by H. W. Brands
Houston judged that the future of Texas would be decided not by Texans alone, but by the United States and Mexico. If he could lure Santa Anna east, into a clash with U.S. forces, the future of Texas would be secure. Houston’s aim all along had been to make Texas American; now it would have to become American by force of American arms, because of Texan arms there weren’t enough.
And so he retreated. His men complained. They called Houston a coward. They hadn’t joined his army to retreat, they said, but to fight. If Houston wouldn’t fight, they would fight without him. The civil officials of the Texas republic echoed the troops. David Burnet, the provisional president of the republic, sent Houston a blunt note: “Sir: The enemy are laughing you to scorn. You must fight them. You must retreat no farther. The country expects you to fight. The salvation of the country depends on you doing so.”
Houston continued to disagree, albeit silently. The salvation of the country depended on his not standing and fighting—and seeing his army destroyed. He continued to be outnumbered and outgunned. Salvation lay not on the Colorado or the Brazos, but on the Neches, in the arms of Andrew Jackson and the United States.
Houston’s men grew more mutinous by the day. The crisis came at a fork in the road the army was traveling. The left branch continued toward the Trinity River, Houston’s next goal. The right branch veered toward Harrisburg, where, according to recent intelligence, Santa Anna was headed with a flying column, hoping to capture the Texas government.
At the fork the men ignored Houston and went to the right.
Had Houston been Andrew Jackson, he would have shot the leaders of the mutiny. But he wasn’t Jackson, and Texas in 1836 wasn’t New Orleans in 1815. Discipline in the Texas army was nonexistent; the men did what they wanted, fought when they wanted, went home when they wanted.
Now they insisted on fighting, and Houston chose to make the best of it. Spurring his horse, he rode to the front of the column and led the men in the direction they had already decided to go.
They caught up with Santa Anna near the confluence of the San Jacinto River and Buffalo Bayou. Santa Anna, as scornful of the Americans as ever, let them come. He would complete his annihilation of the rebel army, and then proceed with the cleansing of Texas of all the Americans.
The two armies approached to within a mile of each other. Santa Anna, awaiting the arrival of an auxiliary column, let his men rest after an arduous march. Houston, sensing a lowering of the Mexican guard, ordered an afternoon assault.
The Texans slipped toward the Mexican camp, initially hidden by tall grass and a slight rise in the field between the two armies. At four hundred yards Houston gave the order to attack. His cannons blasted the Mexican position with shrapnel, and the men charged forward shouting, “Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!”
The Mexicans were nonplussed by the sudden assault. “I was in a deep sleep when I was awakened by the firing and noise,” Santa Anna acknowledged later. “I immediately perceived we were attacked, and had fallen into frightful disorder.” Pedro Delgado, one of Santa Anna’s lieutenants, remembered trying to control the men. “The utmost confusion prevailed,” Delgado said. “I saw our men flying in small groups, terrified, and sheltering themselves behind large trees. I endeavored to force some of them to fight, but all efforts were in vain—the evil was beyond remedy: they were a bewildered and panic-stricken herd.”
The Texans fought like furies, seeking vengeance for their fallen comrades. The Mexican panic grew worse. “On the left, and about a musket-shot distance from our camp, was a small grove, on the bay shore,” Delgado wrote. “Our disbanded herd rushed for it, to obtain shelter from the horrid slaughter carried on all over the prairie by the blood-thirsty usurpers.” The bank of the bayou became a killing ground. “The men, on reaching it, would helplessly crowd together, and were shot down by the enemy, who was close enough not to miss his aim. It was there that the greatest carnage took place.”
The Texans shot and clubbed and stabbed the pinned enemy. “It was nothing but a slaughter,” one of the Texans remembered. “They at first attempted to swim the bayou but they were surrounded by our men and they shot every one that attempted to swim the bayou as soon as he took to the water, and them that remained they killed as fast as they could load and shoot them until they surrendered.”
