by H. W. Brands
More troublesome than the Frenchmen were the local Indians, who hadn’t accepted any of the whites. The Osages and their neighbors didn’t entirely resist the white presence, for they valued the trade goods the whites provided: the knives, cooking pots, firearms, beads, and other items that made aboriginal life easier or more pleasant. But where the French and Spanish had come primarily to trade, these Americans were coming to settle. The effect on the neighborhood could only be disruptive.
The Osages attacked in 1799, then again the next year, and the year after that. The most serious assault occurred in May 1802. Stephen Austin was eight years old at the time, and the experience stuck in his memory. “In 1802,” he wrote later, “the village of Mine à Breton was attacked by a large party of Indians, their chief object being to plunder my father’s house and store, and to kill the Americans, or Bostonians, as they called them.” Stephen Austin continued: “He had, however, taken the precaution to provide himself, in addition to other arms, with a three-pounder [a cannon that fired three-pound balls], and being fully prepared for a defense, the Indians failed in their efforts and were driven back.”
Against the Indians and the French, Moses had his hands full defending his colony. Yet he had never expected the frontier to be for the faint-hearted, and he proceeded to develop the lead mine according to his initial blueprint. He poured all of his own money into the works and borrowed many thousands of dollars from others. He built high-efficiency furnaces, which recovered far more metal from each ton of ore than his predecessors had managed (and allowed him to profitably mine the tailings of previous operations on the site). So efficient was Austin’s operation that other miners in the region brought him their ore to smelt; even after he took his 50 percent cut, they came out ahead. He built a tall tower for the production of shot (molten lead was allowed to dribble from trays at the top of the tower, and in the weightlessness of free fall congealed into spherical beads that were collected at the bottom). Within several years his operation achieved an annual production of eight hundred thousand pounds, making Austin a very wealthy man. In 1810 he estimated his net value at $190,000.
But nothing stayed the same for long on the frontier—not even the location of the frontier. Within a half decade of his arrival, Austin found himself once more on American soil. In 1800 France’s ambitious new ruler, Napoleon Bonaparte, extorted Louisiana back from Spain, and in 1803, after a sudden change of plans, he sold it to the United States. Moses Austin, having abandoned the country of his birth and sworn fealty to Spain, found himself living again on American territory. Had Austin been more patriotic, he might have celebrated this unexpected reunion; but had he been more patriotic he might never have left American soil. In fact, Austin’s loyalty was as fluid as that of many frontiersmen, who acted like Americans on the American side of the border, like Spanish on the Spanish side, and even like Indians among the Indians.
In at least one sense, American sovereignty posed a threat to Austin’s position—a threat worse than that of the Indians or the French. His control of Mine à Breton rested on Spanish authority; whether the Americans, who were notorious for ignoring titles granted under predecessor regimes, would accept his control was an open question. Some did; others didn’t. The latter included a Tennesseean named John Smith, who had a murderous temper and the ear of James Wilkinson, the newly appointed governor of Upper Louisiana. Wilkinson had been a general in the Revolutionary War, a land speculator and merchant afterward, and an intriguer all his life. During the 1790s he engaged the Spanish authorities of Louisiana in negotiations that seemed at least faintly treasonous to his many American enemies, but influential friends in the American government deemed his local knowledge essential for a territorial governor and won him the job.
Between them, Smith and Wilkinson made Austin’s life a trial. Smith stirred the French miners against Austin, challenged the validity of Austin’s title, and apparently attempted to provoke Austin to a duel. “What have I done to this monster in society?” Austin moaned to a friend. Austin declined to duel, but he had no effective answer to the campaign of sabotage and character assassination Smith mounted against him, with Wilkinson’s help.
