4
BOWIE
1820-1824
They despised a petty thief, but admired Lafitte; despised a man who would defraud a neighbor or deceive a friend, but would without hesitation co-operate with a man or party who or which aspired to any stupendous scheme or daring enterprise without inquiring as to its morality.
WILLIAM H. SPARKS, CA. 1880
The business of Louisiana in 1820 was the acquisition of wealth. Men lived on the expectation of fortune, hoping each new day for the bonanza that awaited in the trading houses of New Orleans or out in the vast soil. They were a culture of men seeking the big sale or the windfall crop to redeem all those notes that they traded like currency, and leave money besides to parlay into real riches. As a result this frontier was as much economic as geographical, and the relaxed restraints of civilization on the one loosened inhibitions on the other. This was a frontier for exploitation, and just as ruthlessness and individualism and relentlessness were acceptable means of conquering the wilderness, so were they part of the currency of ambition in the courthouses and counting houses. At the same time they redefined notions of public and private honesty and morality. Moreover, personal and civic ambitions became mixed to the point that political office was a prize sought just like wealth, and often coveted because it afforded a better opportunity to realize personal gain. Men fought for the right to rule rather than to serve. At this, the dawning of the era of the rise of the common man, these Louisianians wanted to be anything but common, and James Bowie was nothing if not a man of his time.1
The speediest road to riches lay in the soil, and for men willing to blindfold themselves to the law, it could be there for the taking. Vast portions of Louisiana land floated somewhere in the legal shadows between Spanish grant and public domain. No one knew for certain how many grants the Dons had given along the bayous, and though the United States received registers of grants made by the several Spanish governors at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, still they were not necessarily complete. The Spaniards surveyed many of the grants, but the surveyor took the surveys—called plats—with him when he moved to Cuba. Many—perhaps hundreds—of grantees failed to claim their tracts. Moreover, some of those awards had been “floating” grants, tied to no specific tract, but intended to allow the recipient to locate the land to his choosing within a specified area or along a certain stream. And many of the Spanish and French Creoles who received the grants never set foot on their lands but subsequently sold them to American settlers, leaving it to them to register and occupy the property. Squatters abounded, and until the General Land Office could register, locate, survey, and issue patents on all of the Spanish grants, the survey and sale of the remaining public domain would be impeded, at no small cost to the treasury.
Such a state of confusion offered ripe opportunity for profit, and the less scrupulous in western Louisiana speedily seized the chance. No sooner did Louisiana become a state in 1812 than the fraud commenced. The next year, at the very northeast corner of the state, John Millikin held a Spanish claim he purchased but could not prove to be genuine, when two locals came forward and offered for one hundred dollars each to swear as his witnesses that they had seen him buy it from the original grantee. “By those two men I could have proved my own claim, and, if necessary, a thousand others,” he warned the General Land Office. “Thus you can see what a system has been pursued to monopolize all the lands of this State.” One need not even furnish an original Spanish grant. The perpetrator had merely to forge a deed of conveyance of the property from the fictitious original grantee and then pay some indigent squatters to swear as witnesses, sign by mark, and then he could come forward to claim the land. They were not even very careful in their forgery. In one 1813 case a conveyance stipulated a grant supposedly given by Gov. Bernardo de Gálvez in 1776 for property on Lake Providence, yet that body of water had been known as Stock Island Lake until Millikin himself renamed it in 1813, thirty-seven years after that name appeared in the supposed grant.2
“If one claim can be forged and sworn to, hundreds may be, and no doubt are,” warned Millikin, and he was right.3 Moreover, it could turn ugly. The next year in Catahoula Parish a group of men combined in a scheme in which one created and registered the fraudulent conveyances, two others acted as witnesses to their purchase from fictitious original grantees, and a fourth in some position of authority approved the sales and issued title. It got messy when the conspirators fell out over a division of the proceeds from the property, and one of them killed another. Josiah S. Johnston of Alexandria was practicing in the Catahoula court when it happened, and came away impressed with the extent of the land fraud being practiced. He, too, warned the government: “It may be strongly suspected,” he wrote in March 1814, “if any individual is conducting an unusual number of claims without written titles, that there is something wrong, or if they are proven by the same witness.”4
This sort of practice was widely known in Louisiana, and would certainly have come to James Bowie's attention. His brother John lived in Catahoula at the time of the well publicized murder, and of course Johnston himself had commanded the Bowies in the War of 1812. Even though James sold his Bayou Boeuf plantation to Stephen, he needed someplace to return to from his slaving expeditions, and apparently an unwritten part of the agreement with his brother was that he could continue to live there. Thus he certainly kept abreast of the local news, and in daily association with neighbors like his friend Caiaphas Ham and the three Martin brothers, Robert, John, and William.5 The Martins, especially, closely observed the land fraud schemes.
