Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  34 Conveyance Book D, 134-38, 208, 214-26, 227-28, 234-35, 237-38, 247-48, 258-63, 293-94, Terrebonne Parish Courthouse. John Bowie, “The Bowies,” 381, said in 1852 that his brother went into land speculation “and soon made $15,000.” The sum is reasonably close to what James derived from these sales, though brother John is quite indefinite as to when James realized this $15,000. It could even refer to James's share of the Arkansas speculations, with which John would have been more familiar than with the Terrebonne sales.

  35 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 536, 615.

  36 Sparks in Ellis, Crockett, 224.

  37 Conveyance Book D, 227-28, 237-38, Terrebonne Parish Courthouse.

  38 Thomas to James Bowie, March 5, 1828, Johnston Papers, HSP.

  39 Thomas to Johnston, March 5, 9, 28, 1828, ibid.

  40 This conclusion is based on the fact that Thomas's letter is in Johnston's papers at HSP and is apparently not a copy but the original.

  41 Henry Boyer to Johnston, March 30, 1828, ibid.; Notary Felix De Armas, Power of Attorney, Jose de la Françia to Bowie, February 10, 1826, vol. 5, 72-73, New Orleans Notarial Archives. Interestingly, there is no further correspondence from Isaac Thomas on the subject in the Johnston Papers. The ultimate fate of the Kemper claim has eluded discovery, but Thomas's sudden silence, after writing repeated and highly excited letters, suggests at least that nothing was done at the time, and perhaps that Boyer's letter and Johnston's investigations may have revealed the scheme at hand. If Johnston refused to be involved, that would silence Thomas so far as he was concerned. Or Johnston may have demonstrated to Thomas that Bowie's title to the claim was forged, causing Thomas to desist from further efforts. In the absence of further evidence, one can only speculate.

  42 Evidence that Bowie still believed the Kemper claim to be an open issue is the fact that he listed $32,800 due him “for quantities that the government of the said United States has given me according to documents already granted” in the dowry statement dated April 22, 1831 (transcript in the James Bowie Vertical File, UT); this statement suggests that the government had admitted the claim and agreed to pay him, but the Bowie dowry statement is so riddled with half-truths and deceptions that this should not be taken too literally. It is just as likely that Bowie's reference to “documents already granted” deals with the several Treasury warrants issued in Kemper's behalf, but for which Congress failed to appropriate funds for payment). No claim of Bowie's against the United States has been found except the Kemper-de la Français matter, and while the $32,800 mentioned is considerably different from the $40,000 plus interest that was due Kemper, it should be born in mind that Kemper's figure was an approximate one.

  Receipts and Expenditures of the United States 1818, 88-89; 1819, 85; and 1820, 62, RG 217, NA, reveal that in those years the Treasury approved warrants in Kemper's name totaling $31,948.05. Not found there, but located by Josiah S. Johnston in 1826, was an additional August 5, 1819 warrant for $1,000.00, making a total genuinely due of $32,948.05, dramatically close to the $32,800 that Bowie would list on his dowry statement. No statement of “settled account” can be found for these warrants, indicating that they were almost certainly never paid, either to Kemper or Bowie or Kemper's heirs. Furthermore, adding the $11,850 due the de la Français heirs to this $32,948 totals $44,798, well in the realm of Kemper's statement in his December 14, 1826 letter (Johnston Papers, HSP), that he was owed “over” $40,000 plus “several years back interest.” Therefore the later Bowie figure of $32,800 would apparently represent the approximate figure of what he felt was due him if he had by then abandoned the de la Français claim or perhaps turned it over to Isaac Thomas, thus deducting the $11,850, but possibly including an unknown amount of interest.

  43 New Orleans Bee, December 17, 1827.

  44 Brent to Taliaferro, May 9, 1828, Taliaferro Papers, LSU.

  45 Tregle, “Louisiana,” 334-35, 345-46, 350-51, 356.

  46 Journal of the House of Representatives During the Second Session of the Eighth Legislature of the State of Louisiana (New Orleans, 1828), 3.

  47 Bowie, “The Bowies,” 381. John Bowie, as usual, is not specific about the date of this. He says it as a prelude to James moving to Texas permanently, which did not happen until 1831. However, James Bowie does go to Texas in the summer of 1828, just after it is evident that he will not be sent to Congress as he had expected, so this seems the most likely time to which John Bowie could refer with his statement about his brother's disappointment with “his political friends.”