Austin’s deeper problems derived from the tumultuous state of the American economy, which in turn reflected the unsettled condition of American diplomacy. During Thomas Jefferson’s second term as president the serial fighting between Britain and France became a battle to the death; in their extremity both sides preyed on American shipping, with Britain seizing American vessels bound for France and France waylaying American ships headed for Britain. Jefferson judged that American security required keeping clear of Europe’s wars, and he persuaded Congress to embargo trade with Europe. The embargo proved an economic disaster, plunging American seaports into depression and generating shock waves that spread up American rivers as far as St. Louis. The lead market collapsed, leaving Moses Austin with tons of metal he couldn’t unload and stacks of bonds he couldn’t redeem.
His prospects improved when a chastened Jefferson and Congress rescinded the embargo, but the War of 1812 (against Britain), after briefly driving prices up, produced another collapse. British warships strangled American trade, and men and money fled Upper Louisiana for the theaters and markets of the war. Moses Austin tried to solve his manpower shortage by leasing a small regiment of slaves, and to augment the local money supply by helping establish a St. Louis bank. Yet the slaves required more upkeep than he had reckoned, and his bank ran into liquidity troubles. The result was that Austin’s debt simply grew deeper. By 1818 he was compelled to put the Mine à Breton up for sale. “Would to God my business was closed,” he lamented. “I would leave this country in a week.”
Potential buyers, however, guessed that if Moses Austin couldn’t make lead pay, neither could they, and the mine went begging. Austin’s debts continued to grow even as his ability to repay them diminished. The end—or what certainly seemed the end—came in March 1820 when the sheriff arrested and jailed him for nonpayment. Once the greatest man in the district, Austin now shared quarters with drunks and common criminals. The fall would have broken the spirit of most men, and it came close to breaking Austin’s. He pleaded with his daughter’s husband to hasten to his rescue lest the sheriff auction the lead works to pay down the debts. His plea failed, and the richest mine in the North American heartland was hammered away for pennies on Austin’s dollars.
Austin won his freedom, but it held no pleasure for him. He refused to live a pauper where he had been a prince. “To remain in a country where I had enjoyed wealth, in a state of poverty, I could not submit to,” he recalled. Two decades earlier, Moses Austin had started a new life in a new country; he was convinced he must do so again.
Yet there was a difference to the moving this time. The trek to Spanish Louisiana had been a hopeful journey by a young man in the prime of confidence and energy; this move was the desperate act of a man drowning in failure and debt, a fifty-eight-year-old with no margin for further failure and nothing to fall back on should this last scheme go awry.
The region to which he pinned his hopes was Texas. Moses Austin knew little of Texas beyond that it was Spanish—a fact crucial to his plans. A treaty concluded just several months earlier had apparently marked the end of a decade and a half of bickering between the United States and Spain over the border between their respective territories. Jefferson had asserted that the southwestern boundary of America’s Louisiana Purchase was the Rio Grande, but he did little to defend this interpretation, having his hands full with the British and the French on the high seas. His successor, James Madison, had even more trouble with the British, culminating in the War of 1812 (which didn’t end before the redcoats chased the president from the White House and burned the mansion and the Capitol). Meanwhile, American friction with Spain focused on Florida, which General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, the military hero of the war and a rising political force in the West, and many others demanded be added to the American domain. By 1819 Se
cretary of State John Quincy Adams was willing to surrender whatever claim the United States might have had to Texas in exchange for a tidying up of the Florida question (in America’s favor) and other details between the United States and Spain.
Moses Austin was that rare American west of the Mississippi who wanted Spain to keep Texas. By this time it was becoming an item of the American gospel—at least as that gospel was preached in the West—that American sovereignty must chase the setting sun. Westerners denounced the abandonment of Texas to Spain as a sellout of their region by New England (Adams was from Massachusetts), an ignoble surrender of territory honestly acquired by purchase from France.
Moses Austin dissented from the gospel. Whether or not he consciously thought himself so, he was a man of the border, an expert in the arbitrage of political and cultural differences. His successful start in Spanish Louisiana had resulted from his ability to broker between the Spanish on the west bank and the Americans on the east; his prospects declined when both banks became American. Others were more adept at business, at straightforward buying and selling, than he; what Austin required was the added complication of a frontier, a political border.
