This is the story of a New Englander who came penniless to Mexican Texas in 1833 and within the next decade helped to bring his adopted country through the turbulent disorders of settlement, revolution, political experimentation, and statehood.

Within a year of his arrival, Anson Jones was successfully practicing medicine, acquiring land, and resolving to avoid politics; but then the Revolution erupted and Jones became a private in the Texas Army, doubling as surgeon at San Jacinto. Military duty done, he resumed medical practice but some acts of the First Congress so irked him that he became a member of the Second and began a political career that lasted from 1837 to 1846 during which he served successively as congressman, minister to the United States, Texas senator, secretary of state, and president of the Republic of Texas. Anson Jones took his own life on January 9, 1858.

Told with imagination and insight, Herbert Gambrell's account of the life of Anson Jones is also a colorful and concurrent biography of Texas and its people.