Lone Star Nation (7 page)

When we reached the Mission we found near the entrance to the stockade the corpse of the Reverend Father President. Farther inside we found, burned to cinders, the bodies of Lázaro de Ayalas and a son of Juan Antonio Gutiérrez. We recognized the former by his head and the latter by a leg, which the flames had not completely consumed. We buried the bodies in the cemetery near the church. The ground was strewn with smoldering debris from its ruins. We moved onward to inspect the other buildings, only to find them all destroyed and the wreckage still burning. . . . As we continued our search, we came upon the corpse of Juan Antonio Gutiérrez, without eyes or scalp, for it is the custom of the barbarous Indians, when celebrating a triumph, to take the scalps of their victims. We buried this corpse also. Then we went on with our exploration and found 18 dead oxen, and even the cats were dead also.

The debacle on the San Sabá cured the Spanish of any desire to tangle with the Comanches. The Texas frontier retreated to the line of the Camino Real, which became the de facto southern boundary of the Comanchería, or Comanche lands. Not that the Comanches respected that boundary, or any other: they continued to raid, more or less at will, to the Rio Grande and beyond. Their warriors would visit San Antonio and saunter about the streets of the town, frightening the inhabitants and seizing whatever caught their eye. So cowed were the Spanish that the Comanches, despite a new and especially devastating outbreak of smallpox, were able to win a treaty from the Spanish in 1785 that specified large payments of tribute in the form of trade goods. The treaty didn't preserve the Spanish settlements from horse raids, but it did buy some protection for human life and limb.

The lopsided peace lasted till the end of the century, when the diplomacy of the Atlantic world delivered Louisiana to the United States and made the Americans near neighbors of the Comanches. Thomas Jefferson, amateur scientist as well as professional politician, was interested in the Comanches as much for their anthropological characteristics as for their military prowess, and he directed American explorers in the vicinity of the Comanchería and American officers and agents around its borders to report to him what they observed of the tribe. John Sibley, a Louisiana-based army surgeon and Indian agent, in 1808 licensed a trader, Anthony Glass, to deal in Comanche horses. Glass traveled to Texas, keeping a journal along the way. On the Trinity River he encountered a Comanche camp. “We found about twenty tents,” he wrote. “They are made of different sizes of buffalo skins and supported with poles made of red cedar, light and neat which they carry with them. Their tents are round like a wheatstack, and they carry their tents always with them.” On the upper Colorado River, Glass and the group he was traveling with were overtaken by a large party of Comanches—he called them “Hietans,” after the Wichita word for the Comanches—who had learned that he was in the area and who wanted to do business. By day the Comanches bartered; after sunset they played. “They amused themselves at night by a kind of gambling at which a great number of horses and mules were lost and won. The game was very simple and called Hiding the Bullet; and the adverse party guesses which hand it was in. They were very dexterous at this kind of gaming.”

With each day, more Comanches appeared. “We have with us now ten chiefs and near six hundred men with a large portion of women and children,” Glass wrote. “I meet with them every day and we hold long conversations together. They profess great friendship for the Americans, or Anglos as they call us.” Some of the Comanches had visited Sibley at Natchitoches the previous year and had appreciated his friendliness. “They are very desirous of trading with us but say Nackitosh [the prevailing pronunciation for Natchitoches] is too far off.”

This last comment explained the Comanches' friendliness—and also explained something that struck Glass more than once on this trip. “Here I found myself at the distance of many hundred miles from any white settlement, surrounded by thousands of Indians, with nearly two thousand dollars worth of merchandise and a large drove of horses and mules fatting away in flesh, and no assistance but Young and Lucas [his two partners].” Why didn't the Indians simply kill him and take his goods and horses? Glass knew the answer, though he often wondered if it would keep him whole till his return to civilization. The Comanches and other Indians suffered Glass—and traders like him—to enter Texas because they wanted the merchandise the traders brought; if they killed the traders, they'd have to travel to Louisiana themselves. They preferred to have their purchases delivered.

Yet Glass discovered something else about the Comanches that constantly vexed relations between them and the whites. A group of Comanches stole two dozen of Glass's horses. Several weeks later he received some of the lost animals back, courtesy of the chiefs he had met earlier. “The principal chief told me he was truly sorry but that there were bad men in all nations, and amongst them they have no laws to punish stealing.” In fact the Comanches had no laws to punish much of anything, for they had next to nothing in the way of government. The separate bands of Comanches were laws unto themselves, and what one band pledged—with respect to the whites, for instance—often had no effect on the actions of other bands. Nor, for that matter, did commitments made by the chief of a band necessarily bind the other members of that band, who followed whom they wanted when it struck their fancy. Natural anarchists, the Comanches recognized very little in the way of human authority, either among themselves or with regard to those other invaders who vied with them for control of Texas.

