Lone Star Nation (3 page)

The region to which he pinned his hopes was Texas. Moses Austin knew little of Texas beyond that it was Spanish—a fact crucial to his plans. A treaty concluded just several months earlier had apparently marked the end of a decade and a half of bickering between the United States and Spain over the border between their respective territories. Jefferson had asserted that the southwestern boundary of America's Louisiana Purchase was the Rio Grande, but he did little to defend this interpretation, having his hands full with the British and the French on the high seas. His successor, James Madison, had even more trouble with the British, culminating in the War of 1812 (which didn't end before the redcoats chased the president from the White House and burned the mansion and the Capitol). Meanwhile, American friction with Spain focused on Florida, which General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, the military hero of the war and a rising political force in the West, and many others demanded be added to the American domain. By 1819 Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was willing to surrender whatever claim the United States might have had to Texas in exchange for a tidying up of the Florida question (in America's favor) and other details between the United States and Spain.

Moses Austin was that rare American west of the Mississippi who wanted Spain to keep Texas. By this time it was becoming an item of the American gospel—at least as that gospel was preached in the West—that American sovereignty must chase the setting sun. Westerners denounced the abandonment of Texas to Spain as a sellout of their region by New England (Adams was from Massachusetts), an ignoble surrender of territory honestly acquired by purchase from France.

Moses Austin dissented from the gospel. Whether or not he consciously thought himself so, he was a man of the border, an expert in the arbitrage of political and cultural differences. His successful start in Spanish Louisiana had resulted from his ability to broker between the Spanish on the west bank and the Americans on the east; his prospects declined when both banks became American. Others were more adept at business, at straightforward buying and selling, than he; what Austin required was the added complication of a frontier, a political border.

And so he was pleased to learn that the border between Texas and the United States had been preserved, and he prepared to exploit it. He would travel to Spanish Texas, as he had traveled to Spanish Louisiana two decades earlier, and he would present a plan for developing the country. He assumed that the same incentives applied now as had applied then: that the Spanish authorities, eager to increase the population and prosperity of their district, would welcome the immigration of responsible, productive individuals and families. For his part in arranging this boon, he hoped to be compensated in land, of which Texas had far more than the Spanish could ever use themselves.

He set off in the spring of 1820, traveling south to Little Rock, Arkansas, where his son Stephen, now an adult, was living, and where Moses contracted malaria. He spent the summer and part of the autumn regaining his strength. Not till November did he resume his journey, riding a horse borrowed from Stephen, carrying fifty dollars from Stephen, and accompanied by one of Stephen's slaves, a young man named Richmond, who rode a borrowed mule.

Moses and Richmond proceeded south to Natchitoches, on the Red River in the state of Louisiana. For more than a century the hundred miles between Natchitoches and Nacogdoches, the first town on the Texas side of the Sabine, had been a no-man's-land, inhabited by individuals who preferred the uncertainty and lawlessness of border regions. Although the Louisiana bank of the Sabine had calmed down somewhat, the Texas side remained desolate and wild, as Austin discovered on crossing over. Indeed, the entire five hundred miles to San Antonio de Béxar, the capital of Texas, was nearly deserted.

Austin's reception at Béxar, as the inhabitants called the town of two thousand, made him regret he had come. The governor, Antonio Martínez, refused to listen to his proposal. Texas had been plagued by American filibusters (from “free-booter” in the language of the Dutch, who had made a business of the piracy the term connoted), and Martínez had orders to allow no more Americans to enter Texas. If Austin had not been carrying the Spanish passport he had acquired twenty-three years earlier, Martínez might well have thrown him into prison; as it was, the governor told Austin to turn around and go home.

With nothing at home to go back to, Austin refused to let the conversation end so quickly. He spoke no Spanish and Martínez no English, but both spoke French, and in French Austin tried to warm the governor up. Martínez still wouldn't listen. His superior, Commandant Joaquín de Arredondo, had made it clear that no aid whatsoever was to be extended to any Americans, and Martínez was loath to cross Arredondo, a man of terrifying reputation. Merely talking to Austin risked trouble. Consequently, the more Austin tried to crack Martínez' reserve, the more anxious and angry Martínez became. Finally, denying Austin even the hospitality of one night in town, he ordered him to leave Béxar immediately.

Austin had no choice; the town was small enough that his every move was public knowledge. He found Richmond and told him to water, feed, and saddle the horse and mule for departure by dusk.

But then occurred something so unlikely that many contemporaries and even some later historians refused to believe it was a coincidence. Walking across the plaza of Béxar that waning afternoon in December 1820, Austin encountered a person he had met many years before in New Orleans. Philip Nering Bögel was a Dutchman born in the Netherlands' South American colony of Guiana and raised, for the most part, in Holland. As a young man, he joined the Dutch army and later became a tax collector. Evidently he collected more than he remitted to his superiors, for he suddenly fled Holland back to the New World, leaving behind a wife and children and a prosecutor waving a reward of one thousand gold ducats for his arrest.

