Lone Star Nation (12 page)

The initial efforts of the militia failed, and the following summer Austin himself assumed the command. Leading a group of more than sixty armed men, he conducted a sweep down both sides of the Colorado. The militia met no Karankawas but did discover where they had been—and what they had been doing. “Found at this encampment the bones of two men which had been cut up and boiled,” Austin noted in his campaign diary for September 5. “Buried them, and called the creek Cannibal Creek.” Evidently the news of the militia traveled faster than the militia itself, for Austin and the settler-soldiers traveled all the way to La Bahía before overtaking any Karankawas. The Indians had sought refuge at the mission there, and the missionaries and town fathers urged Austin to honor the sanctuary. He agreed after the Karankawas promised to keep west of the San Antonio River for a year. As he explained to the Bahíans, “It is not our wish to deprive the Indians of their hunting or fishing grounds”; the settlers' only goal was “to guarantee a secure and permanent peace.” The year of the agreement would allow relations between settlers and Indians to heal. “I sincerely hope with all my heart that before that period, confidence will be mutually established between us and the Indians so that we may mix with each other without suspicion on either part.”

Austin was dissimulating here. He knew perfectly well that his colony intruded on the Karankawas' hunting grounds. And the subtext of his statement—doubtless appreciated by both the Indians and the settlers—was that in a year the settlers' position would be substantially stronger than at present, and the Indians' commensurately weaker. Time was on the settlers' side, and the Karankawas couldn't do much about it.

Other tribes fared little better at Austin's hands. After a group of Tonkawas stole some horses and extorted corn and other provisions from colonists on the Brazos, Austin mounted a punitive raid. “To prevent such outrages hereafter, and to recover the stolen horses,” he reported to Governor Luciano García, “I resolved to march against them, which I did. I surprised their camp . . . and compelled the captain to deliver to me all the stolen animals, and to inflict with his own hands in my presence a severe lashing of the marauders. I ordered them also to leave this river and the Colorado at once, with a warning that if they again attempted to steal cattle, or to molest the settlers on these rivers, I would not be satisfied with lashes only, but would cause the delinquents to be shot.” Not to the Indians but to the governor, Austin confided that this last recourse was “an extremity to which I do not wish to be compelled to resort.”

But if he was so compelled, better later than sooner. Some Indians couldn't be intimidated, at least not yet. These included a band of Wacos who lived along the upper Brazos and were allied with the Comanches. Like the Comanches—and unlike the Karankawas—they had no desire to drive the colonists out of Texas, for they saw the settlers as a convenient source of horses, which they regularly stole, and trade goods. The Wacos' numbers and their allies prevented Austin from retaliating, but not from calculating that he someday might. “We must be vigilant,” he told an associate. “I wish if possible to avoid an open rupture with them for six months longer at least. By that time we shall have more strength. . . . If they commit any more depredations, the only alternative will be an expedition to destroy their village, but this I wish to avoid until next year if possible.”

Time might have been on Austin's side in dealing with the Indians, but it wasn't his ally with the Mexican government. This was no reflection on Austin, who employed every opportunity to demonstrate his devotion to Mexico. “I expect to spend my life in this nation,” he wrote to Lucas Alamán, the Mexican minister of exterior and interior relations, at the beginning of 1824.

Austin took his obligations as a Mexican citizen quite seriously. In the wake of Iturbide's abdication, Mexican thinkers and political figures pondered a new frame of government for their country; Austin contributed to the discussion by drafting a plan specifying a federal structure. Iturbide's rule had cured most Mexicans of their nostalgia for empire; with his downfall and departure, republicanism carried the day. But differences developed between advocates of a strong central government and proponents of distributed federalism. Austin backed the federalists. Noting the example of the United States, whose “happy experience of many years” demonstrated the advantages of a federal system, he sent his draft to Miguel Ramos Arizpe, the leading light among Mexican federalists. Austin later remarked that his plan “had much influence in giving unity of intention and direction to the Federal party.” Here he was too generous to himself—he was by no means the only one in Mexico who had studied the American constitution—but for a newcomer striving to make Mexico home, his heart was in the right place. And when Mexico adopted a new, federal constitution in 1824, he had reason to feel he had contributed to a change for the better.

Austin had reasons beyond those of the other federalists to welcome the triumph of their cause. As a son of the American South, he found it easy to assume that states' rights constituted the bedrock of any reliable republicanism. And the same considerations that recommended a distributed form of government for the United States—starting with regional differences but especially including long distances and slowness of communication—applied even more to Mexico. Austin had spent months on the road to and from Mexico City, which alone argued for as much regional autonomy as possible.

Austin also had reasons more specific to Texas for his federalist sentiments. The closer authority resided to Texas, the easier it would be for him to manage his colony. During his eighteen months away, the colony had nearly collapsed. Uncertainty surrounding land titles, combined with the Indian troubles and the failure of rain, had sorely tested the hopes the colonists carried to Texas. “On my arrival in the colony, which I had commenced nearly two years before,” Austin reported to Alamán, “I found that most of the emigrants, discouraged by my long absence and the uncertainty in which they had been for such a length of time, had returned to the United States, and that the few who remained, hard-pressed and harassed on every side by hostile Indians, and threatened with the horrors of famine in consequence of the drought, were on the eve of breaking up and leaving the province.” Another such absence—which, under a centralized form of government, might be required for even minor matters—could spell the ruin of the Texas project.

