Lone Star Nation (2 page)

In 1797 the Mississippi formed the boundary between the United States and Spanish Louisiana. The Mississippi Valley had been explored and claimed by the French in the seventeenth century, and it was one of the prizes of the subsequent wars among the Europeans and their American kin. When the French lost the French and Indian War (also called the Seven Years' War, despite lasting nine years), Britain took the eastern half of the valley and Spain got the western half. When the British lost the American Revolutionary War, the United States acquired the eastern half, with Spain keeping the west. Yet French interest hadn't vanished, nor had French influence. The French language was still commonly spoken along the Mississippi, and many officials of the government of Spanish Louisiana, headquartered at St. Louis, were in fact French.

St. Louis, founded a century earlier by Robert Cavelier de La Salle, showed the benefits of location in commanding the trade of the Missouri, Illinois, and Mississippi Rivers. “It is fast improving and will soon be a large place,” Austin wrote upon arrival. The prospect piqued his desire to see the mines he had come so far to examine. François Valle, the commandant of the district, was at Ste. Genevieve, on the river a day's ride south; Austin went there and made such a good case for himself that Valle provided fresh horses for the final forty miles.

Knowing the mining trade, Austin could see almost at a glance that the tales he had heard of Spanish lead deposits weren't exaggerated. “I found the mines equal to my expectation in every respect.” The ore was close to the surface and was of “better quality than any I have ever seen.” The deposit was called Mine à Breton, after its discoverer, a French soldier named Breton who was said to have chased a deer into the district, fallen over a rock, and detected a remarkable resemblance between the rock and his ammunition. Austin was more impressed by the recent history of the place, starting with the production just that last summer of four hundred thousand pounds of lead, and by the inefficiency of the miners' techniques, which meant that the deposits would be even more productive in the hands of someone who knew what he was doing. Observation and brief experiment convinced Austin that he could triple the mines' output.

Returning to Ste. Genevieve, Austin presented a plan to Valle whereby Spain would grant Austin land and mineral rights in exchange for his commitment to develop the mines and furnish Spain with the lead shot and sheets its army and navy required. With Spain enmeshed in the wars of the French Revolution, Austin guessed that this strategic angle would appeal to Valle. It did—almost as much as Austin's offer to cut Valle in as a partner. Valle endorsed Austin's plan and sent it south to his superiors in New Spain.

Austin returned to Virginia to await the verdict of the Spanish government. Six months later it arrived. Austin was awarded less land than he had asked for—one league instead of sixteen—but, given that he had requested far more land than he needed, he was happy to accept Spain's terms.

In the summer of 1798 Moses Austin led his family and followers out of Virginia and into the mountains of Tennessee. The family consisted of Maria, five-year-old Stephen, three-year-old Emily, and Austin's sister and her husband and two sons; the followers were some thirty free workers and slaves from Austinville. They went to establish a mining operation at Mine à Breton, but also a colony, since nothing in the way of a settled community existed there. Moses Austin would be employer, political leader, and patriarch.

The journey lasted three harrowing months. Austin's sister died of disease, as did one of her sons. The other son drowned in the Ohio. All the travelers were gravely weakened by the bad food, bad weather, and bad luck of the trip; when the party landed on the western, Spanish bank of the Mississippi, several could hardly walk.

Spanish officials were scarce in Upper Louisiana, and Austin, after renouncing his American allegiance and declaring himself a subject of the Spanish crown, was essentially free to govern his colony as he chose. This brought him no more than the usual conflicts with family and his own workers, but the handful of seasonal French miners who had previously worked the Mine à Breton objected. They hadn't entirely accepted the notion of Spanish rule, and now to find themselves confronted by this American—whatever nationality he currently claimed—sat even less well.

More troublesome than the Frenchmen were the local Indians, who hadn't accepted
any
of the whites. The Osages and their neighbors didn't entirely resist the white presence, for they valued the trade goods the whites provided: the knives, cooking pots, firearms, beads, and other items that made aboriginal life easier or more pleasant. But where the French and Spanish had come primarily to trade, these Americans were coming to settle. The effect on the neighborhood could only be disruptive.

The Osages attacked in 1799, then again the next year, and the year after that. The most serious assault occurred in May 1802. Stephen Austin was eight years old at the time, and the experience stuck in his memory. “In 1802,” he wrote later, “the village of Mine à Breton was attacked by a large party of Indians, their chief object being to plunder my father's house and store, and to kill the Americans, or Bostonians, as they called them.” Stephen Austin continued: “He had, however, taken the precaution to provide himself, in addition to other arms, with a three-pounder [a cannon that fired three-pound balls], and being fully prepared for a defense, the Indians failed in their efforts and were driven back.”

