by H. W. Brands
Perhaps the wooing was excessive, or Santa Anna’s ambition too obvious; in either case a chill descended upon relations between the emperor and the general (as Santa Anna became after another promotion). The coolness acquired an edge when Iturbide abruptly transferred Santa Anna to the capital, the better to keep an eye on him. Santa Anna objected to the move, which, he said, the emperor ordered “without extending to me the mere vestiges of courtesy.” In retrospect he added, “Such a crushing blow offended my dignity as a soldier and further awakened me to the true nature of absolutism. I immediately resolved to fight against it at every turn and to restore to my nation its freedom.”
He discovered allies among the early revolutionaries, who resented Iturbide’s hijacking of their struggle. And in their name, in Veracruz in December 1822, Santa Anna declared the republic of which Stephen Austin wrote that Christmas Day. The improbability of the onetime royalist and recent imperial courtier experiencing another conversion, to republicanism, was overlooked in the excitement of an hour that promised to fulfill the revolutionary dreams for Mexico.
The fulfillment was delayed when Santa Anna’s attempt to spread the republican gospel to his hometown of Jalapa encountered the combined hostility of Iturbide’s conservative supporters and Santa Anna’s personal enemies; in the aftermath of his defeat there—the one Stephen Austin also remarked upon that Christmas Day—Santa Anna lost his nerve and prepared to flee the country for the United States. But one of the original rebels, Guadalupe Victoria, urged a steady course. “Go and put Veracruz in a state of defense,” the guerrilla leader told Santa Anna. “You can set sail when they show you my head.”
Santa Anna remained in Mexico, and the republican reaction to Iturbide acquired momentum. Many of those who joined were as opportunistic as Santa Anna, but the weight of their influence, if not of their convictions, drove the emperor from power. In March 1823 Iturbide abdicated, and shortly he, rather than Santa Anna, was the one leaving the country.
Santa Anna hoped to be the beneficiary of Iturbide’s demise; reportedly he hired enthusiasts to parade about calling “Long live Anthony the First!” But Victoria and the other veterans of the revolution hadn’t survived for years in the mountains without developing a knack for self-preservation, and they maneuvered Santa Anna off to Yucatán.
Stephen Austin observed the fall of Iturbide with ambivalence. On one hand, he cheered the emergence of a more representative form of government for Mexico. A Mexican by choice, he remained an American by birth, with all the congenital preference for republican government Americans after 1776 exhibited. And he couldn’t help feeling the warm glow from what he called “the spark of liberty” that was struck by Santa Anna at Veracruz and which “soon kindled into a bright flame and spread with astonishing rapidity over the whole Empire.” On the other hand, Austin had invested many months and much effort cultivating Iturbide on behalf of the Texas project—time and effort that now came to naught.
Wearily Austin resumed his petitioning, this time of the republican successors to Iturbide. Finally, after eleven months in the Mexican capital, he received the requisite seals and signatures, granting authority over colonization on the Brazos River in Texas to “Don Estevan F. Austin.” He left Mexico City, he informed his brother, “with all my business finished to my complete satisfaction.” On the way out he surveyed the political landscape and declared, “The revolution is complete. . . . All is quiet.” Yet he added, significantly, “I will not vouch for its being permanent.”
C h a p t e r 5
The Three Hundred
William Dewees found his way to Texas as many others among Austin’s original colonists did: by accident following setback succeeding disappointment. Dewees was not quite twenty-one when the Panic of 1819 swept through Tennessee, propelling him west with hundreds of others from the Cumberland Valley. He boarded a boat that drifted down the Cumberland to the Ohio, the Ohio to the Mississippi, and the Mississippi toward the Gulf. The prospects appeared no better along the great water highway than back home. “On this river there are but few inhabitants,” Dewees wrote. “Most of them were pale-faced, sickly looking people, apparently fishermen and wood-choppers.” Natchez stood out on the river’s left bank, and in the mind of this innocent young man. “I have often heard of dissipation, but I never saw it in its nakedness till I came to this place. It would fill you with perfect horror were I to describe to you the fighting which is carried on between the boatmen and the citizens of ‘Natchez under the hill.’ . . . Here you might see men, women, and children mingling together in every species of vice and dissipation, the very thought of which is enough to sicken the heart.” Below Natchez, Dewees’s boat entered the plantation country of the Mississippi delta. The scenery was “truly delightful,” but all the land was owned by rich white planters and all the work was done by black slaves, leaving little room for the poor white boy who floated past.
Hearing good things about Arkansas, Dewees ascended the Red River to that territory—only to be disheartened for a different reason. “I saw for the first time a person shaking with the ague [malaria]. I supposed the person to be dying, but was told it was nothing but the ague.” Dewees himself fell ill a short while later, and was incapacitated for six months. After his health improved, he joined a party of buffalo hunters heading northwest toward the Great Plains. On the hunt he narrowly escaped ambush by Osage Indians, hypothermia from the rain and sleet of winter, and accidental violence at the hands of drunken fellow hunters. At the end of the hunting season he was nearly destitute and thoroughly ready for something else.