Austin daily encountered the difficulties of managing a colony so far from the seat of government. His charter directed him to administer justice and preserve order in his colony, pending the establishment of institutions more permanent. This was no small charge, he explained to Alamán. “The situation I am placed in near the frontiers of two nations, and surrounded on every side by hostile Indians and exposed to their attacks and to the no less vexatious pilfering and robbing of those tribes who profess friendship but steal whenever an occasion presents, renders my task peculiarly laborious and difficult and requires a most severe and efficient police to keep out and punish fugitives and vagabonds from both nations.” Catching the miscreants was hard enough; punishing them was almost impossible. Current regulations required that those convicted be sentenced to hard labor on public projects, but there were neither public projects in the colony nor the personnel to supervise the labor. “We are from 40 to 50 leagues from Bexar, and have no jail, no troops to guard prisoners. . . . A condemnation to hard labor without an adequate guard to enforce the decree is only to exasperate a criminal, make him laugh at the laws and civil authorities, and turn him loose on society to commit new depredations. . . . Nothing has a more disorganizing effect than a weak and inefficient administration of the laws, as it discourages and disgusts the good and well disposed, and emboldens evil men and renders them arrogant and audacious.” The solution Austin recommended to Alamán was enhanced local authority: permission to administer corporal punishment upon the settlers and to banish intruders. “I think it would greatly tend to the harmony and good order of this part of the Province.”

In fact Austin already was imposing stripes on evildoers; he simply wanted official sanction for his policy. Yet he realized that punishment was a poor substitute for prevention of crime in the first place. And prevention started with keeping criminal types out of the colony. Austin instructed Josiah Bell, a friend from Missouri whom he named the colony's first justice of the peace, on what to look for in applicants for admission—and what to do when the applicants fell short. “The most unequivocal evidence of character must be produced in the first place, and those who come without any recommendation and who are unknown in this country must be informed that I gave Garner ten lashes for coming here without proper recommendations, and that unless they immediately depart and quit the country, they will be punished.” Whatever the principles of republicanism or the common law might dictate elsewhere, Austin refused to assume innocence pending proof of guilt. An unsavory reputation sufficed to provoke punishment. “Should a man of notorious bad character come in, I hereby fully authorize you to whip him not exceeding fifty lashes, and seize sufficient of his property to pay a guard to conduct him beyond the Trinity River.” Austin assumed that the word would get out. “One example of this kind is wanting badly, and after that we shall not be troubled more.” In a sentence that summarized his policy on immigration, as well as the attitude he was developing toward those who did get in, he stressed:
“Let us have no black sheep in our flock.”

Yet even some of the white sheep grew restive, especially when Austin began charging them for land the Mexican government gave him for free. He had his reasons, starting with the fact that planting a colony cost far more than he had reckoned. He was constantly spending money; traveling to and from Mexico City and supporting himself there for twelve months had been a sizable drain in itself. Through much of this period, he relied on the funds Joseph Hawkins contributed; but Hawkins died in early 1824, cutting off that source. As empresario, Austin was entitled to a great deal of land upon the completion of his contract with the Mexican government—that is, when the three hundred families were fairly settled—but even then he might be cash-poor, for with Mexico giving away land, there wouldn't be many people willing to pay for it. Consequently, Austin had to devise a scheme for coaxing money out of his immigrants.

His empresario agreement allowed him to charge a reasonable fee for the services—surveying, allotting, registering—he provided the immigrants. He decided to set the fee at twelve and a half cents per acre. Although this was a bargain in per-acre terms, it nonetheless required the typical family to come up with more than five hundred dollars for its league—a substantial sum for that time, place, and clientele. Austin was willing to accept goods in lieu of cash, and he offered installment plans for those who couldn't pay at once. “I will receive any kind of property that will not be a dead loss to me, such as horses, mules, cattle, hogs, peltry, furs, bees' wax, home-made cloth, dressed deer skins, etc.,” he announced. “Only a small part will be required in hand; for the balance I will wait one, two, and three years, according to the capacity of the persons to pay.”

Despite Austin's flexibility, many of the immigrants felt badly used. They knew that Austin was paying the Mexican government nothing for the land for which he was charging them hundreds of dollars, and though the acre price in Austin's colony was lower than anything they could find in the States, they resented his middleman's cut. Some suspected him of partiality in distributing the lands, of reserving the best parcels for friends and family. The small number of Americans whose presence in Texas preceded Austin's included several who wondered what right this newcomer had to pronounce on their actions. Aylett Buckner, with a farm on the Colorado, was a veteran of the Gutiérrez expedition. “I was one of the first men who built a cabin on this river, the first man who had a plough stuck in the field,” he wrote Austin. Buckner recounted the costs he had incurred making things easier for those who came after. “I have never asked the first cent for a man eating under my roof and have fed as many and I believe more people than any man in this colony. . . . I have lost as much and I believe more property by the depredations of Indians than every other man on this river.” Yet others were now benefiting unfairly from his hardships. “Some men get half a league and don't pay a cent because the other half is transferred to you or your brother. I know that lands are unequally divided. I do not consider myself a perfect simpleton, neither am I blind. My eyes are open and I look and watch with vigilance.” If Austin refused to deliver justice, Buckner would seek it elsewhere. “If you refuse granting me that which I think the Government will generously bestow on me, I shall apply to that authority.”