by H. W. Brands
The missions were expensive and only intermittently successful. Some of the Indians who accepted baptism were evidently sincere in their adopted faith; others simply preferred their prospects under the Spanish to the depredations of Apache and Comanche raiders. Troubles between church and state in both old Spain and New Spain spilled over onto the frontier, and the commitment of the government to the missions rose and fell on the fall and rise in relations with France: when France seemed a threat, Texas appeared important; when France was friendly, Texas diminished. After France ceded Louisiana to Spain in 1762 (lest it be taken by the British, to whom the French were losing the Seven Years’ War), the Texas missions lost nearly all their strategic value. The more distant ones, in East Texas, were abandoned and their personnel withdrawn along the Camino Real to San Antonio de Béxar and points south.
During the half century after 1770, Spain felt peculiarly vulnerable to foreign incursion. The war that began in Boston in 1775 between Britain and her North American colonies spread by the end of the decade to include France (allied directly to the Americans) and Spain (allied to France). The American-French-Spanish side won, but the victory was a mixed blessing for the Americans’ European partners. Spain found itself confronting the Americans as neighbors across the Mississippi. More threatening, the success of the American Revolution set the spirit of republicanism loose upon the world. Every throne of Europe felt the ground rumble beneath its feet; within a decade of the war’s end, the most glorious throne—that occupied by the Sun King of France and his heirs—was swallowed by the earthquake the Americans started.
In the wake of the revolution in France, Napoleon Bonaparte erected a new empire on the rubble of the ancien régime. Bonaparte’s empire briefly reached to North America, after the Corsican wrested what was left of Louisiana—that is, the part of Louisiana that didn’t belong to the United States—back from Spain. Napoleon envisioned reopening the American front in France’s centuries-old struggle against Britain, but after he lost an army to yellow fever in St. Domingue (Haiti), he reconsidered and in 1803 sold Louisiana to the surprised Thomas Jefferson, who had sent envoys to Paris to purchase merely New Orleans. At the time, the confusion that had started with La Salle still surrounded the southwestern border of Louisiana, and neither Napoleon nor his foreign minister, Talleyrand, did anything to dispel it. “If an obscurity did not already exist,” Napoleon remarked to an aide, “it would perhaps be good policy to put one there.” Talleyrand enigmatically congratulated his American interlocutors: “You have made a noble bargain for yourselves, and I suppose you will make the most of it.”
In fact, the American government made less of the Louisiana bargain, as it touched Texas, than did certain Americans acting on their own. Aaron Burr, already notorious for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel on the New Jersey shore, compounded his notoriety by fleeing west and conniving to become master of some portion of the land between the Mississippi and the Rio Grande. Over whiskey and maps, Burr and James Wilkinson, Moses Austin’s bête noire, evidently discussed detaching portions of Louisiana and Texas from the United States and Mexico to create an empire of the Southwest. Burr had little difficulty finding followers among the land-hungry, Indian-fighting populations of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, where Hamilton’s death was generally applauded. Andrew Jackson, a veteran duelist himself, contributed cash and moral support to the Burr cause; men of lesser means signed on for the prospect of winning farms and plantations in Louisiana and Texas.
During the summer of 1806 the West bubbled with Burr’s plotting. Volunteers mustered along the Ohio; boats were secured and supplies purchased for the journey to the front. But the plotting got away from Burr. Newspapers picked up the story and circulated it east. Federalists demanded that Jefferson act to suppress the patent separatism; a Federalist prosecutor in Kentucky charged Burr with treason. He dodged this charge but in the process lost whatever cover his conspiracy had retained. He was arrested by federal agents in Mississippi territory, then jumped bail and fled toward Spanish Florida. He was rearrested in Alabama territory and dispatched to Virginia for trial.
The case became a landmark in American legal history when Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall defied Jefferson and held the court to the strict constitutional standard of proof of treasonous acts, and Burr was acquitted. But the enthusiasm with which American frontiersmen had embraced the idea of invading Texas and making it their own augured ill for the tranquillity of New Spain’s northeastern province.
