Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
The two missions on the south brought a few of the grubbing Coahuiltecan bands together. But these Indians tended to stay so long as they were fed or offered gifts. When they were put to work, they either died out quickly or ran away.
The Karankawa mission, Espíritu Santo, actually persuaded a number of the fierce coastal tribe to gather about the fort. This attention, however, was rewarded by the now usual lethal infusion of epidemics. The Karankawas fled back into their coastal marshes, and killed any Spaniards who came after them. The Karankawas ever afterward avoided all contact with Europeans, but they had already received a fatal blow. European disease had been introduced, and, like the Caddoans, the Karankawa numbers were soon in rapid decline.
In east Texas, especially at Nacogdoches, across from Natchitoches (the French rendition of the same Hasinai name), tiny Spanish settlements did take hold around the forts. But these were based on Spanish, or Spanish-Mexican, settlers who emigrated to them and built small, struggling communities. Without an infusion of Hispanicized Indians, these could not grow large, and they were crippled by the Spanish intransigence toward any kind of legitimate trade with their French neighbors. This Spanish determination to direct all commerce in Texas back toward New Spain, hundreds of miles away across unsettled and savage territory, made any kind of economic growth around the presidio-missions impossible.
Had Spanish settlement in Texas been allowed to seek and make contact with its natural economic partner, Louisiana, history might have been somewhat different. But the Spanish wanted the best of all possible worlds: a purely Hispanic province of Texas, from which all profit accrued to their own Church and State.
The tiny mission of San Antonio de Valero, founded in the same year the French began New Orleans, developed differently from the failures all around it. San Antonio de Valero (named for the Viceroy) started with certain advantages. One was its location, the closest of all the Spanish missions to New Spain, only 150 miles away from border to border, though in real terms—settlement to settlement—this distance was doubled.
San Antonio lay at the headwaters of the San Antonio River, in a region that rose up out of the dusty, cactus-studded lower Sonoran plain like a green oasis. A Spanish friar described it eloquently as "the best site in the world, with good and abundant irrigation water, rich lands for pasture, plentiful building stone, and excellent timber." The area lay just below the Balcones Escarpment, which gave it several advantages; a mild, dry, healthful climate, with pleasant winters and unhumid, quite bearable summers, somewhat similar in fact to the climate of Spain; and it was the hunting ground or preserve of no powerful tribe of Indians. It was the more or less permanent territory of a Coahuiltecan band, but Coahuiltecans were no danger to Spanish friars.
With plenty of water, numerous groves of trees around the streams and springs, solid native limestone for building, and several miles of rolling, rich soil between the edge of the rocky Edwards Plateau on the north and the stretches of dry
brasada
to the south, the area at the headwaters of the San Antonio was a sheer delight to the Spaniards. They never intended San Antonio, with its admittedly sparse native population, to become the nucleus of their northernmost province, but it was no accident that this happened.
Although a Mass had been said in the area in 1692, the first permanent settlement began in 1718, when St. Denis and his bemused Spanish cohorts passed back through. A mission was established, to be a way station between New Spain and the East Texas missions that St. Denis inspired. The friars who founded San Antonio were Franciscans, but the mission itself did not begin there. The clergy, and the commission, had been moved around from several different sites in northern Mexico, called variously for St. Joseph and St. Francis, before the Marqués de Valero decided to dispatch them across the Bravo into Texas. In Mexico, the religious had picked up a considerable band of Coahuiltecans, of the same blood and language as the Texas tribe. These accompanied the mission to San Antonio de Valero. They gave the Franciscans an immediate advantage—they were already in business, with tame Indians, who could tell the others about the good things attending the Spanish-Indian way of life. The partly Hispanicized Coahuiltecans did bring some others into the new mission.
