Late in the summer of 1863, a horse trader named John Savage rode through the warm, tree-scrubbed lowlands of south Texas.
He had recently sold horses to the Confederate Army, and now, with $600 worth of gold in his saddlebags, Savage rode south toward Corpus Christi, or perhaps Matamoros, Mexico, where more horses could be gathered and sold to the Confederacy.
Savage followed a branch of the Cotton Road, a network of trails and backroads used by the South to transport cotton and other commodities during the Civil War…