Benjamin Milam (20 October 1788 – 7 December 1835) was a general of the Texian Army during the Texas Revolution.
Biography[]
Benjamin Milam was born in Frankfort, Kentucky in 1788, and he served in the US Army during the War of 1812. In 1818, he decided to become a trader along the Red River in Texas, then a colony of Mexico. In 1819, Milam and several other Americans decided to head to Mexico to assist in the country's war of independence against Spain, and he was imprisoned in Mexico City from 1819 to 1822 before becoming a colonel in the Mexican Army in 1824 after Mexico adopted a republican constitution. He attempted to run a mining operation during the 1820s, but this venture failed, and he was arrested in 1835 after Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna seized power in Mexico. His jailers were sympathetic to him and gave him a horse to escape, and Milam joined the Texian Army at the start of the Texas Revolution. He assisted the army with its siege of Bexar in late 1835, and Milam was shot in the head by a Mexican rifleman on 7 December 1835, killing him. Milam County is named for him.