The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation (4 page)

The men who followed the priests, almost without exception, came for the land.

B
Y THE MID
-1600
S
, the Spanish claimed all the territory from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico and more beyond—from California to the Florida peninsula. (France, Spain’s chief rival in North America, claimed Louisiana, the Mississippi Valley, and Canada.) Since Cortés had conquered the Aztec empire in 1521, Mexico City had become the center of Spain’s empire in the New World. The wealth of the Aztecs, and that of the Incas of Peru, had funded Spanish wars and further voyages of exploration. But after two major expeditions in the mid-1500s—Coronado’s epic trek across much of the American Southwest, and Hernando de Soto’s journey through the Southeast, neither of them finding the fabled cities of gold or any wealth at all—Spain abandoned any further exploration into the far northern frontier of its colonies.

In 1690, the church-controlled Spanish authorities decided to establish missions near the Rio Grande to Christianize the natives there, not just for altruistic reasons but also for political reasons, to help guard New Spain’s borders. Nacogdoches, in the far eastern reaches, was established in 1716, then a few others in the area followed, each with a presidio to house a company of soldiers. Two years later, in 1718, came the mission of San Antonio de Valero, situated in a picturesque valley watered by a small river. Other missions and presidios followed.

By the early 1800s, after the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the subsequent political maneuvering, much of the region’s ownership had changed hands—sometimes more than once. The British had claimed much of the Floridas over the previous century, and in 1763 Spain ceded that province to them in exchange for Cuba. Twenty years later, England returned Florida to Spain, which had also added Louisiana to its empire a year earlier. Despite its extensive holdings in the New World, there remained only a few Spanish settlements east of the Mississippi.

Three years after Spain returned Louisiana to France in 1800, a cash-strapped Napoleon sold Louisiana to the fledgling United States, doubling that young nation’s territory. Though the phrase “manifest destiny” would not be coined until 1845, its doctrine of God-approved expansion across the continent had already taken hold. The Louisiana Purchase, it seemed, had only whetted the young republic’s appetite. President Thomas Jefferson claimed Texas as part of the deal, and in 1806 sent troops to explore the limits of lower Louisiana much as he had sent Lewis and Clark to follow the Missouri west to the Pacific two years earlier. (The prescient Jefferson was convinced of the region’s value: fourteen years later, he would write to President James Monroe, “The province of Techas will be the richest state of our Union, without any exception.”) Spanish troops were sent to block them, and the two columns met in east Texas; war was averted when the opposing army commanders wisely agreed to a twenty-mile-wide Neutral Ground between Louisiana and Texas, which was allowed to stand by their respective governments. The dispute was finally solved in 1819, when Spain ceded the Neutral Ground to the United States for $5 million and the American renunciation of any claims on Texas they might have held from the Louisiana Purchase.

But it would not be long before the United States made overtures to Spain about the availability of Texas. Though no deal was struck, Spain was now fully alerted to the intentions of its hungry neighbor to the north. Texas was emerging as an increasingly important buffer zone, both against rapacious European powers and the intransigent aboriginals who fiercely resisted encroachment on their homelands. The Spanish government countered with attempts to bring Mexican settlers into the area to populate the territory and tame the wilderness—but found few takers.

Then, in December 1820, a risk-taking fifty-eight-year-old American named Moses Austin arrived in sleepy Béxar, the capital of the province, with a plan of colonization: he would bring three hundred American families to Texas to do what New Spain could not.

Austin had some experience with this. Two decades earlier, he had, with the permission of the Spanish authorities, established a lead-mining operation and colony in northern Louisiana; the venture was successful, and made Austin a rich man. But the War of 1812 had drained his manpower and forced him to substitute slave power; he spent too much money feeding and housing them, driving him into deep debt and reducing his fortune to nothing. When his business failed in March 1820, he was jailed for nonpayment of debts and his lead works auctioned for a fraction of their worth. He was released from prison to find himself virtually penniless. A lesser man would have fallen into the poorhouse and obscurity, but the resilient Austin had already come up with another colonization scheme, again in a Spanish territory.

