Bryan, Moses Austin, 1817-1895

Moses Austin Bryan, 1817-1895, became Stephen F. Austin's secretary in 1832. Bryan enlisted in the Texas army in 1836 and served at the Battle of San Jacinto. He was a member of the Somervell Expedition in 1842, and enlisted in the Third Texas Regiment during the Civil War. In 1873, Bryan helped organize the Texas Veterans Association and served as its secretary until 1886.

Moses Austin Bryan was the third son born to James and Emily Austin Bryan, the daughter of Moses Austin and sister of Stephen F. Austin, in Herculaneum, Missouri, on September 25, 1817. After the 1822 death of James Bryan, Emily Austin Bryan married James F. Perry. Emily Perry and her children moved to Potosi, Missouri, where Moses Austin Bryan attended school until the age of eleven. Employed in Perry and W. W. Hunter's store until December 1830, Bryan accompanied Hunter to Texas and worked in the San Felipe store of W. W. Hunter and Stephen F. Austin.

In 1832, at the age of fourteen, Bryan began service as Stephen F. Austin's secretary when he accompanied Austin to Saltillo, Mexico. Bryan and Austin boarded with one of the legislators, Don Jesus de la Grande, and it was there that Moses Austin Bryan learned to speak Spanish. In 1835 Bryan clerked in the Austin colony land office and in the fall again served as Austin's secretary during Austin's brief tenure as commander of the Texas army.

Bryan enlisted in the Texas army as a private shortly after the fall of the Alamo and participated in Houston's retreat. He served at the Battle of San Jacinto as third sergeant in Captain Moseley Baker's company, as an aide-de-camp on the staff of Thomas J. Rusk, and as an interpreter for the meeting between Sam Houston and Antonio López de Santa Anna. In 1839, President Mirabeau B. Lamar appointed Bryan as secretary of legation under Anson Jones, minister from the Republic of Texas to the United States. Bryan served as a member of the 1842 Somervell Expedition. During the Civil War, he enlisted in the Third Texas Regiment, rising to the rank of major. In 1873, Bryan helped organize the Texas Veterans Association and served as its secretary until 1886.

In 1840, Bryan married Adaline La Mothe of Rapides Parish, Louisiana; she died May 30, 1855. They had four sons and two daughters. Bryan married Cora Lewis, daughter of Ira Randolph Lewis, in 1856; they had four sons and one daughter. Moses Austin Bryan died in Brenham at the home of his son, Beauregard, on March 16, 1895, and was buried at Independence, Texas.