But even if Bowie knew little of the means of fraud from other sources, he soon learned it at infuriating firsthand. When he and his partner, John Stafford, bought a Bayou Boeuf parcel from John D. Reeves in October 1818, they intended to profit by it, and soon. Each spent some money in improving the land, but by April 1819 they had yet made nothing from it and were unable to pay Reeves the note due. That resulted in another summons to the court in St. Landry, and another plea from James that, not being a resident of that parish, he was not bound by its courts. They continued to try to sell the property, however, and by 1820 Bowie discovered something mortifying: Reeves had sold them a property with a faulty title and had not told them. They had been stung by much the same sort of fraud that Johnston and Millikin foretold. Within twenty-four hours Bowie and Stafford went to Opelousas and posted at the courthouse and other public places a statement of what Reeves had done, and thereby repudiated their notes to him and warned others not to take those notes in exchange for goods or payment of debt, as was common. Then they set about trying to find Reeves himself, and it was well for the culprit that, though known to be in Opelousas, he had secreted himself well.6
By now James Bowie's character and temper stood fully developed, and even his friends confessed that his qualities were mixed. Caiaphas Ham, his friend and neighbor from Bayou Boeuf, admired Bowie's courage and his loyalty to friends. “He was a clever, polite gentleman,” said Ham. “He was a true, constant, and generous friend; an open, bitter enemy, who scorned concealment, and any unfair advantage. He was a foe no one dared to undervalue, and many feared. When unexcited there was a calm seriousness shadowing his countenance which gave assurance of great will power, unbending firmness of purpose, and unflinching courage. When fired by anger his face bore the semblance of an enraged tiger.”
William Sparks saw the same traits and more. He found Rezin cool and anxious to avoid violence, but James was quick and “always belligerent in the presence of his enemies.” Where Rezin concealed his feelings for his own ends, “with James the deeper ardor of his nature forbade this equanimity.” A gleam in his eye, the clenching of his jaw, and the pursing of his thin lips, gave certain signals that Bowie was on the boil and that whoever had offended him should beware. “It was his habit to settle all difficulties without regard to time or place, and it was the same whether he met one or many,” said Sparks. Otherwise cool and self-possessed, James Bowie was r
elentless when enraged, and then in the height of his fury his demeanor could suddenly change to a seeming coolness that some mistook for fear or second thought. “It was then,” said Sparks, “that he was terribly dangerous to an over-confidant foe.”7 If Bowie had found John Reeves in Opelousas that day, or anytime soon thereafter, it would have been much the worse for Reeves. But he did not, and it may be just as well, for in a perverse way Bowie should have thanked him. In the event, since he never paid the notes due, Bowie lost nothing out of pocket other than what he and Stafford invested in time and labor to improve the property. Far more important, however, Reeves showed him at embarrassing firsthand how to practice a land fraud. He either secured a bogus title to the tract or else persuaded Bowie and Stafford that he could furnish such title if necessary, and on that basis they agreed to buy. If it had worked completely, Reeves would have had his money, Bowie and Stafford their land, and only the government would have been the poorer for the loss of a piece of what was rightfully public domain. Like the slave smuggling, it was another crime from which everyone profited, and seemingly without a victim other than a faceless bureaucracy in Washington.
The lure proved irresistible. “I know no other country where love of money has such a grip on men's hearts,” Tocqueville said of the Bowies' generation.8 Sparks observed of James and Rezin specifically that in personal relations they were truthful and frank, sincere in their conduct. “They held in contempt all little men and all little meanness,” he said. But there was something else in their nature: “They despised a petty thief, but admired Lafitte; despised a man who would defraud a neighbor or deceive a friend, but would without hesitation co-operate with a man or party who or which aspired to any stupendous scheme or daring enterprise without inquiring as to its morality.”9 With the lesson learned from Reeves, and fired by the lure of easy money that he could never resist, just such a “stupendous scheme” now came to James Bowie.
In an effort finally to clear the way to the surveying and sale of the public domain in Louisiana, Congress passed an act on May 11, 1820, authorizing all claimants to Spanish land grants in Louisiana to file their claims prior to December 31. It required that all such claims, with any supporting evidence, were to be turned over to the “registers”—registrars—of the district land offices, and those officers in turn should immediately file reports to the General Land Office in Washington, D.C., with recommendations on each of the claims presented.10 There were just three districts at the time. The New Orleans, or South Eastern, District, covered all of Louisiana east of the Atchafalaya and south of the former West Florida parishes. The land office in Opelousas handled everything west of the Atchafalaya and south of the Red River, while the District North of Red River, or “Ouachita District,” had its office in Natchitoches and covered the balance of the state.
It was this last region that especially interested James Bowie, for it was the least settled, and attractive soil rimmed long rivers and bayous. In the main the land along the bayous sat well above the waterline and sloped gradually back until it disappeared in forested swamps. For productive harvesting of timber or planting of crops, a distance of forty arpents, or 6,600 feet back from the bayou, was all that was practical. The old Spanish grants typically specified this distance, and a bayou frontage of fifteen, twenty, forty, or even sixty arpents. Moreover, the old grants often included the same measure on both sides of a bayou, making in all a considerable grant of land. The Ouachita, or Red River, District possessed another benefit, as well: The government surveyor's office lay right across the Mississippi in Washington, just outside Natchez, and readily accessible, an important feature since every claim, once recommended by the local register, still must be properly surveyed before a patent was granted and ownership confirmed.
