by H. W. Brands
After a week in Béxar, Austin resumed his reconnaissance. Following the San Antonio River southeast toward the Gulf, he continued to be thrilled by the country. “The land adjoining the river is very rich and lays beautifully,” he wrote. After a week he reached La Bahía, where a small village clustered about the Franciscan mission. “This place is beautifully situated on an eminence, immediately on the bank of the St. Antonio River. The surrounding country is rolling prairie, land rather sandy but produces well; might all be watered from the river.”
Austin carried letters of introduction from Governor Martínez. The alcalde of La Bahía wasn’t impressed; when Austin asked for guides to conduct him on the next stage of his journey, the official said he couldn’t release anyone without another letter specifically directing him to do so. The local curé, however—“a very gentlemanly and liberal minded man and a great friend of the Americans,” Austin noted—saw in the empresario a ticket out of a dismal post. “He expressed a wish to be appointed the curé of my new settlement.”
On this eastward leg of the journey, Austin encountered several groups of Indians. He had heard of the Tonkawas, a powerful tribe that intimidated its enemies by, among other methods, eating them. Consequently he was surprised to meet some Tonkawas along the San Antonio River who seemed as happy as the friars to learn of his project. The leader of the Tonkawa band, which comprised eight men and ten women, approached Austin in a friendly manner. “I had a talk with him, smoked and gave him some tobacco, informed him of my intended settlement, which pleased him, and he sent on two of his sons next day with me to his town to inform his nation who we were and our objects.”
A run-in with some other indigenes caused Austin greater concern. On the lower Colorado he heard an “Indian war whoop.” A native approached Austin’s party and signaled for them to stop. His mien wasn’t especially threatening, but he was backed by more than a dozen warriors. Austin, telling his companions to be on their guard, went forward to engage the Indian. This fellow wanted Austin and the others to come to his camp. Austin asked who they were, and was told they were Cocos, whom Austin knew to be a branch of the Karankawas. In light of the Karankawas’ bad reputation—they, too, practiced cannibalism, and were considered treacherous by the Spanish—Austin declined the invitation, “until one of the chiefs laid down his arms and five squaws and a boy came up to me from their camp. This satisfied me they believed us to be too strong for them and therefore that they would not attack us (of their disposition to do so I had no doubt, if they thought they could have succeeded).”
Austin found his hosts worthy of note, for good and ill.
These Indians were well formed and apparently very active and athletic men. Their bows were about 51⁄2 to 6 feet long, their arrows 2 to 3, well pointed with iron or steel. Some of the young squaws were handsome and one of them quite pretty. They had panther skins around their waist, painted, which extended down to the knee and calf of the leg. Above the waist, though they were naked, their breasts were marked or tattooed in circles of black beginning with a small circle at the nipple and enlarging as the breast swelled.
These Indians and the Karankawas may be called universal enemies to man. They killed of all nations that came in their power, and frequently feast on the bodies of their victims. . . . An American population will be the signal of their extermination for there will be no way of subduing them but extermination.
At this point Austin’s assessment of the character of the Karankawas relied on the hearsay of their enemies (who indeed included most of their neighbors, not least the Spanish). His forecast, of course, was simply a guess, but it hardly boded well for relations between this native people and the colonists Austin aimed to bring in.
Austin’s Karankawa problem—or the Karankawas’ Austin problem—was aggravated by their location: near the coast, where Austin hoped to establish the port of entry for his colony. He scouted the head of San Antonio Bay, at the mouth of the Guadalupe River, and though he pronounced the site “a beautiful situation for a town,” the remains of a large recent encampment of Karankawas worried him. He would have examined the mouth of the Colorado but a group of Karankawas blocked the way.
Skirting the Indians, Austin and his companions crossed over to the Brazos. The area teemed with wildlife, native and introduced. One of Austin’s fellows killed what Austin called “the fattest buck” he had ever seen. Feral horses roamed the prairie. “Saw three gangs of mustangs, in one of which was 2 mules.” Wild cattle were “abundant.” The country was enough to make any farmer cry for joy. “Land all the richest kind of soil, very deep. . . . Prairies of the richest kind of black sandy land, intersected by branches and creeks of excellent water, heavily timbered, beautifully rolling.”
