As the sun slowly set, nine of the condemned Texans, bound with cords and blindfolded, were made to sit on a log in front of a wall, staring blindly toward the red-capped firing squad. For seconds that seemed like an eternity, silence filled the courtyard. Then the curt command to fire shattered the stillness, and the first salvo tore into the Texans, knocking them from the log. It took the sloppy-shooting Mexican troops several volleys to quiet the anguished cries of the dying men.

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The remaining eight prisoners were then led to the place of execution, and the process was repeated. When the muskets fell silent ten minutes later, one man, Henry Whaling, remained alive, despite twelve wounds, cursing his tormentors with his remaining breath. Colonel Huerta approached him and, placing his pistol against the contemptuous Texan’s head, pulled the trigger, sending Whaling to join his comrades in death.

The detail sent to cart away the ravaged corpses for burial the following morning found only 16 bodies. Seventeen-year-old James Shepherd, his cheek and arm shattered by musket balls, had only pretended to be dead, then crawled away from the ranch during the night. Four days later, however, the luckless boy was captured outside Saltillo and immediately put to death.

Huerta had carried out his bloody punishment to the letter, but to Santa Anna, the hated Ewen Cameron remained a loose end. The surviving Texans were quickly put back on the road to Mexico City, eight hundred miles to the south. Near the end of their trek, they rested for a night in an Indian village called Huehuetoca. When they again headed south at dawn on April 26, Cameron remained behind. Santa Anna, who had expected Cameron to die at Salado, had decided that the need to eliminate this Scottish terror outweighed concerns for justice, and so he had ordered him shot. As the sun slowly climbed into the morning sky, Cameron bared his chest to a firing squad and cried, “Fire!” The Mexicans readily obliged.

The ordeal of the remaining Mier prisoners continued for many months, as relations between Texas and Mexico deteriorated even further. After reaching the Mexican capital, the prisoners were put to work building a road from Santa Anna’s residence to the nearby village of Tacubaya. During this time, Samuel Walker and several others managed to escape. When the road was finished, the Texans hoped they would be released, but to their dismay, they were marched 160 miles east, where on September 21, 1843, they were deposited in the gloomy castle at Perote. There they joined William Fisher, the other officers who had avoided the Black Bean affair, and about 35 other Texans who had been captured during the fighting at San Antonio a year earlier.

Languishing in the squalid cells of the imposing stronghold, the Texans were plagued by cold, lice, and occasionally typhus. As the months passed, several prisoners managed to tunnel out of the castle, although most were later recaptured. Some tried to slip out with the San Antonio veterans when they were released in March 1844, an act that spurred prison officials to place the Mier veterans in chains that they would wear for the balance of their captivity.

Finally, on September 15, 1844, Santa Anna declared a general amnesty for the remaining Texas captives, whose numbers had dwindled considerably. In the 18 months since the Salado executions, Santa Anna had released a few men for diplomatic reasons, and the ranks of the Texan force had been further thinned by fatalities and escapes. Just 104 threadbare men, roughly one-third of their original number, stumbled out of the Perote fortress to begin the long trip home.

From a military standpoint, the Mier expedition was insignificant. The individual Texans who survived the long ordeal came home to a transient nation on the verge of joining the United States, one whose people had largely forgotten them. The Mier veterans, however, stood by their actions and swore vengeance upon the nation at whose hand they had suffered. When Mexico and the United States went to war in 1846, survivors of Salado marched with the American armies of Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott. In battles at Monterrey, Buena Vista, Vera Cruz, and Cherubusco, their memories of the Black Bean Lottery triggered bloody retribution against Santa Anna’s army.

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