What augured worse was the continuing weakness of Spain itself, which was the reason the Spanish had lost Louisiana to the French in the first place. Historically an ally of France, Spain became Napoleon’s pawn in the wars that convulsed Europe during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century. The wars bled Spain financially, and as part of their effort to raise money, Spanish authorities extorted loans from landholders in New Spain. The loans forced the sale of holdings among elites who had been a mainstay of loyalty to the Spanish crown; many of these elites, observing the prosperity of the United States after thirty years of independence, pondered whether independence might suit them too.
Dissatisfaction grew after the French invasion of Spain in 1808, which led to the deposing of King Ferdinand VII in favor of Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte. As Spain rose in rebellion against the usurper and demanded restoration of the lawful monarch, Spanish America did likewise, although the sentiment against France was stronger than sentiment for Ferdinand. In 1810 a priest in the Bajío district northwest of Mexico City, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a creole (American-born) son of Spanish parents, raised the cry—or grito—of revolt in the village of Dolores. A large crowd responded, seizing Spanish officials, releasing prisoners from jail, and for the first time taking power into their own hands.
The revolt in Dolores ignited similar passions elsewhere in Mexico and gravely upset the status quo. A bitter and bloody three-way struggle developed among royalists, who adhered to the existing government of Spain; conservative nationalists, who advocated independence short of revolution; and revolutionaries, who intended for independence to yield a thorough restructuring of Mexican society and politics. Resentments that had accrued over centuries among Indians and their mestizo (mixed-race) offspring gave rise to demands for land and to mass killings of those who opposed them. Fear among the European-born and their creole children fueled reprisals that matched in ferocity the attacks of the rebels.
The advocates of independence sought help, with many looking to the United States. The Americans’ successful struggle for freedom provided a tested philosophy of republicanism that appeared adaptable to Mexico’s case, and the American people and government might reasonably be expected to support a similar struggle by their hemispheric neighbors—especially if that struggle had the effect of weakening imperial Spain. More concretely, American markets at New Orleans and elsewhere were the logical places for the Mexican rebels to seek the weapons they needed to offset Spain’s advantage in arms. Hidalgo dispatched an envoy toward Washington to negotiate treaties of alliance and commerce akin to those the fledgling United States had signed with France in the 1770s; he also sent an agent north bearing silver seized from the royalists, which was to be used to underwrite the arsenal of freedom. The envoy, however, was arrested by the royalists before reaching the Gulf coast, and the agent was captured at San Antonio de Béxar.
But another rebel, José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, carrying more silver, did manage to make his way across Texas to Natchitoches, where, among the marginal and often criminal elements that frequented the Neutral Ground (as the border region was designated prior to the 1819 treaty), he recruited an insurgent army, before continuing to Washington to solicit aid from the Madison administration. Gutiérrez got nothing formal from Madison, who was on the verge of asking Congress for a declaration of war against Britain, but Madison’s secretary of state, James Monroe, offered moral support and apparently some money, and intimations of further assistance
should the rebels’ efforts prosper.
Returning to Louisiana, Gutiérrez enlisted Augustus Magee, a clever young American military officer (third in his class at West Point) who had grown disaffected after being passed over for promotion. Gutiérrez and Magee led a band of a hundred men against Nacogdoches, which quickly fell. As news of the victory traveled back to Louisiana and beyond, it inspired more enlistments. “The business of volunteering for New Spain has become a perfect mania,” wrote William Shaler, an American merchant who tripled as an agent for the Madison administration and a political adviser to Magee and Gutiérrez. “I hear of parties proceeding thither from all quarters, and they are constantly passing through this village from Natchez. . . . I suppose the volunteer force cannot now be rated under 600 Americans, generally good soldiers, and there is every appearance of its becoming very respectable in a short time, equal even to the entire conquest of the Province of Texas.” In Shaler’s mind, and presumably in the minds of these recruits, more than Mexican independence was at stake. “The volunteer expedition, from the most insignificant beginning, is growing into an irresistible torrent that will sweep away the crazy remains of Spanish Government from the Internal Provinces [Texas and its neighbors], and open Mexico to the political influence of the U.S. and to the talents and enterprise of our citizens.”