When a friend in similar straits suggested, in early 1821, a visit to Texas, Dewees eagerly assented. Nacogdoches was their first stop. “The buildings consist of a large stone church, another large stone building with eight or ten apartments in it. . . . The remainder of the buildings are adobes, except a few which are made of wood.” About a hundred people lived there, including the Mexican commandant, who had to deal with all manner of mundane and extraordinary occurrences. During Dewees’s visit a distraught traveler from Mexico presented himself to the commandant and demanded to be hanged. The commandant thought he was mad and told him to go away. But the traveler insisted that he deserved death: he had murdered his partner on the road and sunk the body in the Angelina River. So importunate was he that the commandant finally agreed to send a party to the Angelina, where the murderer produced the corpse, weighted down by rocks. Upon the group’s return to Nacogdoches, the conscience-stricken man got his wish. “The Commandant called a few persons together to witness the solemn scene, took the man out behind the old stone building and there, according to the man’s request, hung him on a tree till he was dead.”
In Nacogdoches, Dewees learned of the Austins’ Texas colony and decided to give it a try. He returned to Arkansas to conclude some personal affairs, and discovered that the news of Texas was traveling fast. “When we arrived at this place [Pecan Point, Arkansas, on the Red River] we found several families had heard of this enterprise of Austin’s, and they are now making preparations to join the colony.” Dewees was happy to have his judgment confirmed, and he looked forward to the company on the trail. He also looked forward to sinking roots in Texas. “If I like the country I intend to remain there, as I am tired of this wandering mode of life.”
By the time he reached the Austin colony, Dewees was even wearier of wandering. “We were several months in getting here,” he wrote, “there being several families in company, among whom were quite a number of women and children. A part of the time we were detained by the sickness of one or another of the company. Besides this, we lost several horses on the way, and in fact we seemed to meet with a great many misfortunes. We carried our luggage entirely upon pack-horses, the roads being perfectly impassable for a vehicle of any description.”
Dewees and a few other families pitched camp in January 1822 where the Camino Real crossed the Brazos, a short distance above the mouth of the Little Brazos. Two families had preceded them
to the spot and were busy building cabins with timber from the riverbank. “We were, all of us, well pleased with the situation of the place and decided to remain here for the present. The settlement now consisted of seven families; there is no other settlement within fifty miles. About the time of our arrival here, a few families settled below us on this river, near the old La Bahia crossing.”
The pioneers’ lot was hard at first, especially for the women and children. Their flour and meal ran out, and though they had planted some corn, lack of rain stunted its growth. Yet there was no risk of anyone starving. “The country is literally alive with all kinds of game. We have only to go out for a few miles into a swamp between the Big and Little Brazos, to find as many wild cattle as one could wish.” These escapees from Spanish herds had multiplied along the Gulf coastal plain; their only competition came from the buffalo that wandered in from the north, and which also supplied the settlers’ wants. “If we desire buffalo meat, we are able to go out, load our horses, and return the same day.” The hunters worked communally and shared their take equally, with the exception of the tongues, which went to the men who felled the beasts. Dewees’s companion on one hunt upstream was a “yankee preacher.” Dewees called him a preacher because the man so identified himself upon hearing the other hunters habitually swear. As for the “yankee”: “My reason for calling him a yankee . . . is on account of the way he managed to get our buffalo tongues. About the time we got our canoe loaded with meat ready to start home, he proposed a plan to break us from swearing, to which we all very readily agreed. The first one who used an oath was to give whoever reminded him one of his dried buffalo tongues. Oaths being so common with us, we, of course, did not notice them, and in less than three days the minister was possessor of all our dried tongues.”
After some months on the Brazos, Dewees crossed over southwest to the Colorado. The allure of the land amazed him. “Around all was wild, all was silent. Before us flowed the beautiful Colorado, while around us lay the prairies, green and lovely.” Dewees’s party camped for the evening and was readying its dinner of deer meat when some of the members heard a dog barking, across the river and upstream. “Not knowing whether it was the dog of an Indian or a white man, we shouldered our rifles and went up opposite the place from whence the sound proceeded. There we were delighted by the sight of a small log cabin, on the west bank of the river.” The river was too deep to ford, so they shouted across and raised the cabin’s occupants: “two old adventurers by the names of Buckner and Powell.” The pair shouted back, explaining that a dozen miles downstream on the east bank lay a small settlement of a few families. The next morning Dewees’s party found the settlement, which included a friend of his from Arkansas. Having arrived only a short while before Dewees’s group, the six families were busy building cabins and otherwise making themselves at home. Dewees joined them, hunting, reconnoitering the country, and doing whatever he could to be useful.
Before long a traveler from downriver brought word that a boat had landed at the mouth of the Colorado with cargo and passengers for the Austin colony. Finding no one there, the passengers and crew had headed upstream, leaving a single guard with the vessel. Karankawas had set upon the boat, killed the guard, and stolen the cargo. As their own fate depended on keeping the Indians under control, Dewees and the other settlers prepared a response. “We immediately collected all the men we could up the river; these amounted to about twenty-five. We elected Robert Kirkendall, Captain, and took up our line of march for the mouth of the river.” En route the posse found a few more families along the west bank of the river, and three men from Arkansas who had an unusual quantity of provisions for some who had come so far overland.
