Lone Star (9 page)

In 1688, however, a filthy, bearded Frenchman dressed in skins staggered into a Spanish presidio in northern Mexico. He said he was Jean Henri, a deserter from La Salle. This arrival—the Spanish were incredibly sensitive toward any foreigners in their territory—galvanized Don Alonso de León, Governor of Coahuila, into action. Formerly, he had not discovered any use for Texas, which at this time the Spanish called New Philippines—but this did not mean that His Most Catholic Majesty's men were prepared to surrender the country to the Most Christian King without a fight.

Don Alonso marched up the Texas coast with one hundred soldiers and the indomitable military chaplain, Padre Damian Masanet. He crossed the Bravo (as the Spanish called the Rio Grande), then the Nueces, the Hondo, the Medina, and the Guadalupe, all of which he named. In April 1689, the Spanish reached Fort St. Louis.

The stockade still stood, eery and deserted in the sunlight. Eight small ship's guns, still on their carriages, covered the approaches. As the Spanish cautiously approached, they stumbled over three rotting skeletons outside the palisade. One was female. Swords drawn, muskets cocked, they went in through the open, sagging gate. Inside was a scene of utter desolation.

Chests had been broken open and looted, furniture smashed. Some expensive, leather-bound books lay mouldering on the ground. Here and there was a broken gunstock. Crossing himself, Don Alonso ordered Padre Masanet to say the proper words and burn the place to the ground.

The Governor of Coahuila was diligent. An empty fort did not mean there were no French in the vicinity, and he began a search among the Karankawa tribes. In one filthy village, he found two Frenchmen, who had deserted La Salle soon after arrival. They had gone native, smearing themselves with stinking fish oil like the Indians for protection against mosquitoes. Both men refused to join the Spaniards, and since the Indians were restive, Don Alonso let them be.

Further away, on the Brazos, De León discovered two more Frenchmen, this time in a village of the peaceable Caddoan Hasinai. These men told Don Alonso they had deserted the fort before a "massacre," after which they had returned and buried fourteen bodies. The Spaniard had these men put in irons.

In all, two more white boys and one Frenchwoman were found and rescued by the Spanish. De León pieced together a tragic story, from the youngest survivors, of the last days of Fort St. Louis.

After La Salle took the men and left, the settlement was consumed with despair. Smallpox broke out. With only invalids and women, the Sieur Barbier realized he must make friends with the Karankawas to survive. One day, when five Indians approached the fort, Barbier took a great, but he thought necessary, risk. He opened the gates to them and offered them hospitality.

As soon as the gates were open, however, a larger party of Indians who had been concealed in the bushes rushed the fort. The whites had no chance. Barbier and Sablonnière were hatcheted, all the other men killed. The whooping Karankawas carried off the children and many of the young Frenchwomen, who, to their horror, at last found husbands in the New World. For years, the Spanish heard rumors of white women in Indian villages, but rescued only one.

De León destroyed Fort St. Louis so thoroughly that its exact location remained in dispute until recent years, when the site was rediscovered by archeologists. A steel spearhead was found nearby, stamped with the fleur-de-lis. That was all that remained of the French presence in Texas.

De León was still concerned over the danger of French intrusion. In 1690, he returned to East Texas with a larger party. Avoiding the unhealthy Karankawa coast, he erected a mission in the pine-wooded Caddo country along the Trinity River. This was called San Francisco de los Tejas, from the name the Spanish gave the Hasinai. European diseases, however, broke out among the friendly "Tejas" and the mission soon failed, which should have been an ominous warning for future efforts.

No further French threats arose, and in 1692 the Spanish again withdrew from Texas. But once again, French activity pulled them back, into the land they really did not want.

