Lone Star (15 page)

Meanwhile, Spain was employing a new, and temporarily very effective, weapon in the north. Frenchmen from Louisiana, now under Spanish control and citizenship, were used to win friends and influence tribes on the far-northern frontier. The principal architect of this plan, originally conceived by Rubí, was Athanase de Mezières, who significantly enough was a son-in-law of Louis de St. Denis, as well as a brother-in-law of the Duc d'Orleans. In 1769, he had been appointed lieutenant governor of the Natchitoches district. He had lived on the Louisiana frontier for some thirty years.

De Mezières traveled to north Texas, and with all the French genius for blending with the land and reaching rapport with the savages, by 1771 he had buried the hatchet with the Wichitas, former allies of the Comanches, by making separate agreements with each Wichita subtribe: Taovayas, Wacos, and Tawakonis. In 1772, he recovered Parilla's lost cannon and sent them on to Bucareli. He voyaged up the dangerous Brazos more than a hundred miles, skirted the regions of the Red, and finally came to Béxar. He was even able to secure a fleeting peace with one Comanche band, in 1774. He worked closely with Ripperdá, and for a time it seemed that the Marqués de Rubí's master plan for a two-front war against the Lipans was taking shape.

De Mezières enthusiastically supported the concept. His reports on Texas Indians north of the San Antonio region revealed that these fell into three broad groups: the maritime (coastal) tribes; the eastern inland nations; and the frontier, or northern bands. De Mezières stated that the coastal tribes, such as Coahuiltecans and Karankawas and Atakapans, were useless to Spain and should be ignored. Of the Eastern, inland tribes—the Caddo confederacies—two had been virtually wiped out by disease and vice, and the remaining, which he called the Tejas, were on friendly terms, but not much use for war. The third group, the frontier Indians that included the Tonkawa and Wichita tribes and the Comanches, were all warlike and dangerous to the Apaches. Of these, only the Comanches were hostile to Spain, and he was working on this problem.

The Spanish authorities were much impressed by this Frenchman, who was the best European frontiersman in Texas since St. Denis. He was permanently transferred to Texas, and appointed governor to succeed the Baron de Ripperdá. This was an enormous concession by the jealous
hidalgos
of Spain, who rarely permitted even highborn Spanish colonials to hold office. Unfortunately for Spain, however, he died before he could take office. His great work, which might have created an enduring alliance between the Spanish-Mexican civilization and the Plains tribes against all comers, was never completed.

Teodoro de Croix, councils completed, now drew up his plan of campaign. All the Spanish troops that could be scraped up from the frontier, including settlers and militia from New Mexico and the northern settlements of New Spain, were to advance on Apachería from the west and south. All the presidial soldiers in Texas, and the allied northern tribes (including, it was hoped, Comanches) making up the strongest contingent, were to attack from the north. The Apaches were to be swept up and pressed into a trap along the Rio Bravo. Three thousand troops in all were to be used.

De Croix did not believe that such a campaign would actually exterminate the Apaches, but he did think it would "secure the happiness of the province." At the very least, it would further reduce the Lipans, damage their spirit, and teach respect for the power of Spain. He ordered that the war must come to the enemy as a surprise, and to achieve this, both the Commandant-General and the governing councils agreed that sincere-sounding protestations of peace and friendship be sent immediately to the Apaches to throw them off guard.

De Croix stated that once the Apaches were reduced, he had hopes of straightening out the embarrassingly bowed frontier. In the future, it would run directly from Louisiana along the Red River on a line with Santa Fé. At one swoop, he would secure a country larger than the size of Old Spain. The new frontier along the Red would still be a "frontier of war," but Hispanic settlement could pour freely into the vacuum, and Béxar and all northern Mexico would be relieved of Indian wars.

The grand plan of Apache extermination was never carried out. The reasons were several: the alliances with the northern tribes were never cemented; there were bureaucratic delays; and most important, De Croix could never find the men and money for operations of the magnitude required. A few minor military expeditions were mounted, sometimes with Indian allies, and a few peace treaties were made with various Comanche bands. Both produced ephemeral results.

