Three Roads to the Alamo
Page 13
The audacity of Bowie's scheme was stunning. In the Lafourche he laid claim to almost nineteen miles of bayou frontage, containing more than twenty-thousand acres of prime land. North of the Red River his ambition was even greater, where more than a fourth of all claims field were his, and of the class of claims that submitted original Spanish grants, his constituted twenty-nine out of fifty-one. There he claimed forty-two miles of waterfront and 45,700 acres. In all, if his scheme succeeded, he would own more than 65,000 acres, just over one hundred square miles of Louisiana, and all at almost no expense other than the surveying.16 Moreover, he made his forged grants general in nature, specifying only a certain bayou or river or lake without further identifying the property. That kind of floating grant would allow Bowie to pick the best available plots to locate his surveys, and in some cases he already had buyers—squatters happy to act as perjured witnesses in order to get a preferential price for title to their land. He would become one of the largest landowners in the state. His intent was not to own land, however, but to sell it, and at the going rate of anywhere from $2 to $5 or more per arpent, he stood to make as much as $250,000 which would make him what he really wanted to be—one of the richest men in the Southwest.
James Bowie was hardly alone in forging fraudulent grants, though he worked on an almost industrial scale compared to others. The land registrars soon recognized the falsity of much of the paper coming across their tables. First to spot the problem was Levin Wailes, the registrar at Opelousas. On the very day of the filing of reports, January 1, 1821, and within hours of the deadline just past, he complained of “a most disgraceful scene of speculation.” He believed that as many as half the claims filed with him would prove to be fraudulent, yet he still took them in at his office, in order to keep them from being sold to unsuspecting buyers.17
Bowie filed no immediate claims in the Opelousas District, but Samuel Harper quickly identified nine suspicious claims filed with him, eight of them Bowie's. When his clerk and translator started working with the grants and accompanying papers, he found the handwriting on all of them virtually the same and the signatures of several supposed individuals to be identical. He gave them to a couple of the former secretaries of the Spanish governors who were still in New Orleans, and who would know the governors' signatures, and they pronounced the documents forgeries. Harper immediately ordered his clerk to stop entering the grants in the official record books, so that in any future dispute about the grants, no certified copy could be taken from his records, and Martin and Wilson would have to produce the original grants. By March 9 he felt sure enough of the swindle to take action.
But then a phenomenal stroke of luck bought Bowie valuable time. Harper applied to the U.S. district attorney and to the attorney general of Louisiana to see if any existing statutes allowed him to initiate criminal prosecution, though at the time he did not yet know that Bowie himself lay behind the forgeries. Incredibly the attorneys informed him that no law on the books, either state or federal, applied. This kind of fraud was simply too new. Harper still hoped to head off the scheme, though, when he wrote to Washington on March 9 to inform Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford that though he had passed favorably on the Bowie claims in his January 6 report, he now believed that “the whole of the claims above mentioned are feigned and fraudulent.” Since Congress had to pass a formal act accepting his report before surveying and granting of patents could proceed, he urged that Crawford take steps to remedy the mistake. What Harper could hardly anticipate, however, was that through pure accident his letter would never reach Washington. Three years passed before the Treasury Department finally heard of his warning.18
Having gotten his claims past the land registrars and into their reports, Bowie had to wait until Congress approved them before he could start the surveying. He could expect that it would take a long time, and impatient though he was, he could not rush Congress. Besides, in the interim other matters required attention. From 1820 onward he divided his time between New Orleans during the winters and Avoyelles the rest of the year, with frequent visits to Alexandria and perhaps Natchez. He went about the business he always practiced of cultivating acquaintances with influential men, and as well of enjoying himself. All who knew him testified to his prodigality: “His style of living was like a man who had plenty of money,” one recalled, and his friend the Natchez attorney Angus McNeil agreed that Bowie “was exceedingly lavish in the expenditure of money.”19 Whatever he actually made from the slave smuggling he soon spent, and by May 1821 creditors once again went to court for judgments against him for debt.20 Living with Stephen on the Bayou Boeuf plantation kept his expenses to a minimum, at least. Unable as yet to sell any of his land claims, with no other apparent source of income, and to recoup his finances, it is quite possible that Bowie undertook another slave venture or two, for Laffite still clung to his perch at Galveztown as late as June or even October 1821, and cargoes of captured Spanish slave ships continued to come in to meet Louisiana smugglers.21 When all else failed—and sometimes in preference to all else—James Bowie's winning and persuasive manner always elicited loans. He had, said McNeil, “an extraordinary Capacity in getting money from his friends.”22
