The first missionary effort in Texas came in 1690, following the furor caused by La Salle's landing at Matagorda Bay. It was abortive. But its results were studiously ignored in later years in the ecclesiastical councils where concepts, not experience, remained dominant. But in its appalling prophecy for later years, it is worth exploring.
De León returned to East Texas in 1690 with a large body of soldiers and priests, determined to found a permanent colony to halt further French exploration. He constructed a log mission, San Francisco de los Tejas (from the name by which the Spaniard mistakenly called the confederacy of the Caddoan Hasinai), in just three days. This structure was raised on the Trinity River, about fifty miles south of Nacogdoches, deep in the pine forests.
The Hasinai had many villages in the vicinity, where they lived in relative comfort, planting corn and vegetables in spring, hunting and fishing in the rich region in other seasons. The Hasinai lived a secure, basically lazy life. They did not often venture out on the dangerous plains to the west, and they were the most numerous tribe in Texas. They were raided now and then, but their existence was hardly in question. Horsemen did not care to plunge into the dense, dank forests; Hasinai and the Plains tribes lived in utterly different worlds, which hardly impinged.
Secure and basically unwarlike, the Hasinai welcomed the Spaniards into their country. Hundreds came to watch the priests dedicate the mission, and to celebrate the colorful Mass. A people with a strong, but rudimentary, sense of pageantry, they were impressed. They listened gravely to the priests, presented the soldiers with corn and other foods, and promised to give thought to the matter of becoming mission Indians.
But they gave it interminable thought, which made the dedicated religious orders restive. Hasinai seemed more amused than frightened at the idea of year-round work in the fields, and at the argument that they should cease being warriors altogether, now that the soldiers were on hand to protect them. They lived in an essentially timeless world, and while they agreed the Spanish arguments had merit, they appeared in no haste to begin making changes.
Now, a difficult kind of problem arose, complicating relations. The Spanish soldiery, many months on the march and away from the comforts of New Spain, began instructing the Caddoan girls in things other than the Christian faith. This put the garrison in bad odor not only with the Indians but with the friars, and there were many bitter recriminations.
Then, the Spanish unintentionally transmitted a lethal epidemic to the neighboring villages. What the Europeans called normal childhood diseases, such as measles, were fatal pestilences to all Texas Indians. The nearby Hasinai were decimated. The survivors simply avoided the mission, and those who had congregated melted back into the forests.
The priests requested the soldiery to bring them back, but now the soldiers did some procrastinating of their own. The Caddoans were getting restive, and they began to steal horses and cattle from the garrison.
The departure of the friendly Indians precipitated crisis. Not only was the purpose of the mission failing, but the mission was dependent upon the natives for its food. The supply bases in New Spain were many hundreds of miles to the south. The priests' job did not include farming for the garrison, and most of the soldiers had entered the King's service precisely to avoid that kind of labor. The military grew increasingly unruly and angry, and as the religious reported, "arrogant and intractable." They wanted to go out and skewer a few of the Hasinai to teach the rest hospitality.
While the two groups of Spanish elite argued bitterly over ways and means, the Caddoans died of disease or disappeared. The French menace, meanwhile, seemed to have evaporated. In 1692, by full agreement between the religious orders and the military, the mission of San Francisco de los Tejas was abandoned, and the Spanish marched back to Mexico. Both parties forgot about Texas for more than twenty years.
Again, it was the French who incited action. St. Denis's appearance in New Spain may have interested his father-in-law, Captain Ramón, in potential smuggling profits, but it stirred the Marqués de Valero, the Viceroy, into calling again upon the orders to reenter Texas. Again, the Crown raised soldiers, put up money, and authorized an extensive colonization project.
This time the Spanish presence was to be permanent. A great semicircle of presidio-missions was planned to stretch up from northern Mexico, generally reaching across the middle area of Texas on a line from Laredo to the Sabine River. Both the Great Plains and the fever coast were avoided by the Spanish; both were unhealthy. At this time, the Gulf Coast of northern Mexico was not settled by the Spanish, for climatic reasons, and the impetus of Spanish colonization came up through central Mexico to skirt the central plateau of Texas along the Balcones Escarpment.