The accession of a Bourbon king to the Spanish throne had no effect on the bitter rivalry between French and Spaniards in the West. The Spanish remained intensely jealous of their fabulous empire, now measured in continents. But Spanish power was clearly on the wane, and Spain was not able to prevent French seizure and settlement of the Gulf coast, from Mobile to the Mississippi. D'Iberville placed the French flag here permanently. In 1713, the Sieur de Cadillac, Governor of the new province of Louisiana, sent the Canadian St. Denis up the Red River, to build a fort on "Spanish" soil. France's claims to Texas had never been officially relinquished.

Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, a Quebeçois, was to become a remarkable figure in the old Southwest, and a living legend to both the French and Spanish. Ironically, this Frenchman did more to bring Spanish colonization of Texas than any Spaniard of the time.

To understand the actions of St. Denis and Cadillac, it is necessary to understand the French approach to their Gallic empire of Louisiana. They were more interested in trade than territory; they were not much concerned with converting, incorporating, or pushing the natives off their land. Thus their aims and approach were entirely different from either English or Spanish in America. They did desire to keep the other powers out, and they generally tried to use the Indians to their advantage in this. By the 18th century, the French had traders and officers voyaging from Canada and Louisiana over the entire central part of North America, agitating Indians and encouraging them to resist the other Europeans.

Louisiana was always envisioned not so much as a colony as a trading enterprise. The settling of French peasants was accidental: the English displaced French settlers in Nova Scotia, or Acadia, and these "Cajuns" had nowhere else to go. Mobile and New Orleans were established as trading posts, and St. Denis built his fort of Natchitoches in the Red River Valley for the same purpose.

The French were far more successful than either English or Spanish in getting along with North American Indians. The reason was obvious, since the French approach neither displaced nor enslaved the natives. The French were also aided by a curious characteristic, a tendency to blend into the forests and even adopt much of the Indian way of life. They became the greatest traders, trappers, and squaw-men of them all. Unlike other Europeans, they freely sold the Indians guns. Their influence over most tribes, naturally, became very great.

Trading with Indians was profitable, but Louis de St. Denis envisioned far greater profits for Louisiana—if the Spanish built settlements in Texas. All trade between Spanish colonies and foreigners was strictly forbidden, of course, but on the frontier such regulations were not only ridiculous, they could not be enforced. St. Denis and, to some extent, Cadillac, were hopeful of a much more lucrative business if permanent Spanish garrisons could be induced to remain in Texas.

Soon after founding Natchitoches, the young Canadian, who was always described as gay, brilliant, and utterly charming, rode boldly across Texas and appeared at Spanish settlements in New Spain. Though his arrival caused consternation, he avoided arrest and even married the daughter of an important military official. Then he talked the Spanish authorities into the reentry of East Texas. In 1716, St. Denis, his wife, his father-in-law, and a large party of priests and soldiers marched into Texas to found four new mission-forts, including one at Nacogdoches, across from Natchitoches on the Red.

Although Governor de Cadillac was as charmed as the Spanish with St. Denis, he and other French officials became a little concerned about the young man's initiative. Cadillac wrote dryly that St. Denis seemed to be acting in his own service as much as that of the King. Cadillac himself, however, was on the payroll of Crozat, the French merchant who had been granted a trading monopoly for Louisiana, and St. Denis undoubtedly was prepared to include the Governor in whatever "smuggling" profits that accrued.

Now St. Denis, from Natchitoches, set up a smuggling (as all trade with the Spanish had to be classified) business with his father-in-law across the more or less accepted boundary between Louisiana and Texas. St. Denis, actually, did more than anyone else to define this boundary. Both French and Spanish claims widely overlapped but, despite continual tension, a sort of gentleman's agreement came about. The Sabine was considered the eastern limit of active Spanish influence, while French power halted at the Red. St. Denis himself was wholly unconcerned with the Most Christian King's rights to Texas; on one occasion he unilaterally offered to cede to the Spanish all territory west of the Mississippi—a cession quite beyond the powers of the commander of Natchitoches.