C h a p t e r   4

Don Estevan

I
n certain respects Stephen Austin could not have been less like his father. Moses was innately audacious, a gambler who crossed half a continent to build a business empire in the wilderness, who rode the western boom to become the richest man in the district, only to ride the bust into bankruptcy and disgrace, and then turned to Texas to try it all again. Stephen, on the other hand, was cautious, diffident, self-doubting. His caution owed much to his father's failure, but his diffidence and doubting were his own. He never possessed the can-do optimism that characterized his father (and the frontier generally); he constantly questioned himself and his actions. His appearance suggested a poet rather than a pioneer. Five feet eight inches tall and slight of build, he had brown ringlets for hair, an aquiline nose, hazel eyes, and skin that burned far too easily for a trailblazer and colonizer. Where the Texas project came naturally to Moses, Stephen, left to himself, would never have dreamed of anything so bold. If not for his father's deathbed request, he likely would have pursued a career of solid innocuousness. He would have become a lawyer, perhaps a state judge, and spent his life pondering the perplexities of human nature, his own included.

After his Virginia birth and the harrowing trek across the Mississippi, Stephen Austin grew up among the Frenchmen, Spaniards, Indians, and African slaves that inhabited the neighborhood of Mine à Breton. Moses and Maria educated Stephen as best they could, but Moses insisted, as the lad approached eleven, that he be sent east to receive real schooling. A suitable place was found at an academy for young men in Connecticut. Stephen suffered the homesickness that has tested boarding-schoolers since parents first shipped their children away; he also received the traditional remonstrances from home. “I hope and pray you will improve every moment of time to the utmost advantage and that I shall have the satisfaction of seeing that my expectations are not disappointed,” Moses wrote. “Remember, my dear son, that the present is the moment to lay the foundation for your future greatness in life, that much money must be expended before your education is finished, and that time lost can never be recalled.” On Stephen would rest responsibility for the family. “I hope to God I shall be spared until I see you arrive at an age to give protection to your dear mother and sister and little brother Elijah Brown. Remember that to you they will look for protection should it so happen that my life should be shortened. Keep in mind that this may happen.”

What the eleven-year-old made of this counsel is difficult to know; that he saved the letter suggests he took it at least partly to heart. And when, after three years, his tutors declared him ready for college, he accepted his father's decision for him to attend Transylvania University in Kentucky, rather than Yale, as his mother desired. The cash flow from the lead mines was diminishing, and the college in Lexington was cheaper than Yale. At Transylvania Stephen handled himself in an “exemplary and praiseworthy manner,” according to his preceptors. But his higher education was cut short after a year and a half. The lead business had gone from bad to worse, and the mine needed new investors. Moses had to travel east to find them; Stephen must come home and manage the operation in Moses' absence.

Sixteen was hardly too young to start a career in those days, although it wasn't the career Stephen had envisioned. He wanted to be a lawyer and hoped to apprentice for the profession. But for now the lead mines—that is, Moses—called, and Stephen couldn't refuse. He worked at headquarters until, during the summer of 1811, Moses consigned him a cargo of lead to float to New Orleans. Troubles delayed the departure: Stephen contracted malaria, and then a large portion of the downstream population caught yellow fever. Winter brought the yellow fever under control, as it usually did, but that winter also brought something quite extraordinary for the Mississippi Valley: a series of very large earthquakes. The tremors were centered southwest of New Madrid in southern Missouri, yet were so strong they rang church bells in Boston. They also rerouted the Mississippi River and threw river traffic into a horrible tangle.

By the time Stephen got away, in April 1812, the river was spring full and the ride daunting. “This is one of the worst eddies in the river and ought carefully to be guarded against by hugging the left shore very close,” Stephen wrote of a stretch above Cape Girardeau, in a journal he kept of the voyage. He managed to escape the eddies and guide his barge nearly to New Orleans, only to strike a sandbank almost within sight of the Crescent City. The barge started taking on water and, predictably for a box filled with lead, sank.

It might have remained on the river bottom had Congress not recently declared war against Britain. The local price for lead plunged as cargoes backed up on the docks, but Stephen guessed that the war would push the price higher. “Sheet lead will sell well, and also shot,” he told Moses. Accordingly he returned upriver to the site of the sinking and, after considerable effort, raised most of the lead.

The trouble and expense went to naught. Stephen's prediction about the demand for lead proved wrong, and after several weeks in New Orleans without finding a buyer, he turned north for home.

The nineteen-year-old was a likely candidate for military service against the British and their Indian allies, and he enlisted. On account of his business experience—and perhaps, too, on account of his comparatively delicate appearance—he was made quartermaster of his regiment in the territorial volunteers. He learned what moving men and animals through unsettled country required: how an army marches on its stomach but sleeps on its back, how volunteers can be cajoled but less effectively ordered, how horses are faster than mules but mules more reliable. He also learned about the evanescent nature of militia service. When his regiment encountered insufficient fighting to keep the men interested, it melted away as they returned to their civilian occupations. Stephen Austin soon followed their example.

