Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
Significantly, in the light of later events on the Great Plains, in the last half of the 18th-century Spanish policy in Texas underwent a great change. Secular and ecclesiastical authorities had long been locked in a bitter battle over the best way to manage the northern frontier; but the impetus and desire to incorporate Texas had always come from the fear that the French in Louisiana would usurp the Spanish claim. In 1762, this French pressure was removed. As a gambit to keep the Louisiana territory out of the hands of the victorious English, France ceded the Louisiana country to Spain, and this transfer was ratified at the close of the Seven Years War in 1763. Up to this time, Louisiana had been hardly more profitable to the French Crown than Texas had to the Spanish; both provinces were a constant worry and a constant drain.
The removal of the French threat called for a reassessment of the situation in Texas, and in 1766 the King sent out an inspector general, the Marqués de Rubí, to examine the whole northern frontier of New Spain, map the territory, and make recommendations for future policy. The new Spanish King, Charles III, was the ablest and most enlightened of the Bourbon line, and he was creating incisive reforms in the Spanish state. These were extended to the New World, and after 1759 a series of capable officers were dispatched to the Spanish frontier. Spain had good men in Texas in the last half of the century: the Frenchman Athanase de Mezières, El Caballero (Chevalier) Teodoro de Croix, the Baron de Ripperdá, and the Marqués de Rubí. Unfortunately, this handful of far-seeing and enlightened aristocrats were unable to reverse the situation. Spain and New Spain simply did not possess the will and the resources, or, above all, a growing, disciplined, homogenous population, which was required to cement and push back the frontier.
Rubí and his map-making engineer, de la Fora, spent three years traveling the frontier from Louisiana to Baja California, covering some 7,000 miles. Rubí arrived determined to understand and correct a colonial system that obviously was not working. The civilized Indian population of Texas was declining instead of growing, and the danger of Indian warfare was rapidly increasing. By the time he arrived in Texas, in 1766, not only the mission at San Sabá but the presidio of San Luís in the area and the forts at Orcoquisac on the lower Trinity River and El Cañón on the upper Nueces were being intolerably harassed by Comanches. The garrisons for all practical purposes were pinned behind their walls and defending cannon, and the missionary effort in the areas was hopeless. San Antonio de Béxar itself was in constant danger; the Comanches as well as the Lipans were now riding to Béxar with impunity.
Rubí quickly discovered the basic failures of the mission-colonization scheme, and he further saw something that the various officers and governors of Texas had reported but had never been accepted by higher authority. The scattered presidios, filled with only a few hundred soldiers, could not police the country—they could not even maintain or defend themselves. Rubí was disgusted with some features of the presidial system: the use of "so-called Spaniards" instead of the pure race as soldiers, and the corruption of the local commandants, who were permitted to act as paymasters, sutlers, and commissaries for the garrisons. Prices on the frontier were exorbitant for the soldiery, who were paid some 450 pesos per year; some garrisons were in rags, and improperly mounted and armed. In other places, soldiers were being used to work on private lands of officials rather than guard against the Indian menace. The deep social decay into which New Spain had fallen permeated Texas, and it turned out to be impossible to eradicate.
Rubí saw something else: that the supposed frontier of Spanish power in Texas was wholly imaginary. The string of scattered, far-flung presidios from East Texas to San Sabá did not give Spain control of the country; the soldiers hardly controlled the ground on which the forts were built. This advanced line did nothing whatever to prevent or punish the incessant, tragic plundering of the "real" frontier—which was the line of Spanish-Mexican settlement in New Spain, and which had not yet reached the Bravo, or Rio Grande.
