Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  Other kinds of education awaited James and Rezin in their teen years. Even after the start of substantial settlement, dangers loomed. Following the purchase of Louisiana, almost all the region was public land, unavailable for purchase until it was properly surveyed and townships and ranges were laid out. That would be the work of years to come. The only more immediate ways to take possession of a tract were either to buy it from a confirmed occupant or else to acquire a Spanish grant owned by a grantee who never actually took possession. No matter how the land was obtained, however, when the buyer arrived on the scene he might find the property already inhabited by squatters. Eviction required the law, and sometimes force, as Rezin and Elve apparently discovered when squatters on one of their properties tried to resist being displaced.33

  The boys also learned about life with slavery. Their grandfather John owned a few, and so certainly did their father, Rezin. Though hardly planters on even a modest scale, the Bowies still worked enough land that they needed a few field hands. Moreover, Rezin's timber-cutting enterprise required substantial cheap labor. Typically for land owned by small farmer-slaveholders, Bowie plantations enjoyed benign, even familial, relations between blacks and whites. They certainly were for Uncle Rhesa, who never married but who fathered a son named James by a slave mistress sometime around 1790 and thereafter openly acknowledged him, gave him his freedom and the family name, and brought him to Louisiana with the rest of the clan. The black James Bowie remained in Catahoula when the rest moved south. For years to come he steadily did land and loan business with both Johns, senior and junior, even buying and selling slaves himself, and achieved some minor position in the community near Sicily Island.34 Wherever the Bowie blood flowed, the clan loyalty followed. In later years the family remembered as well stories of Rezin's young James's closeness to an old slave woman named Mandy, of the little kindnesses he did for her, and of the advice she passed on to the boy.35 There was never any question that the Bowie slaves were property, though, and with the exception of a few favorites like old Mandy, they were usually sold with the land whenever a Bowie moved on.

  Mostly James Bowie looked up to his brothers, especially nineteen-year-old Rezin, and it must have upset him in the late summer of 1812 when Rezin left home and went northwest one hundred miles, along the Red River past Alexandria, to the frontier outpost at Natchitoches, and James could not follow. Louisiana became a state that year, its western boundary at the Sabine River. Many Americans believed that the Louisiana Purchase had rightfully included the province of Texas beyond, but Spain held firmly to the territory as a part of its Mexican possession, even in the face of a frequently rebellious population. That led to a series of uprisings by Mexican officials—with North American collaborators or instigators—to wrest away the province of Texas. José Bernardo Gutiérrez and Augustus Magee raised a small contingent of adventurers, including Rezin Bowie, at Natchitoches in August 1812, and marched on Nacogdoches, Texas immediately. A few months later when Magee died, Samuel Kemper took over. He was already a veteran of an uprising in West Florida in 1804, and another in 1810 when he and his brothers Reuben and Nathan helped lead ragtag planters and adventurers in taking control of Spanish territory from Baton Rouge to Mobile. The independent republic of West Florida lasted just ten weeks before the United States took possession and added all but the eastern bit of it to Louisiana. Now, with revolution seemingly in his blood, Kemper led the small but growing company of filibusters (a term derived from “freebooter,” a name for pirates; land pirates is largely what the filibusters were) in capturing the capital of Texas itself, San Antonio de Béxar, on April 1, 1813. But for Kemper, as for many of the Anglo-Americans with him, Gutiérrez spoiled the victory and shamed their efforts when he allowed the surrendered Spanish commander and his staff to be executed. Kemper and more than one hundred of the men who had come with him left in disgust and returned to Louisiana, Rezin Bowie presumably among them.36 Still, it was the first time a Bowie had seen Texas and its abundant promise, a first taste of filibustering, a first promise that the frontier did not end at Louisiana.

  By the time of Rezin's return more than enough had happened east of the Sabine to occupy Bowie attention. There was family news, some good, more bad. On his return to St. Landry, Rezin courted Margaret Neville, and on September 15, 1814, they wed.37 John senior had also married in 1806, but his fortunes turned against him in February 1812, when Catahoula's sheriff had to seize his goods and chattels to redeem unpaid debt.38 Sometime in this period James's brother David, aged only seventeen, drowned in the Mississippi. And Rhesa Bowie, though just in his early fifties, was ailing, and would die in a few months.39

  If those blows to the family were not enough in themselves, by late 1814 the war with the British finally came to the Lower Mississippi Valley. Prior to that time it had been as if there were no war at all. General Jackson did lead a small army south in 1813, intending to fortify the mouth of the Mississippi below New Orleans, but he got no farther than Natchez. The subsequent Creek War was too distant to involve western Louisiana. Only in November 1814, when the British gathered an expedition to strike at New Orleans, did the war finally arrive. Jackson was already in Mobile, and as soon as he learned of the enemy plans he marched for the Crescent City. Now it was Louisiana's war at last.