The slaughter didn’t end with surrender. Still shouting about the Alamo and Goliad, the Texans exacted their revenge. Houston tried to get them to stop, but they again ignored him. Houston had led the charge and been wounded. “I observed Gen. Houston on a bay pony, with his leg over the pommel of the saddle,” Nicholas Labadie, a medic, recalled. “‘Doctor,’ said he, ‘I am glad to see you; are you hurt?’ ‘Not at all,’ said I. ‘Well,’ he rejoined, ‘I have had two horses shot under me, and have received a ball in my ankle, but am not badly hurt.’ ‘Do you wish to have it dressed?’ said I. ‘Oh, no, not now, but I will when I get back to the camp. I can stand it well enough till then.’ He then faces his horse about, and orders the drum to beat a retreat. But the men, paying no attention to the order, shouted with expressions of exultation over the glorious victory, and it was difficult to hear anything distinctly.” Houston tried again. “While I was within ten feet of him, he cries out, as loud as he could raise his voice: ‘Parade, men, parade!’” recounted Labadie. “But the shouts and halloing were too long and loud; and Houston, seeing he could not restore order, cries at the top of his voice: ‘Gentlemen! Gentlemen! Gentlemen! (a momentary stillness ensues) Gentlemen! I applaud your bravery but damn your manners.’”
Robert Hunter, another soldier, was standing close by. “General Houston gave orders not to kill any more but to take prisoners,” Hunter remembered. “Capt. Easlen said, ‘Boys, take prisoners—you know how to take prisoners. Take them with the butt of your guns, club guns,’ and said, ‘Remember the Alamo, remember La Bahía’”—Goliad—“‘and club guns, right and left, and knock their brains out.’” Hunter continued, “The Mexicans would fall down on their knees and say, ‘Me no Alamo, me no La Bahía.’” But the Texans gave no quarter. The Mexicans ran for a lagoon beyond the battlefield. “Man and horse went in head and ears to the bottom,” Hunter said. “That lagoon was full of men and horses for about twenty or thirty feet up and down it, and none of them ever got out. I think their bones are laying there yet.”
IV
THE GREAT MIGRATION
17
THE FOUR WISE MEN
TEXANS MISUNDERSTOOD THE MEANING OF THEIR VICTORY at San Jacinto, and nearly two centuries later, most still do. A monument erected above the battlefield declares, “San Jacinto was one of the decisive battles of the world.” Even allowing for Texan pride, this grossly exaggerates the consequences of that bloody day. San Jacinto decided nothing important at all. Santa Anna’s defeat didn’t end the Texas war of independence, though the Texans soon told themselves it did. They captured the Mexican leader trying to escape the battlefield and compelled him to sign away his country’s claim on Texas. But the government in Mexico City deposed Santa Anna, disavowed his disclaimer and continued to assert possession. During the next decade Mexican armies reinvaded Texas and twice reoccupied San Antonio.
They were able to do so because Sam Houston’s dream of delivering Texas as a gift to Andrew Jackson stalled on the opposition of Northern members of Congress to the admission of Texas to the Union as a slave state. The antislavery elements weren’t a majority, but a treaty of annexation required the approval of two-thirds of the Senate, which slavery’s foes were able to deny the annexationists.
The result was that the Texas republic, envisioned as a swiftly transitional step to American statehood, acquired an unexpected permanence. Texans of later generations would wax nostalgic about their state’s experience as an independent republic. A few Texans at the time warmed to the idea, imagining Texas expanding far to the west and becoming a great nation of its own. But most Texans, facing an empty treasury, a worthless currency, harrowing raids by Comanches, and
embarrassing vulnerability to the Mexican army, still longed for attachment to the country from which the great majority of them had come. Texans would eventually profess to disdain the power of the American federal government, but in the dicey decade after San Jacinto that power seemed a comforting embrace they could only wish for.
Houston was shrewd enough, following his victory in a battle his men had forced him to fight, not to air his belief that the question of Texas wouldn’t be settled until the United States went to war with Mexico. He had intended for this to happen in 1836, but his men’s mutiny prevented it. San Jacinto, far from resolving the Texas question, left any resolution pending, awaiting that war.