Significantly, in the year 1780, Domingo Cabello, who took Ripperdá's post as Governor of Texas, wrote the Viceroy: "There is no instant by day or by night when reports of barbarities and disorders from the ranches do not arrive. Totally unprotected as we are, this can only result in the complete destruction and loss of this province."

The frontier communities could survive, clinging to a stultified Spanish-Mexican ranching culture at Béxar and at Santa Fé. They could not grow or flourish. Meanwhile, their simple maintenance cost the Crown millions of gold
escudos
and returned nothing. Hoping to ease the military threat, the authorities now tried a policy Spain had never resorted to before, that of giving presents to the Indians to buy peace. Trade goods and gimmicks were distributed to Apache and Comanche chiefs, but the raids did not cease. Actually, Indian social organization was such that this practice could not succeed. No chief had that kind of control over the warriors, who raided when they either needed horses or felt like it. In 1792, a new Governor, Manuel Muñoz, reported that peace treaties and lavish gifts were having no beneficial results at all.

The presidio at Béxar was materially strengthened, however. At one time, as many as eight companies of troops were dispatched from New Spain. These were supposed to form powerful, mobile units capable of pursuing and defeating Apache and Comanche raiders. One detachment of Spanish troops was sent from a post in northern Mexico, which was called Pueblo de San Carlos del Alamo de Parras or, in the Spanish fashion, Alamo for short.

The commander was horrified to find that over all the years, no one had ever gotten around to building a genuine presidio at Béxar. Soldiers had always merely been billeted in the villa. This officer appropriated the old mission of San Antonio de Valero, just east of the San Antonio River from the town proper, which had just been secularized. The few Coahuiltecan squatters who were still clinging to the grounds were driven off by force.

Here, as in a few other places surrounding Béxar, the Franciscans had erected a strong compound and chapel out of native stone. The walls had fallen into disrepair, but were easily put right. The living quarters of the mission were turned into a barracks, and the chapel into an armory. This new presidio was called the Alamo by the soldiers, in nostalgic recollection of the post in Mexico where they had served. In this way, the generations-old work of the missionary friars passed into the hands of the military, and even the name of San Antonio de Valero was forgotten.

The outbreak of a general European war in 1793 brought further interest in development by the Spanish Crown to an end. A century of Spanish colonization had resulted in a population of about 4,000 citizens, of which 1,000 were soldiers, in an area larger than Spain itself.

The historian Richardson wrote that Spain suffered most "because of a lack of realism in her policies"—the presidio-mission was doggedly retained, although it soon proved useless in Texas; trade was never permitted with Louisiana, Texas's natural commercial partner; firearms were never sold to friendly Indians, thus making them allies not of Spain but of the French; and to the last the fiction was maintained that poorly paid officers commanding isolated posts would be both vigorous and honest. Another Texas historian, Walter Prescott Webb, laid most of the problem to the savage and incorrigible Indians, which Spain, for the first time in its history, could not conquer, convert, or destroy.

Rigid adherence to outmoded ideas—always the mark of a society in decline—certainly played a major role in Spanish failure. In Texas Spain met new and different conditions, and the Spanish secular and ecclesiastical mind was never able to adjust.

The Texas tribes could not be tamed or Hispanicized; they could not be used to populate the land. Only an expanding, pragmatic, decentralized, adaptable culture could have penetrated the region and put down roots in the face of the Apache-Comanche threat. And this was precisely what Spain lacked. Spain failed to put people in Texas. Gil Ybarbo's five hundred, acting on their own initiative, showed what several thousand Spanish peasants, had they moved into the fertile forest areas, might have done.

The violent
entradas
and explorations, the friars, the council-calling civil servants, and generations of presidio soldiers left only romantic legends and a dotting of Spanish place names. A few attractive structures of native stone survived around Béxar, for the Franciscans did build for the ages. But the quiet, gentle beauty of these crumbling mission walls remained the principal monument to the dreams of Spain.

