Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  He preferred New Orleans, and as had been his custom, he left the Lafourche to winter in the Crescent City. Indeed, for the future he made only occasional visits to the plantation, usually when he needed Rezin's advice. Their friend Sparks noted that James “had implicit faith in the wisdom and abilities of his brother.”24 Building something suited James's temperament, but the humdrum of running it was another matter. Besides, in New Orleans he could attend to some of the plantation's business, including placating the creditors whose debts were tied to his property. He may even have investigated obtaining a charter from the state for the construction of a short-line railroad connecting the Lafourche with a convenient shipping point on the Mississippi. It was the era of a sudden explosion of interest in the new iron horse, with innumerable charters being sought and fortunes dreamed of. Indeed, it would have been unlike the Bowies not to consider attempting to cash in on the growing mania. Louisiana had no railroads as yet, but the legislature granted charters right and left, and with the growing volume of sugar from the Lafourche, the carrying trade promised a handsome profit, and also could open the interior to further development, making their holdings only the more valuable.25

  There were also new friends to cultivate, especially Benjamin Z. Canonge, a former interpreter of the city criminal court not long ago dismissed for killing a man in a duel. Canonge was now a broker and auctioneer on St. Louis Street, who could be helpful in the Bowies' sugar dealings. Perhaps more important, he stood in line soon to become the new registrar of the land office in New Orleans, and James Bowie could use his help in the continuing battle over some of his claims. On December 22 James visited James Erwin, whom he may have known years before as one of the planters buying and smuggling Laffite's slaves. He paid Erwin $275 for an eleven-year-old boy named Charles, and that same day deeded him as a gift to Canonge's minor son Dawson.26 James Bowie understood bribes well enough, and rarely gave away anything without expecting something in return. Canonge would be a good man to have in his debt.

  Someone else was in New Orleans that winter. In January 1829 George Graham stopped there, having visited his plantation in Rapides. He and Bowie would hardly have called on one another, but his presence punctuated the fact that Bowie still faced a formidable foe in Washington. Without needing the help of Canonge, over the winter Bowie successfully sold almost all of his remaining property in Terrebonne from the Harper report. He profited from the generally rising land prices in the region, and got more than $18,000 from property sold to his attorney Quitman and, more importantly for future events, from a sale to rising Natchez attorney and politician Robert J. Walker. By now he realized in all from the Harper report claims at least $51,250, a good payoff for eight years of waiting. Most of the new cash probably went to retire old debt, and for equipment for the new sugar plantation.27

  Yet the success of his Terrebonne sales only emboldened Bowie to try to bully through his fraudulent claims north of Red River. Late in February he took a boat to Natchez and then rode the few miles to Washington, Mississippi, to confront the new man in the land office there, James Turner. In polite but increasingly belligerent tones he vented his dissatisfaction at the delays in providing locations and certificates of his claims. Turner replied that he had recent instructions from Graham that henceforth on all suspicious claims a claimant must first prove that the survey about to be located for him on the official township plats was precisely the land specified in the original grant. Of course, none of Bowie's spurious grants specified anything other than a certain bayou, since it had been his intention to choose the best land available for surveying, but now that part of his plan wrong-footed him, and Turner saw through him. He protested that his claims should be treated and located just the same as those in which there was no suspicion of forgery. Turner stood firm. He told Bowie that he would advise Graham to proceed immediately with surveying all the areas covered by Bowie's claims as if they were unquestioned public lands, and then offer them for sale, at which time Bowie might take his case to court and prove the legitimacy of his claims if he could. Turner was blunt, both with Bowie and Graham. “My own opinion is, that four out of five of all the claims reported by Mr. Sutton, are fraudulent,” he said, and that Bowie and other forgers “who are so noisy about their rights, are no more entitled to the land they claim on the principles of justice and equity, than the inhabitants of Hindostan.”28

  Worse, Turner now started to extend his gaze to the Harper report claims in Terrebonne. When Bowie learned of that, or perhaps even in anticipation of a problem, he remembered that he might have neglected to get all of his original papers out of Harper's office in Donaldsonville back in 1827, and indeed he had. There were still the papers and survey of the tract on Bayou Black for which he had used William Wilson as a front. He could not afford to have Turner scrutinizing any of his self-created originals.29 Bowie went to James Allison, the pliable surveyor whom he had paid to locate the erroneous surveys in the first place, and told him to get into the land office in Donaldsonville, find out if the Wilson papers were still there, and if so to get them out before Turner saw them.30

  Bowie asked Allison to get the papers in part because he would cause less suspicion, but also because Bowie was leaving. By the spring he was ready to travel once more, his imagination fired by memories of Ursula, of the empire awaiting in Texas, and of those stories of lost silver mines. Before going he bought for a mere $350 a twenty-two-year-old runaway mulatto slave named William Ross, so light-skinned he could pass for a Cherokee. Accompanied by him, and perhaps by Caiaphas Ham or another friend or two, and maybe even Rezin, Bowie set off not long after his visit to Turner in Washington. He made the long trip up the Red River, and so on once more through Natchitoches and across the Sabine into Texas.31

