Texas Rising

by Stephen L. Moore

  The people built dogtrot-style windowless cabins from logs, with chimneys for heat and cooking. Floors were either dirt or wood plank, which were sawed by hand from logs. Farmers began working the land, building new and better lives for themselves. The encroaching white men soon found resistance with the numerous Indians, whose ancestors had lived there for many generations. In 1821, some thirty-five hundred white settlers had inhabited Texas but they were outnumbered nearly six-to-one by approximately twenty thousand Indians. The Karankawas were the main threat to coastal settlers while Wacos, Tonkawas, and Tawakonis were tribes that had long inhabited the inner regions of the Texas area. Relations between both cultures were uneasy at best. Mexican authorities secretly hoped that the new immigrants would serve as a buffer against aggressive Indians. Instead a cultural and geographical divide was created in which the Anglo Texans were fairly subdivided from the Mexican Texans. Both communities still had to contend with Indians.4

  Mexican citizens were concentrated in the region surrounding San Antonio. They also spread down the San Antonio River to La Bahía (Goliad) and beyond. Other Mexican rancheros herded cattle and sheep in the chaparral plains, with their towns stringing up the Rio Grande from Matamoros to Laredo. The Anglo settlements were virtually nonexistent west of the Guadalupe River. To the north, the Hill Country and the Edwards Plateau were ranged by Comanches, considered to be the finest horsemen of the continent.

  The early Anglo settlers lived primarily in the coastal plains, prairies, and woodlands along the Trinity, Brazos, and Colorado rivers. The people took up planting crops of cotton and corn, and raising livestock. Not all of the Old Three Hundred were productive citizens, as Texas attracted its fair share of opportunists who sought refuge from past misfortunes or legal issues. Stephen Austin was granted civil and military power over his settlers by Mexican authorities. José Félix Trespalacios, the first Mexican governor of Texas, gave written orders for the colonists to create the Brazos and Colorado districts with mounted militia companies and to elect an alcalde, the equivalent of a justice of the peace, for each district. In December 1822, Josiah Bell was elected alcalde in the Brazos District and John Tumlinson Sr., alcalde in the Colorado District. Governor Trespalacios further advised the new alcaldes to administer justice and “to oppose the Karankawa or other intruders who might attack their persons or their property.” Stephen Austin had been advised that detachments of Mexican troops might be deposited in the larger settlements but that he and his settlers were primarily responsible for their own defense.5

  In early 1823, the two districts held popular elections for officers to lead local militia companies, electing Captain Robert Kuykendall for the Colorado District and Captain Andrew Robinson in the Brazos District. One of the first engagements between the Anglo settlers and Indians occurred that winter when three men paddling up the Colorado River were attacked by Karankawas near the mouth of Skull Creek. Two were killed but the third escaped badly wounded. A fourth man in a separate incident was also severely wounded by an arrow shot at him. Captain Kuykendall raised about twenty militiamen and found the Indian camp just after dawn. They killed between eight and twenty-five Indians, according to various accounts, and sustained no losses in the first organized Texas Militia action in Austin’s colony.6

  The roots of the Texas Rangers can be traced to both Spanish/Mexican and anglo influences. Alcalde John Tumlinson and Captain Kuykendall proposed to Governor Trespalacios in early spring 1823 that a more permanently manned company be stationed at the mouth of the Colorado River to construct blockhouses or fortifications to protect supplies and new colonists arriving by ship. They recommended for its commander Moses Morrison, an Old Three Hundred bachelor settler who had recently been elected as a lieutenant in the militia. On May 5, 1823, Lieutenant Morrison mustered in his first ten men, apparently unable to raise his allotted fifteen men even with the promise of pay. It was the first standing militia command of Austin’s first colony and as such performed as had earlier rangers of English colonial groups, who “ranged” the frontier as partisan fighters separate from any regular army or militia unit.7

