“The Immortal Thirty-two”

•May 20, 2026•

by Janet Roney

It’s been one hundred and ninety years since March 6, 1836, when Moultrie County’s Jonathan Lindley became the only Illinois man to die at the Alamo.

At age twenty-two, Jonathan had everything to live for. After coming to Texas in 1833 from Moultrie County, Illinois, with his father, Samuel Washington Lindley, he owned 80 acres of land, a small herd of cattle, some pigs, and a cozy little cabin near Gonzales where he and his sweetheart, Sarah, would soon start their married life. What more could a young man ask for? But Jonathan had been born with a strong sense of right and wrong, like his Whitley and Lindley grandfathers.

Texians were outraged when the Mexican “Napoleon of the West,” Santa Anna, jailed Stephen Austin after refusing his request to make Texas an independent Mexican state. He also stopped legal American immigrants and seized their weapons, even though he had been inviting them to settle in the land of “smiling prairies” for the previous decade. Soon, ready or not, the Texians wanted complete independence from Mexico.

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