Lone Star Nation (11 page)

“I have just had the pleasure of spending a few days in the company of Stephen F. Austin,” Dewees wrote under the date August 29, 1823. “He was on this river”—the Colorado—“with a surveyor, having lots laid off from a tract of land that he had just located for the purpose of building a town, about eight miles above the crossing of the old Atascocito road. But he has since abandoned it, and located his town, which he calls San Felipe de Austin, on the Brazos River.”

In planting his Texas colony, Stephen Austin had to feel his way along a dark and unfamiliar road. Nothing in his own experience had prepared him for this, and almost nothing in American experience provided a model for what he was trying to accomplish. His father's establishment of the settlement at Mine à Breton, and the struggles Moses had with French squatters, Indians, Spanish officials, and American frontiersmen, suggested some of what Stephen was up against. But the Texas project was far more ambitious, involving many more people, vastly more land, and convoluted politics that made Spanish Louisiana look like a New England town meeting.

In theory the job of an empresario was straightforward. Within the boundaries assigned him by the government of Mexico, he allotted land to settlers. He then registered the allotments with the government, which conferred titles to the settlers. These made the land the settlers' own, to improve, bequeath, sell, or otherwise dispose of.

Between theory and practice, however, loomed a considerable gap. Before the land could be allotted, it had to be surveyed. In contrast to the situation in the United States, where (following the Land Ordinance of 1785) a rectangular grid existed, from which new surveys might be extended, in Texas there existed no such framework or template for surveying. And the scale in Texas was much larger than in the United States. Americans thought in terms of the quarter section—160 acres, or a quarter of a square mile—which in the well-watered country east of the Mississippi sufficed to support a family. In Texas the unit was the league—4,428 acres. This reflected Spanish and Mexican practice, which in turn reflected the scantier rainfall in those countries, as well as the fact that land ownership there wasn't intended for the masses but was largely reserved to the gentry. It also reflected the fact that land was something Texas had lots of. A league, while huge by American standards of agriculture, was lost in the vastness of Texas.

The surveys were only the start of the empresario's task. Austin had to make settlement easy and attractive. He had to provide facilities for landing those colonists who came by sea, for importing the goods they required, and for exporting the goods they produced. Settlers and their families expected to be able to purchase pots and pans and glass and nails and lead and powder and guns and knives and cloth and sugar and tea and coffee and books and musical instruments and the other items that distinguished civilized people, as Americans interpreted such things, from savages. They didn't expect all of this at once, but they wanted to see progress in that direction. And to pay for what they purchased, they had to be able to sell what they produced. Every farmer was an entrepreneur; without access to markets, even Texas, bounteous Texas, wasn't worth the gamble. This was so obvious that a novice like Austin knew it, which was why in his initial advertising for Texas he had emphasized the colony's prospective port of entry and why he had sent his first colonists by boat.

Internally, too, the colony required markets, where farmers could buy and sell locally. The markets would be located at conveniently spaced towns, of which the most prominent could serve double duty as a headquarters for the colony. New arrivals needed a place where they could meet the empresario, register for their land, reprovision after the journey from the States, and receive advice from those who had gone before. All the colonists would want a place to gather, to find spouses for themselves and their children, to educate the young ones, to muster against Indian attack, to sue one another in court.

Austin had a personal reason as well for wanting to establish a headquarters, a capital for his colony. Far down the dim road along which he was groping, he could see the outlines of what would become his guiding vision. The Texas of his dreams was not a collection of isolated homesteads but a community of cooperating individuals and families. A college man, reasonably cultured and comparatively well read, Austin had no desire to live on the frontier any longer than necessary. He had come to Texas to pay the family's debts, but Texas was evolving in his mind from a means into an end. And the Texas of that end would be filled with economically independent yet socially supportive individuals and families, centered about his capital.

“Since my return from Mexico I have been trying to induce the people to move nearer together on the Colorado,” Austin wrote in September 1823, regarding the initial town-building efforts Dewees described. “I could not effect this object.” So he crossed over to the Brazos, to the site that had favorably impressed him on his first visit to Texas. What came to be called San Felipe de Austin consisted, at the outset, of scores of empty town lots arranged in a grid on the high west bank of the Brazos. Just beyond the town were dozens of one-
labor
(177-acre) lots, each to be paired with a one-league tract located up or down the river. Austin envisioned that the arriving families would live on their smaller lots close to town, lending a sense of security and community to the settlement. The colonists, however, had other notions, preferring to reside on their leagues away from the town. As a result, San Felipe grew slowly, and Austin, who built himself two cabins there—one for living quarters, one for the colony's land office—had little company at first.