And so he was pleased to learn that the border between Texas and the United States had been preserved, and he prepared to exploit it. He would travel to Spanish Texas, as he had traveled to Spanish Louisiana two decades earlier, and he would present a plan for developing the country. He assumed that the same incentives applied now as had applied then: that the Spanish authorities, eager to increase the population and prosperity of their district, would welcome the immigration of responsible, productive individuals and families. For his part in arranging this boon, he hoped to be compensated in land, of which Texas had far more than the Spanish could ever use themselves.
He set off in the spring of 1820, traveling south to Little Rock, Arkansas, where his son Stephen, now an adult, was living, and where Moses contracted malaria. He spent the summer and part of the autumn regaining his strength. Not till November did he resume his journey, riding a horse borrowed from Stephen, carrying fifty dollars from Stephen, and accompanied by one of Stephen’s slaves, a young man named Richmond, who rode a borrowed mule.
Moses and Richmond proceeded south to Natchitoches, on the Red River in the state of Louisiana. For more than a century the hundred miles between Natchitoches and Nacogdoches, the first town on the Texas side of the Sabine, had been a no-man’s-land, inhabited by individuals who preferred the uncertainty and lawlessness of border regions. Although the Louisiana bank of the Sabine had calmed down somewhat, the Texas side remained desolate and wild, as Austin discovered on crossing over. Indeed, the entire five hundred miles to San Antonio de Béxar, the capital of Texas, was nearly deserted.
Austin’s reception at Béxar, as the inhabitants called the town of two thousand, made him regret he had come. The governor, Antonio Martínez, refused to listen to his proposal. Texas had been plagued by American filibusters (from “free-booter” in the language of the Dutch, who had made a business of the piracy the term connoted), and Martínez had orders to allow no more Americans to enter Texas. If Austin had not been carrying the Spanish passport he had acquired twenty-three years earlier, Martínez might well have thrown him into prison; as it was, the governor told Austin to turn around and go home.
With nothing at home to go back to, Austin refused to let the conversation end so quickly. He spoke no Spanish and Martínez no English, but both spoke French, and in French Austin tried to warm the governor up. Martínez still wouldn’t listen. His superior, Commandant Joaquín de Arredondo, had made it clear that no aid whatsoever was to be extended to any Americans, and Martínez was loath to cross Arredondo, a man of terrifying reputation. Merely talking to Austin risked trouble. Consequently, the more Austin tried to crack Martínez’ reserve, the more anxious and angry Martínez became. Finally, denying Austin even the hospitality of one night in town, he ordered him to leave Béxar immediately.
Austin had no choice; the town was small enough that his every move was public knowledge. He found Richmond and told him to water, feed, and saddle the horse and mule for departure by dusk.
But then occurred something so unlikely that many contemporaries and even some later historians refused to believe it was a coincidence. Walking across the plaza of Béxar that waning afternoon in December 1820, Austin encountered a person he had met many years before in New Orleans. Philip Nering Bögel was a Dutchman born in the Netherlands’ South American colony of Guiana and raised, for the most part, in Holland. As a young man, he joined the Dutch army and later became a tax collector. Evidently he collected more than he remitted to his superiors, for he suddenly fled Holland back to the New World, leaving behind a wife and children and a prosecutor waving a reward of one thousand gold ducats for his arrest.
By the time he resurfaced in Spanish Louisiana—shortly before Moses Austin’s first visit—he was passing himself off as the Baron de Bastrop. Promotions of this nature weren’t uncommon on the frontier, and the title stuck. He applied for and received permission to plant a colony in the Ouachita Valley and to engage in trade. He remained in Louisiana through the reversion of that territory to France, but when the United States acquired the country he crossed into Texas. He applied at San Antonio de Béxar for permission to found another colony, northeast of the town. Though his application was granted, the colony never amounted to much. Bastrop took up residence in Béxar, where he dabbled in business and served as assistant alcalde (the alcalde was an appointed mayor-cum-sheriff), as an unofficial one-man chamber of commerce, and as host to the strangers who periodically wandered through.
