Pleasant C. Sams came to Texas from Arkansas in the 1850s. At age 16, when the Civil War began, he was left in charge of the family mills and instructed by his father to give the entire flour output to widows of Confederates. In 1862, he was captured in Missouri as he went through enemy lines to get his bride, then "escaped" from a Federal who also admired her. Their wedding trip was a horseback ride to Texas. He served in 1864-65 in a Confederate frontier regiment, became a pioneer cattleman, and emerged as a business and financial leader as founder and president of the Benjamin Commercial Company and president and director of the First National Bank of Benjamin.