"John Holland Jenkins was thirteen and a half years old when the Alamo fell in 1836 and he became a soldier of the Texas Republic under General Sam Houston.... [But] it was not until 1884, when he was past sixty years old, that he began writing down...the reminiscences that, as now put into book form, light up for whoever will read [them] the earliest days of early English-speaking Texas."

—from the Foreword by J. Frank Dobie

"This is the firsthand account by one who measured up to the demands of danger and hardships and lived to write about it for others. For, here is history in the making—Indian raids and Mexican forays were daily menaces and brought massacres, capture and torture to these first settlers. These reminiscences...are invaluable for their recordings of early frontier times and for their presentation of such historic happenings as the Mier and Santa Fe expeditions. The original flavor of the writing has been beautifully retained and the entire account is well documented."

—Library Journal