Against the Indians and the French, Moses had his hands full defending his colony. Yet he had never expected the frontier to be for the faint-hearted, and he proceeded to develop the lead mine according to his initial blueprint. He poured all of his own money into the works and borrowed many thousands of dollars from others. He built high-efficiency furnaces, which recovered far more metal from each ton of ore than his predecessors had managed (and allowed him to profitably mine the tailings of previous operations on the site). So efficient was Austin's operation that other miners in the region brought him their ore to smelt; even after he took his 50 percent cut, they came out ahead. He built a tall tower for the production of shot (molten lead was allowed to dribble from trays at the top of the tower, and in the weightlessness of free fall congealed into spherical beads that were collected at the bottom). Within several years his operation achieved an annual production of eight hundred thousand pounds, making Austin a very wealthy man. In 1810 he estimated his net value at $190,000.

But nothing stayed the same for long on the frontier—not even the location of the frontier. Within a half decade of his arrival, Austin found himself once more on American soil. In 1800 France's ambitious new ruler, Napoleon Bonaparte, extorted Louisiana back from Spain, and in 1803, after a sudden change of plans, he sold it to the United States. Moses Austin, having abandoned the country of his birth and sworn fealty to Spain, found himself living again on American territory. Had Austin been more patriotic, he might have celebrated this unexpected reunion; but had he been more patriotic he might never have left American soil. In fact, Austin's loyalty was as fluid as that of many frontiersmen, who acted like Americans on the American side of the border, like Spanish on the Spanish side, and even like Indians among the Indians.

In at least one sense, American sovereignty posed a threat to Austin's position—a threat worse than that of the Indians or the French. His control of Mine à Breton rested on Spanish authority; whether the Americans, who were notorious for ignoring titles granted under predecessor regimes, would accept his control was an open question. Some did; others didn't. The latter included a Tennesseean named John Smith, who had a murderous temper and the ear of James Wilkinson, the newly appointed governor of Upper Louisiana. Wilkinson had been a general in the Revolutionary War, a land speculator and merchant afterward, and an intriguer all his life. During the 1790s he engaged the Spanish authorities of Louisiana in negotiations that seemed at least faintly treasonous to his many American enemies, but influential friends in the American government deemed his local knowledge essential for a territorial governor and won him the job.

Between them, Smith and Wilkinson made Austin's life a trial. Smith stirred the French miners against Austin, challenged the validity of Austin's title, and apparently attempted to provoke Austin to a duel. “What have I done to this
monster
in society?” Austin moaned to a friend. Austin declined to duel, but he had no effective answer to the campaign of sabotage and character assassination Smith mounted against him, with Wilkinson's help.

Austin's deeper problems derived from the tumultuous state of the American economy, which in turn reflected the unsettled condition of American diplomacy. During Thomas Jefferson's second term as president the serial fighting between Britain and France became a battle to the death; in their extremity both sides preyed on American shipping, with Britain seizing American vessels bound for France and France waylaying American ships headed for Britain. Jefferson judged that American security required keeping clear of Europe's wars, and he persuaded Congress to embargo trade with Europe. The embargo proved an economic disaster, plunging American seaports into depression and generating shock waves that spread up American rivers as far as St. Louis. The lead market collapsed, leaving Moses Austin with tons of metal he couldn't unload and stacks of bonds he couldn't redeem.

His prospects improved when a chastened Jefferson and Congress rescinded the embargo, but the War of 1812 (against Britain), after briefly driving prices up, produced another collapse. British warships strangled American trade, and men and money fled Upper Louisiana for the theaters and markets of the war. Moses Austin tried to solve his manpower shortage by leasing a small regiment of slaves, and to augment the local money supply by helping establish a St. Louis bank. Yet the slaves required more upkeep than he had reckoned, and his bank ran into liquidity troubles. The result was that Austin's debt simply grew deeper. By 1818 he was compelled to put the Mine à Breton up for sale. “Would to God my business was closed,” he lamented. “I would leave this country in a week.”

Potential buyers, however, guessed that if Moses Austin couldn't make lead pay, neither could they, and the mine went begging. Austin's debts continued to grow even as his ability to repay them diminished. The end—or what certainly seemed the end—came in March 1820 when the sheriff arrested and jailed him for nonpayment. Once the greatest man in the district, Austin now shared quarters with drunks and common criminals. The fall would have broken the spirit of most men, and it came close to breaking Austin's. He pleaded with his daughter's husband to hasten to his rescue lest the sheriff auction the lead works to pay down the debts. His plea failed, and the richest mine in the North American heartland was hammered away for pennies on Austin's dollars.

Austin won his freedom, but it held no pleasure for him. He refused to live a pauper where he had been a prince. “To remain in a country where I had enjoyed wealth, in a state of poverty, I could not submit to,” he recalled. Two decades earlier, Moses Austin had started a new life in a new country; he was convinced he must do so again.

Yet there was a difference to the moving this time. The trek to Spanish Louisiana had been a hopeful journey by a young man in the prime of confidence and energy; this move was the desperate act of a man drowning in failure and debt, a fifty-eight-year-old with no margin for further failure and nothing to fall back on should this last scheme go awry.