One mission was planned and planted on the north Texas coast, at the mouth of the Lavaca, with two purposes, to reduce the Karankawas, and to provide the Spanish with a settlement near the sea. This site, however, was quickly moved inland, though still in Karankawa country.
Three missions were organized for the Hasinai area. The Caddoans were the most civilized of Texas Indians, and therefore held the most promise for quick reduction; also, their territory overlapped that of the French in Louisiana. East Texas required greater attention.
A mission was sited in the Tonkawa territory, midway between the East Texas presidios and the way-station mission of San Antonio de Valero, built in 1718 near the headwaters of the San Antonio River, some 150 miles northeast of the borders of Coahuila. The San Antonio mission was not at first considered important, except as a feeder-station and backup for the main effort further east.
Two more missions, Rosario and Refugio, were planted in south Texas, along the crescent coastal bend.
The planning showed that each known Texas tribe (Caddoans, Tonkawas, Karankawas, and Coahuiltecans) was considered in the scheme of things. At this time, in the first years of the 18th century, there was no real contact between the Spanish and the Apaches of the higher plains in Texas.
Although many of them were pushed with great persistence, backbreaking labor, and heartbreak, all but one of these missions failed utterly. Each had a detailed and sometimes romantic history. But in the sweep of important events, they can be bypassed briefly: none achieved its primary mission of reducing any important Indian tribe, or increasing Spanish power.
The three missions among the Hasinai were balked by two problems. The Caddoans refused to adopt Christianity and Spanish serfdom of their own will, and the French, with considerable cleverness, gave them both arguments and the power to resist. French traders freely sold the Hasinai firearms, and the Spanish military always decided against trying to congregate the confederacies by force. This trade greatly embittered the Spanish, whose policy was always to deny Indians firearms, even their allies. But there was nothing they could do about it.
So long as St. Denis lived, he exercised great influence over the Hasinai, and kept them from adopting Spanish ways. Afterward, other Frenchmen took up the task. But meanwhile, ominously for the Caddoans, both French and Spanish diseases were debilitating the sedentary tribes. There was no stopping the spread of measles, smallpox, and other European maladies so long as foreigners moved among the Indians. By the middle of the 18th century, the Caddoans were in rapid decline, and by the end of the century they had almost disappeared. Unwittingly, and certainly unwillingly, the good friars helped exterminate the people they had come to save.
The Tonkawa mission never attracted any Indians at all. The nomadic Tonkawas ignored it, and the soldiers with the mission avoided locating Tonkawas for the padres to proselyte.
The two missions on the south brought a few of the grubbing Coahuiltecan bands together. But these Indians tended to stay so long as they were fed or offered gifts. When they were put to work, they either died out quickly or ran away.
The Karankawa mission, Espíritu Santo, actually persuaded a number of the fierce coastal tribe to gather about the fort. This attention, however, was rewarded by the now usual lethal infusion
of epidemics. The Karankawas fled back into their coastal marshes, and killed any Spaniards who came after them. The Karankawas ever afterward avoided all contact with Europeans, but they had already received a fatal blow. European disease had been introduced, and, like the Caddoans, the Karankawa numbers were soon in rapid decline.
In east Texas, especially at Nacogdoches, across from Natchitoches (the French rendition of the same Hasinai name), tiny Spanish settlements did take hold around the forts. But these were based on Spanish, or Spanish-Mexican, settlers who emigrated to them and built small, struggling communities. Without an infusion of Hispanicized Indians, these could not grow large, and they were crippled by the Spanish intransigence toward any kind of legitimate trade with their French neighbors. This Spanish determination to direct all commerce in Texas back toward New Spain, hundreds of miles away across unsettled and savage territory, made any kind of economic growth around the presidio-missions impossible.