But the regime he had charmed in New Spain changed; a new viceroy and a new governor of Coahuila took office. On a visit to Texas on business St. Denis was rudely arrested for trespass, and sent under guard to the City of Mexico. Here it was decided to incarcerate him in Guatemala. St. Denis, however, made a daring escape, stole a horse, and galloped north to Texas. He stopped at his father-in-law's post long enough to pick up his wife, then crossed the Louisiana border. Cadillac happily reinstated him to his old command. St. Denis had tremendous influence among the Caddoan tribes of the Red River Valley; this neither the Spanish nor the French authorities ever forgot.

Because of this power among the Indians, he kept the Spanish in continual alarm. He also traded the Indians a large quantity of guns and ammunition, and this caused them more than alarm. In 1720, the French-armed and allied Pawnee defeated a Spanish expedition on the Platte, in the Nebraska country. A not very serious border war broke out, and on one occasion St. Denis captured a Spanish fort with only seven men. The Spanish maintained far more troops in East Texas in these years than the French had across the river, but French influence with the Caddoans—who came armed at St. Denis's call—more than made up for the difference.

St. Denis continued to harass, frustrate, and trade with the Spanish on the sly for more than twenty years. He made an enormous fortune and lived in grandee style. Louis XV knighted him a Chevalier of St. Louis. Dozens of legends grew up about him, none of which were important to history, including the story that the Viceroy of New Spain, the Conde de Fuenclara, cried out
"¡Gracias a Diós!"
(Thank God!) when he was dead. Louis de St. Denis, who only wanted to keep the Spanish off balance and doing business, died in bed in 1744.

His place in Texas history was secured, not by his daring or smuggling, or even his establishment of borders, but because he directly caused the King of Spain to found a number of Texas forts and missions. One of these eventually came to be called the Alamo.

Chapter 4

THE FAITH AND THE FAILURE: THE MISSIONS

I see that for a century the faith has been planted in these provinces, and that nothing has prospered . . . if we had only expended the money that we spent fighting the Apaches, since God took them to be an instrument to punish our sins, in building new establishments, where would not be raised the standard of the holy cross?

PADRE FRANCISCO GARCES,

DIARY OF THE YEAR 1775–76

Most Excellent Señor: The time has come when the Supreme Powers simply must understand that the Comanches, Lipan Apaches, Wichitas, and other small bands of savages have not only hindered the settlement of Texas . . . but for two centuries have laid waste to the villages and committed thousands of murders and other crimes. . . . These depredations have dressed whole families in black, and filled their eyes with tears.

The Government must realize that, with utterly baseless hope and with paralyzing fears, the cowardly governors and ecclesiastical councils have presided over enormous crimes, under the deliberate and infantile notion that some day these barbarians will be converted to the faith, and reduced to their dominion. To this perverse view and policy, countless victims have been and are still being sacrificed.

THE REPORT OF THE OFFICIAL,

TADEO ORTIZ

THE Spanish empire in America was an empire very much in the ancient Roman sense. The Spanish came, conquered, displaced the Amerind ruling hierarchies, threw a patina of Hispanic civilization over the masses, and incorporated new provinces into the Spanish state. Wherever the natives had already been broken to division of labor or the plow, as in Mexico or Peru, the Spanish installed themselves as a new elite. The system was successful. Lima and the City of Mexico had brilliant societies in the 17th century, and the Spanish empire accomplished everything possible for an empire to do. It defended itself adequately against outside enemies; it lasted three hundred years; and it passed on to a vast area the Spanish language, ethic, and religion. It left its successor states immense problems: in class structures, theory of government, land tenure, and church-state relationships. But these were all problems of Hispanic society itself since the Middle Ages. Spain could only transmit its own values. It could not impart to the New World ideas, ethics, or practices Spaniards themselves did not value or possess.

But the Spanish system was incorporation, not colonization. When Hernán Cortés was offered land in Cuba, he snarled that he had not come to the New World to till the soil like any peasant. This angry statement summed up both the philosophy and the polity of the Spanish conquest. Spain never intended to send out large numbers of settlers—emigration was rigidly controlled—and except in rare cases, those who arrived expected to live not off the soil but off the resources of a subject native population.