  48 Thomas L. Miller, The Public Lands of Texas, 1519-1970 (Norman, Okla., 1972), 15-16, 18; Eugene C. Barker, “Land Speculation as A Cause of the Texas Revolution,” Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 10 (July 1906): 76-77; Eugene C. Barker, “The African Slave Trade in Texas,” Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 6 (October 1902): 150.

  49 Woodville, Miss., Republican, September 23, 1826; New Orleans, La., State Gazette, October 2, 1826; Alexandria, La., Messenger, July 28, 1826.

  50 Natchez Newspaper and Public Advertiser, July 28, 1826.

  51 Littleton Bailey to Johnston, April 22, 1824, Benjamin Morris to Johnston, November 24, 1827, Johnston Papers, HSP.

  52 There is no contemporary evidence of Bowie visiting Texas in 1826-27. Speer and Brown, Encyclopedia, vol. 1, 434, says he first came in 1826 and maybe as early as 1824. Fifteen years later Brown, Indian Wars, 136, says only that Bowie first came to Texas in 1824. Neither source gives any authority for its statement, and neither Speer nor Brown ever met Bowie, so their statements must be considered as conjecture at best. Still, it is not unreasonable to suppose that Bowie would have looked over Texas after the land laws were published, but prior to his decisive trip of 1828.

  53 Nevitt Diary, Mary 31, 1828, SHC, UNC; Check on the Bank of the State of Mississippi, May 1828, Bowie Family Papers, Natchez Trace Collection, UT. The check, in the amount of $245, it signed by Stephen Bowie and made payable to himself and James Bowie. This may have been expenses for James's trip, or something else entirely, but it does place James in Natchez that month.

  54 John Johnston to Josiah S. Johnston, June 8, 1828, Johnston Papers, HSP.

  55 Flint, Recollections, 264-65.

  56 Ibid., 267.

  57 Amos Parker, A Trip to the West and Texas in 1834 (Concord, N.H., 1836), 185-86.

  58 The Bowie-Prather-McKinney connection is complicated but important. John J. Bowie supposedly married Nancy Scoggins in 1806. Walter Bowie in The Bowies, 264, states that she died in 1816, and John's daughter Martha Burns, by his second wife, states that Nancy Scoggins Bowie died “a few years” after their last child, Rezin, was born in 1815 (Martha Burns, “Eventful Lives of the Bowies,” undated newspaper clipping in the James Bowie Biographical File, DRT; internal evidence dates the article no earlier than 1896). Both are in error, and Martha Burns, at least, may have been concealing a minor family scandal. While no divorce records are extant, it is clear from Catahoula Parish records that by 1818 Nancy Bowie was not dead but was living apart from John right under his nose in Harrisonburg, and calling herself the “Widow Bowie,” even though John was very much alive. Moreover, sometime during that year she had married Blassingame W. Harvey, who abandoned her by 1820 and went to Texas, after which she lived with his brother John Harvey and eventually married him as well. Blassingame Harvey, meanwhile, married again in 1826 in San Augustine, this time to the daughter of Stephen Prather (Margaret Henson to the author, July 11, 1996). Thus, while James Bowie had no blood or legal relationship to Prather, still he certainly either knew or at least knew of Blassingame Harvey, and also may have known Prather himself from the days when Prather lived in Catahoula. His brother John would have known both men, and may have born Blassingame no ill will if Nancy was herself the reason for their parting, and could have provided an introduction to either. With Prather as McKinney's uncle, and Blassingame Married to the merchant's first cousin, an introduction to McKinney for Bowie would then have
been quite natural.

  Whether John Bowie abandoned Nancy, or she abandoned him, or whether theirs may have been only a common-law marriage without benefit or clergy, is unknown, and of no importance here, though judging from her history it would appear that she was not adept at keeping husbands and moved rather easily from man to man. It is even possible that their parting was quite amicable, as John Bowie witnessed a document for Nancy on March 9, 1819, well after she had taken up with Blassingame Harvey (Bowie Family Papers, Natchez Trace Collection, UT).

  59 William Gray, From Virginia to Texas, 1835: Diary of Col. Wm. F. Gray (Houston, 1909), 111.

  60 Noah Smithwick, The Evolution of a State (Austin, 1900), 135-36. Smithwick is notoriously suspect in many details, his recollections being written down at the age of ninety, some sixty-seventy years after the fact, and then heavily embellished by his daughter as editor, including some outright inventions of her own. Thus it was thought best not to incorporate his stories of making a knife for Bowie during this visit. Mention of his meeting Bowie in San Felipe in 1828 is only included because Bowie definitely did visit Texas that summer.

