Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  Other news was coming to San Antonio almost the same time that the convention met. Governor Letona had died in September, and now Veramendi would go to Saltillo to assume office in his place. When Veramendi reached Saltillo on November 11 he found the city in an uproar. Bustamente's government was all but toppled, and Santa Anna was taking power. Already he had proclaimed the return of the 1824 constitution and dissolved the former centralist legislature, calling for the election of new delegates. What this might result in was anyone's guess, but when the news reached Bowie, he realized soon enough that here might be an opportunity to further his own land interests and those of Texas. Saltillo was a seedbed of centralist sympathy, poor soil to nurture any norteamericano land speculator. But Monclova on the Rio Grande, a scant forty miles from the Texian border on the Nueces, was far more friendly to Texian concerns, and physically close enough that Texians could hope to exert much more influence there than in Saltillo. Perhaps he and Veramendi had already discussed the idea of trying to get the capital of Coahuila y Tejas moved before the new governor left. Certainly it answered the needs of both.

  James Bowie decided that he could help, but he would have to go to Saltillo. On December 27 he appeared in San Felipe to leave his power of attorney with his friends Donoho and Thomas Gay to handle any of his land affairs in his absence, then made ready to depart.37 Before leaving San Felipe, however, he made a new acquaintance who would come with him as far as San Antonio. Just then arrived on his first visit into Texas was Sam Houston, the onetime governor of Tennessee, friend of Crockett, and once the presumed heir apparent to the presidency after his friend Andrew Jackson. Houston virtually self-destructed in 1829 when his new marriage broke down. He resigned his governorship, and for the next three years lived with the Cherokee in the territory west of Arkansas. There he earned the sobriquet “Big Drunk,” and entertained the soldiers at Fort Gibson by telling them stories in return for drinks. One of them, young Lt. Jefferson Davis of the First U.S. Infantry, found Houston to be an “enigma,” and elaborated by calling him “a worthless man with some good points.”38 Now, for reasons that may have ranged from land speculation to a desire to see the United States annex the province, or even to see it become independent, Houston had decided to remake himself in Texas, and his first stop was San Felipe.

  It was not unnatural that Houston would attach himself to Bowie. A man of big ideas and bold talk, a man of action, he would naturally gravitate to Bowie, given his current reputation. For his part, Bowie found Houston a congenial companion and an eager listener on the road. They were men of the same stripe: always on the move, seeking something better—and quickly—bold and decisive if sometimes hasty, and occasionally intemperate. Houston listened intently to Bowie's stories. He came in part to report on the Comanche, who had been raiding north of Red River, and also to observe for himself the mood of the Texians toward independence. Bowie's San Saba explorations and Indian encounters could inform him on the former, while the Piedras capture, perhaps exaggerated in Bowie's storytelling style, helped convince Houston of the mistaken notion that Texians had already beaten and expelled all the Mexicans from the province.39

  Bowie, Houston, the ever-present Caiaphas Ham, and another new friend, Gen. Sterling Robertson of Tennessee, left for San Antonio before year's end. Another would-be empresario, Robertson had been trying to get a grant to settle in Texas since 1822, then actually brought a number of families on a contract in early 1830, only to arrive after the April 6 decree. The government denied him permission to settle the families, instead turning his contract over to Austin and Williams, but now he was coming back to try again for a contract of his own, and his association with Bowie on this journey suggests that he may have been one of the causes of friction between Bowie and Austin, for a considerable enmity naturally developed between Robertson on the one hand and Austin and Williams on the other.

