Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  AUSTIN’S IMMEDIATE OBJECTIVE WAS TO SEE IF THE ACCEPTANCE tendered by the government of New Spain to Moses Austin applied to him as well. He prepared the arguments he would make to the Spanish governor in San Antonio. But before he reached the town he learned that the Spanish no longer governed Texas. Mexico’s war of independence had finally succeeded; Mexico now governed itself.

  If Stephen Austin had been looking for an excuse to drop the Texas project, this was it. There was no assurance the new government of independent Mexico would see Texas as the Spanish had. Nor was it clear who constituted the new government of Mexico. The aftermath of revolution is often uncertain. Austin could reflect that the United States had swapped one national government for another within just a few years of victory in its own war of independence.

  Yet by this time Austin was not looking for an excuse to go back to his law studies. His father’s debt still loomed, for one thing. For another, something of the family ambition had taken hold of him. As he rode across Texas, he imagined himself becoming a great man, the founder of a colony. And what a colony it might be! Texas was lush and sprawling; a whole country might be made of it. He, Stephen Fuller Austin, could be its founding father.

  He proceeded to San Antonio, where the governor who had negotiated with his father remained in place. The governor initially encouraged Austin to believe that the deal was still on, but as news of political turmoil in Mexico City arrived, he waffled. He told Austin that the only way to be confident in moving forward was for Austin to go to Mexico City himself.

  Austin’s spirits sagged. He had come seven hundred miles already; another nine hundred to Mexico City was enough to dismay anyone. But concluding he had no choice, he set out, teaching himself Spanish from a language primer along the way.

  Just south of the Nueces River he encountered the Indians he had heard much about. “Fifty Comanches charged upon us a little before sunrise,” he wrote in his diary. Austin was traveling with two other men, but the pair were retrieving the horses from an overnight graze. The Comanches were upon him before he could react. “They surrounded me in an instant and took possession of every article we had.” A few moments later his companions returned—as prisoners of other Comanches.

  Austin’s Texas project might have ended at that point, with his death. But he wouldn’t die without a fight, or rather an argument. “I then expostulated with them for treating their friends the Americans in such a manner,” Austin recorded. He knew that the Comanches had encountered Americans primarily as traders—suppliers of guns, knives and other items useful against the Spanish. And they had indeed treated the Americans as friends. These Comanches had mistaken Austin and his companions for Spaniards. “When they found there were no Spaniards with me, they gave us back our saddle bags, saddles, and everything else except four blankets, a bridle, my grammar and several other little things and all our provisions.” Even so, Austin didn’t count on the next band of Comanches to make the same distinction. He sought safety in larger numbers. “I have waited for the company that is going on tomorrow.”

  He eventually reached the capital city of the new country, whose leaders couldn’t decide whether to create an independent monarchy or a republic. Their indecision postponed any decision on Austin’s project; not until nearly a year had elapsed did he receive the necessary approvals. Even then he wasn’t sure how long they would last. “The revolution is complete,” he wrote. “All is quiet.” But perhaps only for the moment. “I will not vouch for its being permanent,” he said of the calm.

  12

  TEXAS WILL BE LOST

  WILLIAM DEWEES WAS ONE OF AUSTIN’S FIRST TEXAS colonists. A financial panic in 1819 had sent waves of foreclosures rolling across America, displacing many thousands of farmers, mechanics and others who now hoped for better luck in the West. Dewees left Tennessee for Arkansas, where he contracted malaria and alternately sweated and shivered for six months. He joined a band of buffalo hunters on the southern plains, where he was nearly killed by Osage Indians, then by cold and finally by rotgut liquor. Multiple informants told him that Texas was the coming thing for a young man like himself, and he decided to give it a try. He had already crossed the international frontier when he learned of the colony Stephen Austin was planting. He went directly there.