All over western Louisiana men scrambled to get their claims—most of them quite legitimate—filed. But James Bowie followed a different course. He traveled north for several days, or even weeks, scouting the country along Bayou Maçon, which flowed into the Tensas River in the northeastern part of the state. He looked a few miles west at Deer Creek, in Catahoula, and from there turned his eyes fifteen miles farther west to Horseshoe Lake, an isolated former bend of the Ouachita River now in Ouachita Parish. He turned southwest to the Red River and its tributaries Bayou Darrow, Bayou Toreau, Bayou Marteau, and the Rigolet de Bon Dieu, concentrated in an area fifteen miles northwest of Alexandria in Rapides Parish. All but the Rapides locations lay in or close to Catahoula, where his brother John and perhaps even his mulatto cousin James could no doubt be of some help. The ground close to Alexandria was only forty-five miles—a good day's ride—from Stephen's plantation, where he lived, so James could look after affairs there himself.
He followed the scheme exposed by Millikin and Johnston several years earlier. James himself had enough familiarity with Spanish to essay forging the land grants, probably using a genuine one as an example for wording and style. Though there is no suspicion whatever that Rezin took part in the scheme with him, he was even better at the language and had already had some experience at faking Spanish documents in his earlier involvement with the Cuban slaves.11 Brother John, too, had some Spanish. Any of the three of them could have done the penwork, but the scheme was entirely James's. He needed identities for the fictional grantees, and created names wholly consistent with the early Spanish and French settlers of Louisiana, but quite fictitious. His imagination gave life to Antonio Vaca and Francois Leclair, Juan Bulgar and Pedro Himenes, Jacques Dupui, Louis Hernando, Juan de Lion, Juan Mansol, Jacques Pecendon, Baptista Garza, and twenty more. As evidence that John at least played some very minor role, one forged grant (to Santiago del Rio) would be his. James's pen became that of Spanish governors from Gálvez in 1776 to Manuel Gayoso de Lemos in 1799, and in his hand it granted tracts of ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty, and even sixty arpents' frontage on those bayous. In the process—and evidence of Bowie's tendency to rush without thinking everything through carefully—he made no attempt to prevent the handwriting in all of the grants from appearing the same, even though they were supposed to have been written by a number of secretaries for three different governors. Neither was he very careful about giving some of the common names of the grantees their customary spelling. And lurking within some of the grants he left glaring telltale giveaways—had he but thought.12
He was not yet done with penmanship. Having created the grants, Bowie next forged deeds of sale by which he could show himself as purchaser. Obviously they bore dates prior to the December 31, 1820, congressional submission deadline, and in the interest of security placed the location of the sales far enough away from the Ouachita District and Natchez that it would be difficult to verify any of the sellers' names. Some variety in dates and places of sale lent added verisimilitude. He headed some of the documents April 1817 in St. Martinville, St. Martin Parish, in the southern part of the state, and the rest out of state in Mobile in November 1818, in Pensacola the following month, and in San Augustine, Texas, in December 1819. Although the purchase prices, being a fiction, were immaterial, he kept them reasonable, ranging from $35 to $150.
Only at this point did Bowie probably spend any money remaining with him from the slave smuggling. He needed two men to attest by their signatures or marks to having witnessed in person his purchase of each of the grants. At the going rate for perjured witness of $100 per man per document, it could have cost Bowie $6,000 or more, though by locating the sites of his purchases anywhere from 100 to 250 miles away, he put verification of the witnesses at a sufficient distance to risk forging their signatures or marks as well.13 As a result his “purchases” now carried signed witness by men like Francois De Leon, Pedro Gonzales, Baptista Garza—one of the fictitious sellers—and more, but the one name used more than any other as a witness was that historically ubiquitous character “John Smith.”14 Thus it was done. All he now had to do was take his documents to Daniel J. Sutton, registrar of the land office for the District North of Red River. Wisely Bowie
waited until almost the last moment, ensuring that Sutton would already be swamped with other genuine—and forged—land claims, and would not have time to give his documents careful scrutiny before filing his required report on January 1, 1821.
Nor was this all of Bowie's enterprise, for he did exactly the same thing on a smaller scale in what was called the Lafourche Interior, for plots along Bayous Black and Caillou and another Bayou Boeuf, all in the Eastern District some fifteen miles south of the newly founded hamlet of Thibodeauxville, the first trading post between New Orleans and Bayou Teche. Again they were based on forged grants dated from 1775 to 1798, from Gálvez, Esteban Miró, and Gayoso, and this time given to names like Francois Flores, Miguel Saturneno, Antoine Pilbero, and five others. In an added wrinkle, rather than present forged documents of sale to himself, Bowie had his “grantees” assign all of the grants but one “for the use of” his Avoyelles friend and neighbor Robert Martin, and the other to William Wilson. The effect, if confirmed, would be that the land officially belonged to the grantee, but the application and all dealings with Samuel H. Harper, the land register in New Orleans, would be by Martin and Wilson. Bowie could then create a deed of sale from the grantee to himself as before, and pay Martin and Wilson something for their trouble. These documents, too, Martin and Wilson filed at the very last minute with an already harassed Harper.15
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