Keeping Austin Weird - Angelina Eberly and the Archives War

Living up to its reputation for weirdness, Austin may be the only city in the world with a statue of a woman firing a cannon.

The story goes back to 1842, when Mexico invaded Texas twice, each time briefly holding San Antonio. President Sam Houston ordered Austin vacated as capital. Only a dozen or so stalwarts remained.

The crisis with Mexico blew over, but Houston had never liked Austin. In fact, he referred to it as "that damned hole."

But the records of the republic had been left in the hole when government officials pulled out. The few diehards who had stayed behind correctly figured that as long as they possessed the young nation's archives, they possessed the capital.

Houston understood the same thing. He issued secret orders to veteran Indian fighters Thomas I. Smith and Eli Chandler to raise a militia company in Milam and Robertson counties to seize the records and take them to Washington-on-the-Brazos, which had offered itself as the new capital.

A vigorous norther blew on the morning of Dec. 30, 1842 as three big wagons escorted by a score or so of armed men moved up Austin's Congress Avenue. When they reached the log building that served as the republic's Land Office, the militiamen began loading boxes of records into the ox-drawn wagons.

Angelina Belle Eberly, who ran a boarding house, happened to be up and sounded the alarm by touching off a loaded cannon, kept on Congress Avenue in case of Indian attack. At least that's the legend.

Houston's henchmen hastily headed out of town with the archives. A posse of Austin men caught up with them the next day about 20 miles north of town. Smith, realizing he was outnumbered, could see no need for unpleasantness on New Year's Eve. He agreed to return the records to Austin.

The president knew when he was beat, and backed off on his attempt to get the government out of Austin. It has been the capital ever since.

On Sept. 25, 2004, city officials, guests and curious passers by gathered in the 600 block of Congress Avenue fin downtown Austin for the dedication of a 7-foot tall, 2,200-pound statue honoring Eberly and the cannon she supposedly fired. Cartoonist Pat Oliphant created the sculpture.

Whether Eberly actually fired the cannon continues to be debated. The late historian A.E. Skinner, researching the "Archives War" in 1981, could find no contemporary account that Eberly had any significant role in the affair. Not until 1875 did writer Dewitt C. Baker claim that she had fired the cannon, and all subsequent accounts seem to have been built on Baker's telling of the tale.

"So long as mankind continues to drive its dark trade in heroes (and in heroines)," Skinner wrote of the Eberly-and-the-cannon tale, "we can only offer...that most damning verdict of Scottish law - NOT PROVEN."