  It was not an uneventful trip, though Bowie had traveled the road many times. Given the climate of unrest, they felt it wise to mount a guard every night, for the Comanche and other bands were occasionally raiding this far south again. One morning Houston came to the campfire laughing, saying that on his watch that night he believed he had heard an arrow whizzing past him every time he turned his head. Stand or stoop, look left or right, he heard the buzz of another shaft past his ear. Only by morning did his terror turn to amusement when he finally discovered that the noise came from his own hat rubbing against his collar.40

  Houston left the party in San Antonio, but there at his home Bowie found an old face awaiting to join him—his recently arrived brother-in-law Alexander Sterrett. Just what brought Sterrett to Texas now is uncertain, but it may well have been bad news, perhaps even word of the death of Stephen Bowie. Just as likely, Sterrett came to advise Bowie of the family's financial situation in Louisiana. The whole Walker and Wilkins sale was falling through, thanks to James's bogus titles. On July 28 they had sold for thirty thousand dollars part of the land on Bayou Boeuf that Bowie secured through forged grants in the names of Antonio Pilboro and Julien Galbon, only to have to refund the money on September 11.41 Moreover, when the Walkers and Wilkins sold other tracts to purchasers, they found on survey that the claims infringed on the lawfully located claims of others and that some of the land was already occupied.42 Congress was passing renunciation acts, under which titles gained by forgery were being withdrawn, regardless of innocent purchasers who might own them, and the Walkers and Wilkins had no choice but to accept “all the renunciations and confirmatory acts for the plantation purchased…from Reason & James and Stephen Bowie.”43 With that avenue of future revenue cut off, it was all the more important for Bowie to press for an opportunity to start selling the eleven-league grants on which he held leases, and especially before those leases expired.

  Thus the trip to Saltillo came at an opportune time. Bowie and his party reached the capital on February 7, 1833, and immediately called on Veramendi.44 In a climate of dangerous uncertainty, Veramendi felt unsure of his own position, since he had been elected under the former regime. The centralist delegates recently turned out of office hid themselves in their homes for fear of some form of reprisal, and republicans felt unsafe in the city of the opposition. Veramendi himself thought it wise to keep sentinels on guard outside his Saltillo home. Bowie and Ham shared a room in the Veramendi house, and they kept a guard in the chamber with them. No one entered the house without giving the password “como caballo,” which meant rather loosely: “I eat horse.”45

  Veramendi only held office briefly, serving out Letona's term, and when the new legislature met it did little but debate. Yet Veramendi would have his influence, and so too would Bowie. The day after his arrival in Saltillo, on February 8, Bowie met with Veramendi, who then introduced him to influential members of the new congress. In the days to come, Bowie unsheathed all of his old charm to ingratiate himself with the legislators. Even down here his capture of Piedras would be known, and applauded by the republicans and santanistas. Of course his connection to Veramendi gave him considerable clout, and so did his reputation from the San Saba fight. Bowie also took pains to look the part of an important man. However rough he dressed for the long trek across the interior, he always had a blue broadcloth suit in his baggage to change into once he reached civilization.46

  Most important of all, though, was James Bowie's attitude. He lived in a time and place where some white Texian settlers felt—and all too often manifested—a condescending racial superiority to tejanos and Mexicans, regarding their brown-skinned neighbors as only a step or two removed from the black-skinned men whom they actually bought and sold. Moreover, being overwhelmingly Protestant, the Texians resented the virtual hegemony of the Catholic Church, while unquestionably the continuing spectacle of disorganization and instability in its public affairs gave all the immigrants a healthy disdain for Mexican political institutions when compared to government in the United States. Thus, being ruled by Mexicans carried with it an added element of distaste an
d resentment that contributed to the sentiments for complete independence. That this had actually been the Mexicans' land for centuries did not matter. White Americans were destined to have it by a kind of divine right that must inevitably see their eventual rule everywhere on the continent. Yet the tejanos and the Mexicans in Saltillo could see that Bowie was different. Whatever his private feelings may have been, publicly he showed nothing but courtesy and respect and every indication that he regarded them—the landed class, anyhow—as equals. His treatment of Piedras and his soldiers testified to that, and so did his marriage to Ursula. No doubt he felt the same superior attitude toward the landless peons that the aristocratic Veramendis would naturally have entertained, but still in meeting these legislators and others in Saltillo, he impressed them with his courtesy and consideration. Seguín's son Juan recalled that Bowie was “known among the Mexicans from Saltillo to Béxar.” Some loved him. Others loathed him, calling him “fanfarrón Santiago Bowie”—“James Bowie the braggart.”47 But whether they liked him or not, said Seguín, “they all knew that he was absolutely brave, and that they could depend upon his being fair to foe and loyal to friends.”48