  Certainly Bowie went to San Antonio to visit with the Veramendis and to see Ursula again. She would be eighteen that coming fall.32 Sometime during his visit Bowie broached the subject of marriage to her father, and did not meet with an unencouraging response. By now he had enough money—or the promise of it—that he could talk in earnest of the idea of building a cotton mill somewhere in the province of Coahuila y Tejas, probably in partnership with Veramendi, and what better way to seal their financial alliance than with one between their families? Besides, Bowie had developed some genuine romantic feeling for Ursula, so matrimony did not seem so onerous, and at thirty-three it was time for him to wed. Just what plans were made Bowie kept to himself, but undoubtedly by the time he left San Antonio that summer there was an understanding at least of his interest.

  While in Béxar Bowie also met José Antonio Menchaca, a locally born native Mexican, or tejano, and friend of the Veramendis with whom he struck up a close acquaintance.33 Indeed, Bowie found that the tejanos and the local bexareños made good company. Just as he could ingratiate himself with the influential civil leaders, so did he win friends among the middle class, like Menchaca. They could tell him about the countryside, take him hunting the bison that ranged the prairies, advise him where the best land was to be had, and provide wonderfully convivial companions of an evening in the cantina or at one of their festive fandangos. Some of them could also tell him more about those stories of lost Spanish silver mines, especially the legendary Los Almagres mine in the San Saba country. Somewhere more than 120 miles northwest of San Antonio, in an unsettled wilderness ruled only by the Comanche, lay a forgotten shaft that led to a rich vein once worked by the local natives for the Spaniards. No one had seen it for a century. That alone provided a challenge to James Bowie.

  The possibility of new riches only added stimulus. Accompanied by a few companions, he rode out across the trackless hill country, probably following the Colorado River to the mouth of the San Saba, then up its course until he reached the ruins of the old Presidio de San Saba and the nearby abandoned mission. There they spent untold days scouring the countryside looking for a closed shaft, or the tell-tale pile of crushed rock from which ore had been extracted, but without success. He could no
t know that the whole story was a myth, and that in any event he was looking in the wrong place. Los Almagres lay seventy miles away and had never been an operating mine, its ore assaying too thin to merit the effort required to extract it from the earth. In the end he left with nothing to show, but at least he could leave a sign of his passing. On the wall of the main entrance to the ruined presidio earlier visitors had carved their names. One was a “Padilla” in 1810. Another had passed through that very year, etching the name “Cos” nearby. Beside them, before leaving, the latest visitor engraved “Bowie con sua tropa 1829.” His Spanish grammar was not yet what it should be, but the words conveyed well enough the message that “Bowie with his troop” had passed that way.34

  By early June Bowie was on his way home, and somewhere near Nacogdoches the runaway William Ross ran away again, only to be caught and sent to the jail in Alexandria to await his owner's sending for him, but Bowie did not interrupt his journey on that account.35 The news awaiting him in Louisiana was not good. He found James Allison and discovered that when Allison called at the Donaldsonville land office, Turner just happened to be there and immediately turned suspicious when Allison asked if the Wilson survey plat he had done was still there. He even made the mistake of calling it one of “Mr. Bouyes” claims. The official said that it was still there, which was not what Allison hoped to hear. Allison began acting restless—which Turner took as suspicious—then said he wanted to remove the document to make some further notes on the back of the survey. Turner flatly refused, and Allison lost his composure, saying first that he thought he had destroyed it, that it should have been destroyed, and that he suspected someone of concealing it from him when he had removed the rest of Bowie's surveys.36 There was nothing else he could do, and now Bowie knew that not only was he suspect, but that Turner had documents by which he might prove forgery.

  His reaction was typical. Confronted by the mounting weight of evidence and prejudice against his claims, he assumed the offensive. Late in June he went to Natchez for a few days, collected some debts, played some faro, and spent at least an evening or two in the local taverns.37 In one of them he must have had rather more to drink than was good for him, for he began to brag of his plans. He was going to go east to Washington and pull every string he could find to get George Graham dismissed from his position as commissioner of the General Land Office. That would solve his problems and get his land speculations back on course. On June 27 he boarded a steamboat for the trip up the Mississippi, unaware that someone less sympathetic to Bowie's scheme overhead his injudicious boasts and passed them along to Turner. On another boat, just two days behind Bowie, a letter from Turner was on its way to apprise Graham of what was coming.38

  In fact the letter may have reached Washington before its subject, for Bowie stopped at Lake Providence to visit with his brother John and no doubt look into the progress of the Arkansas scheme.39 He would not have reached Washington until well into July, and whatever efforts he made there failed to live up to his boast. He could no longer look to Brent for support. Indeed, he had no friends in the Louisiana delegation now, and Congress was in recess until December in any case. With Andrew Jackson in office as president, Graham had a new superior in office as secretary of the treasury, a Pennsylvanian whom Bowie did not know and with whom he could have no influence. What Bowie really expected to accomplish, or how he thought he would do it, is a mystery, the whole trip being another example of that impetuosity that Rezin often decried. At best Bowie may have thought he could somehow resurrect an attempt to unseat Graham that had been set in motion two years before when the dismissed and disgruntled surveyor John Wilson filed charges against him with Congress.

