The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (6 page)

Rangers scouting the country accepted temperatures in excess of a hundred degrees Fahrenheit as a normal condition of summer, when the sun beats down like a glowing ball. In the winter, they faced subzero temperatures in the north, and even in the southernmost sections of the state, sustained temperatures in the twenties and thirties are not uncommon. Often the cold arrives suddenly, with temperatures dropping as much as forty or fifty degrees within a few hours. Even in the driest months, rain is more of a curse than a blessing, for it is not the gentle showers of the East Coast or northern California, but sudden, torrential downpours bringing deadly flash floods.

And no matter where the Rangers went, they had to guard against attack by Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, and various other Indian bands, for the Anglo-Saxon colonists who established the first Texas Rangers inherited a war of extermination between white and Indian that was already almost a century old when the first English-speaking settlers arrived in the country.

RANGERS DID NOT
originate in Texas, but were a concept carried over from the British colonies in the East, where local militia forces called rangers protected the frontiers of Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and the Old Northwest. In 1759, during the French and Indian War, a battalion commanded by Maj. Robert Rogers served with distinction on the northwest frontier as Rogers’s Rangers. The English-speaking people who settled in Texas in the 1820s were predominantly Southern frontiersmen with a ranging tradition, and they brought with them a strong sense of community and of personal honor, together with a martial spirit that became infectious even among non-Southerners and pacifists. These traditions were the most basic foundations of what ultimately became the Texas Rangers.
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The original Texas Rangers were organized under Mexican law, because the state belonged to Mexico at the time. One of the Mexican motives for permitting these English-speaking pioneers to settle the area was frontier defense against Indian raids, which had been chronic since Spanish colonial times.

Although Europeans ventured into Texas as early as the 1520s, permanent settlement—and by extension Indian conflict—did not begin until the second decade of the eighteenth century. In 1716, in response to French incursions from the Mississippi Valley, the Spanish government placed Texas under the jurisdiction of the adjacent province of Coahuila, a situation that would continue off and on for the next 120 years. Two years later, the Spaniards initiated a formal and permanent entry into Texas, establishing the settlement that ultimately became San Antonio.
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The Spanish entry more or less coincided with the arrival in Texas of the vanguard of another group of invaders, the Kiowas and Comanches, nomadic wanderers who originated in what is now the northwestern United States. At some point in their history, they began separate migrations out onto the Plains to the southeast, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, the Spaniards were encountering them in Texas and New Mexico. Although the two tribes initially fought each other for domination of their new territory on the Southern Plains, by about 1790 they had confederated, forming an alliance that was to last until their defeat by the United States in the Red River War of 1874–75.
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One of the most pronounced aspects of Kiowa and Comanche society was its unending warfare. They were a raiding people, and a man’s prestige was determined by his ability as a warrior. Depredations against other peoples—Indian and white—became such a pronounced part of their culture that an annual raiding season was established, beginning in the spring when grass was high enough for their ponies to feed and warm, moonlit nights allowed them maximum mobility. Each year they burst out from their strongholds on the Plains of the American Midwest, rapidly covering thousands of miles and marauding with impunity to within five hundred miles of Mexico City.
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Although the Kiowas viewed Texas less as a potential homeland than as raiding grounds, some Comanche bands were determined to make it their own. As they moved into Texas, they began displacing numerically weaker native tribes. The Tonkawas and the Lipan Apaches, to name only two, were driven from their traditional lands by the Comanche wedge from the north. It was only a matter of time before this wave of newcomers would clash with the Spaniards, who then were entering the territory from the south.
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The pivotal confrontation between these two alien races occurred at a mission on the San Saba River, near what is now Menard, some 150 miles northwest of San Antonio. In the early-morning hours of March 16, 1758, the Comanches and allied tribes attacked the mission and massacred its people.
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This massacre opened a war between the whites and the Kiowa-Comanche confederation that would rage across Texas for more than a century.
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The hostilities would be passed down among the Indians from generation to generation. When the Spaniards ultimately abandoned Texas, their Mexican successors inherited the war, and they would in turn pass it on to the Anglo-Saxons. The area between the Red River and the Rio Grande became a battleground with no quarter given and none expected.

After the San Saba massacre, Spain made no further effort to colonize or settle the frontier. The Spaniards acquired Louisiana from the French at the end of the Seven Years War, removing the military necessity for settlement. No private colonizer wanted to leave the relative safety of the interior provinces and risk destruction in a wild unknown. In what is now Texas, the Spaniards were content to huddle around the only settlements strong enough to provide some semblance of security: Laredo, San Fernando de Béxar (San Antonio), and La Bahía (Goliad).
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OVER THE NEXT
seventy years, little changed in Texas, and by 1820 the Spanish empire was in its death throes, exhausted by the Napoleonic Wars and with most of its American possessions in armed rebellion. This only accelerated the neglect of its northernmost province. There had been a brief flurry of interest in Texas at the beginning of the century when Madrid ceded Louisiana back to France, resurrecting old border disputes. Then, to Spain’s outrage, the French sold the territory to the Americans, who soon convinced themselves that they had purchased Texas as well. In response, the Spaniards moved to strengthen their position in Texas. Anglo-Americans, who previously had been allowed to settle in the Spanish-controlled portions of the Mississippi Valley, were prohibited from obtaining land grants in Spanish territory, and the government planned accelerated colonization of Texas to serve as a barrier against the acquisitive, expansionist Americans. But like so many previous efforts, this one played out simply because Spain was overextended. The empire had become a liability.
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The American threat was removed in 1819, when the Adams-Onís Treaty established the Sabine and Red rivers as the border between Spanish Texas and American Louisiana. Thus, after more than a century, most boundaries were finally established, but others remained vague. In the far south the Nueces River was generally considered the division between Texas and Nuevo Santander (now the Mexican state of Tamaulipas), and in the southwest the Rio Grande marked the line with Coahuila. In the west, however, no one was sure where Texas ended and New Mexico began, and no one really cared. Here the Comanches and Apaches reigned supreme, and there was little the government in San Antonio could do about it.