  61 That Bowie did not actually meet Austin on this trip may be inferred from the fact that two years later, when he came to Texas to settle, he brought with him an introduction to Austin from McKinney. Had they met previously, such an introduction would obviously have been unnecessary.

  62 It has frequently been claimed that while in San Antonio, Bowie accepted baptism into the Catholic Church, a first step to Texas citizenship—and marriage to Ursula. Nothing at all survives connecting Bowie with religion, other than a few stories, to be dealt with subsequently, that show him defending ministers against unruly crowds. These may be entirely apocryphal, however, since such stories are not infrequent in the literature of frontier heroes, including Travis.

  Stories of Bowie's being baptized are erroneously based on a misreading of the baptismal record of “Santiago Rox,” June 26, 1828, Book of Baptisms of San Fernando Parish Church, San Antonio, Texas.

  Research by Robert L. Tarin Jr. of San Antonio concludes that the baptism entry is actually for James Ross, the surname spelled “Rox,” and that students have misread the calligraphy as “Buy,” a frequent Mexican spelling of “Bowie.” Further research by Tarin shows a Texian James Ross who was born in South Carolina, which agrees with the statement in the baptismal certificate, whereas Bowie was born in Kentucky. Moreover, the baptism records the man's parents as James and Juana, a far cry from Bowie's parents, Rezin and Elve. Thus it is virtually certain that this baptism is not that of Bowie. Probably at some time he simply swore that he intended to be baptized, as did many other colonists, and no the basis of that oath he was later granted citizenship.

  63 Ham, “Recollections,” UT.

  64 A Visit to Texas, Being the Journal of A Traveller Through those Parts Most Interesting to American Settlers (New York, 1836), 16, 208-20.

  65 Rogan, “Warren D.C. Hall,” 274.

  66 Conveyance Book D, 349-50, Terrebonne Parish Courthouse. Jeff Long, Duel of Eagles: The Mexican and U. S. Fight for the Alamo (New York, 1990), 31, makes the completely unsubstantiated claim that “shortly after his baptism” Bowie returned to Louisiana via Arkansas, and that on the way he met Sam Houston in Arkansas and recommended Texas to him. Like most of what Long says about Bowie, this is utter nonsense. In the summer of 1828 Houston was till in Tennessee serving as governor, and would not set foot in Arkansas until late Spring of 1829. John Hoyt Williams, Sam Houston: A Biography of the Father of Texas (New York, 1993), 72, places the meeting on a steamboat in spring 1829 (and also misses the fact that Stephen Austin is the man called: “father of Texas”!), and Hopewell, Bowie, 62, also puts the encounter in 1829, though this time ashore in Helena, Ark.

  There is nothing at all to substantiate any of these statements, and they all seem to derive from two works, James, The Raven, 90, and Llerena Friend, Sam Houston: The Great Designer (Austin, 1954), 92. Neither of these authors provided a source for the claim. Friend probably borrowed it from James, and James apparently simply made it up. Speaking of making things up, it is worth noting that Long in Duel of Eagles, 26-27, also states that Bowie and Houston met “floating upriver on a flatboat” just after James's baptism. When Houston did go to Arkansas in the spring of 1829, he went up the Arkansas River to Fort Gibson. In no wise was the Arkansas a river that Bowie or anyone else would use to go to or from Texas. Moreover, unless Long has reinvented the laws of hydrography, nothing, especially a flatboat, floats upriver. A flatboat could not even be propelled upstream, and was used exclusively for a single downstream voyage, after which it was broken up and sold for lumber. As for the first Bowie-Houston meeting, it cannot be dated any earlier than 1832, as will appear subsequently.

  Chapter 10 Bowie 1828-1830

  1 Conveyance Book B, 233, 241-42, 244, 246, Hempstead Country Courthouse.

  2 Deed Book A-B, 38-42, Chicot Country Courthouse.

  3 Bowie Claims, Cleland List, Entry 215, Record Group 49, NA.

  4 The power of attorney is registered in Conveyance Book D, 227-28, Terrebonne Parish Courthouse.

  5 Conveyance Book D, 505, Clerk of the Court, Lafourche Parish Courthouse, Thibodaux, La. It is assumed that James had not yet returned from the fact that Rezin made the purchase rather than James. It is not clear from the copy in the conveyance book that Rezin was buying this for James, but a year later this parcel is spoken of as being the property of James Bowie, and no formal conveyance from Rezin to James has been found, leading to the only alternative conclusion that Rein actually bought it for him in the first place. Since no power of attorney has been found from James authorizing Rezin to make purchases in Lafourche, as was the practice, Rezin had to act on his own and recover from James later, with a transfer that presumably did not get registered. Deed Book G, 256-57, Lafourche Parish Courthouse.