The expeditionary force rolled toward San Antonio, picking up additional volunteers among the Tejanos (Mexican Texans) and even various Indian tribes. It captured La Bahía in November 1812 without a struggle—which disappointed the bellicose Magee. “They are a rascally set of treacherous cowards,” he said of the Spanish soldiers. Although Magee fell ill and died, the invasion continued under Gutiérrez and Samuel Kemper, a Virginia carpenter who had come west in search of adventure and booty. The royalist forces counterattacked outside San Antonio, but the rebels soon put them to flight. Gutiérrez and the others camped outside the Alamo—a mission compound that had been converted to a fortress—while several hundred officers and men of the royalist army switched sides and joined them. On April 6, 1813, the victors, claiming to speak for “the People of the Province of Texas,” declared that “the chains which bound us under the domination of European Spain are forever dissolved. . . . We are free and independent.”
Born of the Mexican revolution, the fighting in Texas reflected the ferocity of that larger upheaval. After the conquest of San Antonio, several captured Spanish officers were executed, apparently with the approval of Gutiérrez. This offended and alarmed some of the Americans, who headed back to Louisiana. It also provoked quarreling among the remaining rebels, many of whom objected to the high-handedness of Gutiérrez in making himself “governor” and then “president protector” of the nascent Texas republic. More of his soldiers drifted away, leaving the rest unready to defend themselves against a fresh royalist army under General Joaquín Arredondo.
At the battle of the Medina River, south of San Antonio, Arredondo and the royalists crushed the rebels in the bloodiest battle ever fought in Texas. Of perhaps fourteen hundred rebels, including Americans, Tejanos, and various Indians, fewer than a hundred survived the battle and its aftermath. No quarter was given by the royalists; rebels captured were summarily executed, and those who fled were hunted down and likewise dispatched. The bodies of the vanquished were left unburied on the field as a lesson to any who might be tempted toward independence in the future.
Taking note of Arredondo’s strategy was a slight young lieutenant of the royalist army, a nineteen-year-old with soft but penetrating brown eyes, curly dark hair, a rather sallow complexion for one who spent so much time out of doors, and a resigned, melancholic expression at odds with the martial career he had chosen. It was this last aspect that made Antonio López de Santa Anna irresistible to nearly all the women and many of the men he met—“decidedly the best looking and most interesting figure of the group,” said a later female visitor who singled him out of a crowd. This visitor, benefiting from some history, went on to say, “It is strange, and a fact worthy of notice in natural history, how frequently this expression of philosophic resignation, of placid sadness, is to be remarked on the countenances of the most cunning, the deepest, most ambitious, most designing and most dangerous statesmen.”
Santa Anna’s cunning would take years to perfect, but his ambition was evident early. A creole from Veracruz province, the young man ached to achieve distinction beyond his family’s modest station; to this end he joined the army, that traditional vehicle of advancement for those not born to privilege. His infantry regiment, commanded by Arredondo, fought Indians on the northern frontier until the revolution broke out, whereupon it turned to fighting the rebels. Santa Anna was undeniably brave; wounded in action against the Indians, he further distinguished himself for valor and vigor against the rebels in the battle of the Medina. Arredondo decorated the young man and marked him as one after his own heart.
Yet Santa Anna’s ambition, besides spurring him to feats of arms, manifested itself in a compulsion to gamble. In time all of Mexico—including Texas—would be his casino; for now the gaming table was his venue, and his downfall. When he couldn’t pay a gambling debt, he forged the signature of Arredondo to access army funds. The fraud came to light and Santa Anna was bankrupted and publicly humiliated.