Rubí quickly was made to understand that many of the Texas Indians posed no threat to Spain. The Hasinai, Karankawas, Tonkawas, and others were not incorporable, but they were either dying out or were reasonably friendly. The Spanish could control these tribes by treaties or by force. But the Comanches and the Apaches seemed to be completely beyond control. Rubí did fall into the trap of adopting a mistaken notion popular on the Spanish frontier: that the Spanish trouble with the Comanches stemmed from Spanish dealings with Apaches, as at San Sabá. It was not yet understood that the Comanches and their allies were the greatest raiders in North America, to whom plundering and horse-stealing had become a way of life. The Apaches had been driven down in close proximity to Spanish settlement, against which they were waging a bitter, interminable guerrilla warfare. Rubí, and most Spanish officers, mistakenly felt that it was only the Apache presence that pulled their enemies, the Comanches, into the Spanish sphere.
In a series of comprehensive and very clear reports, the Marqués sent home a number of suggestions, which added up to a radical change of Spanish Indian policy in North America. He requested the following alterations on the frontier:
The abandonment of all missions and presidios in Texas except two: those in the San Antonio de Béxar region, and La Bahía, which lay below Béxar on the San Antonio River and provided an outlet on the coast.
The strengthening of Béxar by the removal of all Spanish settlers in East Texas to San Antonio, which, with Santa Fé in New Mexico, would remain as the two solitary outposts of Spanish power north of the Bravo.
Recognition of the real frontier, by establishment of a line of some fifteen forts stretching across northern Mexico from just below Laredo to the Gulf of California. This was an immense withdrawal, and it was the recommendation for a purely military response to the Indian problem. All the country north of this line, including all Texas (except the outpost at San Antonio) was to be returned to "Nature and the Indians," at least for the time being.
The institution of a deliberate war of extermination against the Apaches, in which alliances with the Wichitas, Comanches, and other northern tribes should be sought. To secure these alliances, both the abandonment of the country and "French methods" of dealing with the Indians would be helpful. If any Apache women or children survived, they were to be removed to New Spain and civilized by being reared in slavery. With the Apaches removed forever, Rubí thought it would be possible to make peace with the Plains tribes.
With the exception of the possibility of peace with the Comanches, the Rubí reports were clear-cut reflections of Spanish reality in Texas. With the forces available, nothing else was possible. And in fact, the war against the Apaches, while accepted wholeheartedly by officialdom, was already beyond Spanish power to support.
In 1772, substantially all the Rubí recommendations were promulgated by the King, in a "New Regulation of the Presidios."
The New Regulation for the frontier thus marked a Spanish retreat. Ironically, one of the incidents connected with its implementation pointed up the whole nature of the Spanish Texas dilemma—unconquerable Indians, lack of colonists, governmental ineptitude—and unwittingly almost destroyed one of the few genuine Spanish roots in the province.
The Baron de Ripperdá, who arrived in San Antonio de Béxar as Governor of Texas in 1770, inherited the task of removing the Spanish presence in East Texas to the capital. He marched to the Sabine with a party of soldiers in 1772, with orders to close the four moribund missions in the region and to escort all Spaniards to San Antonio.
Ripperdá found the presidials and the missionary clergy ready enough to leave. The forts and missions were stripped of valuables and set afire. But since Rubí had inspected the area in 1767, the small Spanish community clustered near the forts had begun to take root and grow, on its own, completely without aid or even the knowledge of the Crown. It already numbered about five hundred persons.
These people had become small farmers and herders in the rich pine woodlands. The Caddoans left them alone; the Comanches and Wichitas had never smelled them out, and they had created a comfortable life. They raised corn and beans and the ubiquitous rangy Spanish cattle and pigs. They were doing well, and they had no desire to leave their farms and homes in East Texas and move to what was admittedly a less hospitable and far more dangerous frontier.
Baron de Ripperdá sympathized. Quite probably he saw the removal of these families as a mistake; but he also understood the complete impossibility of getting the orders changed. The Spaniards were routed out with soldiers, their goods and livestock gathered together, and their settlements burned. Protesting and weeping, the settlers were marched to Béxar.
But settled on new lands along the San Antonio River, they continued to complain. The best lands were admittedly sequestered by the missions, or already appropriated by officials or Canary Islanders. They hated the dry climate and the thin, rocky soil they were allotted, and they were terrified of Apache-Comanche raids, which were admittedly bad. At this time Ripperdá was writing florid, dramatic reports about the Indian terror to outlying farmers and ranchers, and begging for more troops.