  “I have just had the pleasure of spending a few days in the company of Stephen F. Austin,” Dewees wrote in his journal. “He was on this river”—the Colorado—“with a surveyor, having lots laid off from a tract of land that he had just located for the purpose of building a town, about eight miles above the crossing of the old Atascocito road. But he has since abandoned it, and located his town, which he calls San Felipe de Austin, on the Brazos River.”

  Dewees took up one of Austin’s Colorado River tracts. The living was hard at first. “There have been a great many new settlers come on this fall,” Dewees wrote in December 1823, “and those who have not been accustomed to hunting in the woods for support are obliged to suffer. Were it not for a few of us boys who have no families, their wives and children would suffer much more than they now do; in fact I fear some of them would starve.”

  Things got worse as winter arrived. “Game is now so scarce that we often hunt all day for a deer or a turkey, and return at night empty handed,” Dewees wrote. “It would make your heart sick, to see the poor little half-naked children, who have eaten nothing during the day, watch for the return of the hunters at night. As soon as they catch the first glimpse of them, they eagerly run to meet them, and learn if they have been successful in their hunt. If the hunters return with a deer or a turkey, the children are almost wild with delight, while on the other hand, they suddenly stop in their course, their countenances fall, the deep bitter tears well up in their eyes and roll down their pale cheeks.”

  Hunger drove some of the settlers back to the United States. Those who remained had to manage another peril. Austin’s deal with the Mexican government made no provision for Indian approval of the new colony, and in fact the tribes in the vicinity took sharp exception to the whole project. Like most other tribes, they had tolerated, even encouraged, outsiders to come to their land as traders: transients who brought useful goods and left. Settlers were a different matter. They came in much larger numbers than the traders, and they occupied land the Indians considered their own. Moreover, precisely because of their larger numbers and their designs on the land, they were harder to intimidate.

  The Karankawas, the dominant group on the Colorado and Brazos, certainly tried. “They are an exceedingly fierce and warlike tribe, and also perfect cannibals,” Dewees remarked of the Karankawas. “Their weapons are bows and arrows; each man carries a bow of precisely his own height, and so very strong that scarcely any American can bend it. They can shoot with their bows and arrows one hundred yards with as great accuracy as an American can with his rifle, and with an equally deadly aim.”

  Dewees got his first taste of battle after a settler named Brotherton staggered into one of the cabins with a Karankawa arrow in his back, and told of an attack that had killed two settlers and wounded one other. “We immediately raised a force of fourteen men,” Dewees recalled. “At midnight we arrived at the place where Brotherton had been wounded. We there dismounted, and five of us went to search out the encampment of the Indians.” They found it in a canebrake, gathered the others and crept forward. “As silently as possible, we crawled into a thicket about ten steps behind the camps, placing ourselves about four or five steps apart, in a sort of half-circle, and completely cutting off their retreat from the swamp.” They waited till dawn. “When the light was sufficient for us to see clear, we could not see anything of the Indians. We now commenced talking, in order to draw them from their wigwams; in this we succeeded. They rushed out as if greatly alarmed. We fired upon them and killed nine upon the spot. The rest attempted to escape, but having no way to run, except into the open prairie, we rushed upon them, and killed all but two, who had made their escape, though wounded, after the first fire
. The number killed, nineteen.”

  Dewees’s battle wasn’t over. “Moved somewhat by a spirit of retaliation, I concluded I would take the scalp of an Indian home as a trophy.” He discovered that scalping was an art, and rather than slicing the head skin neatly, he was reduced to sawing it. His courage failed. “The skin of his head was so thick, and the sight so ghastly, that the very thought of it almost makes the blood curdle in my veins,” he said decades later.

  AUSTIN’S COLONY SURVIVED THE HUNGER AND THE INDIAN attacks. The settlers’ crops took hold, the Karankawas were kept at bay, and more settlers followed Dewees and the first arrivals to the banks of the Brazos and Colorado rivers. Within a few years a prosperous community emerged.