  And this time James went with Rezin. The younger brother was well on the way to nineteen when the call came for volunteers to assemble in Opelousas and march to defend New Orleans. While James described brother Rezin as “a perfect rowdy” at this age, he was if anything an even rougher sort himself, less thoughtful and more instinctive in his actions.40 It was already time to leave his father's house, as Rezin had on his marriage. The call to the war provided the perfect opportunity.41

  Men from all over western Louisiana, but especially Rapides, Natchitoches, and St. Landry Parishes, mustered in or near Opelousas as the new year dawned. Rezin left with his wife, Margaret, already three months pregnant. He and James both enlisted on January 8, 1815, as privates in Capt. Coleman A. Martin's company, which soon merged with a number of others from the region to form the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Consolidated Louisiana Militia Regiment, commanded by prominent Alexandria attorney Josiah S. Johnston.42 James saw some familiar faces there to serve with him, men like his uncle Abraham Bird, and there were plenty of new faces as well. The consolidated regiment was a polyglot of nationalities, like Louisiana itself, and side by side with the Bowies were men of Spanish, French, Portuguese, Acadian, and apparently even African backgrounds. There were Sgt. Samuel Wells of Alexandria and Capt. Jean Bruard, commanding a company in the Eighteenth. José Domingo Losoya, who had fled San Antonio after its fall to Kemper in 1813, was there as a private, along with a number of other bexareños, some of whom may have been known to Rezin. John Davis Bradburn, whose path he would cross in years to come, joined the same company as James and Rezin but soon took a commission as a third lieutenant under Bruard.43

  Once organized they left almost immediately for New Orleans, but it was already too late. In a misty dawn battle on the very day that James Bowie enlisted, General Jackson turned back the British attack, and within days word would come that the warring nations had made peace. Rezin never gave up his disappointment at missing the great battle, and always treasured his enlistment papers in the regiment as a memento. No doubt James felt the same. It would have been one of the great moments of their generation.44

  They did not reach New Orleans until January 24—James Bowie's first visit to the great city, with all its exotic flavors of Europe and the Caribbean—and even then they were not allowed to remain long. Assigned to the Second Brigade of Louisiana Militia, their regiment went upriver to Donaldsonville, almost halfway back to Opelousas, and there they remained for more than two weeks. Colonel Johnston found the garrison duty so tedious that he simply went home three days before they were ordered back to New Orleans. There James and Rezin spent more than a month, now really having time to experience the city, as w
ell as to meet soldiers from other units who had seen action in the battle. Dr. James Long, a surgeon at the battle, was in town then, and they may well have met. Certainly they became acquainted with an even more interesting character, a North Carolinian just five years older than Rezin, whom he may already have known. Warren D. C. Hall lived in Natchitoches prior to the Gutiérrez-Magee expedition, and went with them to San Antonio, where he too was repelled by the executions that followed. Here was a true adventurer, and though he served in another unit at the time of the Battle of New Orleans, he transferred to the Bowies' regiment early in March. A friendship between Hall and James especially blossomed, as each felt some kindred in the other.45

  Together they all mustered out in New Orleans on March 31, 1815, and James and Rezin each received $21.93 for their two months and twenty-three days' service.46 There remained the long walk back to Opelousas, the disappointment of missing all the action, and yet a certain eye-opening after the visit to New Orleans and the exposure to so many new faces. James had been away from his father's house for three months, largely on his own, living in the company of other ambitious young men, and with the example of fellow soldiers who were older and who had made their way in the world—some of them, like Hall and Bradburn, rather dramatically. After that experience going back home to the family timber business held little luster.

  James Bowie was full grown to six feet or nearly so, raw-boned, a stoutly built 180 pounds. Above his fair complexion sat sandy hair, not quite red. His deep-set blue eyes, the more pronounced because of his high cheekbones, were so pale as to appear gray, and sitting shadowed deep within their sockets gave them a penetrating look heightened by his manner of gazing directly into another's eyes when speaking. “Taken altogether, he was a manly, fine-looking person,” his brother John believed, “and by many of the fair ones he was called handsome.” Much more to the point at this juncture in his life, John saw that brother James was “young, proud, poor, and ambitious, without any rich family connections, or influential friends to aid him in the battle of life.”47 James Bowie had met some men in New Orleans who might be good connections in time, but for now his ambition and $21.93 were all that he had to start life on his own.

  Once he reached Opelousas, James did not remain long at home before coming to the decision to strike out on his own. Poverty was not necessarily a handicap. He had his discharge money, and, while hardly a rich man, still his father was comfortable by rural Louisiana standards and could offer modest help. And for as little as $100.00 or even less, a man could buy a piece of unimproved land along one of the more remote bayous. A standard measure of forty arpents frontage, by forty arpents in depth back from the bayou to where the land sloped down into swamp, yielded 1,350 acres, and the timber on such a parcel would more than pay for it when cut, sawed into planks, and sent down to the markets. Moreover, Bowie did not even need to buy the land.

