Like many a young man with more libido than conscience, Travis may even have found it convenient to have a wife back in Alabama, for she presented an automatic impediment to any young lady in Texas trying to force him to the altar. Certainly he did not let marriage inhibit his romantic life. Women were scarce enough in San Felipe that when an opportunity presented itself, Travis did not stand on ceremony. Sometimes he paid for sex, mostly with native and tejana prostitutes or Texian washerwomen supplementing their meager income. Occasionally the daughter of one of the settlers was in an agreeable mood. With the callow pride of youth, Travis even numbered his conquests. On September 26, 1833, using his still evolving grasp of Spanish for recording more delicate matters he noted in the diary that he used mainly for business notes, he wrote that “chingaba una mujer que es cincuenta y seis en mi vida”: “I fucked a woman who is the fifty-sixth of my life.”93 If by that he meant that this was only the fifty-sixth time he had enjoyed sexual congress in his life, then the two and one-half years of marriage and living with Rosanna may well have been troubled from the start. On the other hand, if he meant that the lady involved was the fifty-sixth partner in his lifetime, then Travis had been a busy fellow in Texas indeed, and the eight weeks in Bradburn's brick kiln might have provided a welcome bit of rest.
An opportunistic attitude toward casual sex hardly meant that Travis was immune to romance, of course, even more indication that when he left Alabama, not much affection for Rosanna left with him. In December he courted Miss E. Henry in competition with two other suitors, one of them his friend A. C. Westall, and good-naturedly admitted defeat by attending her wedding to Westall on New Year's Eve. Perhaps he took it with equanimity because he had other interests simultaneously, one of them an acquaintance perhaps just starting to blossom into romance. Early in September, on his way home from a business trip, he had stopped at Mill Creek outside San Felipe and dined at the inn kept by John Cummings, meeting there his sister, Rebecca, who acted as hostess. Thereafter he made Cummings's a not infrequent stop.94
After scarcely more than two years, Texas had been awfully good to William B. Travis. When he came he arrived like so many others that Tocqueville had seen “at the extreme edge of the confederated states, where organized society and the wilderness meet.” They were bold and adventurous, leaving poverty in their homes behind them as they “dared to plunge into the solitudes of America seeking a new home-land.” They came with little or nothing. “All his surroundings are primitive and wild, but he is the product of eighteen centuries of labor and experience,” said the Frenchman. “He wears the clothes and talks the language of a town; he is aware of the past, curious about the future, and ready to argue about the present; he is a very civilized man prepared for a time to face life in the forest, plunging into the wilderness of the New World with his Bible, ax, and newspapers.”95 Property and prosperity, fine clothes, influential friends, as good a home as anyone in San Felipe, an end to debt and apparently no end of compliant women, and a seemingly boundless future, all lay before him. No stranger to pride and self-regard, Travis wore his success quite literally on his sleeve. In September, just past his twenty-fourth birthday, he sat down with a pen and his “Common place Book.” At an age when most American men had not yet lived or experienced enough to warrant more than a footnote, Travis wrote what he called “a short memorandum of the principal events of my life up to 1832.”96 Nothing could say more for his opinion of himself at that moment than that he should feel his life to date important enough for an autobiography, however brief. By ending it in 1832, with his rise to celebrity at Anahuac, he also revealed that he was hardly indifferent to the role that his recent past might play in his immediate future. Far from merely equaling his old mentor's success, Travis could already see hope of surpassing Dellet. If his maturing kept pace with his material progress, Travis's prospects in Texas appeared limitless.
12
BOWIE
1830-1831
The pages of history record few such achievements. The valorous men who bared their breasts… who fought without fear and without hope… should be remembered and honored as long as civilization endures.
