All along the way he met other Americans. “A person may travel all day; and day after day, and find Americans only,” wrote a fellow traveler. “He can hardly make himself believe that he is not still in the United States.”57 Bowie may well have known some of the others he met on the road. Certainly he had some acquaintances in Nacogdoches, or at least friends of relatives. Thomas F. McKinney was one of the town's more prominent traders and citizens, and he and his uncle Stephen Prather living nearby were, by a complex set of relationships, connected to John Bowie. James did not neglect striking an acquaintance with them.58 Once he left Nacogdoches he crossed the Angelina and Neches Rivers, rode along the fringes of Kickapoo land and then across the Trinity to Trinidad, just at the edge of Austin's colony.
At Trinity he had his choice. He could take the Camino Real—the King's Highway—southwest for another two hundred miles or more to San Antonio, or he could turn south on the La Bahía and onto the Coushatta Trace and across the Brazos, about eighty miles to Austin's settlement at San Felipe. Bowie chose the latter. The little community was unimpressive. Another visitor found it “a wretched, decaying looking place,” with only five stores, two “mean” taverns, and twenty to thirty unpainted log houses. There was about the place “no appearance of industry, of thrift of improvement of any kind.”59Yet San Felipe, after all, was not just Austin's home and headquarters but the administrative center of his colony. Bowie could find lodging at Jonathan Peyton's inn and learn from local leaders of the ruling council, or ayuntamiento, how to go about acquiring and choosing land. He knew a few people in the small community, most notably Dr. James Long's widow, Jane, who had lived for a time in Alexandria a few years before; and he made friends with at least one, young Noah Smithwick, a gunsmith recently emigrated from Tennessee, during his visit.60 Austin himself Bowie did not meet, for Austin was often absent doing the colony's business, but from others he learned that he would be best advised to go on to the Mexican administrative capital, San Antonio de Béxar.61
San Antonio dated back to 1718, its roots lying in the presidio of San Antonio de Béxar and the village of San Fernando de Béxar. In 1773 it became the capital of Spanish Texas, its houses rough one- and two-story abode buildings on a few streets clustered about the military plaza on which sat the governor's palace. At first sight little recommended the place. With a population of somewhere over 2,000 Spaniards, Mexicans, indigenous natives as poor, dirty, and unpleasant. Worse, it suffered repeatedly during the revolts leading up to Mexican independence. Now, with Texas part of a state with Coahuila, its capital, south of the Rio Grande at Saltillo, San Antonio was reduced to being a provincial center for Mexican administration and a small military outpost. Its most prominent citizen was Juan Martín de Veramendi, an old friend of Austin's who had held a number of minor offices including that of alcalde, or mayor. He had also tried to get a colonization grant of his own and so had some interest in land speculation.
Naturally Bowie sought Veramendi on his arrival. By now he already knew some of the requirements for getting land grants in Texas, the first and foremost being that the settler must accept Mexican citizenship. Prior to that, however, he either must be confirmed in the Catholic church or else sweat that he intended to do so. Whatever religious instruction James Bowie had received came from his parents, a mixture of the Scots Presbyterian and the Methodist, though the Church of Rome was hardly unknown to him. After all, his father Rezin had faced the same conversion requirement when he settled in Missouri many years before, and his brother Rezin had married a Catholic and actually converted. Denominational allegiance was always loose on the frontier, simply because worshippers often settled for any church at hand, regardless of doctrine. The bloody rift with Rome three centuries earlier, not to mention religious wars and Inquisition to follow, still left most Protestants with a special suspicion of Catholicism, but not James Bowie. While he felt some degree of respect for religion and those who believed, he gave no evidence of any deeply held convictions of his own. Thus it would have involved no great struggle with his conscience to decide to take the first step toward acquiring Texas land by swearing an intent to convert to Catholicism.62
Just how long Bowie stayed in San Antonio is unknown, though he took the time to acquaint himself rather thoroughly with the town and the surrounding countryside. It looked like fertile land, good for cotton, though at the moment there was no way of processing it in the province. Any fiber grown had to be shipped at some trouble and expense east to Louisiana, just as manufactured cotton goods had to be imported back from the East, again at some expense. Bowie witnessed the trade in operation in Nacogdoches, where McKinney especially did a thriving business. It did not escape him that this abundant fertile land could be made very profitable indeed by a man with capital and enterprise.
