Bolivar Roads

Last Thursday afternoon I was wandering around on the east end of Galveston Island looking for something of interest for a watercolor painting. The evening sun light on the side of a bright red ship, the complimentary color of the green water in the channel, anchored near the ship channel, caught my attention. There was my painting, so I parked my SUV and set up the easel and started painting.

Through this channel pass all the ships from all over the world going to and from the ports of Galveston, Texas City, Houston, Galena Park, Pasadena and numerous fishing ports around Galveston Bay. There are lots of birds here due to the large concentrations of fish passing back and forth from the Gulf of Mexico and Galveston Bay. On the east side of the channel there is space for ships to anchor, such as this tanker that is used to transport crude oil from the super tankers anchored out in the Gulf to the refineries around the bay. On the maritime charts, this channel is named Bolivar Roads.

Across the way, I can see the small village of Bolivar Point that is about three miles away. It is an insignificant part of my painting, but it becomes the focal point of my thoughts. Militarily, whoever controls that point, controls the channel, so many forts have been built there. As I paint, I am thinking about the story of a young woman who was in the first fort that was built there in 1821. Her story is about courage, tenacity and strength of character.

Her name was Jane Wilkinson. She was born in Maryland in 1798. By the age of fourteen she is an orphan living with her sister in Natchez, Mississippi territory. At the age of sixteen, she meets and then marries one of the heroes from the Battle of New Orleans, the dashing young Captain James Long. He has big plans. He wants to free that vast land to the west called Texas from Spanish rule in the hopes that the following Mexican government, grateful for what he has done, will grant him vast tracks of land. So he mortgages their plantation to get the funds, and talks a bunch of men to follow him to Texas.

They first go to Nacogdoches, but are run out of there by Spanish forces. Next he and his men go south and try again near the Gulf of Mexico. He wants Jane to stay behind until he has freed Texas. She refuses and comes with him with their small daughter. They build a mud fort over there on Bolivar Point where I am looking on this beautiful fall afternoon as I do this watercolor painting.

Soon after building the mud walled fort that hot summer, Captain Long and fifty three men invade Texas. He tells Jane, now pregnant again, that he will be back in a few weeks. A few men stay behind to protect Jane and her daughter. Captain Long never returns. He is captured by the Spanish and executed. As the supplies run out in the fort, the men left behind to protect Jane disappear. As fall approaches, she is now alone in the fort with her small daughter and a twelve year old servant girl. She is only twenty three years old.

The winter of 1821 -1822 was exceptionally cold. Galveston Bay froze over. One day, Jane watches a bear walk across the ice to Galveston Island. In an ice and snow covered canvas tent in a corner of the mud walled fort, on the bitterly cold night of December 21^st, Jane gave birth to Mary James Long. Somehow, they survived that terrible winter. In March, a ship came and found them and took them back to Louisiana.

Later Jane would come back to Texas. She was granted land in Brazoria. She would become a successful and well known business woman owning a hotel and a plantation. The town of Richmond, Texas, was built on land that she had owned. She was courted by some of the famous men of her day such Ben Milam, William Travis, Sam Houston and Mirabeau Lamar. She stayed a widow to her first love, Captain James Long, until her death on December 30, 1880.

In her honor, the U. S. Navy named one of their ships in World War II the USS Jane Long.

As my painting was nearing its finish and I was putting the birds up high in the sky, I was thinking that they were soaring like the spirit and soul of that remarkable woman.