1-43

Part 1, Note 43

The Austin Papers, vol. 1, pp. 1209, 1343, 1359-1360, 1390-1392; and Kuykendall, "Reminiscences of Early Texans," The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, vol. 7, no. 1, July 1903, pp. 35. Kuykendall says, apparently incorrectly, that the settlers gathered in the fort in 1824. William Physick Zuber described one of the blockhouses built by the settlers as "a log cabin with the ground for the first floor, and built as other log cabins to a height of eight feet. A round of strong logs jutted out on each side and end, and probably twenty inches beyond the wall below. On these were placed two rounds of logs, one immediately above the wall below, the other six or eight inches farther out, making an opening through which a man could shoot down upon an enemy approaching the wall. The inner-side logs served as sills, or plates, upon which to place joists, and a puncheon floor extended about three feet inward from the side, all around the house. This served as a platform upon which a defender could stand or walk from point to point, as occasion might demand. Then a second story was built upon the outer round of logs and finished as other log cabins. At the proper height in the upper story, portholes were made in the walls, through which a defender could shoot at an enemy before he could advance to the wall. I have never heard that Indians attacked a blockhouse, but, besides being a good defense, it was an excellent scarecrow to frighten them away" (see Zuber, My Eighty Years in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), pp. 51-52).