William Alexander Anderson "Bigfoot" Wallace was a famous Texas Ranger and frontiersman.
Background
William Alexander Anderson Wallace was born near Lexington, Va. , the son of Andrew and Jane (Blair) Wallace. His family were of colonial stock and Scottish origin. Wallace went to Texas in 1837 to avenge the massacre of a brother and a cousin at Goliad in March of the previous year, drifted inland from Galveston, and settled down to the life of a farmer.
Career
In 1840 he enlisted as a private in a company of rangers under John Coffee Hays whose duty it was to protect the frontier country around San Antonio from hostile Indians and lawless whites. In the course of this service he fought in the battle on the Salado - an incident in Woll's invasion of Texas in 1842 - and later in that year, after Woll's retreat to Mexico, in the futile Mier expedition which ended for Wallace with nearly two years in Mexican prisons. On September 28, 1845, about a year after his release, he enlisted as first sergeant in Capt. R. A. Gillespie's Texas Mounted Rangers and on June 29, 1846, one day after the company was mustered out, he reënlisted in Gillespie's company, then a part of Hays's 16t Regiment, Texas Mounted Rifle Volunteers. With this organization he served in the Mexican War, being honorably discharged as first lieutenant in September 1846. In 1850 he was himself designated by Governor Bell to raise a company of volunteers for frontier service. The recital of his more formal military service is by no means the whole story of his Indian warfare. Time and time again in the course of his fifty active years he had to leave his Medina River farm with a hastily gathered band of neighbors to protect life and property from Indian raiders. In particular, a contract he entered into in 1850 to carry the mail between San Antonio and El Paso brought its share of Indian conflict. Five hundred of the six hundred miles to be traversed lay in entirely unsettled country, much of which was infested with hostile Indians; the trip took a month. On only one occasion, however, when careless camp guards let the Comanches steal his mules, did he fail to deliver the mail in El Paso on schedule time. He lived alone for the most part until his early seventies, when the palsy which he attributed to his Mexican prison experience forced him to live with friends who could give him needed physical care. He died, near Devine, Tex. , of pneumonia.
Personality
He had no sympathy with the Civil War and took no part in it, save to protect the noncombatants on the frontier whose men were away in the army. In his prime Wallace stood six feet two inches in his moccasins and weighed 240 pounds. He never lost a tooth; he never wore glasses. His outdoor life, especially his Indian warfare, developed exceptional quickness of eye and hand. Despite his limited schooling he was for a frontiersman well read.