Peter Ellis Bean

Peter Ellis Bean (sometimes Ellis Peter Bean; Spanish: Pedro Elias Bean) (June 8?, 1783, Bean Station, Tennessee – October 6?, 1846, Veracruz) was a United States filibuster in Texas and Mexico, and a Mexican revolutionary.

Bean was born in Tennessee in 1783, to Elizabeth Blair and William Bean, Jr. 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.

On May 21, 1801, a Spanish force of 120 men under the command of Lieutenant Miguel Francisco Múzquiz left Nacogdoches in pursuit of Nolan, whom they encountered entrenched and unwilling to surrender just upstream from where the current Nolan River flows into the larger Brazos (now in Hill County, Texas). Several of Nolan’s men surrendered immediately, and after Nolan was killed, the remainder yielded. Bean opposed surrender, but Múzquiz promised the prisoners would be taken to Natchez and released. A first-hand account of the expedition, capture and subsequent imprisonment is contained in Bean's Memoirs. Bean was second in command of the expedition.

Instead of Natchez, Bean and the other survivors were taken deep into Mexico, and held at various towns. Bean tried several times to escape. As punishment, he was once held in for fifteen days. The men finally arrived in Chihuahua, where they were held for five or six days in prison, but then granted freedom of the town. The names and fates of the other prisoners are unknown, but thanks to his memoirs, Bean's story has survived.

...
Wikipedia