by H. W. Brands
Between theory and practice, however, loomed a considerable gap. Before the land could be allotted, it had to be surveyed. In contrast to the situation in the United States, where (following the Land Ordinance of 1785) a rectangular grid existed, from which new surveys might be extended, in Texas there existed no such framework or template for surveying. And the scale in Texas was much larger than in the United States. Americans thought in terms of the quarter section—160 acres, or a quarter of a square mile—which in the well-watered country east of the Mississippi sufficed to support a family. In Texas the unit was the league—4,428 acres. This reflected Spanish and Mexican practice, which in turn reflected the scantier rainfall in those countries, as well as the fact that land ownership there wasn’t intended for the masses but was largely reserved to the gentry. It also reflected the fact that land was something Texas had lots of. A league, while huge by American standards of agriculture, was lost in the vastness of Texas.
The surveys were only the start of the empresario’s task. Austin had to make settlement easy and attractive. He had to provide facilities for landing those colonists who came by sea, for importing the goods they required, and for exporting the goods they produced. Settlers and their families expected to be able to purchase pots and pans and glass and nails and lead and powder and guns and knives and cloth and sugar and tea and coffee and books and musical instruments and the other items that distinguished civilized people, as Americans interpreted such things, from savages. They didn’t expect all of this at once, but they wanted to see progress in that direction. And to pay for what they purchased, they had to be able to sell what they produced. Every farmer was an entrepreneur; without access to markets, even Texas, bounteous Texas, wasn’t worth the gamble. This was so obvious that a novice like Austin knew it, which was why in his initial advertising for Texas he had emphasized the colony’s prospective port of entry and why he had sent his first colonists by boat.
Internally, too, the colony required markets, where farmers could buy and sell locally. The markets would be located at conveniently spaced towns, of which the most prominent could serve double duty as a headquarters for the colony. New arrivals needed a place where they could meet the empresario, register for their land, reprovision after the journey from the States, and receive advice from those who had gone before. All the colonists would want a place to gather, to find spouses for themselves and their children, to educate the young ones, to muster against Indian attack, to sue one another in court.
Austin had a personal reason as well for wanting to establish a headquarters, a capital for his colony. Far down the dim road along which he was groping, he could see the outlines of what would become his guiding vision. The Texas of his dreams was not a collection of isolated homesteads but a community of cooperating individuals and families. A college man, reasonably cultured and comparatively well read, Austin had no desire to live on the frontier any longer than necessary. He had come to Texas to pay the family’s debts, but Texas was evolving in his mind from a means into an end. And the Texas of that end would be filled with economically independent yet socially supportive individuals and families, centered about his capital.
“Since my return from Mexico I have been trying to induce the people to move nearer together on the Colorado,” Austin wrote in September 1823, regarding the initial town-building efforts Dewees described. “I could not effect this object.” So he crossed over to the Brazos, to the site that had favorably impressed him on his first visit to Texas. What came to be called San Felipe de Austin consisted, at the outset, of scores of empty town lots arranged in a grid on the high west bank of the Brazos. Just beyond the town were dozens of one-labor (177-acre) lots, each to be paired with a one-league tract located up or down the river. Austin envisioned that the arriving families would live on their smaller lots close to town, lending a sense of security and community to the settlement. The colonists, however, had other notions, preferring to reside on their leagues away from the town. As a result, San Felipe grew slowly, and Austin, who built himself two cabins there—one for living quarters, one for the colony’s land office—had little company at first.
Yet the colony as a whole grew rapidly during the last months of 1823 and all of 1824. The news of Texas was out, and immigrants streamed into Austin’s colony, eager to take up the offer of free land. The absolute number was still small—several hundred by the end of 1824—but in relative terms the growth was remarkable.
