Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
The Lipan Apaches had been meek enough in Béxar, but now, in their own country, they put the Spanish off. They stated they could not congregate just yet; it was the hunting season. Later, it was something else. The priests persisted, and hopefully, kept the mission open. The Indians seemed to be waiting for something, and the Spanish, with very limited intelligence of what was actually happening on the far frontier, decided to be patient.
In retrospect, what was happening was very clear. The Apaches, mauled by Spanish power on the south and shredded by a terrible force from the north, with keen intelligence hoped to get both their enemies involved. They had lured a presidio-mission not just into Apachería but beyond the vague borders of Comanche country. They were eagerly waiting to see what the Comanches would do about it.
A few months after the San Sabá mission was established, a friendly Indian brought word of a terrible calamity that was going to befall. Worried, the Spanish alerted their entire frontier—but when nothing happened during the summer and fall, they relaxed. Winter passed, the grass sprang out green and lush across the plains to the north, and early in March 1758, the moon waxed huge and full. Both priests and soldiers were delighted with the ephemeral beauty of the land. Neither knew Comanches—or that when the grass was full and thick, and the moon threw light to ride by, Comanche warriors could range a thousand miles.
Then, something happened. Every uncooperative Lipan Apache suddenly disappeared. No one saw an Indian—but one morning, there were shrieks and shouts, and a rush of horsemen swooped down on the Spanish horse pasture, between the mission and the fort. Sixty horses disappeared. Colonel Parilla put all his men on the walls, and he sent a messenger requesting the padres to move at once to the presidio. The padres refused. Parilla waited a few days—but nothing happened. He went personally to the mission and argued with Padre Terreros, the priest in charge, to seek safety, and to bring all the sacred articles in the mission with him.
Terreros halfheartedly agreed to move the following day; he told Parilla it was incredible that any unseen Indians would wish the padres harm. Parilla left seventeen soldiers with the priests, and departed.
Early next morning, March 16, Padre Terreros conducted the usual Mass; he was determined that the orderly routine not be disturbed. But before the Host was lifted, there was a booming yell outside the palisade.
The soldiers ran to the walls and cocked their muskets. Padre Terreros and another priest, Padre Molina, climbed to the parapet. What they saw made them speechless. Two thousand Comanches, all on horseback, were deploying slowly around the mission walls. Molina was frightened, and now said so. But his superior stammered that these men must be friendly—the priests had done no one any harm.
The soldiers waited to fire, but Terreros refused to give the order. He seemed hypnotized by the barbaric splendor of the savages, who were painted black and red—war paint, though the Spanish did not recognize it—and wore impressive headgear of buffalo horns, deer antlers, and eagle plumes. All were armed with lances and bows, and at least a hundred carried French-made muskets.
A Comanche warrior boldly walked up to the palisade gate and opened it, while Padre Terreros hesitated. After that, it was too late—the Indians poured inside the compound. Terreros and the other priests began to bring out gifts of tobacco and beads with shaking hands.
In the sign language, the Comanches now demanded that Terreros send a message to the presidio, that it be opened to them, too. A quaking friendly Indian translated, and a message was written out by Terreros for Colonel Parilla. A large party of Comanches took the message and rode off.
But meanwhile, another mission Indian had seen the Comanches arrive and had fled to tell Parilla. The colonel immediately ordered a detachment of troops to reinforce the mission. These men mounted and rode off. They rode directly into the party of Comanches coming from the mission with Terreros's message. The Comanches charged; the Spanish never had a chance. In a few seconds every soldier was shot or lanced. Only one, badly wounded, was able to crawl away.
At the mission, the Indians had thrown off all restraint. They no longer waited for gifts to be offered, but began to sack and wreck the Spanish storerooms. The Europeans gathered in a little knot in the middle of the enclosure.
When the party that had killed the soldiers returned suddenly, yelling and waving fresh scalps, the killing began. Before they could even fire, the Spanish soldiers were shot down or filled with arrows. One priest was stabbed, and his head cut off. Two Comanches seized Terreros and started to carry him off, probably for torture. Fortunately for him, another Comanche shot him dead with a musket as he was pulled away.
