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On the trail of historically elusive doctor
Published June 15, 2009
The events of April 21, 1836, when the Texas army defeated Santa Anna’s troops at San Jacinto, captured the attention of all Texans for weeks afterward, and for a time the man historian Clarence Wharton called “The Phantom Dr. Harrison” was generally forgotten.
“The only trace of him after he went down on the steamboat on the morning of April 16, about the time Fairfax Gray left for Louisiana,” appeared in a column called “Texas Items” published in the Louisiana Courier on June 21, 1836, Wharton wrote in “Remember Goliad.”
“Young Zavala and Doctor Harrison, (son of General Harrison), came as passengers on the Good Hope,” according to Wharton’s quotation from that column.
Again Wharton expressed doubt that so little attention would have been paid to the son of a man who “next to General Jackson … was the outstanding living military character” in the United States.
This was particularly true, he noted, in view of Dr. Harrison’s “miraculous escape” from the Goliad massacre and his release by Mexican Gen. Jose de Urrea.
“Other men from the States who returned from Texas during these stormy days told and retold their experiences and their names and exploits found their way into print,” Wharton wrote.
“But not so with Dr. Harrison or Ben Mordaci (sic). After the Good Hope docked at New Orleans June 12, the doctor passed out forever as far as I can find.”
As for Ben Mordicai, the man released by Urrea as Dr. Harrison’s servant, Wharton found that on May 30, 1836, W.D. Redd had written to Lamar concerning the purchase of land to which Mordicai was entitled as a veteran of the Texas Revolution.
Some years later, however, Lamar wrote Mordicai had died before obtaining a certificate for the land, and it had never been located.
Further research revealed Mordicai was living in Victoria in 1840, and an article in the Colorado Citizen at Matagorda stated he was killed by Comanche Indians on the Garcitas River. Coincidentally, Wharton wrote, Redd died that same year in a duel in San Antonio.
As for Dr. Harrison, no one ever claimed land for his services, “and in all the subsequent annals of early Texas there is no mention of his name,” Wharton wrote.
He added, however, that Gen. Urrea’s diary stated after the “great victory at Goliad in March” and the massacre of Fannin’s men on Palm Sunday, Urrea moved east to Victoria and Matagorda, camping April 9 at Cayce’s Crossing on the Colorado River. Urrea’s book stated on that date he sent Dr. Harrison, “my prisoner, the son of a general of the United States, to the colonies with the special mission of speaking to the colonists who had not taken up arms, offering them guarantees and the protection of the army.”
Urrea added, “It will be seen that this measure was not fruitless.”
Urrea claimed when he marched into Brazoria at mid-morning April 22, he was met by a number of colonists and their families who “expressed satisfaction with the treatment accorded them” and offered to turn Galveston Island over to him.
“It is homage due to justice to confess that Doctor Harrison had contributed very decisively to the good disposition that was noticeable among the colonists,” Urrea wrote.
He added Harrison “thought on his part that he owed me his life and omitted no means to express his gratitude even to the extent of risking it a second time because he thought he owed it to me.”
When Urrea prepared on April 23, 1836, to move to Galveston Island, “where there were a thousand refugees (among them Doctor Harrison),” Wharton wrote, he received word of Santa Anna’s defeat at San Jacinto.
The lag in information about Dr. Harrison also is mentioned by Wharton, who noted Fairfax Gray’s diary was not published for 70 years, Ehrenberg’s memoirs were published in a foreign language prior to his death by Indians in Arizona, and Urrea’s diary was not published in English until 1929.
The conflicting reports as to Harrison’s identity and his fate led Wharton to write to Russell B. Harrison, a son of Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd U.S. president, to know if his great-grandfather had a son who was a doctor in Texas during the revolution.
Russell B. Harrison, told Wharton he was “well informed” about family history since the days of Oliver Cromwell and the Restoration some 300 years earlier. He gave Wharton the names and birth dates of the ninth president’s five children, and said his great-grandfather “had no doctor son and none of his sons was in Texas at any time.”
Wharton wrote he believed “this accurate information from the last survivor of the illustrious family” confirmed suspicions that Dr. Harrison was a myth.
Later, however, he found Gen. Harrison had served as U.S. minister to the new revolutionary Republic of Colombia, under appointment during the term of President John Quincy Adams, and that Gen. Urrea was at that same time the Mexican minister there.
Continuing to look into old books of biography and history, Wharton located a biography of Gen. Harrison published about 1852.
In an appendix, he found an account of the ninth president’s death and funeral that listed the names of family members present and absent, as well as children who had died previously.
This source included the three sons named by Russell B. Harrison as well as two others: “J.C.S. Harrison, who married Miss Pike (both dead),” and Dr. Benjamin Harrison, a son who died in 1840.
Wharton appeared to still have doubts, asking in his 1932 publication, “Was this the doctor son who was in Texas?”
In the years since, however, other sources appear to provide ample proof of Dr. Harrison’s existence, his ties to Brazoria County and his identity as the son of a U.S. president.
Marie Beth Jones, a published author and freelance writer based in Angleton, is chairwoman of the Brazoria County Historical Commission.
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