Legend holds that Emily Morgan, a mulatto servant of Col. James Morgan, "won" the Battle of San Jacinto for Texas after Gen. Santa Anna sacked and burned Morgan's Plantation on April 19, 1836, took her with him, and during the Texans' attack on the afternoon of April 21, 1836, was kept so occupied by her in his tent that he could not rally and command his troops to prevent defeat. She is also supposedly identified as the subject of the 19th century ballad "The Yellow Rose of Texas." The first written mention of Emily appeared in 1842, when William Bollaert wrote that he had heard from an officer who had been at San Jacinto that the battle was lost because of "the influence of a Mulatto girl (Emily) belonging to Colonel Morgan, who was closeted in the tent with General Santana..." Emily D. West, a free black woman, is known to have been at the San Jacinto Battlefield, but no verified record places her in General Santa Anna's tent, and historians note that eyewitnesses with no reason to sympathize with Santa Anna made no mention of such an incident. It is known that Emily West arrived in Texas with free papers in December 1835, was at Col. Morgan's plantation, New Washington, on April 16 when Col. Juan Almonte and a company of Mexican dragoons arrived, accompanied those troops to the plains of San Jacinto on April 20, escaped during the battle the next day but lost her free papers, and after the death of Lorenzo de Zavala, vice-president of the provisional Texas government, left Texas with Mrs. Zavala and returned to New York, with no evidence that she ever came back.