The rapid growth caused problems. San Felipe initially lacked the infrastructure of supply to reprovision the immigrants, and a drought during the summer of 1823 withered the first corn crop (which had been sown by the stone-age method of burning, slashing, and digging holes with sticks). The drought also drove away much of the game, leaving the immigrants additionally afflicted. They grew hungry, then famished. “There have been a great many new settlers come on this fall,” William Dewees wrote in a letter dated December 1, 1823, “and those who have not been accustomed to hunting in the woods for support are obliged to suffer. Were it not for a few of us boys who have no families, their wives and children would suffer much more than they now do; in fact I fear some of them would starve.”
Dewees accounted himself an able hunter, but even he often felt discouraged—which was nothing next to what those who relied on him felt.
Game is now so scarce that we often hunt all day for a deer or a turkey, and return at night empty handed. It would make your heart sick, to see the poor little half-naked children, who have eaten nothing during the day, watch for the return of the hunters at night. As soon as they catch the first glimpse of them, they eagerly run to meet them, and learn if they have been successful in their hunt. If the hunters return with a deer or a turkey, the children are almost wild with delight, while on the other hand, they suddenly stop in their course, their countenances fall, the deep bitter tears well up in their eyes and roll down their pale cheeks.
Hunger was the most pressing problem, and indeed it drove many of the emigrants back to the United States. But it wasn’t the most deadly problem. During its first few years the Austin colony encountered persistent violence from Indians. The Karankawas posed the principal danger. “They are an exceedingly fierce and warlike tribe, and also perfect cannibals,” Dewees observed. “They can shoot with their bows and arrows one hundred yards with as great accuracy as an American can with his rifle, and with an equally deadly aim.” Their rate of fire, moreover, was greater than that of the Americans with rifles. Dewees reported galloping along a riverbank almost an eighth of a mile from some Karankawas and barely escaping a hail of nearly a hundred arrows launched within a matter of seconds. (The arrows stuck in the bank, so he later had a chance to count them.)
The Karankawa attacks prompted the colonists to counterattack. One day a man named Brotherton staggered into a cluster of cabins with an arrow in his back and news that two other settlers had been killed and one wounded. “We immediately raised a force of fourteen men . . . ,” Dewees recounted, “and at midnight we arrived at the place where Brotherton had been wounded. We there dismounted, and five of us went to search out the encampment of the Indians.” Upon its discovery in a canebrake, the scouts reported back to the main body, which moved carefully forward. “As silently as possible, we crawled into a thicket about ten steps behind the camps, placing ourselves about four or five steps apart, in a sort of half-circle, and completely cutting off their retreat from the swamp.” Dewees and the others maintained their silent siege till dawn.
When the light was sufficient for us to see clear, we could not see anything of the Indians. We now commenced talking, in order to draw them from their wigwams; in this we succeeded. They rushed out as if greatly alarmed. We fired upon them and killed nine upon the spot. The rest attempted to escape, but having no way to run, except into the open prairie, we rushed upon them, and killed all but two, who had made their escape, though wounded, after the first fire. The number killed, nineteen.
It was indicative of
the kill-or-be-killed attitude of the colonists toward the Karankawas that no effort was made to single out those Indians responsible for the attack on the settlers. Dewees’s only reservation about the reprisal was that two of the Karankawas had escaped death. So swept up in the savagery of the moment was he that for “the only time in my life . . . I undertook to scalp an Indian.” Like all children of the trans-Appalachian frontier, Dewees had heard numerous stories of Indians scalping whites, including women and children. “Moved somewhat by a spirit of retaliation, I concluded I would take the scalp of an Indian home as a trophy from battle.” But after starting in on one of the dead Indians, his nerve failed, leaving him with no trophy but a gruesome mental image. “The skin of his head was so thick, and the sight so ghastly, that the very thought of it almost makes the blood curdle in my veins.”
Stephen Austin was more discriminating in dealing with the Indians, but hardly less decisive. Responsibility for Texas brought out the steel in Austin; whatever threatened his colony became a personal affront and challenge, and he responded accordingly. In December 1823, following a series of Karankawa attacks along the lower Colorado, Austin summoned “all the settlers able to bear arms” to join a militia against the Indians. The militiamen should elect a lieutenant, whom Austin deputized “to make war against the Karankawa Indians and to raise men within his command and attack or pursue any party of said Indians that may appear on the coast or on the river.”