This was the man Austin encountered in December 1820 in the Béxar plaza, and he listened as Austin told his story. Austin explained that he hoped to bring three hundred American families to Texas and to be rewarded in land for doing so. Confident of his persuasiveness if he could only get a hearing with Governor Martínez, he asked Bastrop for help.
Bastrop arranged for Austin to stay in San Antonio over Christmas, just two days away. During that time the American convinced the Dutchman that his colonization scheme made sense. For several generations the Spanish government had tried to populate Texas in order to keep interlopers and Indians at bay and to lend credibility to Spanish claims of possession. But the efforts had always fallen short. Texas was far from the inhabited regions of Mexico, and it held few attractions that couldn’t be matched by neighborhoods less remote. In part as a result—as Moses Austin had observed on his way south and west—large stretches of Texas were uninhabited. Yet they wouldn’t remain so: already land-hungry Americans were crossing the Sabine illegally and seizing unoccupied tracts. By 1820 the question wasn’t whether the Americans would come; the question was whether they would come with Spain’s blessing and under some measure of Spanish control, or unblessed and uncontrolled.
Austin’s arguments echoed some Bastrop had made on behalf of his own colonizing efforts. Moreover, as a businessman, if not a very dedicated or successful one, Bastrop appreciated the cardinal requirement of any business: customers. Whatever they might do for Spain, American settlers would help business in Béxar.
The day after Christmas, Bastrop took Austin back to see Governor Martínez. Precisely what Austin said to the governor has been lost to history, but doubtless it paralleled the petition he laid before Martínez (which Bastrop helped translate). In his proposal Austin spoke of the obvious intention of the Spanish king that Texas prosper, and he presented himself as “the agent of three hundred families who, with the same purpose in view, are desirous of seeing the intention of his Majesty fulfilled.” Austin’s three hundred families were, at this point, merely notional, but he contended that they would be exemplary colonists. “All of them, or the greater part of them, have property. Those without it are industrious. As soon as they are settled, they bind themselves by oath to take up their arms in defense of the Spanish government against either the Indians, filibusters, or any other enemy that may
plan hostilities—coming upon call and obeying the orders given them.”
Just why Martínez now found Austin’s argument persuasive is hard to say. Certainly Bastrop’s endorsement helped change his mind. Nor did it hurt that Martínez shared Austin’s (and Bastrop’s) views about the value of immigrants, and the governor couldn’t foresee immigrants arriving under circumstances more favorable than those Austin outlined. “The proposal which he is making,” Martínez declared in a letter forwarding Austin’s petition to Commandant Arredondo, “is, in my opinion, the only one which is bound to provide for the increase and prosperity in his settlement and even others in this Province. . . . Otherwise I look upon the appearance of such a favorable development as quite remote.”
With his petition in the hands of the Spanish bureaucracy, Austin headed for home to await the verdict. He left Béxar in company with a man named Kirkham, who called himself a commercial traveler but whose principal stock was stolen horses. Kirkham robbed Austin and Richmond in the middle of the night, taking their mounts and provisions and leaving them stranded in the wilderness. January temperatures on the broken prairies northeast of San Antonio rarely remain below freezing for long, but travelers caught out in the rain, as Austin and Richmond were, risk hypothermia nonetheless. When the travelers lack food, the cold and damp become doubly dangerous. Austin and Richmond struggled east but grew weaker by the mile. They contracted colds and then pneumonia—“flux,” they called it—which got worse with each creek and river forded or swum. By the time they collapsed in the doorway of one Hugh McGuffin, west of Natchitoches, Austin seemed, in words retold from a traveler who greeted them there, “a mere skeleton on the verge of death by starvation.”