The colony would need a headquarters, a town that formed its center. Throughout the trip Austin had been looking for a suitable site; now he found it on the Brazos. “The prairie comes bluff to the river just below the Tuscasite [Atascosito] Road, and affords a most beautiful situation for a town or settlement. The bluff is about 60 feet high. The country back of this place and below for about 15 miles (as far as we went) is as good in every respect as a man could wish for. Land all first rate, plenty of timber, fine water, beautifully rolling.”
Austin’s introduction to Texas erased his doubts regarding his father’s project. He was no son of the soil, but even he couldn’t help lusting after the gorgeous country he traversed that summer of 1821. And when he returned to Louisiana in early October, he learned that the same lust was spreading rapidly among people who had visited Texas only in imagination. “On my arrival here I found near one hundred letters from the neighborhood of where I formerly lived in upper Louisiana (now called Missouri) and many from Kentucky and other places requesting information relative to settling in the province of Texas,” he informed Governor Martínez. “And I am convinced that I could take on fifteen hundred families as easily as three hundred if permitted to do so.”
Austin realized he had to move quickly. He traveled downstream to New Orleans, which he had chosen as the staging point for the initial emigration to Texas. He consulted with Joseph Hawkins and formalized their partnership, arranged additional funding, and purchased a schooner, the Lively, to carry the first colonists by river and sea to the Texas coast. He also selected, from among the many applicants, fourteen men to sail on the Lively and establish a beachhead at the mouth of the Colorado. “They are to assist in building cabins and a stockade, should one be deemed necessary,” Austin and the fourteen agreed, “and to clear fence, and cultivate at least five acres of corn each of prairie or untimbered land, and to gather the crop into corn houses.” The idea was to make ready for the larger emigration that would follow. In exchange for the services of the fourteen (who bound themselves for a year), Austin would provide tools, draft animals, seeds, and foodstuffs, in addition to transport on the Lively. At the end of their year of service, these pioneers would each receive 640 acres of farm land and a town lot.
The Lively set out from New Orleans during the last weeks of 1821. Austin left the city about the same time. While the boat went east and south, down the Mississippi to the Gulf, he went west and north, up the river toward Natchitoches. Traveling overland again, he would scout more of the country and meet the boat at the mouth of the Colorado in January 1822.
But the hazards of the sea befell the Lively. A strong west wind blew her many leagues off course, and navigational error—and the undifferentiated character of the Texas coast—led to a landing at the mouth of the Brazos rather than the Colorado. Austin arrived on the Colorado expecting to find the fourteen hard at work, but they were nowhere to be seen. Equally alarming from the standpoint of Austin’s finances, neither was the boat or its cargo.
What he found instead were other immigrants who had come to Texas on their own. Having heard and read the praises of Texas, they discerned no compelling reason to wait for permission to enter the province, and so, after the fashion of Americans for two centuries, simply
settled on land that looked empty. With each week that Austin awaited the Lively, more squatters arrived.
Austin couldn’t decide whether their arrival was a good thing or bad. The squatters’ presence spoke well for the attractiveness of Texas, and it provided additional evidence that he would have no difficulty filling his quota of three hundred families. On the other hand, these first arrivals naturally sought the best locations, appropriating acreage that Austin already had come to think of as his own—his own, at least, to allot to colonists who signed up with him.
To clarify his status vis-à-vis the squatters, Austin traveled once more to San Antonio. Governor Martínez added to the confusion by explaining that events surrounding Mexican independence had thrown government attitudes and policy regarding the Texas settlements—and regarding Texas officials, including the Spanish-born Martínez—into chaos. The governor no longer spoke with confidence. “He was an European,” Austin explained afterward, “and did not know at what moment he might be removed from office or how the revolution would terminate, in consequence of which he had determined not to transact any public business except such as could not be postponed.” If Austin wanted reassurance, he must seek it in Mexico City.