He may have stayed in Béxar a little longer because of an entirely different opportunity. Veramendi had a comely daughter named Maria Ursula, soon turning seventeen. Though he may still have been paying court intermittently to Cecilia Wells or other women back in Louisiana, nothing serious awaited him there. But James Bowie hardly felt indifferent to women. His friend Ham saw that he was “attentive to ladies on all occasions, and seemed to entertain a devotion for them which might be appropriately termed chivalrous.” Ever the “clever, polite gentleman” with female company, he may well have charmed the girl with his smooth manners, just as he won over her parents.63 Nothing serious necessarily developed with Ursula on this first visit, for that matter, but he did not forget her, despite the difference in their years. And undeniably he could not forget that her father was a rising man in the government, already spoken of for high office, or that a settler who married a Mexican woman received an extra bonus of free land. Such things were worth remembering.
By mid-July it was time to return to Louisiana, though he may have chosen a different route back from San Antonio. At San Felipe a poor road could take him on a three-day trip through forests on the west side of the Brazos, south to Brazoria, just a few miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, and not far from Laffite's old haunts on Galveston Island. There were numerous houses along the way, some operating as inns where one dollar bought a night's lodging and supper and breakfast.64His old friend Warren Hall had moved to Brazoria not long before, himself tiring of the endless feuding and broils of Rapides, and it would have been unlike Bowie to miss a chance to meet with this figure who kept flittling into and out of his life at pivotal moments.65From Brazoria Bowie could ride back toward San Felipe until he struck the Atascosita Trace, then follow it east until he made Balew's Ferry on the Sabine, thence overland to Opelousas, and so on to home. Or he could have ridden back to Nacogdoches and home via San Augustine, or even taken Trammel's Trace north from Nacogdoches into southwest Arkansas to look at his claims business there.
However he traveled, he was back in Terrebonne by the middle of August.66Once there he had much to ponder. Texas looked good to him, and so did Ursula. It offered limitless opportunity and the advantage of a much looser rein for his kind of business than the oppressive scrutiny of men like George Graham and Josiah Johnston. On the other hand, despite his disillusionment with former political friends in Rapides, Louisiana still offered much. He was selling land now, and for big money. Moreover, Rezin and Stephen were about to build a major plantation on Bayou Lafourche. Naturally they wanted him in on the deal, and the Arkansas scheme with John still looked good, though some trouble loomed on that horizon. It was too soon yet to turn his back irrevocably on his old life, but at least with his baptism and his contacts with the Veramendis, he had taken important steps toward a new one. For a little while yet he would have to be content with keeping one foot in each of two worlds.
10
BOWIE
1828-1830
If there has been fraud committed, it is not chargable upon Arkansas, but on the Bowies of Louisiana.
LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas Advocate, FEBRUARY 9, 1830
Bowie returned to Louisiana in late summer 1
828 just in time to see the Arkansas scheme take fire. John Bowie actually moved from Louisiana to Chicot County in the southeast corner of the territory in order to manage it more closely, and in October commenced selling more of the claims in Hempstead and elsewhere. On October 22 alone he took in $5,200 for fifteen of the confirmed grants.1 Previously he sold a plot to none other than the same Hugh White who had sworn years earlier that Bayou Tensas was really Bayou Maçon.2 In July he entered more of the claims in the Batesville district, yet others at Helena and Little Rock in the first half of the year, and he would put more on record at Clarkesville the coming December.3 Nevertheless tremors came from Washington, where Attorney General William Wirt suspected the manner in which all those claims had been stampeded through the territorial superior court. Wisely John Bowie sold what he could now in case legal obstacles arose in future.