WEEKS BEFORE THE OUTBREAK OF THE TEXAS REVOLUTION, the annual fur-trading rendezvous took place on the Green River in modern Wyoming. Joe Meek attended, as usual, and met two men who were unusual for the mountain fair. The rendezvous had acquired a colorful reputation that drew artists, scientists, writers and even tourists, but Marcus Whitman and his partner Samuel Parker were travelers of a different sort. They came west to scout the feasibility of travel to Oregon for the purpose of founding a religious mission.
They were answering a call by the native peoples of the Far West for education in the Christian gospel. Such, at any rate, was how Whitman and Parker and much of Protestant America interpreted an extraordinary tale recounted two years earlier in the Christian Advocate and Journal and Zion’s Herald and reprinted in numerous papers afterward. An article about the relocation of the Wyandot Indians from their Ohio homeland to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi contained a letter from one of the Wyandots, a Christian convert named William Walker, to an Ohio friend. Walker was surveying the territory for his tribe and reporting on its suitability as a new tribal home. As an aside he mentioned a visit to William Clark, Meriwether Lewis’s old partner. “Immediately after we landed in St. Louis on our way to the west,” Walker wrote, “I proceeded to General Clarke’s, superintendent of Indian affairs, to present our letters of introduction from the secretary of war, and to receive the same from him to the different Indian agents in the upper country. While in his office and transacting business with him, he informed me that three chiefs from the Flat-Head nation were in his house and were quite sick, and that one (the fourth) had died a few days ago. They were from the west of the Rocky Mountains.”
Walker asked to see the guests. Clark granted permission. Walker had heard of the Flatheads but had never encountered any in person. “I had always supposed from their being called ‘Flat-Heads’ that the head was actually flat on top; but this is not the case. The head is flattened thus”—he appended a sketch, which the author of the article, or perhaps the editor, improved. Walker went on explain the method of flattening the skull, by means of a board pressed against an infant’s forehead.
Then he got to the part of the story that sent shivers of holy joy up the spines of the readers of the Christian Advocate. “The distance they had travelled on foot was nearly three thousand miles to see Gen. Clarke, their great father, as they called him, he being the first American officer they ever became acquainted with, and having much confidence in him, they had come to consult him as they said, upon very important matters. Gen. C. related to me the object of their mission, and, my dear friend, it is impossible for me to describe to you my feelings while listening to his narrative. I will here relate it as briefly as I well can. It appeared that some white man had penetrated into their country, and happened to be a spectator at one of their religious ceremonies, which they scrupulously perform at stated periods. He informed them that their mode of worshipping the supreme Being was radically wrong, and instead of being acceptable and pleasing, it was displeasing to him; he also informed them that the white people away toward the rising of the sun had been put in possession of the true mode of worshipping the great Spirit. They had a book containing directions how to conduct themselves in order to enjoy his favor and hold converse with him; and with this guide, no one need go astray, but every one that would follow the directions laid down there could enjoy, in this life, his favor, and after death would be received into the country where the great Spirit resides, and live forever with him.”
The Indians had called a council to consider this information. “Some said, if this be true, it is certainly high time we were put in possession of this mode, and if our mode of worshipping be wrong and displeasing to the great Spirit, it is time we had laid it aside. We must know something more about this; it is a matter that cannot be put off; the sooner we know about it the better. They accordingly deputed four of their chiefs to proceed to St. Louis to see their great father, Gen. Clarke, to inquire of him, having no doubt but he would tell them the whole truth about it.”
The four chiefs had done just that. Clark, surprised at their appearance in St. Louis and sobered by the responsibility suddenly placed on his shoulders, proceeded—according to Walker’s account—to confirm the truth of what the lone white man had said and to instruct the chiefs succinctly in the message of the Old and New Testaments.
“Poor fellows,” Walker went on, “they were not all permitted to return home to their people with the intelligence. Two died in St. Louis, and the remaining two, though somewhat indisposed, set out for their native land. Whether they reached home or not is not known. The change of climate and diet operated very severely upon their health. Their diet when at home is chiefly vegetables and fish. If they died on their way home, peace be to their manes! They died inquirers after the truth.”
