away or being caught helping someone runaway, people were careful to "cover their tracks" and public and personal records about freedom seekers are scarce. The are records in greater supply by the people trying to promote slavery or catch enslaved people who have run away. More than 2,500 escapes are documented by the Texas Runaway Slave Project at Stephen F. Austin State University. Southern freedom seekers Advertisements were placed in newspapers offering rewards for the return of their "property". Slave catchers traveled through Mexico. There were Black Seminoles, or Los Mascogos who lived in northern Mexico who provided armed resistance. Sam Houston, president of the Republic of Texas, was the slaveholder to Tom who ran away. He headed to Texas and once there he enlisted in the Mexican military. One enslaved man was branded with the letter "R" on each side of his cheek after a failed attempt to escape slavery. He tried again in the winter of 1819, leaving the cotton plantation of his enslaver on horseback. With four others, they traveled south west to Mexico at the risk of being attacked by hostile Native Americans, apprehended by slave catchers, or being attacked by "horse-eating alligators". Many people did not make it to Mexico. In 1842, a Mexican man and a black woman left Jackson County, Texas on two horses, but they were caught at the Lavaca River. The wife, an enslaved woman, was valuable to her owner so she was returned to slavery. Her husband, possibly a farm laborer or an indentured servant, was immediately lynched. Freedom seekers changed their names in Mexico. They married into Mexican families and relocated further south of the American-Mexican border. All of these factors makes it hard to trace the whereabouts of the former enslaved people. A database at Stephen F. Austin State University has a database of runaway slave advertisements as part of The Texas Runaway Slave Project. The Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression initiated a Federal Writers' Project to document slave narratives, including those who settled in Mexico. One of them was Felix Haywood who found freedom when he crossed the Rio Grande. Rio Grande stations Two families, the Webbers and the Jacksons, lived along the Rio Grande and helped people escape slavery. The husbands were white and the wives were black women who had been formerly enslaved. It is not known if Nathaniel Jackson purchased the freedom