For James, however, the chief attraction on his return lay to the south, along the lovely Bayou Lafourche. James always seemed to trust Rezin's judgment implicitly—even Stephen's at times, which was less wise—and while James was off socializing in San Antonio, Rezin had turned his eyes south.4 The disastrous flood that summer all but drove Rezin and Stephen from their Avoyelles land anyhow, and just before his brother's return from Texas, Rezin bought on his behalf 260 arpents, or about 220 acres, on the right bank of the bayou just one and one-half miles downstream from Thibodeauxville.5 But that was to be only the beginning. Rezin had plans for the place—plans that he and James may have discussed fleetingly months before, when James decided to leave Rapides, but that more likely came to the latter as something of a surprise.6
The whole region had once been called simply the Lafourche Interior, but then in 1822 all of the parish south of Bayou Lafourche became Terrebonne Parish, and there James located his now profitable claims on the Harper report. A sparsely settled region prior to 1817, valuable only for its timber, the Lafourche suffered almost yearly inundation by the Mississippi. But in that year workers finally completed the levees along the banks from Donaldsonville south, protecting the parish from all but the worst floods, and acts by the legislature requiring inhabitants to maintain those levees thereafter ensured that Lafourche could be settled and exploited.7 It flowed roughly parallel to Bayou Teche to the west, anywhere from twenty to fifty miles distant, and a number of south-to-north bayous flowed in between that made east-west travel a nightmare. A resident on the Lafourche could go two hundred miles to Natchez faster than he could get the fifty miles through the bayous to New Orleans. Only now, in 1828, had a canal been constructed connecting the two bayous so that planters in Terrebonne could get their produce to the Lafourche, and thence up to the Mississippi at Donaldsonville, and so down that river to New Orleans.
The inhabitants by 1828 were still mostly Acadians, about whom opinions varied. Some outsiders described them as “lazy vagabonds, doing but little work, and spending much time in shooting, fishing, and play,” and Sergeant S. Prentiss, who visited the area in 1829, called them “the poorest, most ignorant, set of beings you ever saw—without the least enterprise or industry.”8 Yet others, like William Sparks, found them “amiable, law-abiding, virtuous, and honest.” They spoke little English but a rich French patois, and were uncommonly trusting. Rarely did their affairs ever come into court, and when they did a judge could be hard put to find one who was literate enough to act as jury foreman. They lived in sparse settlements strung along a single road on either side of the bayou, making in effect a “street” almost thirty miles long. The men wore blue cotton twill pants and striped shirts, while the women wore no adornment other than an occasional colored kerchief about their heads when they went to church. Both sexes often as not clomped about in wooden shoes, and one resident swore there were not half a dozen proper ladies' bonnets in the parish. There was only one pleasure carriage in the whole Lafourche—and only the one road any-how. Poling up-and downstream in their bateaux; their sail-powered, flat-bottomed skiffs; and their even smaller paddled pirogues, chiefly the bayou itself was their highway.9
Moving at a sluggish three miles an hour when its source, the Mississippi, ran at high water, and almost stagnant when the river ran low, the bayou measured no more than one hundred yards wide in places. On both sides the land was wonderfully fertile—built up along the banks, then gradually sloping away to swampland a mile or so distant—ground full of oak, magnolia, ash, and cypress. Alligators flourished in the swamps as well as on the bayous, and residents constantly worked to keep them under control. “The leisure time of every day was devoted to their extermination, until the cold of winter rendered them torpid,” said one resident, and the locals became somewhat ingenious in their ways of killing the reptiles.10 Miraculously that summer's huge flood did not touch the Lafourche, but the extensive damage it did to the parishes north actually drove many planters there from their land, thus encouraging the settlement in Lafourche, and that in turn drove the price of land upward, all of which attracted the Bowies.11
No more than a half dozen Anglo-Americans lived there at the time, and with the exception of one cotton planter, the rest grew sugarcane. The cane brought the Bowies. The Jesuits first harvested it in 1751, and by 1795 Etienne Boré produced granulated sugar commercially in Twelve years later Evan Hall commenced the commercial cultivation of sugarcane, and by 1811 planters on Bayou Teche ground sometimes two or three barrels a day of syrup.12 Then in 1820 came a new variety of cane that provided a bigger crop, and the business expanded rapidly, though always hampered by the cost of harvest and shipment.13“A sugar establishment is necessarily a very expensive one,” wrote Timothy Flint in 1824, noting that “the great capital that it requires to commence the business profitably” deterred many.14 But as the prices for sugar steadily rose, more planters took the gamble. The Lafourche produced an enormous crop in 1826, some of the stalks running six inches in circumference, and the wholesale price at the New Orleans market hit twenty-two cents a pound. Moreover, cotton prices fell dramatically just then, whereas a three-cent-a-pound tariff actually protected the cane industry and supported the price of domestic sugar. No wonder that between 1825 and 1828 the number of sugar plantations doubled.15