  6 The supposition that the Lafourche purchases were not discussed between Rezin and James prior to the latter's Texas trip rests on the absence of any power of attorney from James to his brother for such purchases. It was the custom for powers of attorney to state specifically those parishes and kinds of transactions that were authorized.

  7 Helen M. Bowie, “Bayou Lafourche” (master's thesis, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, 1935), 23-26.

  8 Harnett T. Kane, The Bayous of Louisiana (New York, 1944), 158-62; Prentiss to William Prentiss, April 9, 1829, G. L. Prentiss, ed., Memoir of S. S. Prentiss, vol. 1 (New York, 1856), 94-95.

  9 Sparks, Memories, 374-77.

  10 Thomas B. Thorpe, The Mysteries of the Back-Woods (Philadelphia, 1846), 140-41.

  11 Sparks, Memories, 374-75.

  12 Joseph C. Guild, Old Times in Tennessee (Nashville, 1878), 107.

  13 Bowie, “Bayou Lafourche,” 18.

  14 Flint, Recollections, 233-34.

  15 New Orleans Louisiana State Gazette, November 29, 1826; New Orleans Price-Current and Commercial Intelligencer, September 15, 1827; Notes, 1829, in John Quitman Diary, John Quitman Papers, SHC, UNC.

  16 Kane, Bayous, 159.

  17 F. D. Richardson, “The Teche Country Fifty Years Ago,” Southern Bivouac, n.s., vol. 1 (March 1886): 594.

  18 New Orleans Louisiana State Gazette, July 16, 1826.

  19 Richardson, “Teche Country,” 594. One of the persistent Bowie myths is that he and Rezin were the first to introduce steam to the sugar industry in Louisiana. See, for instance, Williams, “Critical Study, III,” 92. Hopewell, Bowie, II, says without citing a source that they installed the machinery in 1827, fully a year before James and Rezin first bought the property!

  20 Conveyance Book D, 505, 527, Lafourche Parish Courthouse. Clerk of the Court, Assumption Parish Courthouse, Napolenville, La., has an index listing a judgment against Candolle in favor of Maronges from the November 1826 judicial term, but the document itself could not be found.

  21 Conveyance Book D, 427-28, 430-31, 433-35, Terrebonne Parish Courthouse; Conveyance Book F, 9-10, 1
29-30, Book G, 29-31, Lafourche Parish Courthouse; Conveyance Book E, 439-40, Avoyelles Parish Courthouse. On November 25 James bought Stephen's extensive Bayou Boeuf plantation and slaves for $20,000 in hand—the same plantation he had sold him nine years before for $17,000—and then the next day sold some of the land for a mere $4,000. That same day James bought a large plot from Rezin on Bayou Caillou for $7,000, then immediately sold it again for $9,300. On November 25 he paid Rezin $7,000 for another twelve arpent frontage on the bayou that had belonged to Maronges, and about the same time took legal possession of the old Candolle tract. There was a subtle advantage to his actually buying it from his brother. The practice of the courts was to attach mortgage obligations to property rather than owners. When Candolle lost the land, the obligation for the mortgages went to Maronges, and from him to Rezin Bowie, and now on to James. The money Rezin had paid Maronges had left the family, and should the court foreclose on the mortgages while he held title, they would lose the land, too. But by James buying it from Rezin, they inserted one more layer of legal barrier against foreclosure, and sheltered James's cash from seizure by transferring it to Rezin. This done, James went on in December to buy another adjacent parcel for $2,000 and a slave in the bargain, and the following April yet another four-arpent frontage for $4,000, of which he only paid a fourth down. Now he had just over twenty-four arpents of frontage on the right bank of the Lafourche, a total of about 830 acres. He also acquired more slaves, three in November, added to at least four that he had owned for two years now, plus the ones that came from Stephen. As stated before, the transfer from Rezin to James on the Candolle property has not been found, but must have taken place prior to December 15, 1828, when Bowie bought property from Nicholas Laine that is described as bordering on this tract, now belonging to James Bowie (Deed Book E, 555, Lafourche Parish Courthouse).