Meanwhile there were the affairs of Louisiana to watch, and even broader aspects to claim his attention. In May 1821 his old friend Warren Hall found himself in some trouble with the law, and surrendered to the sheriff in Alexandria for a trial that ended in acquittal. The episode attracted some attention and engendered bitterness in a frontier town already torn by political, social, and economic rivalries. Despite his acquittal, Hall formed a grudge against the judge in the case, and wrote and then circulated a libelous pamphlet reflecting not only on the judge but also on attorney Josiah Johnston. Tempers flared, and the judge responded to Hall that “he will fight the d—d rascal over a rail with a butcher's knife,” a popular idiom in frontier dueling in which the antagonists sat—or were even nailed by their pants—facing each other on a log or rail, and then fought to the death with long knives. In reality it may never have happened, but the threat of it showed a man's grit.23
The duel never came to pass, but there were others, for Alexandria became increasingly a violent place. Robert Crain fought a duel in May 1821 and wounded his opponent with his “stick sword,” or sword cane.24 A few months later Henry Blanchard accosted a physician in the streets in anger over a land deal gone sour, and killed him with a sword cane, the sort of fate that could well have met John Reeves if Bowie had caught him. Influential men complained that “the most bloody deeds may go unpunished.”25 Being often in Alexandria, and well acquainted with Hall at least, Bowie missed none of this, and by mid-1822 already knew men like Blanchard and Crain at least by reputation if not in person, for it was a small and complex, and increasingly polarized, community.26
Then there were the political distractions. In 1822 a bitter contest for the congressional seat for western Louisiana took place between the current representative, Josiah Johnston, and William Brent, a former federal deputy attorney general for the area. He was a Marylander who came to Louisiana in 1809, backed by powerful friends like Henry Clay of Kentucky. Yet even some of his supporters disliked and distrusted him, and when he married a local woman that winter, her father disowned her and refused ever to see her again.27 The campaign turned vicious, involving largely personal attacks by Brent on Johnston's honesty, and predictably over the issue of land. Brent accused Johnston of favoring and pushing the survey and confirmation of large grants for himself and his friends at the expense of the smaller grant holders, and there may have been something to it, since both Johnston and his partner, none other than George Graham, both received large tracts in partnership of Bayou Lafourche. Such a charge struck a chord with the average voter, himself a small landholder. Brent argued in favor of speedy land settlements, and for the use of “preemption rights,” whereby for a small sum a man could effectively take a plot off the market by purchasing the first option to buy it at a late
r date when he had sufficient money. One of James Bowie's very first property deals back in 1818 had been a preemption right. It was how the poor man got started.
Brent also promised men appointments if he was elected, even though they would be to offices a congressman had no power to fill; one of Johnston's friends admitted that some influential men “were completely bamboozled by him.” And then, as a sop to Johnston's friends, Brent hinted that if elected, he would himself support a move to elect Johnston to the Senate. The governor supported him, and gave him a militia appointment that allowed Brent to appear on the hustings in uniform, always a sure vote winner on the frontier. He bent every effort to win the support of Reuben Kemper, now a resident of Rapides, old and infirm but still a man who commanded enormous respect and influence. Johnston's brother John reminded him that Kemper “is indefatigable when he interests himself in the service of another,” and another friend predicted that whichever way Kemper went, so too would Rapides.28 Brent won the election, but at the expense of an even more divided Alexandria.
James Bowie seemed to own no real property at the time, other than a nineteen-year-old slave named Henry, whom he sold the next year to his mulatto cousin James.29 As a result he did not vote, but there is little question that his sentiments lay with Brent. He knew Johnston, at least by reputation, but Brent was the kind of man with whom Bowie could do business and ask favors if the time and need came.
Attractions loomed beyond the Louisiana horizon to vie for Bowie's attention. Dr. James Long had not given up his dream of empire. For more than a year he built a new force at Point Bolivar, opposite Galveztown, but even onetime supporters like John Sibley, now parish judge at Natchitoches, saw that Long was now an anachronism, and predicted that he “will be troublesome.” Indeed he was. Leaving behind rumors that he had been condemned to hang for killing a man with a dirk in a tavern duel, Long set sail in September with only a handful of men for La Bahía, whence he marched overland a few miles to capture a settlement of the same name, but also called Goliad. A few days later they were themselves captured and sent to Mexico City for trial. Long never returned. In a few months he was shot under mysterious circumstances, and the day of the filibuster in Texas came to an end.30
Yet the end of Long was only the beginning for Texas settlement. Mexico won its complete independence from Spain in August 1821, and encouraged limited settlement of its province of Coahuila y Tejas by norteamericanos in order that they form a buffer between the Mexican interior and the marauding Comanche and other tribes. That same month Sibley wrote from Natchitoches that “the Province of Texas is fast filling up by American settlers,” and complained that “the Road by Nackitosh is full.” By the late winter of 1822 four steamboats made regular passage from New Orleans up the Red River to Natchitoches laden with freight for the Texas trade. Several other vessels ran regularly between New Orleans and what was now more commonly called Galveston with passengers, lumber, tools, and provisions, all bound for the settlement of empresario Stephen F. Austin.31 Texas was the talk of the frontier, and for a man with an appetite for land and opportunity—especially one like James Bowie, who had heard and even seen some of it firsthand—such talk held promise for the future.