Padre Molina was able to break away, and with a few others hid in the
padre presidente's
quarters. Now, the Comanches set fire to the mission, and Molina, wounded, soon had to come outside again, smoking and gasping for air. By a miracle, as he thought—the Indians were too busy burning, looting, and celebrating, to notice—Molina's few survivors reached the mission church, which was made of green logs and did not burn. Here they remained, cowering and praying, until the last whooping Comanche rode away.
Sometime after midnight that night, Molina and the others reached the presidio. It was only three days later, when scouts reported that the Comanche horde had left the area, that Parilla and Molina returned to San Sabá. Terreros and the others were found and given Christian burial. After that, Parilla retreated to San Luís, and asked for help.
The destruction of San Sabá caused consternation and rage at the capital, San Antonio de Béxar. The Spanish government and ecclesiastical authorities felt strongly that the burning of a mission and the murder of priests must not go unpunished. When the presidio at San Sabá was raided again by Comanches in 1758, a conference was called at San Antonio. A punitive expedition was planned. All the presidios in Texas were called upon for soldiers, and a large number of Indian allies were raised. The plan was approved by the Viceroy in Mexico. In August 1759, Colonel Parilla was placed in command of six hundred men, with orders to sweep the Indian country north of Béxar.
Only part of Parilla's army was composed of Spanish soldiers. He commanded a number of Coahuiltecan and other Mexicanized Indians, and 134 Lipan Apaches who joined the Spaniards for a Comanche war. He was furnished two field guns and a supply train for an extended campaign. This was the greatest Spanish expedition ever mounted in Texas, and Parilla had more men than either Cortés or Pizarro.
Parrilla did not march for the heart of the Comanche country, which lay to the northwest. Reluctant to put his army out on the Great Plains, he went almost due north, through the fringes of the Comanche range. He did not meet Comanches. He did find a Tonkawa village, and the Spanish frame of mind was clearly shown: Parilla attacked it, killing 55 Indians and seizing 150 women and children, for forcible "reduction" and conversion. He went further and further north, until by October 1759, he approached the Red River, the northernmost boundary of Texas.
Here he found Indians. Apparently a vast, ephemeral alliance was formed by some of the Plains tribes, Comanches, Witchitas, and several others. Colonel Parilla's own account stated that he fought 6,000 warriors who displayed the French flag, and who were probably commanded by French officers.
Though authorities disagree, and it is true that French agents were among the Indians trading and selling firearms, no real evidence of French participation in the Indian alliance was ever revealed. This claim, like the obviously exaggerated numbers, was probably made to make the Spanish defeat appear in a better light. It was one thing to be beaten by other Europeans, but quite another to be routed by savages.
For Parilla suffered the worst military catastrophe dealt to Spanish arms in Texas. When he attacked the massed Indians, his civilized Indian allies ran for their lives instead of at the enemy, and his Lipan Apache allies disappeared. Parilla fought his way out of an Indian encirclement with very small losses in numbers of Spaniards—but he abandoned his two cannon and all his supplies, and a few weeks later reappeared at Béxar after a precipitous retreat. Few Spaniards were killed, but Spanish power was dealt an enormous psychological defeat.
Some years later a Spanish writer stated bitterly: "The memory of this event remains yet on the . . . frontier as a disgrace to Spaniards."
Colonel Parilla was court-martialed in Mexico. His lost cannon were not recovered for twenty years, and then, ironically, were gotten back by a French agent in the Spanish service.
The San Sabá mission-presidio and the Parilla expedition were the high water marks of Spanish power. Never again was a mission authorized for the warlike tribes of the interior; never again was a serious campaign mounted against the Comanches. There was a subtle but terrible change on the Mexican-Spanish frontier; the balance of power had turned over, and, from 1759 forward, the Spanish were on the defensive.
