Lone Star (8 page)

Over most of this land, rain seldom fell more than twenty inches per year, and even this rain was scattered widely, randomly. There were wet years, also severe drouths. But the winters were mild, compared with the North, and the ground was endlessly green and flowering in the spring, or after summer rains. In late summer the oceans of deep grass—buffalo, bunch, needle, and gramma—burned off; the shallow lakes dried, and the country appeared desertlike, only to flower again. The bison roamed over immense distances, following the scattered rains and the grass.

Coronado was the first European to see the bison on its home range; the Spaniards were impressed with the incredible numbers. Coronado wrote that the number was "impossible even to estimate." There were certainly many millions of beasts; there were even individual herds that ran into the millions.

Besides buffalo, there were enormous numbers of other species: hundreds of thousands of pronghorn antelope, bounding and skittering over the grass; varieties of deer, peccary, hares and rabbits, turkeys and squirrel. The game drew predators, wolves, coyotes, and several varieties of cat, including the cougar or mountain lion. There were tall elk in the high river valleys, and lurking bear as well.

The Comanches scorned the snakes, rodents, birds, and smaller game. They killed deer for hides, bear for fat, but real men hunted the buffalo. They carved up this immense buffalo hunting ground into regions or territories for their several bands or tribes. The Penatekas (Honey-Eaters) took the southern fringe, the area lying north of the Balcones Escarpment. To their north, the Wanderers, Wasps, Liver-Eaters, and Buffalo-Eaters hunted. In the far north, the Yap-Eaters (named for a Shoshone root) held sway. The Llano Estacado itself, perhaps the richest grounds, was the preserve of the Antelope Band, or Quahadis, known as one of the fiercest of Comanche peoples.

Within all these hunting regions, the Comanches continually roamed. They never erected fixed villages, and some parts of their domain were not visited for years. They did not have to stand on their land. Their reputation was sufficient to keep both Spaniard and Apache out.

Meanwhile, the horse revolution of 18th-century America set other tribes on the march. North of Texas, the Wichitas, a tribe with Caddoan roots, found themselves caught between the rising Comanche tide and aggressive Osages to their east. The Osages were now armed with French muskets, supplied by traders in Louisiana. The Wichita tribes gave up their grass-hutted villages in Kansas and drifted south, into east-central Texas. Fortunately for them, a French trader was able to arrange a truce between Wichitas and Comanches, and the Wichitas were permitted to settle just beyond the eastern limits of the Texas buffalo range. The main tribe located near the present Fort Worth. Other Wichita bands, Tawakonis and Wacos, moved further east, settling along the Brazos. The Wichitas, although mounted and buffalo-hunting, never made the complete leap culturally to the Plains. They continued to live in houses and planted corn; they were a people partway between the Comanche and the Caddoan culture.

Even further north, another great migration was taking place. The Kiowas, a small but very warlike people, had come out of the mountains of Montana and roamed the Black Hills of South Dakota. Here they came into collision with the terrible Dakotas, or Sioux, then moving west. The Kiowas, harassed by Sioux on the east and Cheyennes on the west, began to drift south. Like the Comanches, they had become a wholly Plains-living, bison-hunting tribe. Moving with them were the Kiowa Apaches—an Eastern Apache band that had, in the
Völkerwanderung
, remained Athapaskan-speaking but adopted Kiowa culture and alliances, probably in self-preservation. In the late 18th century, Kiowas rode into Comanche country.

There was war, but mutual extermination was avoided, almost by accident. In 1790, a party of Kiowas arrived at a Spanish trading station in New Mexico, to find a band of Comanches already dismounted and dickering. The European trader, probably out of sheer desperation, persuaded both tribes to agree to a truce. Out of this shaky agreement grew an enduring alliance; Kiowas and Comanches shared the High Plains hunting grounds, and soon were riding the warpath together against their common enemies, Apaches and Spaniards.

The Kiowas never moved entirely into Texas territory, but in a terrible sort of way they became a true Texas tribe: they were noted, even more than the Comanches, for distant raiding. Kiowas pushed war parties many hundreds of miles into hostile country, harrying both Indians and Europeans. One war band raided so far south they brought back descriptions of monkeys and parrots. They had reached either Guatemala or Yucatán.