The winter of 1823 was the coldest in years. It killed father Rezin Bowie's fruit trees, froze the bayous, and for a time even chilled the rising fever tempers in Alexandria.32 Bowie, as was his custom, wintered in New Orleans that year, and again in 1824, where the century-old Creole custom of the Boeuf Gras on Shrove Tuesday had by now become an annual festival. Oxen pulled a huge bull's head on a cart down the Rue Royale and the Rue Dauphin in the Old Quarter, as masked celebrants followed in train, drinking, singing, and dancing. The Carnival, or Mardi Gras, in early March 1824 was the biggest and best since the one that celebrated the victory over the British in 1815.33 The alluring city offered many other enticements as well. There was theater, for example. Bowie could well have seen a few performances in Natchez before its theater burned in 1821, and even after that traveling troupes occasionally came down the Mississippi to perform at inns. New Orleans, of course, had several playhouses, where broad farces ran cheek by jowl with Shakespeare, and the leading names of the eastern stage sometimes played. The noted tragedian Edwin Forrest appeared here this winter season and he and Bowie became at least passingly acquainted.34 He may even have performed his signature role in Metamora, in which he played a fierce character armed with a great terrifying knife.
There were also the taverns and the gaming tables. Bowie liked gambling, especially faro and something called “bucking the tiger,” and it was one of the ways that money easily made just as easily left his purse. He relished the comradeship and bustle of the grog house. Wine, beer, rum, and a “mean” whiskey were the social beverages of the time and place. Milk was for children, and thanks to the danger of typhoid fever, few people drank water. The quantities that even sober men consumed sometimes startled foreigners, and if Bowie occasionally had more than he should—well, so did almost everyone else.35 Certainly there were women, too. New Orleans abounded with American, French, Spanish, and mixed nationality women, and at any level of the social strata that would suit a man's taste or mood. Bowie left not an atom of a record of his love life for these years, but surely there was one, if only casual and certainly not of any lasting nature, but at least enough to spawn future rumors and myths, that often terminated with jealous fights and violent death.36
In 1823 James may well have accompanied Rezin on a voyage to Havana, where his brother made a substantial purchase of a genuine grant on Bayou Caillou from the Spanish owner. At the same time he almost certainly called on Capitán Vicente Pintado, once the chief surveyor in the Florida parishes until the rebellion and annexation left him without a position, who had moved to Havana in 1817. Pintado and Kemper were old enemies, and Rezin may well have known of him in that connection. More likely, however, Rezin wanted to see Pintado because the Spaniard had taken all his land surveys of Spanish grants with him. Using them for reference, he continued to issue certificates of survey for the property he had located, and Rezin would need one for the grant he had just purchased. The certificate cost him, but it was worth it, for this was the best possible confirmation of a grant's authenticity. Pintado's papers were of no positive use to James, of course, for there could not be anything there to confirm forged grants. Nevertheless, if he took the time to make a careful examination of all of Pintado's papers, he would have seen where genuine surveys lay, and made certain that he did not conflict with them when he tried to get his own claims surveyed. Such conflicts only slowed the process of surveying and, worse, signaled to land registrars that when two grants vied for the same land, one was a fake.37
All of this merely provided diversion. Bowie's continuing fixed purpose was the land claims. In 1821 he cultivated an acquaintance with Isaac Thomas, an influential planter near Alexandria who began writing letters on his behalf to men of influence in Washington trying to hurry the confirmation of the claims, and continued to do so into 1823.38 When Josiah Johnston was in fact elected to the U.S. Senate, Thomas urged him, too, late in 1822 to get speedy congressional action, especially on the claims in the District North of Red River, where lay most of Bowie's claims. “Ouachita is restless, and unsettled,” Thomas warned, and the men there had nothing else on their minds.39 Certainly Johnston took an interest in the matter, the more so thanks to his partnership with Graham in a plantation on Bayou Boeuf that itself rested in part on claims quite near some of Bowie's Martin and Wilson tracts.
That Johnston had some special influence—and a conflict of interest—in the matter is evident from the fact that in 1823 a new commissioner took charge of the General Land Office in Washington—none other than his partner, George Graham. Typical of the labyrinthine nature of Louisiana politics and society at the time, Graham himself was a first cousin of William Brent.40 The connections between them all were even more complex than family ties or business relations. Virtually no formal political p
arties existed at the time, though the disintegrating old Federalist Party still anxiously tried to protect the propertied interests. Instead factions orbited around a number of candidates who stepped forward in the coming presidential election of 1824, representing constituencies more regional than ideological, and only three were real contenders: The Federalist John Quincy Adams spoke for the northeast and for business, Henry Clay for the burgeoning West, and Andrew Jackson attracted the most numerous and least prosperous everywhere, the men like Crockett who saw themselves as the sinews of the young nation. Johnston and Brent, though opposed to each other, stood closely allied with Clay, while Graham favored Clay and Adams alike. Thus, despite their bitter animosity, Johnston and Brent had shared ties to Clay and Graham, and shared interest in the claims. Applicants close to either Johnston or Brent expected their man's support when it came to getting claims confirmed, and both of them assumed Graham's support. When it came to exercising his duties, the land commissioner himself could be torn between kinship on the one hand and his own business interests on the other, though Graham appeared to be more of a stickler for propriety and the rule of law than many other public officials. Land, blood, and politics all combined to produce a seething and confused ferment in Louisiana.