The initial efforts of the militia failed, and the following summer Austin himself assumed the command. Leading a group of more than sixty armed men, he conducted a sweep down both sides of the Colorado. The militia met no Karankawas but did discover where they had been—and what they had been doing. “Found at this encampment the bones of two men which had been cut up and boiled,” Austin noted in his campaign diary for September 5. “Buried them, and called the creek Cannibal Creek.” Evidently the news of the militia traveled faster than the militia itself, for Austin and the settler-soldiers traveled all the way to La Bahía before overtaking any Karankawas. The Indians had sought refuge at the mission there, and the missionaries and town fathers urged Austin to honor the sanctuary. He agreed after the Karankawas promised to keep west of the San Antonio River for a year. As he explained to the Bahíans, “It is not our wish to deprive the Indians of their hunting or fishing grounds”; the settlers’ only goal was “to guarantee a secure and permanent peace.” The year of the agreement would allow relations between settlers and Indians to heal. “I sincerely hope with all my heart that before that period, confidence will be mutually established between us and the Indians so that we may mix with each other without suspicion on either part.”
Austin was dissimulating here. He knew perfectly well that his colony intruded on the Karankawas’ hunting grounds. And the subtext of his statement—doubtless appreciated by both the Indians and the settlers—was that in a year the settlers’ position would be substantially stronger than at present, and the Indians’ commensurately weaker. Time was on the settlers’ side, and the Karankawas couldn’t do much about it.
Other tribes fared little better at Austin’s hands. After a group of Tonkawas stole some horses and extorted corn and other provisions from colonists on the Brazos, Austin mounted a punitive raid. “To prevent such outrages hereafter, and to recover the stolen horses,” he reported to Governor Luciano García, “I resolved to march against them, which I did. I surprised their camp . . . and compelled the captain to deliver to me all the stolen animals, and to inflict with his own hands in my presence a severe lashing of the marauders. I ordered them also to leave this river and the Colorado at once, with a warning that if they again attempted to steal cattle, or to molest the settlers on these rivers, I would not be satisfied with lashes only, but would cause the delinquents to be shot.” Not to the Indians but to the governor, Austin confided that this last recourse was “an extremity to which I do not wish to be compelled to resort.”
But if he was so compelled, better later than sooner. Some Indians couldn’t be intimidated, at least not yet. These included a band of Wacos who lived along the upper Brazos and were allied with the Comanches. Like the Comanches—and unlike the Karankawas—they had no desire to drive the colonists out of Texas, for they saw the settlers as a convenient source of horses, which they regularly stole, and trade goods. The Wacos’ numbers and their allies prevented Austin from retaliating, but not from calculating that he someday might. “We must be vigilant,” he told an associate. “I wish if possible to avoid an open rupture with them for six months longer at least. By that time we shall have more strength. . . . If they commit any more depredations, the only alternative will be an expedition to destroy their village, but this I wish to avoid until next year if possible.”
Time might have been on Austin’s side in dealing with the Indians, but it wasn’t his ally with the Mexican government. This was no reflection on Austin, who employed every opportunity to demonstrate his devotion to Mexico. “I expect to spend my life in this nation,” he wrote to Lucas Alamán, the Mexican minister of exterior and interior relations, at the beginning of 1824.
Austin took his obligations as a Mexican citizen quite seriously. In the wake of Iturbide’s abdication, Mexican thinkers and political figures pondered a new frame of government for their country; Austin contributed to the discussion by drafting a plan specifying a federal structure. Iturbide’s rule had cured most Mexicans of their nostalgia for empire; with his downfall and departure, republicanism carried the day. But differences developed between advocates of a strong central government and proponents of distributed federalism. Austin backed the federalists. Noting the example of the United States, whose “happy experience of many years” demonstrated the advantages of a federal system, he sent his draft to Miguel Ramos Arizpe, the leading light among Mexican federalists. Austin later remarked that his plan “had much influence in giving unity of intention and direction to the Federal party.” Here he was too generous to himself—he was by no means the only one in Mexico who had studied the American constitution—but for a newcomer striving to make Mexico home, his heart was in the right place. And when Mexico adopted a new, federal constitution in 1824, he had reason to feel he had contributed to a change for the better.