By 1750, the Comanches had entered their golden age. The Apaches had abandoned the Plains, though they apparently became more warlike when they were forced into the borderlands near the Spanish settlements—the Spanish began to have even more trouble with them. The once-dangerous Tonkawas were badly dispersed along the Balcones Escarpment. The Wichitas lived on the edge of buffalo country by Comanche sufferance. The two other powerful tribes in Texas, Caddos and Karankawas, were no threat to the lords of the plains. Caddoans were well fed in their forests, and rarely ventured out; Karankawas were confined to the marshy, fever-ridden coast. The Coahuiltecans of the southern savannahs hardly counted.

Although the Spanish soon came into painful contact with Comanches, both in Texas and New Mexico, it is clear that they did not understand at first the full extent of the revolution that had occurred on the High Plains. It would soon be a Comanche boast that the warrior tribes permitted Spanish settlements to exist on the fringes of Comanche territory only to raise horses for them.

The Spanish in New Spain, however, only dimly aware of conditions on the northern frontier, were much more concerned with the advance of an old European enemy, France.

Chapter 3

FLEUR-DE-LIS ON THE FRONTIER

The purposes of the French enemy seem to be to penetrate little by little inland. This country is very suitable for doing this . . .

THE REPORT OF THE GOVERNOR OF NEW MEXICO, DON ANTONIO DE VALVERDE COSINO, TO THE MARQUÉS DE VALERO, VICEROY OF NEW SPAIN

FRAY Marcos de Niza and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado were not the last Europeans to hold aloft a crucifix, wave a sword, and take titular possession of the immensity of Texas. In the year 1682, the Frenchman René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, added greatly to the romantic folklore of North America by navigating the Mississippi from the Ohio Valley to its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico. In the process he claimed ownership not only of the mighty river but of all the lands and territories within the river's and its tributaries' watershed, comprising two-thirds of the present continental United States, and some of Texas. La Salle, unaware that Hernando de Soto had already discovered and named the river the Espíritu Santo, called the country Louisiana, after Louis XIV, and the river the Colbert, for the French minister, thus covering all bets. The Indians, however, continued to call the stream
Misi Sipi
, or Big River.

La Salle returned to France, where he was uncomfortable after years in the woods, to find Versailles already fired by the schemes of a renegade Spaniard from New Mexico. This man, Peñalosa, had been badly abused by the Inquisition, and he petitioned Louis XIV for an expedition to take New Spain from the Spanish. However, it was La Salle, French, famous, and the greatest explorer that nation ever produced, who received a royal commission to return to Louisiana, build a fort at the mouth of the "Colbert," and to establish a French empire in the Southwest, so that "the cause of God may be advanced" among the Indians and "great conquests may be made for the glory of the King, by seizures of provinces rich in silver, and defended only by a few indolent and enervated Spaniards."

La Salle was far-visioned and indomitable. And the country did lie open; the Spanish had shown little interest in the lands between Florida and the River of Palms (the French term for the Bravo, or Rio Grande) since the time of Coronado and de Soto. Under the futile Charles II, Spain was rapidly declining in Europe, and the Puebloan revolt kept it thoroughly occupied in the west. However, Louis XIV, the richest and grandest monarch of Europe, was poorly prepared to give La Salle what he needed to make this dream come true. Almost no Frenchmen were desirous of seeking fame and fortune in the gloomy forests of the New World, and the French gentry much preferred to win honors by fighting Spain and Austria closer to home. La Salle received four ships from the King. But his army consisted of thirty "gentlemen adventurers" with nothing better to do, three friars, three priests, "some girls seeking husbands," and a hundred or so men dragged out of taverns, "the scum of the French ports." With this command, Sieur de La Salle sailed for America in the summer of 1684. The expedition was ill fated from the start, but the fault, as always, lay in the men themselves and not their stars.

Robert Cavelier was brave, strong, and capable, thoroughly knowledgeable of the American frontier. But he was also dogmatic and introspective, shy and hard to get along with, qualities dangerous in a great leader of men. His associates thought him cold, arbitrary, and haughty above his station, because unfortunately La Salle was not born into the nobility of France. The naval commander of his expedition, De Beaujeu, and many of the aristocrats resented him as a self-made man. From the first, La Salle could not maintain full discipline among his officers—and his rank and file were men of the worst stamp that could be impressed in France.