  Wilson was not unknown to Bowie, of course, and possibly played some hand in getting part of his Sutton report claims surveyed before his termination. On January 31, 1827, Wilson filed charges with the Speaker of the House on twelve different counts, most of them wholly frivolous, and after several days of testimony the committee on public lands dismissed all of them.40 That ended the matter, and if Bowie hoped to revive it, he was disappointed. He cut a fine figure on the streets of Washington as he went from office to office, dressed “finely but not gaudily,” but that was his only success.41

  Bowie may have gone on to Boston after finding his Washington mission a failure. Concerns there like the Boston Manufacturing Company could produce the kind of machinery necessary for the cotton-milling factory that he had in mind for Texas. The cost would be high, at least $20,000 initially, with shipping and assembly probably a substantial additional expense, but it was not out of the question for a man of his resourcefulness at raising money. And even if all his talk of the mill was only a ruse to win over Veramendi, still it would serve him well to have as much firsthand information as possible in order to make him the more convincing. He left no later than mid- or late September for the journey home, this time going by coach to the Ohio River, then down it to the Mississippi. Traveling the last leg down the Mississippi by steamboat, he practiced his old craft of impressing the influential, this time Gen. J. E. Jefferson, with whom he played cards on the boat, and who found him “high as a citizen and a gentleman” and of “incorruptible integrity.”42

  He stopped at Natchez before going on to Lafourche to see the progress of the plantation.43 If he hoped to find good news awaiting him, he met even more disappointment than in Washington. Any lingering attachment to Cecilia Wells—if indeed there had ever been one—ceased for eternity. The summer of 1829 proved to be one of the worst for fever in several years, and on September 17 she died of it, having suffered the onset while attending the wedding of the late General Cuny's brother.44

  But far worse was what he learned of the land business. Not only had Allison failed to secure the Wilson papers from the Washington land office, but he had thrown additional suspicion on the whole enterprise, and in his absence Bowie's associates exacerbated the problem. Turner investigated Allison after the May visit to his office, and found that Allison had made all of Bowie's surveys and approved the plats—the final step to confirmation—against his superior's specific orders. “We are left to conjecture,” said Turner, as to why Allison did it, but then he learned that Bowie may have bribed Allison with the promise of a share of the proceeds from the sale of the Wilson tract. Since Bowie knew that the Wilson parcel was under suspicion as far back as 1827, he risked very little in any case, and may have been buying Allison's cooperation for a share of what he knew to be nothing. Regardless of that, Turner was onto Allison now. “All his acts as an officer are becoming public without investigation,” Turner told Graham. And there was more.

  When Allison visited the office in May he told Turner that all the papers supporting the certified plats for Bowie's other Terrebonne claims had been destroyed. Certainly Turner could not find them in the office of the deputy surveyor in Donaldsonville. But then, while Bowie was in the East, his sister Martha's husband Alexander Sterrett paid a call at the Donaldsonville office and produced a stack of documents that proved to be certified copies of those now destroyed originals. He told the surveyor there that such documents properly belonged in his office, of course, and Sterrett was only doing his duty as a citizen by delivering them to be placed in their proper files. But the surveyor knew all about the Bowie claims and refused to allow Sterrett to leave them in the office without first securing a satisfactory explanation from Allison as to their original absence. He saw Sterrett's obvious intent on Bowie's behalf. He wanted to “plant” the certified copies in the hope that once on file they would support the validity of the claims—though not being “originals,” they could be of no use to those suspecting forgery. Instead his visit only aroused further suspicion, as if any more were needed. Turner gave the surveyor at Donaldsonville direct orders thereafter to protect his files from unauthorized intrusion or interference.45

  As if Bowie did not already feel the authorities closing in on him, it now looked as if statute law might join his enemies. All this time he had co
ntinued pressing his forgeries with impunity thanks to the fact that neither the state nor Congress had happened to enact legislation proscribing his activities as crimes. But in the past spring and summer the indefatigable James Turner had been chipping away at that last barrier. He had talked to enough men so that he knew he could get certified statements testifying “how those Spanish orders of survey came into existence,” and promised Graham that he would have them in time for the next session of Congress, starting in December. Moreover, he was working with the “Court for the Parish of the Interior of Lafourche” on two or three cases that he hoped to bring to trial there, revealing the “manner of obtaining transfers for those illegal claims.”46 In short, Turner assembled a dossier to document every step of Bowie's procedure, and if trying to steal public domain land in Louisiana by fraud was not a violation of a statute, still Bowie had broken enough other laws covering forgery, bribery, suborning public officials, and perhaps even extortion or intimidation. Even if it never came to prosecution, still Bowie had to realize that for him the land game in Louisiana was all but up.