  Austin and his colonists, and settlers who joined other Texas colonies on terms similar to Austin’s, owed their prosperity to the government of Mexico, as most of them acknowledged. The Mexican government had given them land—far more land than most of them would ever have acquired in the United States. At a time when a farm in Tennessee might encompass a quarter-section, or 160 acres, the standard grant in Austin’s colony was a league, or more than 4,000 acres. A common concern of farmers in America was that their children, upon reaching adulthood, would have to move away to find farms of their own. Lack of land was one of the principal forces driving America’s westward movement. In Texas, a patriarch had land enough for all his children and their children. Mexican law made princes of many who might have been paupers in the United States.

  But not all the Americans who came to Texas did so under the auspices of Mexican law. By handfuls at first, then by scores, then by hundreds and thousands, illegal immigrants poured into Texas. They seized whatever land parcels weren’t occupied and made them their homes. Mexican officials were few in Texas, and they were distracted by the turbulence that continued to roil Mexican politics. The squatters could be in place for months or years before the government took notice. By then the squatters thought of the land as their own, and they didn’t hesitate to defend it with deadly force.

  Within several years of Austin’s arrival in Texas, the situation in Texas was spinning out of Mexico’s control. The government appointed a commission to examine the Texas question; at its head was Manuel de Mier y Terán, a general in the Mexican army, a former government minister and member of the Mexican congress, an engineer and a scientist. Terán reached Texas in the spring of 1828 and spent the next several months traveling about the settled regions. He visited San Antonio, which remained thoroughly Mexican. But farther east the American influence took hold. His party crossed the Guadalupe River. “On the eastern bank of this river there are six wooden cabins, whose construction shows that those who live in them are not Mexicans,” Terán wrote. “Though the house is a single piece, it has two rooms, a high one and a low one. In the latter is found the storeroom and kitchen, whose chimney sticks up on the outside, and in the higher part are the bedroom and living room.”

  The Americans at first seemed standoffish. “I approached a cabin in hopes that its owner might offer me shelter, but it was in vain,” Terán wrote. “I learned later that the North Americans are not used to making such invitations. One arrives quite naturally, sure of being well received. But if one stops at the door, no one encourages him to come inside.”

  Certain other Americans were as pleasant as could be. Terán’s party crossed the Colorado River on a ferry owned by an American named Beeson. “He is quite urbane, his family very honorable,” Terán noted. “Their services were very helpful to us.” Beeson’s wife had learned enough Spanish to explain how well Texas suited them. They had built a cabin and expanded their herd of cattle. “Madame says they have 1,200 pesos in savings. They have been on this land for five years, and they speak with great satisfaction of its fertility and good climate. In a word, they seem happy.”

  Terán got to Austin’s colony in late April. He was highly impressed with the energy and productivity of the immigrants, reckoning the colony’s annual corn crop at 64,000 bushels and the cotton crop at 240,000 pounds. Most of the former and essentially all of the latter were exported, as were mules that the Americans raised for sale in the West Indies. Terán had expected to see self-sufficient farms; what he found instead was a hive of commercial enterprise.

  Terán asked the Americans what had brought them to Texas. Many mentioned the Texas climate. “To the north the freezing temperatures and snows create obstacles to their work for several months and force them to labor harder. In Texas they work year-round and therefore in greater moderation. In winter they clear and prepare the land that they will plant in the spring.” Others referred to the Mexican markets for the crops they raised. “In the north”—of Mexico—“agricultural production outstrips demand, and the prices are exceedingly low. The colonists hope for greater appreciation in the ports and on the coast of Mexico.” The Americans had big goals. “They hope to take over the supply of flour, grains, and meats in the ports.”

  The residents of Austin’s colony had the makings of solid Mexican citizens, Terán allowed, even if they clung to their American ways. He couldn’t say the same about the Americans he encountered farther east. Nacogdoches marked the beginning of a kind of no-man’s-land that stretched to the Sabine River and American territory. The inhabitants put even Terán’s party of soldiers on guard. “A great number of the foreigners who have entered the frontier are vicious and wild men with evil ways,” Terán wrote. “Some of them are fugitive criminals from the neighboring republic; within our borders they create disturbances and even criminal acts.” The United States and Mexico had not worked out border enforcement and extradition rules. “The inhabitants take advantage of their friends and companions to attack and to defend themselves and cross from one side to the other in order to escape punishment.”