The last thing Austin wished to do at this point was to undertake the long journey to the Mexican capital. The Lively and its passengers were still missing; the squatters were filling up the valleys of the Colorado and Brazos (Austin estimated fifty settlers on the Brazos and one hundred on the Colorado as of March 1822). To find the first group and fend off the second would require his best efforts here in Texas; to leave the province would be to cast his project to the whim of wayward chance and aggressive frontiersmen. The governor’s advice cut against Austin’s every instinct.
Yet he saw no alternative. “One night’s deliberation determined me to accept of this advice,” he wrote. On the ides of March, Austin headed south from San Antonio for Mexico City.
Just across the Nueces River—the southern border of Texas in the administration of New Spain and Mexico—Austin met his first Comanches. “Fifty Comanches charged upon us a little before sunrise,” he wrote in his journal. Austin’s two companions were fetching the horses, and he was alone in the camp. “They surrounded me in an instant and took possession of every article we had.” Resistance was futile, and became more so when other Comanches arrived escorting Austin’s companions at gunpoint.
Austin tried a rhetorical sally. “I then expostulated with them for treating their friends the Americans in such a manner.” The Comanches encountered Americans as traders and generally tolerated them; these Indians had mistaken Austin and the others for Spaniards. Austin’s approach worked. “When they found there were no Spaniards with me, they gave us back our saddle bags, saddles, and everything else except four blankets, a bridle, my grammar and several other little things and all our provisions.” Austin may have heard something about the decentralized nature of Comanche politics, or perhaps he was just operating on his understanding of erratic human nature when he added, from the safety of Laredo, on the Rio Grande: “As the next party might not be so polite I have waited for the company that is going on tomorrow.”
Why the Indians kept Austin’s “grammar”—his Spanish-language primer—is impossible to tell, but its loss dealt him a blow. From the moment he committed to the Texas project, he threw himself into the study of the language that governed Texas. He knew some French, having grown up in colonial Louisiana, and he also knew how fluency in the tongue of the locals was essential to acceptance in any community. His French aided his acquisition of Spanish, although not as much as the effort he devoted to Spanish study. The grammar he had packed in his saddlebags was supposed to help him practice during the long journey south. In its absence he would have to rely on his ear and such assistance as those he met along the way could render.
The journey was wearing. “The country from the River Medina to this place is the poorest I ever saw in my life,” he wrote at Laredo. “It is generally nothing but sand, entirely void of timber, covered with scrubby thorn bushes and prickly pear.” And it got little better the closer he approached to Mexico City.
Yet the Mexican capital made up for the journey. Austin registered wonder at finding himself at “the fountain head of a new born nation.” Almost simultaneous with his arrival came word that Mexico’s independence had been recognized by the United States—“an event exciting the most lively sensations here,” he recorded, “and fraught, I hope, with solid and lasting benefits to both nations.” The Mexican government was finding its feet, hesitantly but nonetheless hopefully. “The Congress here do business in good order and with great deliberation, though rather slow; and the most perfect harmony prevails.”
Austin often erred in analyzing Mexican politics. Hope chronically clouded his judgment, as it did in this case. He expected to spend a few weeks, or at most a few months, confirming his authority to colonize Texas. In fact he spent nearly a year in Mexico City, applying to committees, bureaus, offices, and individuals regarding the need to plant settlers in Texas before the illegal immigrants and the untamable Indians made legal settlement and Mexican control impossible.
At the time of Austin’s arrival, Mexican politics centered on Agustín de Iturbide, a general whose defection from the royalists to the rebels had allowed the victory of the latter and the end of Spanish rule. Iturbide was a Mexican nationalist—after his defection—but he was no republican, and he soon established himself as emperor of independent Mexico.
Austin, like nearly all Americans of his day, didn’t think much of emperors. But the interests of his Texas project prompted him to keep his disapproval to himself. “I make a tender of my services, my loyalty, and my fidelity to the Constitutional Emperor of Mexico,” he wrote Iturbide, “a tender which I am ready to verify by an oath of allegiance to the Empire.” To underscore his point, Austin added, “This solemn act cuts me off from all protection or dependence on my former government. My property, my prospects, my future hopes of happiness, for myself and family, and for the families I have brought with me, are centered here. This is our adopted nation.”