He thought his plan would be irresistible to Spanish authorities eager for industrious settlers in their far northern province. Austin would publicize the opportunity and procure the immigrants, taking care to accept only those who could prove their responsibility and good citizenship. He knew the Panic of 1819 had resulted in many Americans losing their land, and many more unable to afford the land they wanted and needed. In a predominantly agrarian society, land was as necessary to liberty—true liberty, meaning the freedom to work for oneself—as anything on a piece of paper.

Austin would handle all sales of land. Settlers would swear to become dutiful citizens of New Spain, their fealty to include the practice—or at least the outward assumption—of Catholicism, Mexico’s national religion. For a nominal fee, which would cover Austin’s administrative costs—about a tenth of the price of government land in the United States—they would receive full and legal title to generous territorial grants, and exemption from taxes and import tariffs for seven years. In return, New Spain’s new citizens would develop the country through the cultivation of sugar, corn, and cotton, and strengthen Spanish claims of possession; Americans were already crossing the Sabine River into the eastern portion of Texas, but these colonists would enter on Mexican terms, and swear allegiance to New Spain. For his part, Austin would be compensated by large land grants, which he could then sell for profit—if he was successful.

Similar colonization plans had been proposed before: in 1813, royal permission had been granted to an American named Richard Raynal Keene to import settlers into the province, but political upheavals had waylaid that enterprise. Now the Mexican governor, wary of anything American, refused to listen to Austin’s proposal and ordered him to leave immediately. That same afternoon, disappointed and resigned to defeat, he prepared to depart on the long trek home. But as he walked across the main plaza of Béxar, he ran into a slight acquaintance—a Dutchman he had met twenty-three years previously in a Tennessee tavern when he was canvassing for Louisiana colonists. The man was now calling himself Baron de Bastrop for added prestige, and serving as second
alcalde
of Béxar. Austin told him his story, and persuaded Bastrop of the viability of his own colonization plans. The “baron”—like Austin, an opportunist—was cash-strapped at the moment, but he saw a chance to make some money by aiding Austin. He was not without influence with the authorities, and he agreed to intercede. He obtained another audience with the governor, and a few days later he and Austin explained the proposal, no doubt emphasizing its advantages to New Spain. This time, the governor approved, and forwarded the petition to the proper authorities.

A jubilant Austin returned home to Missouri, confident his plan would be approved. Many months on the road had worn him thin, though, and the cold, wet journey across the desolate territory of east Texas induced pneumonia. By the time he reached home he was in bad shape. He never fully recovered. Five days after his reunion with his family, he received word that his petition had been approved. He threw himself into preparations for his return to Texas, eating and sleeping little. He died a few months later. His wife later wrote that before his last breath, he gasped out his dying wish: that his son Stephen would “prosecute the enterprise he had commenced.”

Stephen Fuller Austin was not by nature the risk taker his father was. But he was endowed with a unique combination of qualities essential to his new position of immigration agent/administrator—
empresario
—of a country within a country. He possessed intelligence, integrity, levelheadedness, and tact, and his frail physique belied a quiet determination that would be necessary for the many trials ahead. He had just finished a legal education when he was informed of his father’s death—and of his final request. Moses Austin had been imploring Stephen to join in the enterprise, and he had been considering it. Now, with the approval and the financial backing of his legal mentor, he accepted his new fate and headed west—only to find that Mexico had recently won its independence, making his father’s deal null and void and requiring Austin to travel to Mexico City, where he spent eleven months, until he finally won the new government’s approval. By 1825, despite several obstacles—among them a failed crop, repeated Indian attacks, and a cargo ship that ran aground, destroying all the supplies on board—Austin settled the three hundred families he had promised under contract to bring to Texas (297, actually). After enduring more than its share of growing pains, his colony began to thrive.

A new law enacted that year permitted individual Mexican states to form their own colonization policies, and some two dozen other
empresarios
—all but a few of them Anglos—soon followed Austin’s lead, receiving extensive land grants covering almost the entire territory. None of them was as successful as Austin, but over the next decade they brought in thousands of colonists. Thousands of others streamed into Texas without permission, and many of them—in a time-honored American tradition reaching back two hundred years—set down stakes wherever they found unoccupied land. By 1835, Texas claimed some thirty-five thousand residents, all but a few thousand of them Americans, most from the southern states of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri. Not all shared the high moral character of Austin’s original Old Three Hundred, as they came to be known. Some were fugitives from the law, or from family or creditors. Others moved to Texas intent on shady pursuits, such as smuggling or speculating in land or slavery.

