Eliel Melton was thirty-eight and the quartermaster of the Alamo garrison. Born in Georgia in 1798, he was a son of Jonathan Melton and Tabitha Stroud of Clarke County. He registered in Texas as a single man in January 1830 and entered the Brazos trade at Nashville, in partnership with a man named Joseph L. Hood. In December 1835 he fought in the siege of Béxar, under J. C. Neill.
The Republic’s own pay records give his rank in full: E. Melton, 2d Lieut & Asst Qr Master Artillery.
He was killed on the morning of 6 March 1836. Susannah Dickinson, who lived, remembered a man she called Milton going over the ramparts. His name is on the monument on the Capitol grounds at Austin.
Two months
Three years later the Republic settled his pay account. The form survives.
It is a printed pay-and-allowance form, filled in by hand. The term of service is entered in a ruled column: from 6th Jany ‘36 to 6th March ‘36. Two months, ending on the morning he was killed. Pay for himself at twenty-five dollars a month, fifty dollars. Sixteen dollars against the form’s printed line for 1 Private Servant (not Soldier), and five more for that servant’s clothing. Thirty-two dollars’ forage for two horses. Forty dollars’ extra pay as assistant quartermaster. Then two hundred and forty rations at twenty cents, and a column headed post or place where due, in which someone has written Bexar.
The total is one hundred and ninety-one dollars.
The Pay Office certified it on 30 March 1839 and the Secretary of War, A. Sidney Johnston, endorsed it: let this be audited.
He left no family. He left a claim on the Republic: two months’ pay, and about four thousand acres of land.
A single man
In 1839 the Republic granted 1,920 acres “in consideration of the services of Eliel Melton in the army and his fall at the Alamo.” It was one of three grants in his name, about four thousand acres in all; Part Six follows them. This one was surveyed in May 1847, patented to his heirs in 1861, and in 1880 those heirs were still fighting over it in the Texas Supreme Court. The opinion in that case sets down what the family had established by then: that at his death he was “a single man, leaving no children surviving him,” and that his mother Tabitha — his father had died in Georgia in 1815 — was his next of kin. It also records where the estate was settled — the probate court of Navarro County.
The court’s “single man” leaves one thing out.
Shortly before the battle Eliel Melton married María Juana Francisca Losoya, whose brother José Toribio Losoya was one of the defenders. She survived the siege as a noncombatant. Alamo historians, working from the Losoya family’s own history and from the record of the noncombatants who lived, have long accepted that the marriage was real.
The court record does not mention her, and nothing in it says why.
On children, the court and the historians agree: no record names a child of his. He left none. So what he left went to his mother and his brothers and sisters, and that is what brought one of them to Texas.
The errand
The administrator of the estate was not a Melton.
On 1 April 1839, at the Auditor’s Office in Houston, a man swore the printed oath: that the annexed instrument was just, true and original, that it was the only one he had offered for liquidation, and that he owed the government nothing on his own account or anyone else’s so far as he knew or believed. The War Department recorded on 1 June that he had filed letters of administration on the estate of E. Melton — in its own words, authorizing him to draw land pay &c.
His name was J. L. Hood — the same name the histories give as Eliel Melton’s partner in the Brazos trade. The record does not spell out that they are one man, and the case for it is circumstantial: same estate, same years, same role, and a documented partnership behind it. If the identification is right, the partner in the business became the administrator of the dead man’s affairs, and so in charge of the land grant.
That, by the only account that says so outright, is what brought Ethan Melton to Texas.
Ethan was the eldest brother. The family had come out of Clarke County, Georgia, and by then some of them were living in Chambers County, Alabama. On 28 January 1839 he filed in the probate court at old Nashville-on-the-Brazos to have the administrator removed and the estate moved to Robertson County. A Corsicana newspaper writing a hundred years afterward called that filing the first fixed date in the whole sequence — the first recorded act of Ethan Melton in Texas.
By 1840 the court had given him a second estate to settle: Milton J. Tidwell’s, 1,240 acres on Richland Creek.
The rest of the family was a long way east of him.
He stayed.
Out of that decision came a post office, two surveys on the county map, a graveyard with two thousand people in it, and a town that missed being the county seat by one vote.
Next: a beef bill the Republic refused to pay, and a wagon carried across Richland Creek a piece at a time.
Sources and open questions
- Pay account, oath and the archive’s note: Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Audited Claim 9067.
- Land warrant and the May 1847 survey: General Land Office.
- The 1,920 acres, the 1861 patent and the “single man” finding: Texas Supreme Court, 1880.
- Eliel’s early life, the Hood partnership, Béxar, Susannah Dickinson and the Losoya marriage: Handbook of Texas and the Alamo’s defender and noncombatant records.
- The Tidwell estate: Alva Taylor, “Ethan Melton,” Navarro County Scroll, 1958.
- The 1839 filing: Corsicana Daily Sun, 28 January 1939.
Still open
- J. L. Hood the administrator and Joseph L. Hood the partner are probably the same man; no document says so.
- Historians accept his marriage to María Losoya; the 1880 court called him single.
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