THE AVERAGE READER OF THE CHRISTIAN ADVOCATE WAS IN NO position to question certain aspects of Walker’s letter, starting with the fact that the visit to St. Louis he described took place in 1831 but he didn’t get around to revealing it until 1833. Then there was the matter of the identity of the Indians. Independent evidence suggested that the visitors to William Clark were Nez Perce Indians rather than Flatheads, although one might have been half Flathead. Consequently the illustration of the flattened head was almost certainly an artistic flourish, since, in any event, the Flatheads didn’t actually flatten heads; it was the Chinook and their kin who made the pointed heads, by contrast with which the Salish people known as Flatheads had ordinary, or flat, heads.
Yet these minor matters paled beside the astonishing essence of the story: that four enlightened heathens—soon dubbed the “Wise Men of the West”—had come east in search of the proper way to worship the Great Spirit. What made the story more astonishing still, and on that account perhaps more suspect, was that it reached the American East just as the Second Great Awakening was approaching its height of evangelizing fervor. This Christian revival movement—called the Second Awakening to distinguish it from an eighteenth-century forerunner—rejected the often-elitist rationalism of the Enlightenment in favor of a populist emotionalism. Baptists and Methodists benefited most from the surging demand for a religion a believer could feel, but the desire for a faith that transformed one’s life touched Presbyterians and Congregationalists too.
Nowhere was the Awakening stronger than in western New York, called the “burnt-over district” for the revivals that swept across it, consuming the fuel of unbelief. Marcus Whitman was living in the village of Wheeler, in the heart of the burnt-over district, in the autumn of 1834, when the Reverend Samuel Parker came through summoning support for a mission to the Oregon country. The revivalists weren’t content to save souls in the civilized regions of America; their zeal burned to share the gospel with heathens in distant lands. Some missionaries went out to the East Indies, others to the islands of the South Pacific. Parker, having read of the appeal of the Wise Men of the West, aimed for Oregon.
Marcus Whitman was a struggling doctor with a stingy practice and chronic aches from riding too many miles to see patients amid the harsh winters of western New York. He had been “saved,” in the meaning of the revivalists, but he had never acted on his faith in the way many others in the movement did. His conscience nagged him to do so. He had scarcely heard of Oregon, but when S
amuel Parker related the miraculous story of the Wise Men of the West, Whitman perceived the answer to his professional, physical and existential problems. He decided at once to give up his medical practice, move away from New York and devote his life to saving lost souls.
Four months later he was in St. Louis with Parker, heading west under the sponsorship of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The two men visited the offices of the American Fur Company and secured permission to travel with the company’s annual caravan to the summer rendezvous. For Parker and Whitman the journey was a reconnaissance. They would not go all the way to the Columbia River, their eventual goal; rather, they would assay the prospects for taking women and wagons to Oregon. The former were crucial to the mission board’s evangelizing strategy; experience had shown that unmarried men, even those of the cloth, were too often tempted beyond their strength by heathen women. Christian wives kept their husbands’ passions in check. The wagons were important for the women, who would want to carry more west than could fit on the back of a mule, and for the general provisioning of the missions. Goods might be shipped west by sailing vessel, but the American Mission Board was aware that the Hudson’s Bay Company controlled the lower Columbia, and the board didn’t want its missions dependent on the goodwill of a British company. An overland connection to the United States would be far preferable to running the Hudson’s Bay gauntlet.
By this time steamboats serviced the Missouri River as far as Liberty, Missouri, just east of the northward bend in the river. Parker and Whitman dipped into the funds the mission board had appropriated for their journey and purchased tickets. At Liberty their western experience really began. Friction developed at once between the God-fearing missionaries and the frequently God-damning mountain men to whom they attached themselves. The members of the caravan hadn’t been consulted about being saddled with the Bible-thumping greenhorns, and they didn’t like it. Parker asked the caravan leader if he and Whitman could put some of their provisions in the fur company’s wagons. The caravan leader said they could not; the added weight would burden the horses. Anyway, in the West each man hauled his own provisions. The rank and file of the caravan were even less friendly toward the missionaries, who cramped the mountaineers’ style and slowed the progress of the caravan. The missionaries refused to travel on the Sabbath, and though the caravan didn’t wait for them, the overall pace was inevitably slowed as the missionaries struggled to catch up on the following days. Parker and Whitman felt the hostility, with Parker fearing at times for his and Whitman’s lives.