They all found a land abundant in the things that mattered to an agrarian society. Though there was no river approaching the size of the Mississippi, a half dozen or so waterways, rather evenly spaced and somewhat navigable, coursed through most of the central, eastern, and southern parts of the province and drained into the Gulf of Mexico. Rolling prairies ideal for grazing or farming made up much of the terrain, and the climate was healthy and the temperatures moderate. “It’s fine rich land, high and healthy and free from mosquitoes and in short it is the richest, most beautiful country I ever beheld, fine lumber for every purpose and plenty of it,” wrote one colonist to his wife back in the United States. Another settler with fewer specifics but more poetry declared to a friend back east: “Every poor man in your country that fails to come to Texas and inherit the goodly country does not only stand in his own light he does injustis to his posterity hear is the land that flows with milk and honey come all of you and posses it.”

And possess it they did. By the mid-1830s, there were more than a dozen settlements stretching from the Sabine River on the east to Béxar, three hundred miles to the west, all in the southern half of the province and all but three of them Anglo in origin. Most structures were crude wooden houses, with just a few mercantile establishments. But surrounding them in every direction were thousands of farmers and their families, industriously working their land and slowly building new and better lives for themselves. As word of the rich new land spread via letters and advertisements and returning travelers, immigration rose sharply.

It was not all milk and honey. The land itself could be unforgiving; a drought leading to a bad crop, or a dangerous “norther” (a sudden drop in temperature accompanied by a frigid winter wind that would come slicing down from the north), could spell the difference between meager prosperity and bare survival—or even death. “A vast howling Wilderness of wild things, wild cattle wild Horses wild Beasts and Birds, and wild Men savages hostile in the extreme,” was the way one early immigrant described Texas.

Wild horses, beasts, and birds could be advantageous to a frontiersman, but “wild Men savages” often spelled trouble. Some of the tens of thousands of Indians in Texas in the 1820s—the Wacos, the Tawakonis, and others—had grudgingly accepted the presence of the white invaders. But others resisted fiercely. Neither the cannibalistic Karankawas along the coast, nor the Apaches in the far west around Béxar and south of there, could boast sufficient numbers to mount large-scale attacks. But a much more populous tribe to the north posed a far more serious threat: the Comanches, the People of the Horse.

Like many other Great Plains peoples, the Comanches took to the horse and gun—both introduced by Europeans—with relish. Before these innovations, the short, stocky Comanches, an offshoot of the Shoshone tribe, were a semisedentary population of hunters on the edge of the Rocky Mountains. By the early nineteenth century, they had become the finest horsemen on the continent, roaming the southern plains as far as the Rio Grande and beyond in search of the great herds of buffalo, their staff of life—and in search of more horses, as well as captive women and children to replenish their numbers. They had driven the less populous Apaches out of the south Texas area and terrorized the Spanish inhabitants for a century. For the most part, they remained north of El Camino Real, the “Royal Road” of the Spanish empire that belied its name: a simple cart path that arced from the Rio Grande through Béxar all the way to Nacogdoches in east Texas and beyond.

If the Comanches had been better organized and their resistance better planned, colonization in Texas would have been impossible against ten thousand motivated horse soldiers. One measure of the Comanches’ ferocity could be found in their elite warrior society, the Lobos (Wolves), who were not allowed to retreat from the scene of a battle, not even when they were vastly outnumbered—each brave had pledged to die rather than surrender his ground, even if the other warriors were in full retreat. But the Comanches possessed no form of government, roaming the country in nomadic bands that had little contact with each other. The immigrants, on the other hand, as their own numbers increased, turned to collective action for strength. Some organized militias to defend themselves against the Indians. More often, “ranging companies”—the precursors of the Texas Rangers—would venture far from home in search of Indians. These sweeps proved effective, and some smaller bands and tribes negotiated truces or gave the Anglo settlements a wide berth. The Comanches continued their raids on outlying or vulnerable farms or settlements, though some would trade with white men for goods they needed.