Had Spanish settlement in Texas been allowed to seek and make contact with its natural economic partner, Louisiana, history might have been somewhat different. But the Spanish wanted the best of all possible worlds: a purely Hispanic province of Texas, from which all profit accrued to their own Church and State.
The tiny mission of San Antonio de Valero, founded in the same year the French began New Orleans, developed differently from the failures all around it. San Antonio de Valero (named for the Viceroy) started with certain advantages. One was its location, the closest of all the Spanish missions to New Spain, only 150 miles away from border to border, though in real terms—settlement to settlement—this distance was doubled.
San Antonio lay at the headwaters of the San Antonio River, in a region that rose up out of the dusty, cactus-studded lower Sonoran plain like a green oasis. A Spanish friar described it eloquently as "the best site in the world, with good and abundant irrigation water, rich lands for pasture, plentiful building stone, and excellent timber." The area lay just below the Balcones Escarpment, which gave it several advantages; a mild, dry, healthful climate, with pleasant winters and unhumid, quite bearable summers, somewhat similar in fact to the climate of Spain; and it was the hunting ground or preserve of no powerful tribe of Indians. It was the more or less permanent territory of a Coahuiltecan band, but Coahuiltecans were no danger to Spanish friars.
With plenty of water, numerous groves of trees around the streams and springs, solid native limestone for building, and several miles of rolling, rich soil between the edge of the rocky Edwards Plateau on the north and the stretches of dry brasada to the south, the area at the headwaters of the San Antonio was a sheer delight to the Spaniards. They never intended San Antonio, with its admittedly sparse native population, to become the nucleus of their northernmost province, but it was no accident that this happened.
Although a Mass had been said in the area in 1692, the first permanent settlement began in 1718, when St. Denis and his bemused Spanish cohorts passed back through. A mission was established, to be a way station between New Spain and the East Texas missions that St. Denis inspired. The friars who founded San Antonio were Franciscans, but the mission itself did not begin there. The clergy, and the commission, had been moved around from several different sites in northern Mexico, called variously for St. Joseph and St. Francis, before the Marqués de Valero decided to dispatch them across the Bravo into Texas. In Mexico, the religious had picked up a considerable band of Coahuiltecans, of the same blood and language as the Texas tribe. These accompanied the mission to San Antonio de Valero. They gave the Franciscans an immediate advantage—they were already in business, with tame Indians, who could tell the others about the good things attending the Spanish-Indian way of life. The partly Hispanicized Coahuiltecans did bring some others into the new mission.
In the furor that followed St. Denis's arrest and escape from Mexico in 1721, Valero took action that strengthened his namesake mission. He incorporated the area around San Antonio into the province of Coahuila—thus removing it entirely from New Philippines, or Texas—and sent a force of 54 soldiers to build a strong fort, or presidio, nearby. With the soldiers also arrived a total of four Spaniards, who came north to stay, as settlers.
Nine men and a corporal were assigned to guard the mission, while the rest of the soldiery began, with no great enthusiasm, to erect a stone fort, a few miles away. They named it Fort San Antonio de Béjar (alternately Béxar), after the Duke de Béjar, a brother of the Marqués de Valero, killed fighting the Turks. (All Spanish names in the area were to include that of St. Anthony of Padua, because the first Mass said by Spaniards here was dedicated to this Italian.) As a matter of fact, during the next century this fort was never completed, though the friars, with much greater zeal and energy, put up a series of stone missions along the San Antonio River.
The San Antonio complex, mission and fort, continued to collect people from here and there. By 1726, there were two hundred men, women, and children in the area, not counting Indians. Those Indians who had come in from the alternately hot and cold drab Sonoran plain were progressing nicely, or so it seemed. They showed no great interest in steady work, and some of their free-and-easy sexual customs were distressing to the stern padres, but, as one said, Rome was not built in a day.