In the furor that followed St. Denis's arrest and escape from Mexico in 1721, Valero took action that strengthened his namesake mission. He incorporated the area around San Antonio into the province of Coahuila—thus removing it entirely from New Philippines, or Texas—and sent a force of 54 soldiers to build a strong fort, or presidio, nearby. With the soldiers also arrived a total of four Spaniards, who came north to stay, as settlers.
Nine men and a corporal were assigned to guard the mission, while the rest of the soldiery began, with no great enthusiasm, to erect a stone fort, a few miles away. They named it Fort San Antonio de Béjar (alternately Béxar), after the Duke de Béjar, a brother of the Marqués de Valero, killed fighting the Turks. (All Spanish names in the area were to include that of St. Anthony of Padua, because the first Mass said by Spaniards here was dedicated to this Italian.) As a matter of fact, during the next century this fort was never completed, though the friars, with much greater zeal and energy, put up a series of stone missions along the San Antonio River.
The San Antonio complex, mission and fort, continued to collect people from here and there. By 1726, there were two hundred men, women, and children in the area, not counting Indians. Those Indians who had come in from the alternately hot and cold drab Sonoran plain were progressing nicely, or so it seemed. They showed no great interest in steady work, and some of their free-and-easy sexual customs were distressing to the stern padres, but, as one said, Rome was not built in a day.
The Franciscans felt so optimistic—they alone of all the Texas missions were going to meet their ten-year deadline—that they petitioned the Viceroy and King Philip V to send settlers into the country, to found a true Spanish town to grow up contemporaneously with the adjoining fort and mission.
What occurred in San Antonio from 1718 onward is vital to the understanding of all Spanish-Mexican history in Texas. With the hindsight of history, it is easy to mark the mission concept of colonization as a failure; but what took place in the San Antonio region for the next century showed all the virtues, and all the inherent faults, of the entire Spanish colonial effort in North America.
By the 18th century, the Spanish religious orders in the New World had had long experience with the Spanish military establishment, and also a long period of trouble in the presidio-mission colonization of north Mexico. All the lessons of the East Texas fiasco of 1690–92 were not forgotten. When the Franciscans at San Antonio de Valero wrote the Viceroy requesting a Spanish garrison, they made it very clear they wanted a particular kind of soldier for the Texas mission frontier. He must be of the pure Spanish race (this should not be laid wholly to prejudice; the mixed bloods at this time had an anomalous social and legal position in the New World, and could not be expected to make the best soldiers); of irreproachable moral character, and married. Families should accompany the troops. The friars did not want more mixed bloods bred on the frontier, especially out of their Indian charges. They also specified they wanted no
lobos
or
coyotes
, nor any
mestizos
.
Settlers sent from Spain should also be of high character; otherwise, they would have a bad effect on the new Christians.
Of course, it was quite beyond the powers of the Marqués de Valero to find a garrison wholly composed of men of high moral character, in New Spain or anywhere else. All Mexican soldiery was now mercenary, usually having joined the ranks to escape some worse fate, such as hanging or hard work, and by this time the martial ardor of the gentlemen of Spain had largely cooled. The ranks of the viceregal army were filled with a combination of gutter-Spanish and "so-called Spaniards"—the Marqués de Rubí's bitter phrase for Mexicans who were certified as Spaniards. The infusion of Indian blood was very noticeable; and much worse, the discipline of Spain was considerably less than that of other European powers. The conquistadores had been an undisciplined lot, but they made up for it with fierceness, fanaticism, and a real taste for war. Walter Prescott Webb compared the blood of 18th-century Mexican soldiery to ditchwater, which may be going too far; but certainly, the cutting edge of Spanish fury that had accompanied Coronado was gone.
The record shows the Franciscans of San Antonio de Valero were much chagrined by the quality of the garrison they got. They informed the head of their order in Mexico that half of the soldiers arrived unmarried, and most of those who were had conveniently left their families behind. Furthermore, there were definitely "half-breeds, outlaws, and no-goods" among them.
