Texas Tales - Early Texans Preferred Pistols to Rockets

Looking at it one way, judging by a conclusion he reached in 1839, George Washington Hockley was no rocket scientist.

On the other hand, he was smart enough to see the future of warfare.

Born in Philadelphia in 1803, as a young man Hockley worked as a clerk at the War Department in Washington. That's where he ran into a young Congressman from Tennessee named Sam Houston. The two men became friends, and when Houston was elected governor of Tennessee, Hockley moved to the Volunteer State. When Houston late went to Texas, Hockley was not far behind.

During the fight against Santa Anna at San Jacinto, Hockley was in charge of the two grapeshot-belching cannons called "The Twin Sisters." After the revolution, he served first as Colonel or Ordnance and later as the new republic's Secretary of War.

When Mirabeau B. Lamar became Texas' second president, he named someone else as war secretary, but kept Hockley on as Colonel or Ordnance. That was his position on March 28, 1839, when he wrote a long report to the man who had replaced him as war secretary, Albert Sidney Johnson.

"Permit me now most respectfully to call Your attention to another mode of warfare, which has been for some time under the consideration of this Department" Hockley wrote, "and to be used, if practicable against the Indians -- which is the employment of the Congreve rocket, which can be thrown immediately amongst them if found in a body - excite terror and probable confusion if within their vision-and probably render them victims to the previous arrangement of the commanding officer."

Hockley was spitting phrases like bullets, but the idea's plain enough: Texas ought to use rockets against hostile Indians.

The notion seems like early science fiction until you dig a little deeper into history. As Hockley pointed out, the British had used rockets on U.S. forces during the war of 1812. Two years into the conflict, British rockets rained on Fort McHenry in Baltimore, giving rise to a certain verse in a certain song involving "the rockets red glare."

When Hockley made his suggestion, rockets already had been used in warfare for 800 years. About the time Hockley was born, a British subject named William Congreve developed a metal rocket propelled by gunpowder. In 1806, Congreve rockets were used against the French in the war against Napoleon. A year later, Congreve coordinated an attack on Copenhagen in which some 25,000 incendiary rockets were fired on the city.

By the 1830s, Congreve rockets were a deadly if not totally accurate weapons system. The most commonly used rocket weighed 32 pounds and could travel up to 3,000 feet.

In addition to advocating rocket attacks on Indians, Hockley noted that rockets could be used for signaling between military posts or units.

The weapons could be purchased from the British, but Hockley was convinced that with a bit of an investment, they could be manufactured in Texas.

Hockley's enthusiasm for using rockets against hostile Indians is an interesting contradiction. In the same letter he espoused such a high tech mode of warfare, he recommended against the republic buying any of Samuel Colt's new weapons, including a five-shot revolver the young inventor was trying to peddle.

Lamar, fortunately for early-day Texans living in fear of the Comanches, thought pistols more practical than rockets. At President Lamar's urging, the Texas Navy and later the republic's army purchased more than 200 Colt pistols. Within a few years, the weapons were in the hands of the Texas Rangers.

In Indian warfare, being able to shoot fives without reloading - 10 times if a ranger toted two pistols - was the frontier equivalent of a nuclear weapon. Compared with one-shot muzzle loaders, using those repeaters was real rocket science.