The setback was temporary. Displaying the resilience that was the crucial complement to his ambition, Santa Anna redoubled his devotion to the royalist cause. He helped suppress a rebel invasion of Mexico launched by Francisco Mina from Galveston, on the Texas coast—which disposed him, beyond his experience at the Medina, to think of Texas as a breeding ground for brigands and pirates. (In fact the pirate brothers Jean and Pierre Laffite, operating out of Galveston, did abet and equip the Mina expedition and generally had a hand in most of the attacks against Texas during this period.) Santa Anna’s actions were noted by the viceroy of New Spain, who tendered the thanks of the Spanish crown.
Returning to Veracruz province, Santa Anna directed the relocation of refugees from the revolutionary fighting there. The work went well, and he was happy to report the settlement of hundreds of displaced families. “All this is due to my activity, zeal, and hard work,” he said, displaying another trait—patriotic egotism—that would characterize his whole career. “I did not spare myself work, fatigue, or danger, however great, provided only that I could be useful to my country.”
C h a p t e r 3
The People of the Horse
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while the Spanish were approaching Texas from the south and the Americans and French from the east, another people, more formidable than either the Europeans or the Americans, entered Texas from the north. The Comanches were a young tribe, an offshoot of the Shoshones of the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. Why the tribes separated is shrouded in myth. By one Comanche tradition a group of hunters quarreled over the carcass of a bear they had killed; unable to reconcile, the group divided, with each side taking its dependents: the Shoshones to the north, the Comanches to the west and south. Another version, handed down orally to the twentieth century, explained the split differently:
Two bands were living together in a large camp. One band was on the east side; the other was on the west. Each had its own chief. Every night the young boys were out playing games—racing, and so forth. They were having a kicking game; they kicked each other. One boy kicked another over the stomach so hard that he died from it. That boy who was killed was from the West camp. He was the son of a chief.
The father of the dead boy demanded vengeance, and both sides girded for battle. At the last moment, though, one of the tribe’s old men talked the tempers down, and the western chief was persuaded to accept horses and other gifts in mitigation of his son’s death. But he couldn’t continue to live beside the easterners.
The chief had his announcer tell the people it was time to move camp. “We have had bad luck here. There has been hard feeling.” While they were still there, smallpox broke out. Then th
ey broke up. One group went north; those are the Shoshones. The other group went west.
Whatever the occasion of the parting, the cause was deeper, as the mention of smallpox and bad luck at the end of this story suggests. In the late seventeenth century the effects of European settlement farther east were rippling out across the plains and mountains of the American West. Smallpox was one effect, and could be devastating. With mortality rates of two-thirds or more, the disease depopulated large tracts of Texas (as Moses Austin noticed in 1820, without understanding the cause) and of the surrounding area.
Firearms were another consequence of European contact, and likewise destructive of existing population patterns. French fur traders introduced guns to the Blackfeet and Crows, who had long been rivals of the Shoshones. With the weapons the Blackfeet and Crows drove the Shoshones from their old territory, pushing some north and others—the Comanches—down from the mountains onto the southern plains.
But the land the Comanches entered already had inhabitants, and, as with most peoples moving about the continent, the newcomers had to fight to carve a niche for themselves. It was at this point that the Comanches acquired their name. Like many tribes, they referred to themselves as simply “the People.” To their new Ute neighbors, however, they were “anyone who wants to fight me all the time”; rendered into Spanish, the Ute word became “Comanche.”
The Comanches were fierce fighters, and grew even fiercer when they acquired horses. Like firearms, horses were a European introduction to North America, and, at least on the plains west of the Mississippi River, they were even more revolutionary. Before the advent of the horse, the tribes of the plains hunted buffalo but rarely traveled far to do so. Most were semi-sedentary, planting crops—corn, beans, squashes—in sheltered valleys and at the edges of the plains. The first horses reached the plains with Coronado in the sixteenth century; some may have escaped then, or been stolen. But not for another century were there enough horses to prompt a change of life among the plains Indians.