  Morrison’s men spent much of their time on the Colorado River trying to find enough food to sustain themselves. They returned to their settlement in August to find that alcalde John Tumlinson had been murdered by Karankawa and Waco Indians on July 6 while en route to San Antonio. His nineteen-year-old son, John Jackson Tumlinson Jr., raised a posse that tracked down a band of thirteen Wacos camped above the present town of Columbus. Captain Tumlinson’s younger brother Joseph killed the first Indian and the remainder of the company dispatched all but one of the remainder.8

  John Tumlinson Jr., no doubt feeling great anger for the murder of his father, would become one of the foremost ranger leaders and Indian fighters of the early years of Texas. Moses Morrison’s original ranging unit, promised fifteen dollars per month in land from Stephen Austin’s personal holdings, had disbanded by the fall. The militia system would continue for the colonists, aided by a new Mexican national law of April 1823 that made every male citizen between the ages of eighteen and fifty subject to such service. In the ensuing years, Austin’s colony consisted of six militia districts. Representatives met in August 1826 and they drew up a plan for a Ranger company of twenty to thirty mounted men. Each landowner would serve for a month, or furnish a substitute, for every half league of land owned.9

  Militia companies fought a number of small battles with Karankawas and other tribes during the first years of Austin’s colonization. John Tumlinson took part in another Indian offensive in 1826 against a party of sixteen Tawakoni Indians who had stolen horses from the settlements. The riflemen caught the Tawakoni camp by surprise, killing or wounding most of the Indians. Aside from the brief forays into the wilderness to pursue marauding Indians, the colonists did not keep constantly manned ranging companies in service during this time. The next exception to this rule occurred in January 1827, when Colonel Austin marched his militia out to Nacogdoches to maintain order during the Fredonian Rebellion, a dispute between the Mexican government and local settlers regarding land grants. During his absence, Austin ordered Captain Abner Kuykendall and eight other men “to range the country” between the Brazos and Colorado rivers along the San Antonio Road. Kuykendall’s rangers were short-lived as the rebels holed up in the Old Stone Fort in Nacogdoches fled when Colonel Austin’s militia and Mexican soldiers arrived in town.10

  The 1826 Fredonian Rebellion was but one of several sparks that would lead to rising tensions between the Mexican government and the new colonists, who were increasingly desirous of independence. Two other major events occurred in the coastal settlement of Anahuac, one in 1832 and one in 1835. The town was named by Colonel John (Juan) Davis Bradburn, a Virginia-born mercenary who had earned his commission while fighting for Mexican independence. Bradburn was ordered by Commandant General Manuel de Mier y Terán to erect a Mexican garrison and customs house on the northeastern edge of Galveston Bay.

  Bradburn was placed at Anahuac to enforce the collection of duties and to help control the increased smuggling of slaves, goods, and illegal immigrants into Texas. He created great tensions among the local settlers by refusing to allow Mexican authorities to issue settlers’ titles and by collecting the resented customs, even though the exemption from paying such tariffs granted to Austin’s colonists had expired. Among the leaders opposing the actions of Bradburn in Anahuac were attorneys Patrick Jack and William Barret Travis, who were both arrested in 1832 for organizing a militia company and acting in such a manner as to incite a rebellion.

  Colonel Bradburn announced that Jack and Travis would be given a military trial in Matamoros, three hundred miles away in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. Some 160 enraged Anglo colonists from Austin’s colony organized and marched toward Anahuac, led by Frank Johnson and “Three-Legged Willie” Williamson. The two prisoners were bound and staked to the ground as Johnson’s party approached. Bradburn threatened to have Travis and Jack shot if t
he colonists opened fire. Travis, a twenty-three-year-old lawyer who had abandoned his wife, son, and unborn daughter to depart for Texas in 1830, was prepared to die. His hands bound over his knees, he shouted to Johnson’s men to attack the fort and let him die like a man if need be.11

  Johnson’s men had captured nineteen of Bradburn’s cavalrymen en route to Anahuac, planning to exchange them for the handful of men that Bradburn had arrested. Travis and Jack survived the tense face-off that day when both sides stood down, but Johnson’s rebels clashed with Bradburn’s forces over the next few days at Anahuac and at Velasco, seventy miles down the Gulf Coast. Colonel José de las Piedras, Bradburn’s immediate supervisor, arrived from Nacogdoches and negotiated a settlement in which Bradburn was removed from command. Jack and Travis were released on July 2, seven weeks after being imprisoned.

