered Texas and briefly occupied San Antonio. Texans were shaken and angry.

The Republic answered by sending a force toward the border in late 1842. When that campaign was called off, several hundred men refused to go home. They crossed the Rio Grande on their own and attacked the Mexican town of Mier. After hard fighting they were surrounded and surrendered. This was the Mier Expedition.

Bastrop, where William Dunbar is remembered, was one of the older Anglo-American settlements in Texas. It sat on the Colorado River at the edge of the frontier. Towns like Bastrop supplied many of the young men who answered the Republic's military calls in those uncertain years.

👥People & events

William Dunbar was born in Tennessee on New Year's Day, 1819. Like many young men of his generation he came west to Texas, which had strong ties to Tennessee. He was about twenty-three when he joined the men who marched to Mier.

The expedition's fate is among the best-known episodes in Texas history. After the surrender, the prisoners were marched deep into Mexico. Some escaped along the way and were recaptured in the harsh country. As punishment, Mexican authorities ordered that one in ten of the escapees be executed, chosen by lottery. Each man drew a bean from a jar, and those who drew black beans were shot. The episode became known as the Black Bean Episode.

The marker gives no details of Dunbar's own part in these events, and this story won't make any up. What the record does show is that he survived. He came home and lived another dozen years after the expedition. He died on December 20, 1855, in his mid-thirties, by which time Texas had joined the United States.

The marker is brief: a name, a home state, two dates and one membership. In Texas that membership said a lot. To be counted among the men of Mier was to be part of a story people would tell for generations.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The Mier Expedition belongs to the larger story of the conflict between the United States, Texas and Mexico in the 1840s. Hostility along the Texas border was one reason annexation became such a heated national question. After Texas joined the Union in 1845, the border dispute helped lead to the U.S.–Mexican War.

For Texans, Mier and the black bean lottery became symbols of suffering and defiance, and they were remembered with a bitterness that outlasted the events themselves. They were also part of a cycle of raids and reprisals in which both sides committed violence and suffered losses. Historians still disagree over whether the expedition was a brave stand or a reckless, unauthorized venture. The answer is probably some of each.

Markers like Dunbar's keep these large events at a human scale. Behind every expedition and treaty were ordinary young men from Tennessee, Kentucky and elsewhere who came to Texas, took big risks and afterward went back to quiet lives in frontier towns.

🧭If you visit

Bastrop is a pleasant stop east of Austin, with a historic downtown near the Colorado River and many old buildings to explore. It is a good base for a day of Central Texas history and fits well into a loop through the region's older towns.

Dunbar's marker is a memorial, so visit it quietly and respectfully. It is short, and that is part of what makes it moving. Read the dates and work out the math: he was a young man of twenty-three at Mier and only thirty-six when he died.

If you're traveling with older kids or teens, the Mier story is a good way into a conversation about the Republic of Texas years, which many visitors know less well than the Alamo and San Jacinto. Ask them what it would have been like to draw from that jar. Then remind them that this man made it home.