CAIAPHAS HAM, CA. 1880
Bowie rode back to Louisiana in the fall of 1830, the monotony of the trip broken only by a chance meeting with Caiaphas Ham when he passed through Gonzales, seventy-five miles east of San Antonio. The faithful friend had gone to Natchez to collect Bowie's money, and was now on his way back, almost certainly empty-handed. He turned around and rode as far as Jared Groce's with Bowie, then left him to proceed on to Nacogdoches, the Sabine, and eventually the Lafourche once more in November.1 A lot of news awaited Bowie on his return. For one thing his old nemesis George Graham had died the previous August, one of his last statements a reiteration of his determination that “all claims founded upon fraud should never be confirmed.”2 For another, Rezin had been elected to another term in the legislature, this time representing Lafourche Parish, where he made his principal residence on the brothers' plantation.3
Of most immediate interest, however, was the impending reduction of the import duties on sugar. If that came to pass, the price on domestic sugar would fall more, and the value of the Bowie cane plantation could plummet as well. On this issue the planters lined up regardless of party behind Henry Clay and his nascent Whig organization, but for the Bowies what these events suggested was that the time to sell their plantation was night. The timing could not have been worse. Once Rezin got the steam crusher into operation, the machinery proved to be defective and it ruined half the 1830 crop, a loss of up to five thousand dollars. Then a heavy frost ruined another hundred acres of cane. Even using the steam engine to saw lumber failed.4 If this just happened to coincide with James's need to sell his remaining assets in Louisiana, so much the better. This time James's more deliberate brother Rezin agreed. He did not receive James's announcement of moving permanently to Texas too well, however. “James is too impatient to wait for events,” he complained. “He will hurry them before matters are ripe for action.”5
James and Stephen, and probably Rezin as well, went to Natchez in January 1831 to try to close out their holdings. James unloaded one of his last Terrebonne properties for $3,900 and then met with one of his other former buyers to discuss something much bigger.6 Robert J. Walker walked with a severe stoop, making his diminutive stature seem even smaller, and leading one friend to call him “a mere whiffet of a man.” His voice wheezed when he spoke, while his face remained entirely expressionless, yet behind it lurked a vaulting ambition backed with great ability and no small cunning. He enjoyed a lucrative legal practice in Natchez, while close contacts with such prominent bankers as James C. Wilkins, cotton gin merchant and president of the Planters Bank of Natchez, gave him access to more than enough money to indulge a taste for land speculation. The word was out that he was buying big, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of his credit on cane land and slaves, and that he was willing to take risks on land with questionable titles.7 James Bowie thought Walker made to order even if he—like his brother, Duncan, and his investment partner Wilkins—was a firm Jacksonian. Both Walker and Wilkins had political ambitions as well.
Whether the Bowies approached the Walkers and Wilkins or the other way around, in February they came to terms that saw the sale of the remnant of James's Harper report claims, the Lafourche sugar plantation and eighty slaves, and almost all of the four brothers' other Louisiana land, including twenty-four of James's bogus Sutton report claims. In all the deals covered nearly 70,000 acres and a total purchase price of $192,000. At last it seemed that James had beaten his old enemy Graham. He never got clear title to more than 56,000 of those acres, but now that would be the buyers' problem. Yet the Walkers and Wilkins were no fools. They paid very little outright cash and required that James sign over all of his shares in the Consolidated Association of Planters, acquired when he had used his property as collateral to borrow money from the association. In fact, for most of the sales B
owie only received the buyers' notes, due at intervals, and which they could refuse to pay if trouble arose with titles. If James had any cash in hand after it was all done, it amounted to no more than $20,000, and probably much less.8 There is no question that Robert Walker knew that the Sutton report properties were problematic at best, though the ever-persuasive James managed to convince the buyers that he and his brothers were selling at “great sacrifice” because the surveyor George Davis had spitefully ordered all the evidence of approvals for James's land claims to be destroyed, and thus he could not prove title. Even an eventual appeal to Walker's friend President Jackson did not help him secure clear title. Though he could not know it then, James Bowie would never see most of the rest due him on the buyers' notes.9
Whatever cash he received, Bowie spent $6,000 of it immediately on February 23, when he bought from Stephen two speculative tracts on the Lafourche some twenty-two miles below Thibodeauxville, next to property of his friend Angus McNeil.10 Most or all of the balance he put in the hands of McNeil in Natchez. Then he went downriver to New Orleans, and there on February 25 made out the formal transfer of his shares in the Consolidated Association to Robert Walker, advising the directors that “as I am about leaving this state for Mexico,” he hoped the transfer could be made speedily.11 There was also other family business to take care of. Nothing good was happening in Arkansas. The previous June a decree came down allowing the courts to try all previously allowed Spanish claims, along with the announcement that the United States would file suits against the several claimants. The newspapers published a list of the suits to be prosecuted, and of course the overwhelming majority of them were the Bowies'. That meant the Supreme Court, and they could expect little good to come of that. James had never had any luck in Washington.12
As for brother John, his personal life, as usual, seemed to be a mess. He was living in Chicot County now. Sometime after his first wife, Nancy, left him he had taken another named Lucinda, and in September he filed for a divorce from her, immediately thereafter marrying a widow whose daughter by her first husband would one day marry Stephen Bowie's son James.13 Seeing the Arkansas scheme playing out, John may have turned his hand to trying to lay claim to some land back near New Madrid, Missouri, that their father once owned, but it was a small-time affair compared to the enterprise of the last decade, a faint echo of the great land grabs that James and John attempted.14