The troops themselves were hardly enchanted. The padres refused to allow the mission Indians to perform services for the garrison; in fact, they banned all contact. Denied labor, the garrison never did get a presidio built—while the missions themselves put up impressive and enduring stone edifices—and when the Franciscans moved San Antonio across the river to give the Indian women more security, relations completely deteriorated.
Meanwhile, the Coahuiltecan Indians, who at first had been amenable and shown so much promise, became a great exasperation to the strong-willed, hard-working friars. The Coahuiltecans did not resist conversion, and while some ran away, most were willing to congregate. They were placed under the stern Spanish-Catholic moral code; the men were taught to hoe the fields, and the women practical handicrafts. The Franciscans were men of energy, and no little talent—but from their letters and reports, it is apparent that the Indians simply could develop no initiative, or any joy in their work. At all times, to get anything done, friars had to stand over them, and punishments for malfeasance or laziness were frequent. The Coahuiltecans could understand punishment, but they seemed unable to grasp the need, or rationale, for constant, disciplined labor. From time immemorial, the tribes had eaten well in fat years, starved in the lean. Ten years—or two hundred years—were too few to erase Coahuiltecan tribal memory or to bring them into agricultural civilization. The paternalism of the padres was also deadly—but this was second nature, both to the Church and Spanish nature, and no Franciscan recognized it as such.
The most alarming fact of all, however, was that the Coahuiltecans, once they were congregated into clean stone barracks at the missions, began to die. The death rate rose; the birth rate consistently fell. Disease had some bearing, but most probably this was the result of a terrible failure of morale. The Coahuiltecans were simply overwhelmed; their old way of life was being destroyed, and like many barbarians whose tribal structures and ethos are proven wanting in the face of superior power, they became apathetic. Mission life was miserable, with its incomprehensible moral strictures and eternal, backbreaking labor; if the Indian ran away, the soldiers would bring him back; if he ran too far, the Apaches would surely get him. Death was the only escape.
By the middle of the century a total of five separate missions had been built in the San Antonio area, and at this time each mission had more than two hundred Indians. But this was the high water mark. There was never any successful second generation of mission Indians. Strength could only be maintained by recruitment of new Coahuiltecans from the brush, and the supply, always meager, soon gave out. Though ten-year plan after ten-year plan failed to produce a responsible, responsive native population, the friars grimly held on, and they got their concessions renewed time after time through the free use of their immense influence with the Royal government.
The Spanish orders of the 18th century were probably the strongest and most vigorous element of their declining society, but even their determined refusal to accept reality was a symptom of a general Hispanic decline. While some of the best minds in Spain and New Spain investigated the Texas situation and reported that the missionary effort was failing, clerical influence continually prevailed, certainly for many decades after everyone knew all hope for success had gone.
Generations of missionary priests and friars came out, grew old and died, and were replaced. There is no question that most of them came to hate their charges with what they themselves recognized was unchristian lack of charity. They wrote letters and reports filled with distaste. The passive Coahuiltecans were described as "vile, cowardly, treacherous, and lazy." They could not be trained to defend themselves or to help hold off the wilder Indians above the Escarpment. Ironically, one Spanish missionary, Fray Morfi, who wrote a history of the period, came to look upon the terrible Comanches with much friendlier eyes. With perfect, though unconscious, logic, the Spanish conquerors felt a greater affinity for the powerful warrior tribes than for the poor skulkers who came begging to their missions.
The Spanish settlers requested by the Franciscans arrived in 1731. They were a group of ten families and five newly-marrieds, subsidized by the Crown and sent from the Canary Islands. There were fifty-six Spaniards in all. The origins of this group are obscure; apparently they were people who had been exiled to the Canary Islands from Spain, for political reasons. Life in these barren islands induced them to volunteer for the Texas frontier, at a time when almost no Spaniards could be persuaded to go. The King was pleased to grant their request; the government paid the entire costs of passage, and they were to be the vanguard of between two hundred and four hundred families in all.