  Thanks to the respect that he earned in legislative circles, Bowie soon began to call on individual congressmen, as no doubt did Veramendi, with their plan to move the capital to Monclova. The idea was probably already in the minds of many of the new delegates anyhow. Firmly in the hands of republicans, Monclova offered a much more congenial atmosphere for Texian interests, and for Bowie's. Such a move would certainly serve Veramendi as well, and his voice and Bowie's were heard in the taverns and drawing rooms of Saltillo during the following days, encouraging the new delegates to their vote. From two of the leading delegates, in particular, he secured promises of assistance, and they came through, for when finally the congress met on the issue, it cast a decisive ballot to move to Monclova. Veramendi's family friend Menchaca believed that Bowie himself bore the greatest influence in effecting the change. If so, it most likely involved more than his charm. If the land and immigration restrictions could be relaxed, there was money to be made in renewing the old eleven-league-grant policy. In the friendly atmosphere of Monclova, these legislators could easily arrange the grants for themselves and their friends, and men like Bowie and Williams and Robertson could buy them. With the capital on the waters of the Rio Grande, one hand could wash another.49

  His goal accomplished, Bowie returned to Béxar and was in San Felipe in time to participate in the convention that met on April 1, the very same day that Santa Anna finally took power in Mexico.50 Bowie's friend Houston sat as a delegate from his new home near Nacogdoches, and William Wharton took the chair to preside, guaranteeing that the more radical faction would be in charge. By the time it adjourned on April 13, the meeting had not only affirmed all the resolutions of the previous October but now taken the additional step of drafting a constitution for the proposed new Mexican state of Texas, reminding Mexico City that in the 1824 constitution, to which Santa Anna professed loyalty, Texas was only provisionally attached to Coahuila until its population grew sufficiently to merit its being a state in its own right. Certainly its population now justified separation.51 They selected James Miller, Erasmo Seguín, and Austin as emissaries to take their petition to Mexico City. When it came to it, the first two refused to go, but by the end of the month Stephen Austin was on his way—hopeful, apprehensive, and somewhat disillusioned at the way Texas had gotten away from him. Yet he seemed resigned. “No one can be blamed in any manner for what has happened since June 1832, in Texas,” he would say shortly. “It was inevitable.”52

  While in San Felipe, Bowie did a final service for Piedras's soldados when he secured from merchant John Brown supplies valued at 101 pesos for them to make their final return to Mexico.53 Then he turned his attention to his own affairs. It was time to prepare for speculating in earnest. Immediately after the adjournment of the convention, he went south to Brazoria in company with a powerful host of men anxious for land. There were Archibald Hotchkiss and Gen. John Thompson Mason, agents of the Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company of New York, which had been stymied for some time in settling families; Bowie's new friend Houston; Samuel Sawyer, to whom Bowie had sold one of his eleven-league grants; Sterrett; Thomas J. Chambers, who had been the official surveyor for land titles in Texas and was now a paid representative at Saltillo for residents of eastern Texas; Henry S. Brown, who had been a delegate from Brazoria; and others.54 They kept their purpose well cloaked, but so many men with a hunger for speculation could hardly have been on a pleasure trip.

  Not only did he have those leases on eleven-league grants that he and Donoho had bought in Saltillo back in 1830, but now he was taking advantage of the growing rift between Austin and Williams to get close to the latter. Bowie had already sold at least one of his leased grants to Sawyer prior to March 1833. The leases cost him as little as seventy-two dollars, whereas the property could be sold for at least two thousand.55 As for Williams, he was branching out into selling merchandise in partnership with McKinney, and at the same time was promoting a second colony thanks to an empresario grant to himself and Austin jointly. It allowed him to settle eight hundred families north of the original Austin colony, in a large tract between the Navisota and the Colorado that had originally been the Robertson grant prior to the April 6, 1830, law. Stephen Austin became disenchanted with the proposed colony and sold his interest to his cousin John Austin. Now, standing to profit considerably by this, Williams turned most of his attention away from the San Felipe colony.