The Franciscans felt so optimistic—they alone of all the Texas missions were going to meet their ten-year deadline—that they petitioned the Viceroy and King Philip V to send settlers into the country, to found a true Spanish town to grow up contemporaneously with the adjoining fort and mission.
What occurred in San Antonio from 1718 onward is vital to the understanding of all Spanish-Mexican history in Texas. With the hindsight of history, it is easy to mark the mission concept of colonization as a failure; but what took place in the San Antonio region for the next century showed all the virtues, and all the inherent faults, of the entire Spanish colonial effort in North America.
By the 18th century, the Spanish religious orders in the New World had had long experience with the Spanish military establishment, and also a long period of trouble in the presidio-mission colonization of north Mexico. All the lessons of the East Texas fiasco of 1690–92 were not forgotten. When the Franciscans at San Antonio de Valero wrote the Viceroy requesting a Spanish garrison, they made it very clear they wanted a particular kind of soldier for the Texas mission frontier. He must be of the pure Spanish race (this should not be laid wholly to prejudice; the mixed bloods at this time had an anomalous social and legal position in the New World, and could not be expected to make the best soldiers); of irreproachable moral character, and married. Families should accompany the troops. The friars did not want more mixed bloods bred on the frontier, especially out of their Indian charges. They also specified they wanted no lobos or coyotes, nor any mestizos.
Settlers sent from Spain should also be of high character; otherwise, they would have a bad effect on the new Christians.
Of course, it was quite beyond the powers of the Marqués de Valero to find a garrison wholly composed of men of high moral character, in New Spain or anywhere else. All Mexican soldiery was now mercenary, usually having joined the ranks to escape some worse fate, such as hanging or hard work, and by this time the martial ardor of the gentlemen of Spain had largely cooled. The ranks of the viceregal army were filled with a combination of gutter-Spanish and "so-called Spaniards"—the Marqués de Rubí's bitter phrase for Mexicans who were certified as Spaniards. The infusion of Indian blood was very noticeable; and much worse, the discipline of Spain was considerably less than that of other European powers. The conquistadores had been an undisciplined lot, but they made up for it with fierceness, fanaticism, and a real taste for war. Walter Prescott Webb compared the blood of 18th-century Mexican soldiery to ditchwater, which may be going too far; but certainly, the cutting edge of Spanish fury that had accompanied Coronado was gone.
The record shows the Franciscans of San Antonio de Valero were much chagrined by the quality of the garrison they got. They informed the
head of their order in Mexico that half of the soldiers arrived unmarried, and most of those who were had conveniently left their families behind. Furthermore, there were definitely "half-breeds, outlaws, and no-goods" among them.
The troops themselves were hardly enchanted. The padres refused to allow the mission Indians to perform services for the garrison; in fact, they banned all contact. Denied labor, the garrison never did get a presidio built—while the missions themselves put up impressive and enduring stone edifices—and when the Franciscans moved San Antonio across the river to give the Indian women more security, relations completely deteriorated.
Meanwhile, the Coahuiltecan Indians, who at first had been amenable and shown so much promise, became a great exasperation to the strong-willed, hard-working friars. The Coahuiltecans did not resist conversion, and while some ran away, most were willing to congregate. They were placed under the stern Spanish-Catholic moral code; the men were taught to hoe the fields, and the women practical handicrafts. The Franciscans were men of energy, and no little talent—but from their letters and reports, it is apparent that the Indians simply could develop no initiative, or any joy in their work. At all times, to get anything done, friars had to stand over them, and punishments for malfeasance or laziness were frequent. The Coahuiltecans could understand punishment, but they seemed unable to grasp the need, or rationale, for constant, disciplined labor. From time immemorial, the tribes had eaten well in fat years, starved in the lean. Ten years—or two hundred years—were too few to erase Coahuiltecan tribal memory or to bring them into agricultural civilization. The paternalism of the padres was also deadly—but this was second nature, both to the Church and Spanish nature, and no Franciscan recognized it as such.
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