  At Nacogdoches Terán reflected on what he had seen. “As one travels from Béxar”—San Antonio—“to this town, Mexican influence diminishes, so much so that it becomes clear that in this town that influence is almost nonexistent,” he wrote. “But where could such influence come from? Not from the population, because the ratio of the Mexican population to the foreign is one to ten; nor from its quality, because the population is precisely the contrary: the Mexicans of this town consist of what people everywhere call the abject class, the poorest and most ignorant.” The Americans in Nacogdoches operated an English-language school for their children. “The poor Mexicans neither have the resources to create schools, nor is there anyone to think about improving their institutions and their abject condition.” As a result, English had become the language of the region, and American influence appeared to be its future.

  So what was to be done with the American immigrants? How to stem the invasion? Terán saw no easy answers. “Nature tells them that the land is theirs,” Terán wrote, “because, in effect, everyone can appropriate what does not belong to anyone or what is not claimed by anyone. When the occasion arises, they will claim the irrefutable rights of first possession.” Terán acknowledged that the legal immigrants of Austin’s colony were a different sort than the illegals of the border region. But he wasn’t sure that this made the future of Mexican Texas any more secure. “I must say in all frankness that everyone I have talked to here who is aware of the state of the country and devoted to its preservation is convinced, and has convinced me, that these colonies, whose industriousness and economy receive such praise, will be the cause for the Mexican federation to lose Texas unless measures are taken soon.”

  What kind of measures? First, a stronger military presence. “On the frontier there are intrigues,” Terán wrote. And lest the intrigues become rebellions, Mexico needed more soldiers in Texas. Second, immigration should be suspended until it could be controlled. The border must be policed and illegal immigrants deported. Third, and most important, Mexico needed to make Texas truly Mexican, before the Americans made it irretrievably American. “The land of Texas, or at least its eastern part where its principal rivers begin to be navigable, should
be reserved for Mexican settlers,” Terán declared. He didn’t advocate removing legal immigrants like those in Austin’s colony, but any new settlers must come from Mexico, not from the United States. Terán proposed that the government provide incentives to attract five thousand Mexicans to the Trinity River, to act as a bulwark against the Americans.

  His plan would be expensive, Terán conceded. But he saw no other choice. If current trends persisted, Texas would be lost.

  13

  RUIN AND REDEMPTION

  SAM HOUSTON DID HIS BEST TO ENSURE THAT TEXAS WOULD be lost. Houston made it his life’s work to separate Texas from Mexico. At least he did so after his other life’s work failed. Born in Virginia, like Stephen Austin (and Joe Meek and Meriwether Lewis and William Clark: there was something in Virginia’s soil that propelled her sons in a westerly direction), Houston moved to Tennessee with his mother and eight siblings after his father’s death. Houston was fourteen. A tattered copy of the Iliad fell into his hands, inspiring romantic notions of great deeds. When romance collided with the reality of life behind a plow, Houston ran away from home and took up with a band of Cherokees. The leader of the band became his surrogate father; the Cherokee word for Raven became his adopted name.

  After a few years he returned to white society. America was going to war against Britain, and the country needed soldiers. Houston, a strapping fellow with a head and mane like a lion’s, answered the call, albeit as much for the pay, to retire some debts, as from patriotism. Yet he served with conspicuous courage, especially in the 1814 battle of Horseshoe Bend, where an army under Andrew Jackson defeated a faction of Creek Indians that had lately massacred hundreds of whites, including women and children, at Fort Mims in Mississippi Territory. Houston led a charge over a well-defended Creek rampart and was so badly wounded that the medics gave him up for dead and left him lying on the battlefield. Yet he survived, and crawled into camp the next day, to the amazement and chagrin of the medics. Andrew Jackson was impressed.