  Instead, apparently on advice from Bowie, he started selling “location privileges” in the area, essentially a device to raise money from would-be settlers by giving them the right to squat on certain land, though under current law they could not actually purchase title.56 Stephen Austin was already distressed over what Williams was doing when he left for Mexico, and it troubled him enough that when he stopped in Matamoros at the end of May, he wrote to Williams, chiding him strongly: “Keep clear of land jobbing,” he warned. “Keep clear of all speculations for the future.” Austin feared that he might be ruined himself by his own second small colony just above the Colorado. As for Williams and his cousin and their much more ambitious venture, he warned sternly that “such men [as] Bowie etc will led [sic] you and John too far into speculations.”57 In fact, Texas was about to experience a boom in speculating that many then and later would date from the first sales of Bowie's eleven-league grants.58 That boom would play no small role in the increasing tensions between Texas and Mexico.

  As summer approached, Bowie decided that it was time to return to Louisiana, with a variety of business at hand. The news Sterrett brought required that he see for himself what remained, if anything, of his prospects of realizing any money from his sales there. Rezin was planning a trip to the East on business of his own, and James might accompany him, both for pleasure and to make one more approach in Washington on the Kemper-de la Français claim. Finally Veramendi, possibly at Bowie's coaxing, sent ten thousand dollars to Músquiz in July, with instructions that it be sent to New Orleans, for an unknown purpose most likely connected with the proposed cotton mill. Since Bowie's sources of large cash from Louisiana land sales had dried up, the governor may have decided to risk his own capital to buy the machinery to get started.59 It was only natural that Bowie himself actually transport the money, especially if it was to be involved in one of his schemes.

  Accompanied by Caiaphas Ham, Bowie left San Antonio and Ursula one more time.60 Married just over two years, they had actually spent at least eleven months of that time apart, with now the prospect of at least another three or four months' separation as Bowie traveled the East. For poor Ursula, now just twenty-one, still childless though possibly expecting at last, there was nothing to do but accept her lot as his wife, keep her complaints to herself, and like a woman of her class restrain her tears and assure her husband that wherever he went, her heart was with him.

  The groun
d was well traveled by now, and the trip to Louisiana seemingly got shorter as the years passed. Once he reached Natchitoches, Bowie could get to New Orleans by steamboat in a mere three days, and from New Orleans to Natchez in only five. There was small cause for rejoicing when he arrived, however. By now Stephen was definitely dead, aged scarcely thirty-five, with a widow and two orphans left behind. Worse, from John—if not from the press—came word that at its January term, the Supreme Court of the United States had passed down its ruling in Sampeyrac and Stewart V. the United States, finding against the plaintiffs. In the argument Stewart's attorney admitted that the original grant to Sampeyrac was a forgery, and that the deed from Sampeyrac to John Bowie was also a forgery, and that the witnesses who testified to having seen Bowie make the purchase had lied. Stewart's whole case rested on his being an innocent good-faith purchaser, but the court found that no right of title could be claimed by any buyer of a forged grant, whether knowingly or unknowingly. Since Bowie never had any title to sell, Stewart could not buy it from him.61 In a single stroke the Court overthrew all of the Bowies' Arkansas claims. Their past sales could be revoked at any time, leaving them very unpopular in the area, while regardless of the confirmation of their claims by the superior court of the territory, they would certainly be unable to sell any more. And in an infuriating irony, the Sampeyrac and Stewart V. United States decision would henceforth be used by the U.S. Treasury and the General Land Office to deny title or compensation to innocent buyers of James's Louisiana lands, men like the Walkers and Wilkins. The day of what Commissioner of the General Land Office Ethan Brown called “the numerous fraudulent Bowie land claims” was over at last.62