Primary Documents: San Jacinto

Rounding out a month of inaugural documents. I can name, like many people I'm sure, my first stolen song.

That is to say my first Internet music and my first peer-to-peer download, because these were all synonymous then. Napster was the pioneer in 1999, but I used LimeWire, for a file tagged Wednesday March 6, 2002, 5:41 PM. It was Peter Gabriel’s “San Jacinto.”

You could do worse! I can see that landscape he sketched, and it's right at the crux of American history. So was my smuggling of this imported British good:

Yankee Doodle [Thomas Ditson] came to town,
For to buy a [British, illegal] firelock
We will tar and feather him,
And so we will John Hancock.

Though I soon stopped rebelling; when the record companies started suing I had long been paying. The cover is said to be Gabriel, born in Surrey. Song: YouTube. Peter Gabriel, "San Jacinto," from Peter Gabriel (aka Security), Geffen Records, 1982. Yankee Doodle: Wikipedia. Robert Wellman Campbell, "Primary Documents: San Jacinto," RSS Longa, 30 July 2026, public domain via CC0 1.0.