  With the exception of its one city at New Orleans, and a few small towns and villages like Opelousas and Alexandria, Louisiana was thinly settled when it passed into American hands. When it became a state, the government recognized as lawful all the valid existing land claims from Spanish grants, but as much as 90 percent of the state remained public domain. It would take decades for the slow wheels of bureaucracy to survey all that and offer it at public auction. Meanwhile, until such survey, or until the holder of a valid Spanish grant appeared to claim a parcel, squatters could and did move in. They built their cabins, cleared the timber, planted crops, and treated the land in every way as their own until evicted by a grant holder or offered the opportunity to buy the grant and keep their place. Consequently, with virtually no money and little other wherewithal but an ax and a gun, a man could make a home for himself.

  Most likely James Bowie squatted when he left home again sometime in 1815. Commencing just a few miles above Opelousas, Bayou Boeuf meandered in a northwesterly direction to Alexandria, along the way cutting across the southwestern corner of Avoyelles Parish. It was sparsely settled country, with just a lonely woodcutter's cabin now and then standing beside the swamp. What was not heavily timbered was grassy prairie where Creole squatters raised cattle—a wild country, full of game, and much of it as yet unclaimed or settled, where the reach of civil law was almost unknown.48 In short, it was ideal for a young man starting out on his own with little but ambition, and determined to provide for himself. He chose a piece of unoccupied land close to the border between Avoyelles and Rapides, and began to clear it of timber.49 There for the next few years he worked to build his plantation. For money he cut the cypress, whipsawing them into planks, then floating the loads down Bayou Boeuf to sell in Opelousas. That made him enough for food, clothing, and powder and shot with which to hunt for his meat, with money to save besides.50 Within two years he had put by three hundred dollars to purchase his land and improvements from the claimed owner on April 3, 1817. At the same time he bought a small family of four slaves from his father, offering in payment his note for $1,700.51

  Gradually Bowie expanded his smallholding, needing more adjacent timberland as his own was cleared. In October 1818 he acquired two more parcels on Bayou Boeuf in Avoyelles, handing over cash or personal notes for $700.52 Two months later, in December, Bowie gave notes totaling $1,040 for three more parcels, one on the Red River that flowed through Avoyelles, and two others on nearby Elm Bayou.53 And in February 1819 he added yet more Bayou Boeuf property, for another $500.54 All or most of these transactions involved promissory notes rather than hard cash in payment. Bowie was clearly learning that an enterprising man willing to take risks could acquire property with little more than his word, trusting that the returns from exploiting the land would provide the cash to meet the notes. It was the beginning of speculation, the lesson not slow in impressing him. Indeed, in October 1818, still only twenty-two, he went into his first business venture, buying another Bayou Boeuf property in partnership with John Stafford for $1,000, with the intention of making a profit from it by subdivision and speculation. The owner, John D. Reeves, was unable to give them absolute proof that he held a clear title to the property, but they took him at his word.55 In the informal and uncertain legal world of the frontier, where even the wealthy had limited actual hard cash and there were no banks, a handshake and a promise had to be enough.

  Meanwhile James Bowie enjoyed his youth, the freedom of living on his own, and the opportunity to indulge what John Bowie called “the innate love of excitement” that he inherited from his father. He hunted and fished and explored in the rugged bayou wilderness. No manner of backwoods sport found him reluctant to participate, and he acquired something of a local reputation for daring to the point of recklessness. In the forest he roped deer and wild horses, and occasionally on a bet or a dare even roped and rode alligators. The woods had plenty of bears that came out into the clearings in the summers to eat planters' green corn, and Bowie devised a rude trap made of a hollowed cypress knee. He put honey in the bottom or pointed end of the knee, then drove nails from the outside through to the hollow, inclined toward the point, and left the trap in a corn patch. When the bear shoved his snout in to get the honey, the spikes held it fast and prevented him from pulling it out, and in that helpless condition he became easy prey for Bowie's gun.56

  Bowie occasionally went to Cheyneyville on Bayou Boeuf, a settlement a few miles from his plantation, where he traded at Bennet's store for sundries and materials to mend his clothes, or a quart of wine from time to time.57 There too he saw the occasional newspaper, received mail from family, and sat with neighbors in a tavern for gossip and conviviality. In Cheyneyville he could find music and amusement, a game of cards, and a merry glass to soften the hard life of the frontier. Society was important to James Bowie. He loved company, and his open, frank manner and even temper attracted others to him. He was also ambitious and knew it to be in his interest to cultivate friendships with what John Bowie called “the better class of the people.” And there, on rare occasion, when there were too many glasses an
d the merriment turned to harsh words, his other side might emerge. “The displays of his anger were terrible,” brother John recalled, “and frequently terminated in some tragical scene.” He would not abide an insult. When enraged, James Bowie became entirely single-minded in his determination to vent his anger on a foe. What observers took for fearlessness was as much an entire forgetfulness of his own safety in the grips of his fury. He soon acquired a reputation as a man both to respect and to fear.58