GRANT, JAMES (1793-1836). James Grant, physician and Texas revolutionary leader, was born on July 28, 1793, at Killearnan Parish, Ross-shire, Scotland. He moved to Texas in 1823 and in 1825 purchased a large estate known as the Hacienda of the Furnaces in Parras, Coahuila. He served as secretary of the Executive Council of Coahuila and in 1832 was a member of the legislature of Coahuila and Texas.^qv In 1833 he and John Charles Beales^qv contracted for the settlement of 800 families between the Nueces and the Rio Grande in what was known as Beales's Rio Grande Colony.^qv Grant brought some colonists to Texas and laid out the settlement of Dolores, near present Goliad, in March 1834, but the project soon collapsed. In December 1833 Grant was in Nacogdoches, Texas, where he remained most of the time until October 1, 1835. On August 1, 1835, he purchased a house on what is known as Sand Hill, sixteen miles east of Nacogdoches, evidently intending to make it his home. Grant was secretary of the legislature of Coahuila and Texas at Monclova from March 12 to April 22, 1835, when the government was broken up by Antonio López de Santa Anna's^qv troops; Grant fled with John Durst^qv to Nacogdoches. In October 1835 he joined the company of which Thomas J. Rusk^qv was captain and left for the siege of Bexar.^qv Grant was elected as a Goliad delegate to the Consultation^qv at San Felipe but did not leave the army to attend its sessions. While Rusk was organizing his company to resist Santa Anna, Grant and James Bowie^qv arranged with the political chief of the department of Nacogdoches, Henry Rueg,^qv for the use of the Mexican armament in Nacogdoches, then in charge of Peter Ellis Bean,^qv for the purpose of arming Rusk's company. In the early spring of 1836 Grant and Col. Francis W. Johnson^qv organized one of the Matamoros expeditions of 1836 and 1837^qv and proceeded as far as San Patricio. Grant, with a group of fifteen volunteers on a foraging expedition, was attacked by Gen. José de Urrea's ^qv cavalry. The Texans were killed in the battle of Agua Dulce Creek^qv on March 2, 1836.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hans Peter Nielsen Gammel, comp., Laws of Texas, 1822-1897 (10 vols., Austin: Gammel, 1898). Nacogdoches Archives, Steen Library, Stephen F. Austin State University; Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin; Texas State Archives, Austin. Texas House of Representatives, Biographical Directory of the Texan Conventions and Congresses, 1832-1845 (Austin: Book Exchange, 1941).

Robert Bruce Blake