Then there was brother Stephen, always the weakest link in the tight Bowie chain. In Rezin's family it was said that Stephen “had more good looks than practical sense,” and Rezin's wife, Margaret, frankly claimed that he was the “least bright” of the Bowies. Certainly he felt a lesser brand of loyalty to his brothers than they gave in return, James and Rezin having bailed him out of financial trouble more than once. When he won appointment as sheriff of Lafourche Parish in February 1830, Rezin posted part of a $9,560 bond for his good feasance in office, and just that past November, after returning from Texas, James signed another $7,500 bond for him. Nevertheless, on the very day in 1826 that Rezin sold Stephen a piece of land in St. Martin Parish at a very low price, Stephen turned around and filed suit against his brother for the collection of a $50 debt. And on February 23, when Stephen sold James those two new tracts on the Lafourche, one of which Stephen himself had bought only the day before for $1,000, he then demanded $2,000 from his brother. It was even rumored that Sheriff Stephen Bowie walked out of his office leaving a substantial sum of money on his table, and that when he returned it was gone, and James and Rezin had to make it up out of their own pockets before the theft was discovered. Despite the land sales to the Walkers and Wilkins, he was almost broke.15 Six months later his land in Terrebonne would be seized for his debts, and in another few weeks he would be arrested on the streets of Natchez for debt and vagrancy. Typical of him, he blamed his insolvency on his brother James, claiming that he had left for Texas owing him $12,000. By the end of the year he was apparently actually hiding to try to avoid an arrest order being served by the U.S. marshal for eastern Louisiana.16
When James left Natchez early in March 1831, moving to Texas for good, he gave Rezin his power of attorney to sell his few remaining bits of land in Louisiana, as well as in Arkansas and the “province of Texas, in Mexico.”17 Clearly he still had some hopes for more Arkansas sales, and just as clearly, he asked Rezin to start selling tracts in his new eleven-league grants to potential immigrants. Then, after taking in hand $600 in a cash payment due from the Walkers and Wilkins, he set out once again.18 Behind him there was almost nothing left to sell. Rezin would take $7,340 for parcels on the Red River and Bayou Black in June and July, and another $2,000 a year later, but even then the payments would come in installments, and one tract was encumbered with $1,990 in debt that James had never satisfied.19 As for what cash he actually took with him when he left Natchez, Bowie may well have lost some of it in gambling on the way. He met Noah Smithwick somewhere in western Louisiana, where he was in virtual banishment after helping a friend escape from the San Felipe jail, and the gunsmith recalled that “Jim was prodigal with his money, though he was no gambler, and soon let his share slip away from him.”20 But James was a gambler, enough so that he was reputed to play faro in a tavern where the dealer was a known cheat, simply because it was the only game within fifty miles.21 It would have been unlike him to hold on to much money for long.
As usual the road back to Texas took him up the Red River, through Alexandria of ill memory, and there he could note with grim satisfaction that the inhabitants were still killing one another, the most recent being the murder of a retired general during the recent election: “We are here now so effectually divided that society does not exist for any one except with those of his side,” wrote a friend of Senator Johnston's. “The line of demarcation is traced with blood.”22 Quite happily James Bowie passed right on through to Natchitoches, and so on to the Sabine.
These long journeys could be lonely affairs. The only companion Bowie brought from Natchez was a twenty-five-year-old slave named Ned, on loan from his brother Stephen. Bowie had spent part of the money he had received on what Ham called “some fine stock” of china and porcelain, carpenter's tools, and more, that he hoped to sell at a tidy profit in San Antonio, and Ned would be of help with the pack animals.23 As a result men like Bowie often struck acquaintances with other travelers and banded together for company and mutual protection. On this journey, however, two of his newfound companions almost brought him trouble. One was an itinerant preacher bound for Nacogdoches to pitch his tent and save souls. Rudeness, loud talk, and obscene banter during a church service was fairly common in the Southwest, and even more so out there.24 Religion was not a man's business on that frontier. They left faith to the women and children, and a circuit preacher often found himself harassed and even threatened by the men.25 When Bowie's companion reached his destination and held his first service, rowdies tried to break up the meeting by braying like asses and hooting like owls. Despite his own apparent indifference to religion, James Bowie was always faithful to a friend, even one of short acquaintance, and now he threatened to thrash any man who further disturbed the proceedings. The sight of his supreme self-confidence, remembered stories of the Sandbar, and the knife at his belt, were all that it needed to ensure silent worship.26
The other companion Bowie picked up along the way proved far more controversial. Col. Martin Parmer fought in the ill-fated Fredonian rebellion in 1826, in which he led a small group of men against Nacogdoches to arrest and try the town officials on charges of corruption. Soon thereafter he and others proclaimed the independent republic of Fredonia near Nacogdoches, but in January 1827 the appearance of Mexican troops put them to flight, and Parmer himself escaped to Louisiana. He was still under proscription by the Mexican authorities, but decided now to try to return. Parmer was the sort of adventurer who always appealed to Bowie, and whether by accident or previous acquaintance, they rode into Texas together. It was spring, and as they approached San Anton
io they rode through prairies exploding in wildflowers, the bluebonnets and the brilliant orange- and persimmon-colored Indian paintbrush. But the new season brought no forgiveness for Parmer's transgressions of four years before. The tejanos and the Mexican authorities deeply resented him as the kind of troublemaker who attracted unwanted attention from Mexico City, and Bowie quickly discovered that by arriving in his company he jeopardized his own standing with the Veramendis and others. “Popular as Bowie was at that time with the Mexicans,” his friend Frank Johnson noted, “he could not disabuse them of the jealousy and fears of Parmer.” Parmer left to go back to Louisiana before he was arrested, and Bowie quickly set about mending fences.27
Three Roads to the Alamo Page 36