Ironically, while millions of
pesos duros
were spent keeping soldiers and missionaries in Texas, a separate Hispanic advance occurring at the same time was to have vastly more influence on North America.

The 18th-century Spanish-Mexican frontier, as the Marqués de Rubí saw, still lay far south of the Rio Grande. But along this frontier, a genuine Mexican civilization, differentiated in many ways from the Spanish, was beginning to take shape and expand. A way of life, and a value system, were evolving that would eventually reach as far north as Calgary in Canada.

The dry, mountainous, thinly populated regions of northern New Spain had never been suited for the hoe or for the
encomienda
. Here the Spanish met conditions similar to those they would find further north. Before the close of the 17th century, the
encomienda
had become valueless, and after this colonial system was officially abolished in 1720, the frontier was pushed north in other ways. The presidio and mission played a big role, and a more successful one, in New Spain than they did in Texas. But even here they could not adequately populate or hold the land. Conquered and converted Indians were not declared free subjects of Spain until almost the close of the 18th century, but there was already a large class of Mexican peasants or laborers who were not slaves but were bound to the hacienda system. Their status—peonage, or debt slavery—was eventually codified into Mexican law, probably inevitably, because of the class, caste, and paternalistic trends of Hispanic society. No worker or servant could leave a master to whom he was in debt, and most Mexicans of the lower class were almost literally born into debt.

The
hacienda
, or agricultural estate, was strong in Yucatán and on the south-central plateaus, but in the rougher and less fertile regions to the north it soon gave way to the
estancia de ganado
, or
rancho
(which always denoted a relatively small estate) devoted to cattle raising. The first Spanish cattle were brought to Mexico in 1521; Cortés and the importer Gregorio de Villalobos were responsible for the first acts leading to a new way of life.

The great conquistador was the first man to use brands—not on his livestock but on his Aztec slaves. Captive Indians were branded with the letter "G" (for
guerra
, signifying prisoner of war) on their cheeks with a hot iron, and thus marked as personal property. Many of these men were put to herding their masters' cattle, and the transfer of the personal identifying mark, or brand, from man to beast came about soon afterward. The brand, in New Spain, took on both legal and symbolic connotations. It became sacred.

Spanish law at first expressly forbade any Indian slave to ride a horse. But this rule was obviously unworkable, especially as cattle ranches pushed north into arid, open country. On the broad semideserts of the Sonoran Plain, and in the mountains, a man on foot was helpless, herding cows. As the Indians became more Hispanicized, they were mounted, and the emerging Mexican became a horseman.

Spanish-Mexican cattle were lean, rangy, longhorned, ugly, and incredibly tough. Like the Afro-Arabian horse, however, they were splendidly suited for the country. Left to roam wild, they flourished and increased. With such stock, and possessed of almost unlimited grazing land, the Mexican cattle industry became entirely different from animal husbandry in Europe. Cattle were branded for identification, turned loose on what was virtually open range (though it was owned by someone, usually a large
hacendado
), and they were protected from wild Indians, rounded up, and branded or slaughtered by a new breed of laborer, the
vaquero
, "cowman." Such cattle were not much good for beef, but in a very poor frontier society, such as was developing in the north, they could be raised profitably for hides.

Open spaces, a rough frontier where there were still dangerous Indians, both from the north and the mountains to the west, and labor performed almost entirely on horseback began to create those attitudes and values known in New Spain as
charro
. The
charro
was not just a horseman or a cowboy; he represented a genuine, if somewhat limited culture and way of life. The new breed was subtly different from the cowed and captive hoe-men of the old Aztec empire. The
vaquero
might still be legally and socially a peon—but he rode horseback, and this changed his outlook. There was an old saying: to be a
vaquero
was to be a hero; to be a
ranchero
was to be a king.