Inspiration is where you find it. Sometimes, its in tiny print.

I don’t recall the exact day but it was a slow news day and I put off any actual work for my employer, The Dallas Morning News, by thumbing through the Texas Almanac,  published every year or so to chronicle the story of Texas, everything from the workings of the Legislature to its city populations, value of goats, cows and food crops for a given year to the state economy, weather extremes – all the stuff of Texas life. That day, history won out. I scanned the capsule accounts of things past when a brief item from 1865 hit me like a brick.

In a few sentences, the Almanac reported that on June 11, 1865, a small band of ex-Confederate soldiers rode into Austin, robbed the Treasury of thousands in gold, then rode off into the west after a brief gunfight with residents. The raiders disappeared over Mount Bonnell. Neither they nor the money was ever found.

That story stayed with me. Eventually, I realized that this true story would be better told in fiction. It eventually became the key part of my novel, Soldier’s Joy.

The odd part was how little there was in the historical record. Austin was in chaos. The Confederacy was in collapse, the army in Texas had begun to melt away in the east and the Union army was advancing on the state capitol. The governor and other officials,  sensing that their rebellion would not be seen as treason, fled Austin, heading south toward Mexico. Law enforcement and civil order vanished. Mobs of citizens and ex-soldiers ransacked the city.

According to the Handbook of Texas,  Captain George R. Freeman, a Confederate veteran, organized a small company of thirty volunteers in May 1865 to protect the city.

“I found the public stores sacked and the whole city in turmoil,” Freeman

wrote.  Captain Freeman’s volunteers gained control and restored the peace, remaining an informal police until Union forces arrived.

On the evening of June 11, Captain Freeman learned that raiders were planning to rob the treasury. A church bell rang to alert the volunteers, who assembled on Congress Avenue below the capitol grounds.  As they approached the treasury, where the robbers were busy opening the safes, gunfire broke out.  In the brief gun battle, one of the robbers was mortally wounded and Captain Freeman received a wound to the arm. The raiders made their escape and rode out of town toward Mount Bonnell. The dying robber identified the raiders’ leader as a Captain Rapp.

Initial reports said the robbers, numbering about 50, had stolen $17,000 or so in gold. A later, a more detailed audit to Gov. Andrew J. Hamilton in October 1865, reported that at the time of the robbery,  a total of $27,525 in specie and $800 in Louisiana bank bills was located in the treasury. Several million dollars in United States bonds and coupons and other securities were in the vaults at the time but were overlooked by the robbers.

The money was never recovered and the robbers never seen again.

Capt. Freeman and his volunteers were praised by the new state government for their efforts and a reward named. The Legislature, however, never passed a resolution to actually pay them.   But that’s another story.