Memoir of Colonel Ellis P. Bean, Written by Himself, About the Year 1816

"Colonel Bean was in the van of the Anglo-Saxon development in Texas and had a life of highly colored adventure in Mexico...born in Tennessee in 1783...joined the rebels and engaged in guerilla warfare against the Spaniards." -Star Tribune, May 4, 1930

"Women of Mexico appear in a romantic, if not passionate, light in the memoirs of Colonel Ellis P. Bean the young Tenesseean who blazed a path of military glory in the history of Texas and Mexico of about 1810." -Waxahachie Daily Light, Oct. 7, 1914

Peter Ellis Bean (1783-1846) was a United States filibuster in Texas and Mexico, and a Mexican revolutionary.

Bean was born in Tennessee in 1783. In 1800, at 17 years of age, his father sent him south to the Mississippi River via the Tennessee River by flatboat with a load of trade goods. The boat capsized at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and Bean escaped with nothing but his clothes. He continued on to Natchez, Mississippi, where he joined Philip Nolan's last filibustering expedition to Spanish Texas, on the promise of riches from captured mustangs and perhaps gold and silver.

In 1856, Henderson K. Yoakum published "History of Texas from Its First Settlement in 1685 to Its Annexation to the United States in 1846." In Volume 1, Yoakum included Appendix II, which was a 55-page narrative titled "Memoir of Colonel Ellis P. Bean, Written by Himself, About the Year 1816." It is this Memoir that has been republished here for the convenience of the interested reader.