Yet as the Spanish empire drew to a close, an opportunity to settle Texas suddenly presented itself in the person of Moses Austin, a speculating chameleon who had been born a British subject in colonial Connecticut and at various times had held either Spanish or U.S. nationality, according to what best served his interests. His arrival in San Antonio on December 23, 1820, was opportune, because Spain was searching for a solution to the settlement problem, and Austin wanted land.

MOSES AUSTIN WAS
fifty-nine when he came to Texas. He had followed the frontier until he arrived in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, then part of Spanish Louisiana, where he became a Spanish subject, and developed lead mines in the vicinity. Louisiana’s transfer, first to France and then to the United States, did not affect Austin, who prospered until the War of 1812 paralyzed trade along the Mississippi. A postwar depression aggravated the situation, and when the Bank of St. Louis, in which Austin was a major stockholder, failed in 1818, he was ruined. His attention now turned to Texas. Once before, he had succeeded in Spanish territory, and he believed he could do it again.
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Upon his arrival in San Antonio, Austin presented himself to Governor Antonio Martínez in the Spanish residency that still stands on the city’s Military Plaza. The immediate timing was bad. Spain had only recently put down the latest in a procession of uprisings led by adventurers from the United States who had made trouble in Texas over the past seventeen years. Despite the overall relaxation of restrictions under the Adams-Onís Treaty, the civil and military officials responsible for security in Texas and the other northeastern provinces took a dim view of Americans. Austin was an American. Governor Martínez listened perfunctorily, and then ordered him to leave the country.

Dejected, Austin was walking across the plaza from the residency to his lodgings when he encountered the Baronde Bastrop, an old acquaintance from Missouri days. Although he now lived in genteel poverty in San Antonio, Bastrop had influence with the governor and offered to intervene.
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BASTROP WAS ONE
of the most important people in the development of Texas, yet he seems almost deliberately elusive. Indeed, little was known about him until the latter part of the twentieth century, when records were located in the Netherlands, his country of origin. It is now reasonably certain that his name was Philip Hendrik Nering Boegel (Hispanicized as Felipe Enrique Neri), and he was born in Paramaribo, Suriname, in 1759. His will, prepared shortly before his death in 1827, stated that Bastrop was a hereditary title that came from his father.
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To some pioneers, however, he claimed that he had entered the Prussian service as a youth and had been ennobled by Frederick the Great.

The truth, however, is more prosaic. “Baron de Bastrop” was a title he bestowed on himself, for Philip Hendrik Nering Boegel was hiding from the law. After growing up in the Netherlands, he was appointed collector-general of taxes for the province of Frisia. Accused of embezzlement, he fled the country about 1793, arriving in Louisiana, where he became a Spanish subject. He was granted thirty square miles, but after several years abandoned his grant and moved to Texas. Some said he had lost his Louisiana holdings in title disputes once the United States took over the territory, and was bitter against the United States because of it. Others maintained that he crossed into Texas when Louisiana reverted briefly back to France, possibly finding that his adopted Spanish nationality was politically safer than coming under French jurisdiction with its Napoleonic ties to Holland.
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Whatever Bastrop’s past, his chance meeting with Moses Austin in the Military Plaza bound his future firmly to Texas. He intervened with the governor using several arguments. First, he said the Comanches were becoming increasingly brazen in harassing the settlements, and Americans had a proven record as Indian fighters. Second, Spanish subjects simply were not immigrating to Texas; after more than a century the province was still almost empty. Third, American colonization had been successful during the Spanish regime in Louisiana. Finally, and no doubt the clincher, Austin had been a Spanish subject in good standing once before; he would not do anything to undermine the status quo.
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The next day, Austin was back at the residency, showing the Spanish passport he originally had used to obtain his Ste. Genevieve grant, declaring he was a Roman Catholic and a former Spanish subject, and requesting a grant on which to settle some three hundred families who would emigrate from the United States and become Spanish subjects. Governor Martínez convened his council and eventually agreed to forward Austin’s application to the military headquarters for the northeastern provinces in Monterrey, where the authorities eventually approved it.

Austin, meanwhile, had returned to the United States, where he began preparations for a massive movement of people and equipment to the new country. By now, however, he was suffering from a severe cold, which, aggravated by his age and the exhaustion and exposure of the trip to Texas, developed into pneumonia. On June 10, 1821, he died, leaving instructions that his son, Stephen, take over the Texas project.
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STEPHEN F. AUSTIN
is a shadowy, one-dimensional figure, despite the fact that his entire life is thoroughly documented. Texans speak of him respectfully, generally calling him by his full name, including the middle initial, but he is more a symbol than a man. Upon his death at the age of forty-three, Sam Houston called him “the Father of Texas.” The capital is named for him. And it is generally agreed that without Austin the development of Texas would have been substantially delayed, and neither Houston nor any other of the early leaders and heroes would have been important to the process. Yet he remains elusive, never completely studied or understood. Part of that was the character of the man himself. Blacksmith and sometime Ranger Noah Smithwick remembered, “Dark hair and eyes, sparely built, and unassuming in manner, there was little in Austin’s outward appearance to indicate the tremendous energy of which he was possessed.”
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