The end of the war raised lead prices but not enough to rescue the Austin business. Moses, discouraged and distracted, leased the operation to Stephen, who accepted the transfer with ambivalence. “I have taken possession of the mines and the whole establishment here,” he wrote his brother-in-law, James Bryan, “and commenced business under the style of S. F. Austin & Co., and am flattering myself with the pleasing hope of being able by the end of this year to free the family from every embarrassment.” Yet the task would require all his energy and wit. “I shall literally bury myself this spring and summer in the mines.”

He nonetheless found time to enter public service, gaining election to the territorial legislature. With many—perhaps most—of the members, he saw public service as a complement to his private enterprises. He drafted a petition to Congress to raise the duty on imported lead, arguing that encouragement of the lead industry would “add another most important item to the prosperity and independence of the Nation.” It went without his saying that a higher tariff would also contribute to the prosperity and independence of the Austin family.

But neither Stephen's work in the mines nor his appeal to Congress brought relief to the business. The gloom that already afflicted Moses descended on Stephen. “My opinion of mankind has, unfortunately perhaps, been as bad as it could be for some years,” he told James Bryan, “but the longer I live the worse it grows.” His father's debts, which had become his own, weighed upon him—yet, paradoxically, gave him a reason to carry on. “As for myself, I believe I am nearly indifferent what becomes of me, or whether I live or die, unless I am to be of use to my family by living.” Usefulness took one form above all: paying off the family debt. “When the day arrives that the whole family are out of debt I mean to
celebrate it
as my
wedding
day—which never will come until then.”

In marrying Moses' debt, Stephen bound himself—without realizing it—to Moses' Texas venture. While Moses was dreaming of Texas and what a man might accomplish there, Stephen attempted a fresh start in Arkansas. He acquired an interest in properties that showed promise as town sites, including one on the Arkansas River at Little Rock. But though the town flourished, other men were quicker and shrewder than he at extracting the profits. He won appointment to be circuit court judge, only to have his court closed by the territorial legislature almost before he robed up.

He moved farther south, to New Orleans, where the elder brother of a college classmate took him in as an apprentice lawyer. Austin's sponsor, Joseph Hawkins, was an attorney with standing in the community. “He is not rich,” Stephen explained to his mother, “but he has a most generous heart. He has made me this offer: if I will remain with him, he will board me, permit me the use of his books, and money for clothes, give me all the instruction in his power until I am well fitted to commence the practice of law in this country; for my board and the use of his books he will charge nothing, and for the money he advances he will wait until I make enough by my profession to repay him.” Having failed at business, Stephen saw the law as a means to make good what Moses had lost. “If I am left alone a few years I may get up and pay all off.”

Yet he was not left alone. At the very moment that Stephen was launching his career as a lawyer, Moses was winning approval for his Texas scheme, and catching pneumonia. In May 1821 Moses wrote to Stephen from his sickbed, relating his success with the Spanish government and urging his son to join him in what would be a crowning achievement. “I now can go forward with confidence,” Moses said, “and I hope and pray you will discharge your doubts as to the enterprise and, if any means can be commanded, use your utmost to have every thing brought into motion. . . . Times are changing. A new chance presents itself. Nothing is wanting but concert and firmness.” Less than a month after receiving this letter, Stephen learned that Moses had died, in the letter in which Maria related Moses' final request.

Whether filial obligation alone would have deflected Stephen from his path toward law is hard to say; in any event, Joseph Hawkins seconded Moses' advice about looking to Texas for salvation. Hawkins seems to have had the best interests of his protégé at heart—“our intercourse has resulted in mutually warm and I trust lasting attachment,” Hawkins assured Maria—but like nearly everyone else in the West, he couldn't resist a promising speculation in land. Moses had cut Hawkins in on the deal, and though Hawkins disliked losing a bright young assistant, he essentially pushed Stephen out the door toward Texas. He also put up the cash for the first stage of the colonization. “I have advanced Stephen all the funds he desired for the expedition,” Hawkins wrote Maria, “and have promised to furnish more as he requires them.”

A more forceful person might have resisted the pressure impelling him west, but not Stephen Austin. His legal career cut short, his family in debt, his father giving orders from beyond the grave, he put down his books and headed for Texas.

Austin's timing in launching the Texas venture could hardly have been better. In the aftermath of the War of 1812 with Britain and the 1819 treaty with Spain, American affairs relating to the West were at once settled and uncertain. The British war had demonstrated that the United States was not going to acquire Canada, having tried and failed three times to do so during the course of that conflict. The Spanish treaty gave the United States Florida, rounding out American holdings east of the Mississippi. It also declared Texas definitively part of New Spain.

Yet mere declarations could never be definitive in the face of America's hunger for land. The Canada question had been settled by force of British arms, the Florida question by force of American arms. And the settlement of those two questions channeled American expansionist energies toward Texas, where neither Spanish arms nor American—nor Comanche, for that matter—had established a decisive advantage. It didn't take much imagination to guess that Texas would be fought over before its fate was settled.