The Lipans continued to terrorize the frontier communities, and the Comanches began to raid and plunder deep into New Spain. The presidial soldiery, clinging to their forts, were ineffective to halt the menace—in many cases they refused to venture out in pursuit of Indians. The Spanish had a cluster of missions and settlements in East Texas near the Louisiana border, a few barely surviving missions and forts along the south Texas crescent, and the capital at Béxar. Other than that there was no settlement of the land, and nothing on the northern frontier except Santa Fé, hundreds of miles to the west in New Mexico. The true state of affairs is shown plainly by the fact that if a Spaniard wanted to travel between San Antonio de Béxar and Santa Fé, he had to go far south into Mexico, west to Durango, then up the Rio Grande. It was considered perilous for even a full company of soldiers to try to cross the Apache-Comanche plains.
Once the warlike tribes learned the vulnerability of the Spanish, the Indian problem was primary. It was a classic case of guerrilla warfare along a poorly defined frontier of vast spaces and immense distances. The Apaches, and even more so the Comanches, enjoyed a privileged sanctuary on the trackless plateaus, onto which the Spanish dared not penetrate too far. The Indians could ride far and fast; the Comanches could range a thousand miles. They galloped into Spanish territory, raided and killed and plundered, then galloped away into the wilds. War bands then split into many tiny groups, making effective pursuit impossible. If a punitive expedition did press far into Indian country, then the war bands came together again, in superior numbers. Colonial Spain had neither the resources nor the will to fight this kind of war.
Meanwhile, ranches, haciendas, and struggling frontier settlements on the northern fringes of Mexico, all through Sonora, Coahuila, and Durango, lived in perpetual fear and harassment. The full moon of summer, and the greening of spring grass, upon which the Indian horses could forage, brought a sense of terror. As Toynbee wrote, when the frontier between a more advanced culture and a barbaric one becomes stationary, the balance usually does not accede to the advanced civilization. The more aggressive culture, in fact, tends to become "superior."
The idea of reducing the Indians through mission-presidios, and thus forming an Hispanicized core to populate and hold Texas, died slowly and painfully. Mission after mission failed, as Indians died out or moved away, or became bitterly hostile. Some were moved to new locations, but with little better success. After the middle of the 18th century, the congregation of missions at Béxar began to wither away, too. Yet the idea was so strong, and in decline the rigidity of the Spanish mind so great, that one new mission was founded in South Texas as late as 1792, long past the time when either the military or the secular powers had any faith in the system.
In 1793, after continual requests by the citizens of Béxar backed up by the military commanders, the mission of San Antonio de Valero was secularized; that is, the lands of the mission were distributed, and the mission building itself turned over to the military. At that date, after seventy-five years of continual effort, San Antonio de Valero contained only forty-three settled converts, and none of the other four missions in the area had any more. The total population of Spanish Texas was less than three thousand, including all converted Indians and garrison troops.
By the second half of the 18th century, thousands of men and women on the Spanish-Mexican frontier, who each year lost cattle, horses, and loved ones in continual, cruel warfare, had come to curse both the ecclesiastical councils and the Crown.
Chapter 5
THE KING'S MERCIES
The country should be given back to Nature and the Indians.
FROM THE REPORT OF THE MARQUÉS DE RUBÍ TO THE KING OF SPAIN
TWO of the enduring myths concerning the Spanish colonization of America are: it was never Spanish policy to exterminate Indians; the Spanish were less rigid about racial matters than other peoples. Neither of these myths can stand inspection, but their origin is understandable. Where the Spanish found adaptable Indians, they always worked to incorporate them into the state as third- or fourth-class citizens to form a laboring class. And while the position of all except Spaniards born in Spain was always anomalous in the empire, and blood castes were rigidly defined if not always enforced, after the Spanish departure the soon-to-be-dominant
mestizo
groups naturally preferred never to dwell much on the notion of racial descent. It was impossible for all but a handful in New Spain to prove a racial purity that other European colonists took for granted. But class distinctions, always sharply drawn in Hispanic civilization, remained.