Austin had reasons beyond those of the other federalists to welcome the triumph of their cause. As a son of the American South, he found it easy to assume that states’ rights constituted the bedrock of any reliable republicanism. And the same considerations that recommended a distributed form of government for the United States—starting with regional differences but especially including long distances and slowness of communication—applied even more to Mexico. Austin had spent months on the road to and from Mexico City, which alone argued for as much regional autonomy as possible.
Austin also had reasons more specific to Texas for his federalist sentiments. The closer authority resided to Texas, the easier it would be for him to manage his colony. During his eighteen months away, the colony had nearly collapsed. Uncertainty surrounding land titles, combined with the Indian troubles and the failure of rain, had sorely tested the hopes the colonists carried to Texas. “On my arrival in the colony, which I had commenced nearly two years before,” Austin reported to Alamán, “I found that most of the emigrants, discouraged by my long absence and the uncertainty in which they had been for such a length of time, had returned to the United States, and that the few who remained, hard-pressed and harassed on every side by hostile Indians, and threatened with the horrors of famine in consequence of the drought, were on the eve of breaking up and leaving the province.” Another such absence—which, under a centralized form of government, might be required for even minor matters—could spell the ruin of the Texas project.
Austin daily encountered the difficulties of managing a colony so far from the seat of government. His charter directed him to administer justice and preserve order in his colony, pending the establishment of institutions more permanent. This was no small charg
e, he explained to Alamán. “The situation I am placed in near the frontiers of two nations, and surrounded on every side by hostile Indians and exposed to their attacks and to the no less vexatious pilfering and robbing of those tribes who profess friendship but steal whenever an occasion presents, renders my task peculiarly laborious and difficult and requires a most severe and efficient police to keep out and punish fugitives and vagabonds from both nations.” Catching the miscreants was hard enough; punishing them was almost impossible. Current regulations required that those convicted be sentenced to hard labor on public projects, but there were neither public projects in the colony nor the personnel to supervise the labor. “We are from 40 to 50 leagues from Bexar, and have no jail, no troops to guard prisoners. . . . A condemnation to hard labor without an adequate guard to enforce the decree is only to exasperate a criminal, make him laugh at the laws and civil authorities, and turn him loose on society to commit new depredations. . . . Nothing has a more disorganizing effect than a weak and inefficient administration of the laws, as it discourages and disgusts the good and well disposed, and emboldens evil men and renders them arrogant and audacious.” The solution Austin recommended to Alamán was enhanced local authority: permission to administer corporal punishment upon the settlers and to banish intruders. “I think it would greatly tend to the harmony and good order of this part of the Province.”
In fact Austin already was imposing stripes on evildoers; he simply wanted official sanction for his policy. Yet he realized that punishment was a poor substitute for prevention of crime in the first place. And prevention started with keeping criminal types out of the colony. Austin instructed Josiah Bell, a friend from Missouri whom he named the colony’s first justice of the peace, on what to look for in applicants for admission—and what to do when the applicants fell short. “The most unequivocal evidence of character must be produced in the first place, and those who come without any recommendation and who are unknown in this country must be informed that I gave Garner ten lashes for coming here without proper recommendations, and that unless they immediately depart and quit the country, they will be punished.” Whatever the principles of republicanism or the common law might dictate elsewhere, Austin refused to assume innocence pending proof of guilt. An unsavory reputation sufficed to provoke punishment. “Should a man of notorious bad character come in, I hereby fully authorize you to whip him not exceeding fifty lashes, and seize sufficient of his property to pay a guard to conduct him beyond the Trinity River.” Austin assumed that the word would get out. “One example of this kind is wanting badly, and after that we shall not be troubled more.” In a sentence that summarized his policy on immigration, as well as the attitude he was developing toward those who did get in, he stressed: “Let us have no black sheep in our flock.”