By the time he resurfaced in Spanish Louisiana—shortly before Moses Austin's first visit—he was passing himself off as the Baron de Bastrop. Promotions of this nature weren't uncommon on the frontier, and the title stuck. He applied for and received permission to plant a colony in the Ouachita Valley and to engage in trade. He remained in Louisiana through the reversion of that territory to France, but when the United States acquired the country he crossed into Texas. He applied at San Antonio de Béxar for permission to found another colony, northeast of the town. Though his application was granted, the colony never amounted to much. Bastrop took up residence in Béxar, where he dabbled in business and served as assistant alcalde (the alcalde was an appointed mayor-cum-sheriff), as an unofficial one-man chamber of commerce, and as host to the strangers who periodically wandered through.

This was the man Austin encountered in December 1820 in the Béxar plaza, and he listened as Austin told his story. Austin explained that he hoped to bring three hundred American families to Texas and to be rewarded in land for doing so. Confident of his persuasiveness if he could only get a hearing with Governor Martínez, he asked Bastrop for help.

Bastrop arranged for Austin to stay in San Antonio over Christmas, just two days away. During that time the American convinced the Dutchman that his colonization scheme made sense. For several generations the Spanish government had tried to populate Texas in order to keep interlopers and Indians at bay and to lend credibility to Spanish claims of possession. But the efforts had always fallen short. Texas was far from the inhabited regions of Mexico, and it held few attractions that couldn't be matched by neighborhoods less remote. In part as a result—as Moses Austin had observed on his way south and west—large stretches of Texas were uninhabited. Yet they wouldn't remain so: already land-hungry Americans were crossing the Sabine illegally and seizing unoccupied tracts. By 1820 the question wasn't whether the Americans would come; the question was whether they would come with Spain's blessing and under some measure of Spanish control, or unblessed and uncontrolled.

Austin's arguments echoed some Bastrop had made on behalf of his own colonizing efforts. Moreover, as a businessman, if not a very dedicated or successful one, Bastrop appreciated the cardinal requirement of any business: customers. Whatever they might do for Spain, American settlers would help business in Béxar.

The day after Christmas, Bastrop took Austin back to see Governor Martínez. Precisely what Austin said to the governor has been lost to history, but doubtless it paralleled the petition he laid before Martínez (which Bastrop helped translate). In his proposal Austin spoke of the obvious intention of the Spanish king that Texas prosper, and he presented himself as “the agent of three hundred families who, with the same purpose in view, are desirous of seeing the intention of his Majesty fulfilled.” Austin's three hundred families were, at this point, merely notional, but he contended that they would be exemplary colonists. “All of them, or the greater part of them, have property. Those without it are industrious. As soon as they are settled, they bind themselves by oath to take up their arms in defense of the Spanish government against either the Indians, filibusters, or any other enemy that may plan hostilities—coming upon call and obeying the orders given them.”

Just why Martínez now found Austin's argument persuasive is hard to say. Certainly Bastrop's endorsement helped change his mind. Nor did it hurt that Martínez shared Austin's (and Bastrop's) views about the value of immigrants, and the governor couldn't foresee immigrants arriving under circumstances more favorable than those Austin outlined. “The proposal which he is making,” Martínez declared in a letter forwarding Austin's petition to Commandant Arredondo, “is, in my opinion, the only one which is bound to provide for the increase and prosperity in his settlement and even others in this Province. . . . Otherwise I look upon the appearance of such a favorable development as quite remote.”

With his petition in the hands of the Spanish bureaucracy, Austin headed for home to await the verdict. He left Béxar in company with a man named Kirkham, who called himself a commercial traveler but whose principal stock was stolen horses. Kirkham robbed Austin and Richmond in the middle of the night, taking their mounts and provisions and leaving them stranded in the wilderness. January temperatures on the broken prairies northeast of San Antonio rarely remain below freezing for long, but travelers caught out in the rain, as Austin and Richmond were, risk hypothermia nonetheless. When the travelers lack food, the cold and damp become doubly dangerous. Austin and Richmond struggled east but grew weaker by the mile. They contracted colds and then pneumonia—“flux,” they called it—which got worse with each creek and river forded or swum. By the time they collapsed in the doorway of one Hugh McGuffin, west of Natchitoches, Austin seemed, in words retold from a traveler who greeted them there, “a mere skeleton on the verge of death by starvation.”

Yet the skeleton housed a heart that quickened to think of what lay ahead. Recuperating at McGuffin's, Austin wrote a letter to Bastrop depicting the bright future of Texas upon the planting of the American colony. To encourage Bastrop's continued support, Austin invited him to invest, avowing “full confidence” that the project would return “thousands of dollars” to those who got in early. He said he would travel north to gather his belongings before coming back to Texas in the spring. “I shall, life and health admitting, most undoubtedly return from the upper country by May next, when I wish to remove with all my property to the Colorado.”

Unfortunately for Austin, life and health didn't admit. He began the journey north before he was ready, and relapsed en route. When he could travel again, he was well enough only to proceed by boat: down the Red River to the Mississippi, and up the Mississippi to home. Maria Austin, shocked at her husband's condition, ordered him at once to bed.

But he wouldn't stay in bed, sick though he was. He had been back less than a week when a messenger from Texas brought word that his petition had been approved. As Austin's luck would have it, the government of Spain had recently decided to encourage immigration to its American empire; Austin's petition provided an early opportunity to try out the new approach. In February 1821 Governor Martínez dispatched an envoy named Erasmo Seguín to find Austin and tell him that he might start signing up colonists.