La Salle and Beaujeu argued most of the way across the Atlantic. At the French island of Santo Domingo, Beaujeu disobeyed an order and put into a different port from the one La Salle picked out. It was a bad choice, "an evil place and with evil fruits," as Henri Joutel, La Salle's most loyal lieutenant, wrote. "The scum of the French towns" and "local females who were worse" engaged in "dissipation and vice," which left many of them with "loathsome diseases." Even the aristocrats were not immune; one, the Marquis de Sablonnière, tottered back onboard with a raging case of syphilis. When the expedition set sail again, it was riddled with venereal maladies and tropical fevers.

One ship never arrived at all. The
St. François
was picked off by the Spanish navy. All its valuable tools and stores were lost, and worse, the crew gave the expedition away under judicious Spanish interrogation.

The King of Spain had issued an edict against all navigation by foreigners in the Gulf of Mexico. La Salle did not dare make too many landfalls; he sailed directly for what he hoped was Louisiana. But he was not a great navigator, and he forced De Beaujeu to bear too far west. The remaining three ships made land on the Texas coast at Matagorda Bay, missing the mouth of the "Colbert" by four hundred miles.

Here one of the ships was wrecked. La Salle, preferring to explore the country on foot, moved inland and built a wooden stockade, surrounding six small log cabins and one large one, on Garcitas Creek. He hoisted the fleur-de-lis, and called his post Fort St. Louis. He could not have selected a worse site. The coast held plenty of wild game and fish, but it was low, marshy, and unhealthy for an already sick and weakened company. Even worse, Garcitas Creek lay in the very heart of Karankawa country, who were utterly unlike the relatively civilized Caddoans and Natchez Indians of Louisiana.

From the very first day, there was trouble with the local tribes. La Salle overawed them at first by ship's cannon, fired over water, and with musket shots—the Karankawas were unused to firearms. But the Indians were not cowed, nor could La Salle make friends with them. There was mutual robbery and murder; the Indians skulked about in the marshes, and picked off several Frenchmen. Some of these were probably ritually cannibalized in the
mitote
: tied to stakes, pieces of their flesh sliced off, roasted, and eaten before their eyes.

La Salle made explorations. He found a river, which he hoped was the Mississippi but was only the Brazos. Sickness and dissension increased in the company, and La Salle was able to maintain control only with the harshest and most arbitrary discipline. With supplies low, in hostile country, only the highest discipline and self-sacrifice could have saved the expedition. La Salle, with all his great qualities, could not evoke this spirit. Finally, realizing his situation was desperate, on January 7, 1687, La Salle gathered almost all the able-bodied men, who were not eager to go, and started on a difficult march to reach the Mississippi, then travel on to find French outposts in the Illinois country. He left Fort St. Louis under the command of the Sieur Barbier, with the sick and the women and children, including the Marquis de Sablonnière, who could no longer walk. Also left behind were the poor French girls who had come seeking husbands.

On the march, the "scum" of La Salle's party mutinied; some wanted to stay behind, others wanted to become "squaw-men" with the Indians. La Salle was treacherously shot from ambush. After fighting, in which several more French were killed, Joutel and seven others escaped, and these eight miraculously eventually reached the Illinois country.

Here, the courageous Italian-French captain, Henri de Tonty, who had been supposed to join with La Salle on the Mississippi, immediately set out with a party to rescue Fort St. Louis. He searched the Texas coast, but was unable to find anything. Sorrowfully, he returned north in 1690. Even had he found Fort St. Louis, he would have been too late.

Meanwhile, there had been considerable debate about the French expedition among the "indolent and enervated" Spaniards. The Viceroy of New Spain was aware of La Salle's invasion even before the Frenchman reached Matagorda Bay. A ship was sent to search the coast, but it was wrecked. This, and the continuing troubles in New Mexico, delayed positive action. In 1686, a land expedition was despatched. Hugging the coast, this party found the wreckage of one of La Salle's ships, but did not go inland in the area of Garcitas Creek.