  Travis thereafter moved inland to San Felipe de Austin, using his new celebrity to build a healthy legal profession. He used his wealth to buy up great quantities of land and dress himself in fine clothes. He was a ladies’ man, but he soon fell in love with a young woman named Rebecca Cummings, whom he told he would marry once he could properly divorce his wife in Alabama. Before any of this could be carried out, Travis became engaged in the second big disturbance at Anahuac in the spring of 1835.

  Another company of Mexican troops sent to garrison the fort at Anahuac had incited inevitable clashes between citizens and soldiers. Merchant Andrew Briscoe, a friend of Travis, was jailed on suspicions of smuggling. A secret war party met in San Felipe, and they elected William Travis to lead a force to bust Briscoe from jail. He was joined by two dozen armed men who used the password slogan “victory or death.” They sailed into Galveston Bay on a chartered sloop on which was mounted a six-pound cannon. Travis’s rebels announced their arrival at Anahuac by firing a cannon shot on the late afternoon of June 27.

  Travis and his company rowed ashore and demanded that Captain Antonio Tenorio and his forty-four men surrender. The Mexicans were paroled after pledging to leave Texas, and Travis returned to San Felipe to find that several Texian communities, fearful of reprisals, had condemned his actions. He used the local newspaper to communicate his defense, but instead was faced with orders issued in August by the Mexican president for the arrest of Frank Johnson, Robert Williamson, and Travis.

  Travis avoided arrest for the time, spending his energy at whipping up rebellious sentiment among his influential friends. Upon hearing that two hundred soldados would be garrisoned in San Felipe within a few weeks, Travis wrote, “We shall give them hell if they come.”12

  THE PRESIDENT OF MEXICO was more than willing to give hell right back to Travis and any other colonial rebels.

  The leader of the newly independent Mexican nation was hailed as a patriot. Antonio López de Santa Anna Pérez de Lebrón, a master showman, was a thirty-eight-year-old hero of the revolution in which Mexico secured its independence from Spain in 1821. Santa Anna had been born into a criollo (persons born in the New World to Spanish-born parents) middle-class family and had received only limited schooling. He found his calling in the military, where he was cited for bravery and was promoted to brigadier general by 1821.

  At five feet ten inches, Santa Anna was taller than the average Mexican of his time and he possessed the looks and confidence to impress women. His military record also impressed his countrymen, who appointed him military governor of Yucatán. Following the Mexican Revolution, Santa Anna retired to civilian life and became the civil governor of Veracruz. One of his great strengths was in his ability to pull an army together quickly in times of crisis, as evidenced by his defeat in 1829 of a 2,600-man Spanish invasion force in the coastal city of Tampico. Santa Anna emerged as a national hero, shifted his former allegiances to the liberals fighting for the establishment of a republic, and was elected president of Mexico in April 1833. He allowed his vice president to largely run the country during the next year but he seized control in April 1834 with a vengeance. President Santa Anna overthrew the constitutional government and replaced the Federal Constitution of 1824 with his own laws, upsetting Anglos and liberal Americans alike. Santa Anna called for greatly reducing the independent state militias in favor of his regular military, which backed his dictatorial style command.13

  Almost half of Mexico’s nineteen states expressed their outrage, including the state of Coahuila y Tejas, in which Austin’s Colony had been established. Most notable of those opposing Santa Anna’s new regime were the citizens of Zacatecas, who refused to disband their large, well-trained militia. In April 1835, President Santa Anna led a four-thousand-man army north from Mexico City to Zacatecas and fought a bloody battle. Santa Anna’s centralists suffered only a hundred casualties, while the Zacatecan militarists incurred as many as twelve hundred killed.