He should have saved his breath. Before Iturbide could reconfirm the Texas project, he was overthrown. Austin first got a hint of the change in December 1822. “There has been and still is much difficulty in the province of Veracruz,” he wrote to his brother, James, on Christmas Day. “A General Santana has proclaimed a Republic, but he met with a defeat on the night of 20 and morning of the 21 at Xalapa, which it is expected will soon force him to leave the country or yield.”
Austin discovered before long that this General “Santana” was Santa Anna, and that the defeat at Jalapa was hardly conclusive. Iturbide’s defection to the rebels had caught the royalist Santa Anna flat-footed, and for some time thereafter he continued to defend the Spanish monarchy. In March 1821 a group of rebels at Orizaba invited him to follow Iturbide and switch sides; he answered with an armed attack.
Yet when the attack faltered and the rebels surrounded him, Santa Anna experienced a sudden conversion to Mexican nationalism. The rebels’ offer of a battlefield promotion made the conversion that much easier.
At a time when bigger names than Santa Anna were switching sides, his coat-turning occasioned no unusual notice. Yet his efforts on behalf of independence soon won him acclaim among the now-dominant party. He marched toward Veracruz at the head of a rebel army, taking several towns along the way. At his hacienda of El Encero he issued a proclamation in the grandiloquent tone for which he would become famous.
Comrades! You are going to put an end to the great work of reconquering our liberty. You are going to plant the eagle of the Mexican empire, humiliated [by Cortés] three centuries ago on the plains of the valley of Otumba, on the banks of the humble Tenoya, where the Castillian flag was first unfurled. The soul of Quauhpopoca, burned alive in the great square of Mexico City, because he avenged the iniquitous act of Juan Escalante, pleads for justice; and the victims of the horrible m
assacre of Cholula, whose cries have startled two worlds, filling both with horror, will not be satisfied unless you restore to your oppressed native land the liberty which they lost.
Fighting in his native province against officers and men with whom he had lately been allied, Santa Anna aroused predictably bitter feelings. The reputation he had acquired as a royalist scourge didn’t enhance his popularity. One observer noted that assassins lay in ambush, wishing to “avenge themselves for the many cruelties that he had committed.” The assassins missed their chance, but the royalist troops did better, forcing Santa Anna’s rebels back. He responded with a verbal barrage:
Veracruz! the cry for your extermination will be from this time on the watchword of our men going into battle. In all juntas and senates the demand for your ruin will be added to all deliberations. The memory of Carthage, from whose grandeur you are as far removed as the humble grass from the stately oak, should make you tremble. Mexicans! Carthage never offended Rome as Veracruz has Mexico. . . . God help you.
Santa Anna’s warning didn’t endear him to the inhabitants of Veracruz, nor did it cause the city’s surrender. The Spanish commandant vowed he would never yield to such a despicable character.
Eventually he did surrender, but to another officer sent out by Iturbide. Swallowing his pride, Santa Anna rode into Veracruz with the conquering colonel, Manuel Rincón, and joined Rincón in urging all in the city to put past differences behind them.
He then headed toward Mexico City, where Iturbide was consolidating his power. Upon hearing that the general had made himself emperor, Santa Anna applauded the coup. “I cannot restrain my excessive joy, for this step is the most suitable possible to bring about the prosperity of all,” he told Iturbide. “It is the thing we sighed for and longed for, and although it may be necessary to exterminate some discordant and disturbing elements which do not possess the true virtues of citizens, let us hope that we can hasten to proclaim and take an oath to support the immortal Iturbide as emperor.” Carrying the flattery to an extreme, the dashing twenty-eight-year-old colonel conspicuously paid suit to Iturbide’s sister, a not unhandsome lady but one who, at sixty, wasn’t surrounded by beaus.