Mary Maverick

Mary Ann Adams Maverick (March 16, 1818 – February 24, 1898) was an American memoirist and early pioneer in Texas. Her memoirs form an important source of information about daily life in and around San Antonio during the Republic of Texas period through the American Civil War.

Mary Ann Adams was born in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, to William Lewis Adams, a lawyer, and Agatha Strother (Lewis) Adams. Her maternal grandmother was a cousin of James Madison, while her father's family had founded Lynchburg, Virginia. Her parents lived along the James River in Virginia, where her father exported flour and tobacco. During the War of 1812 her father left Virginia for what is now Alabama and bought a plantation near the site of Tuscaloosa. While purchasing supplies in Mobile, Robert Adams answered Andrew Jackson's call for volunteers to help defend New Orleans and raised a company which he led at the Battle of New Orleans. In 1816, her mother came to live permanently in Alabama as well.

In Alabama, Robert Adams practiced law, and in 1827 he served as an agent of U.S. Treasury Department. He died in June 1827, leaving his widow to raise their six surviving children, all under the age of 12. Mary attended boarding school in Tuscaloosa to meet her father's wish that his children be appropriately educated.

On August 4, 1836, Mary Adams married Samuel Augustus Maverick, a Yale graduate who had been the Alamo garrison's delegate to the Convention of 1836 declaring Texas' independence from Mexico. Sam Maverick sold his Alabama plantation at the beginning of 1837, and Mary Maverick accompanied her husband to New Orleans so that he could conduct business and be closer to news of Texas. While she was in New Orleans, her brother William Adams left for Texas. In March 1837, she and her husband visited his father in South Carolina, where they refused the elder Maverick's gift of his plantation. On May 14, 1837, she gave birth to her first child, Samuel Maverick, Jr. in South Carolina.

In October 1837, Mary Maverick, her brother, son, and seven slaves left South Carolina. After a brief stop in Tuscaloosa, they left for the Republic of Texas on December 7, accompanied by her fifteen-year-old brother, Robert Adams, and three additional slaves. The party crossed into Texas near New Year's Day 1838. On February 4, they rented rooms at the home of George Sutherland, and for four months Maverick remained there while her husband continued on to San Antonio.

Maverick and the rest of her party reached San Antonio on June 15, 1838. In her memoirs, she claims to have been the first U.S.-born female to settle in San Antonio, but letters to her mother mentioned another American lady, married to an Irishman, who died shortly after the Mavericks arrived. The family rented rooms at the same home where her brother William resided.

Shortly after moving into a new home along the San Antonio River, Maverick gave birth to her second child, Lewis Antonio Maverick, who became the first Anglo-American child to be born in and grow up in San Antonio. During the next few years, more Anglo families moved to San Antonio. Her brothers returned to Alabama, but William came back to Texas in 1839 with another brother, Andrew, to begin farming. Mary was often left alone, as her husband spent months traveling for business or combing the Texas wilderness on surveying missions.

The Mavericks participated in the so-called Council House Fight on March 19, 1840, when half of a peace-delegation of sixty-five Comanches, consisting of men, women and children, was slaughtered and the other half taken hostage. The Comanche delegation arrived in San Antonio, a traditional safe haven for peace talks, to negotiate a peace treaty and a demarcation line and bargain for the ransom of white captives. The army had ordered prior to the meeting that, if not all Anglo-Texans believed to be Comanche captives at that time were returned at the beginning of the talks, all the negotiators of the band be held until the captives were returned, and then the ransom would be paid. Maverick and a female neighbor had been watching several Indian children playing when they heard gunfire within the council house and saw Indians fleeing from the building. She alerted her husband and brother Andrew, and, while Samuel Maverick rushed outside to chase down the Indians, Maverick and Andrew hurried outside to find the children. They discovered three of the fugitive Indians in the back yard, while their slave cook, Jinny, tried to protect the two Maverick children and her own four children by threatening the Indians with a large rock. Andrew Adams shot two of the three Indians and joined the main fight. Maverick hid her children in the house and watched the battle through the windows. At one point she was curious enough to go outside for a closer look, but was ordered to return indoors by a soldier. The skirmish continued until all of the Indians were dead or captured. In her diary, Maverick wrote that "'All [Indians] had a chance to surrender ... and every one who offered or agreed to give up was taken prisoner and protected.'"