  Santa Anna returned to Mexico City a great hero, winding through several cities en route to celebrate his great victory over the rebels. When the alarming news of his butchery reached the colonists of Texas, some settlements began forming militia companies and Committees of Safety in fear of what this powerful leader might do to those born on foreign soil. Convention leaders meeting in October 1832 and in April 1833 drafted a constitution for statehood, electing empresario Stephen Austin to deliver the petitions to the Mexican government. Austin arrived in Mexico City in July, and eventually succeeded in persuading officials to repeal an April 1830 ban on immigration into Texas from the United States. Santa Anna, however, refused to approve state government for Texas. Austin was arrested on his way back home in January 1834, under suspicion of trying to incite insurrection in Texas.

  Austin was imprisoned and shuffled from one jail to another until December 1834. He was released on bond but was not allowed to leave Mexico until July 1835. He met with President Santa Anna at his hacienda outside Veracruz before departing, whereupon the famed general helped clear up Austin’s permission papers. Santa Anna promised to visit Texas the following March as a friend, but the “Father of Texas” had good reason to doubt the good intentions of the self-proclaimed “Napoleon of the West.”14

  Colonel Austin returned to Texas in late August 1835 after an absence of twenty-eight months. On September 8, he gave a notable speech at Brazoria to endorse a general convention, or consultation, that was to meet in October. The seeds of rebellion had taken strong root by this time, and events that would forever change the fate of Texas transpired before the convention could be seated.

  3

  “COME AND TAKE IT”

  IT ONLY TAKES A spark to ignite a powder keg. For the already aroused Texan colonists, it took only a beating and a little bronze cannon to start a revolution.

  The residents of Gonzales—the capital of empresario Green DeWitt’s colony and the westernmost point of Anglo-American settlement—had shown loyalty to Mexico throughout the summer of 1835. This trust was shattered on September 10, when twenty-five Mexican soldiers appropriated the store of merchant Adam Zumwalt to quarter for the night. Thirty-two-year-old Jesse McCoy, recently appointed second lieutenant of the town militia, attempted to make his way into Zumwalt’s storeroom. The son of a former Indian fighter from Missouri, McCoy had arrived in Texas and settled on the east side of the Guadalupe River south of Gonzales. Without provocation, one of the Mexican soldiers began beating the young militiaman with the butt of his Brown Bess musket.1

  McCoy survived, bloodied and badly injured. News of the beating spread quickly through the settlements of the colony. Weeks later, the Mexican military commander at San Antonio, Colonel Domingo de Ugartechea, sent a Corporal DeLeon and several soldiers to request the town’s cannon from alcalde Andrew Ponton. The old cannon was a bronze six-pounder, crudely mounted on a makeshift wooden caisson, presented to the town in 1831 by Mexico for local defense against Indians. Ponton found that his townspeople had no intentions of handing over the cannon to DeLeon upon his arrival on September 25. The small party of Mexican soldiers was disarmed and marched out of town. Gonzales citizens then moved their families t
ogether for safety, consolidated weapons, and dispatched messengers through the surrounding settlements.

  Colonel Ugartechea responded to this act of defiance by sending Lieutenant Francisco Castaneda and his hundred-man Alamo Presidial Company to Gonzales to demand the brass weapon. They had orders to arrest alcalde Ponton and anyone else who resisted. The soldiers reached the west bank of the rain-swollen Guadalupe River on September 29, where they were met by a force of eighteen armed colonists. The Texians had removed the ferry and all the boats to the east side of the stream. This force of freedom fighters—which included such noteworthy names as George Washington Davis, William W. Bateman, Almeron Dickinson, and Captain Albert Martin—was later immortalized as the “Old Gonzales Eighteen.”2

  Castaneda yelled across the river, demanding the cannon. Captain Martin, leader of the eighteen rebels, shouted back that their alcalde was not available until the next day. The hundred Mexican soldiers therefore bivouacked three hundred yards from the fording site on the Guadalupe. The Gonzales colonists had no intentions of handing over their cannon. Martin then sent three of his men to haul the artillery piece to one of Davis’s peach orchards to bury it. Express riders raced to spread the call for help in the settlements of Mina, San Felipe, Columbus, and Washington while Martin stalled.