About twenty-five miles above the mouth of the river, the posse discovered a cabin where the passengers from a previous boat had stored their provisions. These had recently been rifled, apparently by the same band of Karankawas. But a few barrels of whisky had been spared. Liquor being rare on this frontier, “we began of course to feel a little desirous to know what kind of whisky the barrels contained; we removed the bung from one of them, drew some of the whisky, and each of us took a sip.” Sentinels had been posted at the edge of the camp; a gourd was filled and delivered to them. “The sentinels shortly became very brave and courageous, refused to stand guard any longer, and came into camp. The captain being fond of a wee bit of drink himself, had kissed the gourd quite often, and finally decided that we were smart enough to whip all the Indians in that part of the country, that there was no need of sentinels, and we could stay at the guard fire all night. We kept up the frolic till nearly morning, some of the company now and then exclaiming that they wished the Indians would attack us, that we might show them how the Americans could fight.” Fortunately no Indians appeared, and the only injuries the revelers sustained were splitting headaches the next morning.
Upon reaching the plundered boat, the posse discovered no sign of the murdered man. “We could find nothing of the body . . . and came to the conclusion that the Indians, who were cannibals, must have devoured it.” But they did find something curious: the track of a sled or litter that had been drawn from the boat into a canebrake nearby. Investigating, they stumbled upon a cache consisting of part of the craft’s cargo. “Knowing that this was not done after the manner of the Indians, our suspicions naturally fell upon those men from Arkansas, whom we had discovered with such large supplies of provisions.” Returning upriver, the posse questioned the Arkansans, who denied everything. “Being unable to obtain from them any satisfactory answer, we continued our journey home.”
But their suspicions regarding the Arkansans rankled. Crime was crime, whether committed by Indians or whites, and frontier security depended on punishing criminals to deter others. Several members of Dewees’s party decided to investigate further. “They formed a court by electing a magistrate, a sheriff, and other necessary officers. The sheriff was sent down to take the men prisoners.” One of the men, named Parks, agreed to turn state’s evidence (or the equivalent, in the absence of any formal authority) against his fellows. He explained that he and the other two—named Wilson and Moss—had learned that the Indians had already stolen part of the boat’s cargo, and decided to take the rest themselves, guessing that the second theft would also be charged against the Indians. For cooperating, Parks was released, while Wilson and Moss were sentenced to hard time.
This raised a problem that vexed all frontier societies: how to jail criminals where no jail existed. The tribunal in the Wilson-Moss case solved the problem in a manner that educated Dewees to the ways of the world. The prisoners were to be escorted to San Antonio de Béxar, where the Mexican authorities could imprison them; but before being taken away, Moss was allowed to visit his cabin, accompanied by the sheriff. Soon after, the sheriff returned without Moss. The prisoner, he said, had escaped. All the sheriff had to show for his efforts was a gold watch, which he said Moss had entrusted to him for safekeeping; now that Moss was gone, apparently back to the States, the sheriff guessed he would indeed keep the watch.
Dewees and two other men were chosen to take Wilson to San Antonio. While they were there, a large party of Comanches arrived. The Indians’ purpose was peaceful: “They brought in dried buffalo meat, deer skins, and buffalo robes, which they wished to exchange for sugar, beads, &c.” Yet the issue of peace or war appeared to be at the Comanches’ discretion. “These Indians are very friendly with the Mexicans”—or at least they were on this visit—“but friendly as they are, they seem to have the Mexicans rather under their control.”
Dewees and his fellow deputies left Wilson at San Antonio and returned to the Colorado. They applied to the informal court there for compensation for their time and effort on behalf of the public weal. “To our sad disappointment we found that the property of Wilson had been divided among the officers during our absence, and there was nothing left us, after the other expenses had been paid.” Completing Dewees’s education in frontier justice was a report received abo
ut then that Wilson, like Moss, had escaped custody and fled back to the United States.
“I have just had the pleasure of spending a few days in the company of Stephen F. Austin,” Dewees wrote under the date August 29, 1823. “He was on this river”—the Colorado—“with a surveyor, having lots laid off from a tract of land that he had just located for the purpose of building a town, about eight miles above the crossing of the old Atascocito road. But he has since abandoned it, and located his town, which he calls San Felipe de Austin, on the Brazos River.”
In planting his Texas colony, Stephen Austin had to feel his way along a dark and unfamiliar road. Nothing in his own experience had prepared him for this, and almost nothing in American experience provided a model for what he was trying to accomplish. His father’s establishment of the settlement at Mine à Breton, and the struggles Moses had with French squatters, Indians, Spanish officials, and American frontiersmen, suggested some of what Stephen was up against. But the Texas project was far more ambitious, involving many more people, vastly more land, and convoluted politics that made Spanish Louisiana look like a New England town meeting.
In theory the job of an empresario was straightforward. Within the boundaries assigned him by the government of Mexico, he allotted land to settlers. He then registered the allotments with the government, which conferred titles to the settlers. These made the land the settlers’ own, to improve, bequeath, sell, or otherwise dispose of.