And no wonder the Bowies came. It helped that the trusting Acadians, unused to hard currency or to financial dealings in general, often proved willing to sell their holdings for very small sums.16 For a mere $4,200 Rezin bought that first tract from Jean Maronges on August 12. On paper it looked like a lot of money for just 220 acres, but what the little did not show was what sat on his property. Maronges only purchased it himself on July 5, from André Candolle of Assumption Parish, a Creole who was one of the first to see the way to high production. Until then slaves had put cut bundles of cane in stone bins, and teams of mules or oxen then pulled a heavy grindstone around and around over the cane, crushing out the syrup that ran in rivulets into scuppers for collection. The syrup then went into the perjurie, a long low building where fires burned constantly under several kettles, reducing the liquid.17 It was slow and tedious work, with an output of only two or three barrels a day. But eastern manufacturers could now build steam-driven mills that crushed many times the old daily output, and as early as 1826 merchants in New Orleans solicited orders for their purchase.18 Two planters on Bayou Teche already used steam crushers, but to date no one on the Lafourche had made the investment.19 The property that Rezin bought had a crusher, but it may have been animal powered and slow. Certainly the plantation had virtually bankrupted Candolle. In November 1826 creditors started trying to foreclose, and finally a district court judgment against him put the property in Maronges's hands. Candolle was forced to sell to satisfy judicial mortgages and loans totaling $31,659.48, the largest due to Candolle's own father. What Maronges paid satisfied none of the debt, but in buying the property for James, Rezin refused to recognize that the mortgages were binding on him. That remained for a court to settle, and he ran some risk as a result. Meanwhile, having acquired it all for a more $4,200, he could hope to make enough by i
nstalling a steam crusher to cover his risk if a court should decide in favor of the creditors.20
James Bowie was apparently delighted with the new prospect offered by the Lafourche, and with Rezin's going ahead on his behalf even without his power of attorney. Here was a chance to start something big, profitable, and legitimate for a change. Moreover, a prosperous planter could become a man of influence. The eyes of Louisiana were turning to these sugar lands southwest of New Orleans. A success here could win him far more than he would ever have achieved in faraway Alexandria. Thanks to his large sales in Terrebonne the past winter and spring, James had substantial cash to lay out in order to expand on the start made by Rezin. First he bought out his brothers' holdings in Avoyelles and elsewhere, to give them sufficient cash to invest in the new plantation on the Lafourche. He resold the land but kept the slaves that went with their property, for sugar planting and harvesting was labor intensive even with the crusher. Then he started building the new plantation with purchases in November and December that brought it up to more than 800 acres and seventy blacks.21
Candolle may not have had the steam crusher operating yet when Maronges took over the land and sold it to Rezin, and in any case the harvest and grinding season had passed before James assembled the full plantation. They would have to wait for the 1829 crop to start producing syrup, and that would not come until October. Of course there was plenty to do in the meantime, but James virtually left the running of the plantation to Rezin, whose first task was to order $874.09 worth of machinery, including a steam boiler and all the shafts, bearings, journals, and a gear box and pump, to run the crusher—all of it on credit from the Massachusetts firm of Cushing and Ames.22 Instead he may have mixed a little in local society, but such as it was, it offered few attractions. Cecilia Wells was 150 miles away, well out of sight, and probably long out of mind. The local Creole women rode about in old caleches made of wood and rawhide, hardly better than a farm wagon, and the Acadian women were mostly noted for “blowzed, uncombed hair” that hardly turned his head. Ursula Veramendi must have seemed all the better in recollection. The local planters lived well, were polished and somewhat educated yet without snobbery, and most shared Bowie's sentiments in support of Henry Clay as opposed to the new President Jackson. They sometimes gave lavish afternoon dinners at 2 P.M., starting with gumbo and ending with black coffee and champagne, not to mention wine and cards. But it was still a provincial life for a man of Bowie's tastes. Half the population were slaves, and the best entertainment available was their singing in the caneyard at night while cooking syrup, or the wild Acadians at their carnival time.23
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