Two leaders of the East Texans, Gil Ybarbo and a man named Flores, petitioned the Viceroy for permission to return to their old homes. This petition, understandably, caused consternation, embarrassment, and some confusion in official circles. Finally, at Ripperdá's suggestion, Ybarbo was told his people were not to return to their former settlement, but they were permitted to emigrate in that general direction. They were not to approach closer than 100 leagues to Natchitoches in Louisiana, now a Spanish fort.
Ybarbo and the East Texans pushed their mandate to the limit. They packed up and left Béxar and picked a new settlement site on the Trinity River, about as far east as they could go. Ripperdá agreed to this site, since the land was fertile, with good rainfall, and it was east and south of the Wichita and Tonkawa ranges. Both of these tribes were now friendly toward the Spanish, and Ripperdá thought they would create a buffer between Ybarbo and the Plains Indians. The new settlement was named Bucareli, like all the forts, missions, and settlements in Texas, after a prominent Spanish official, a lieutenant general of New Spain, who founded the National Pawnshop of Mexico.
For four years Bucareli thrived. Then, in May 1778, a Comanche war party rode past and stole some horses. Ybarbo, with considerable courage, formed a posse and pursued. He came across a few Comanches and killed them. When he reported this incident to Béxar, he was gravely adjudged to have done the correct thing, since it was considered that no Comanche would be in the vicinity of a Spanish settlement for friendly reasons. However, Ybarbo's people became frightened and called for troops. There were none to spare.
Then, in the Indian summer of October 1778, a howling horde of Comanches swooped down on Bucareli. They did not kill anyone, but took away 276 horses. Ybarbo sent a new appeal to San Antonio, while some friendly Indians pursued the Comanches, but without success. The Bucareli priest, Padre Garza, wrote that now no Spaniard dared step outside the village, even to plant his crops or to go hunting, unless all the men went along. The whole town was on guard and in constant terror night and day.
Gil Ybarbo decided not to risk another Comanche spring.
Defying his orders, he took the Bucarelians back into the East Texas timberlands, to the site of the old presidio of Nacogdoches, arriving in April 1779. Here, they were in familiar territory and deep enough into the woods to be free of Comanche terror. Ybarbo and his five hundred put down new roots. The Royal Government accepted this fait accompli, and the descendants of these folk were still living in the region in the 1960s.
If there had been more like Ybarbo and his followers, Hispanic civilization might have dominated the land and altered history. As it was, they remained a tiny, isolated outpost in a vast area, soon to be overwhelmed by a new invasion from the east.
Meanwhile, at Béxar, Ripperdá got more troops, but he was never able to make the country secure. The planned war of extermination against the Lipan Apaches proceeded with massive slowness, always a characteristic of 18th-century Spanish bureaucracy. In 1776, the year the English colonies on the Atlantic seaboard declared themselves independent, all the northern frontier provinces of New Spain were placed under Teodoro de Croix, whose headquarters was at Chihuahua, in north-central Mexico. The new commandant-general—his office was primarily a war post—began his planning the next year. He held three major war councils, at Monclova, San Antonio, and Chihuahua, during 1777–78. He asked each of these councils sixteen questions, and got substantially the same answers, as follows:
The Apache terror had existed since the first Spaniards entered the country. Each year, instead of seeing improvement, was worse than the last. The Apaches numbered 5,000 fighting men, armed with bows, lances, and guns. They always made war by surprise, and fought like guerrillas—that is, they only attacked when they had the advantage. The Comanches were their enemies, and if an alliance could be made, "by God's grace" they would soon be destroyed. There were not enough troops on the frontier for either attack or defense. There should be a campaign against the Eastern Apaches.
It would require at least 3,000 soldiers
. The friendship of the Comanches should be cultivated, and the war should proceed. On these statements, virtually all Spanish officers agreed.