Yet the colony as a whole grew rapidly during the last months of 1823 and all of 1824. The news of Texas was out, and immigrants streamed into Austin's colony, eager to take up the offer of free land. The absolute number was still small—several hundred by the end of 1824—but in relative terms the growth was remarkable.

The rapid growth caused problems. San Felipe initially lacked the infrastructure of supply to reprovision the immigrants, and a drought during the summer of 1823 withered the first corn crop (which had been sown by the stone-age method of burning, slashing, and digging holes with sticks). The drought also drove away much of the game, leaving the immigrants additionally afflicted. They grew hungry, then famished. “There have been a great many new settlers come on this fall,” William Dewees wrote in a letter dated December 1, 1823, “and those who have not been accustomed to hunting in the woods for support are obliged to suffer. Were it not for a few of us boys who have no families, their wives and children would suffer much more than they now do; in fact I fear some of them would starve.”

Dewees accounted himself an able hunter, but even he often felt discouraged—which was nothing next to what those who relied on him felt.

Game is now so scarce that we often hunt all day for a deer or a turkey, and return at night empty handed. It would make your heart sick, to see the poor little half-naked children, who have eaten nothing during the day, watch for the return of the hunters at night. As soon as they catch the first glimpse of them, they eagerly run to meet them, and learn if they have been successful in their hunt. If the hunters return with a deer or a turkey, the children are almost wild with delight, while on the other hand, they suddenly stop in their course, their countenances fall, the deep bitter tears well up in their eyes and roll down their pale cheeks.

Hunger was the most pressing problem, and indeed it drove many of the emigrants back to the United States. But it wasn't the most deadly problem. During its first few years the Austin colony encountered persistent violence from Indians. The Karankawas posed the principal danger. “They are an exceedingly fierce and warlike tribe, and also perfect cannibals,” Dewees observed. “They can shoot with their bows and arrows one hundred yards with as great accuracy as an American can with his rifle, and with an equally deadly aim.” Their rate of fire, moreover, was greater than that of the Americans with rifles. Dewees reported galloping along a riverbank almost an eighth of a mile from some Karankawas and barely escaping a hail of nearly a hundred arrows launched within a matter of seconds. (The arrows stuck in the bank, so he later had a chance to count them.)

The Karankawa attacks prompted the colonists to counterattack. One day a man named Brotherton staggered into a cluster of cabins with an arrow in his back and news that two other settlers had been killed and one wounded. “We immediately raised a force of fourteen men . . . ,” Dewees recounted, “and at midnight we arrived at the place where Brotherton had been wounded. We there dismounted, and five of us went to search out the encampment of the Indians.” Upon its discovery in a canebrake, the scouts reported back to the main body, which moved carefully forward. “As silently as possible, we crawled into a thicket about ten steps behind the camps, placing ourselves about four or five steps apart, in a sort of half-circle, and completely cutting off their retreat from the swamp.” Dewees and the others maintained their silent siege till dawn.

When the light was sufficient for us to see clear, we could not see anything of the Indians. We now commenced talking, in order to draw them from their wigwams; in this we succeeded. They rushed out as if greatly alarmed. We fired upon them and killed nine upon the spot. The rest attempted to escape, but having no way to run, except into the open prairie, we rushed upon them, and killed all but two, who had made their escape, though wounded, after the first fire. The number killed, nineteen.

It was indicative of the kill-or-be-killed attitude of the colonists toward the Karankawas that no effort was made to single out those Indians responsible for the attack on the settlers. Dewees's only reservation about the reprisal was that two of the Karankawas had escaped death. So swept up in the savagery of the moment was he that for “the only time in my life . . . I undertook to scalp an Indian.” Like all children of the trans-Appalachian frontier, Dewees had heard numerous stories of Indians scalping whites, including women and children. “Moved somewhat by a spirit of retaliation, I concluded I would take the scalp of an Indian home as a trophy from battle.” But after starting in on one of the dead Indians, his nerve failed, leaving him with no trophy but a gruesome mental image. “The skin of his head was so thick, and the sight so ghastly, that the very thought of it almost makes the blood curdle in my veins.”

Stephen Austin was more discriminating in dealing with the Indians, but hardly less decisive. Responsibility for Texas brought out the steel in Austin; whatever threatened his colony became a personal affront and challenge, and he responded accordingly. In December 1823, following a series of Karankawa attacks along the lower Colorado, Austin summoned “all the settlers able to bear arms” to join a militia against the Indians. The militiamen should elect a lieutenant, whom Austin deputized “to make war against the Karankawa Indians and to raise men within his command and attack or pursue any party of said Indians that may appear on the coast or on the river.”