The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (8 page)

“The fight was an entire surprise [to the Indians],” Moore later recalled. “We all felt it was an act of justice and of self-preservation. We were too weak to furnish goods for Carankawaes [Karankawas], and had to be let alone to get bread for ourselves. . . .

“This was the first fight with the Indians in Austin’s colony.”
³⁸

DESPITE SUCH PUNITIVE
actions, the Karankawas still moved openly near the mouth of the Colorado and Matagorda Bay, and Morrisson, whose company was charged with keeping them under control, could do little about it. On August 3, he wrote Kuykendall that his men had discovered a party of Karankawas by the bay, but because the powder was now completely depleted he felt it was not “altogether safe to attack them in our present fix, if you would come down and join us with a party of your men immediately I think we would be able to give them a good drubbing and clear them from our Coast.”
³⁹

Austin arrived at the Colorado settlements the following day. Returning from Mexico City, he had paused in Monterrey to clarify his authority with military officials of the independent Mexican government.
⁴⁰
This conference gave him essentially full dictatorial powers to maintain order, with the exception of capital cases, in which the record of trial would be referred to the authorities in San Antonio.
⁴¹

Determined to use his new power to assist the beleaguered Morrisson (and to remind the colonists of their dependence on himself), he issued a proclamation on August 5, pledging his own resources to pay ten additional men for Morrisson’s company “to act as rangers for the common defence.” Not having cash, he offered each man $15 a month payable in land from his holdings.
⁴²
This proclamation is significant because it appears to be the first time the word “rangers” was applied to a Texas defense force.

It is uncertain whether the ten rangers were ever enlisted. No record has ever been found indicating that this detachment was ever formed.
⁴³
In a letter to military authorities in Monterrey in November, Austin indicated he had had second thoughts about organizing them on his own and wanted formal government sanction before recruiting them. So far, he said, the only full-time defense force was Morrisson’s original unit mustered the previous May by order of then governor Trespalacios, and who “as of now have not received nothing in pay.” Besides failing to pay the men, the government had provided only eighteen pounds of powder for ammunition, and that powder was of too coarse a grain to be serviceable for their rifles.
⁴⁴

Far from being able to maintain order, Austin told the military authorities:

The roads are full of errant thieves united with the Indians, and without a small force of mounted troops to clean-up and guard them, I cannot respond to the security of travelers. . . . If it is possible to permit me to continue in service the 14 men and augment them with 10 more and a Sergeant, I can respond to the security of the roads.
⁴⁵

In other words, he needed rangers.

Chapter 2

Indian Raids and Revolution

It is estimated that nine tenths of the fatal encounters between
colonists and Indians between 1821 and 1824 involved Karankawas. By late June 1824, depredations had reached such an extent that Austin organized a formal campaign against them. Capt. Amos Rawls was detailed to take a detachment of rangers and chase a band that had been stealing cattle. The rangers found the Indians, and in the ensuing fight one warrior was killed and a settler was permanently crippled by an arrow through the elbow. The Karankawas fled into the canebrakes, and Rawls sent for reinforcements. Austin dispatched more volunteers, who moved against the main Indian camp on the coast. This unit got into a fight near the mouth of the Colorado River, and five warriors were killed.¹

In August, Indian movements indicated about fifty Karankawas planned a retaliatory raid against both the lower and upper settlements of the Colorado. Austin himself organized a company of sixty-two men, which he divided to reconnoiter both banks of the river. Finding nothing, the company reunited and scouted southwest toward the Lavaca River.

“Most of our route was through a prairie country without road or path,” Gib Kuykendall recalled. “Bordering many of the creeks which we crossed were very dense thickets. Austin detailed pioneers to open roads through such places.”²

By September 7, Austin concluded that the Indians had left the area and moved toward the San Antonio River, which runs through the
tejano
town of Goliad, where a mission had been established in the eighteenth century to evangelize the Karankawas. By now, however, Austin’s provisions were almost exhausted, and he ordered his company back to San Felipe to resupply and gather reinforcements. Once that was done, he planned a direct march 110 miles southwest to Goliad.

The company, when it left San Felipe for Goliad in mid-September, was augmented by thirty armed and mounted slaves under the leadership of their owner, Col. Jared C. Groce. September is one of the hottest months in Texas, and the sun beat down and baked the prairies along the route. A short distance above the present city of Victoria, “one of our men fainted and fell from his horse,” Gib Kuykendall remembered. “He was bled and soon revived.”³

Camp that night was on the banks of the Guadalupe River, a little over thirty miles short of their goal. The men were in a good mood. William Pettus, known to the others as Uncle Buck, and Gustavus Edwards ran a foot race. Both were middle-aged, overweight, and hopelessly out of shape, and their comrades thought it was hilarious.

The following morning, the company was intercepted some twelve or fifteen miles outside of Goliad by a courier from the local authorities, who requested that the men stay away from the town. They went into camp on a creek about four miles out, and soon they were visited by the
alcalde
and mission priests. The Karankawas had taken refuge in the mission and had asked the priests and civil authorities to propose a truce whereby they would never again go east of the San Antonio River. Austin accompanied the Mexicans back to town to finalize the agreement. In the meantime, the Karankawas had reconsidered, realizing the San Antonio River would severely restrict their hunting and fishing grounds, and asked that instead the line be extended eastward to the Lavaca River. Since the priests and
alcalde
stood surety for the Indians, Austin agreed, but warned them to keep west of the Lavaca. The following day, the troops broke camp and returned home, having completed the first successful expedition of its kind in Texas.
⁴

THE AGREEMENT WITH
the Karankawas was never completely workable, and raids and counter-raids continued. Yet for the time being, at least, it bought some breathing space with that tribe. The Karankawas, however, were not the only Indians in conflict with the settlers, and as the colonists moved west and out onto the prairies, the Wacos and Tawakonis proved equally dangerous. The Americans’hold was still tenuous at best. For all their progress on their river bottoms in eastern Texas, the colonists were still strangers in a hostile and unknown country. Austin’s Karankawa campaign demonstrated the need for an organized, extensive defense system. The necessity became even greater when Mexican military authorities in San Antonio began pressing the colonists to uphold their responsibilities as citizens and initiate a campaign against the Wacos, Tawakonis, and Tawaheshes.

After a fight between Colorado settlers and Tawakoni horse thieves in April 1826, Austin sent an order to the ranger-militiamen calling on them

to protect your own homes, your own property, to shield your wives and children from the arrows of a savage and merciless enemy—your adopted country now also called [
sic
] upon you to rally around the national flag and fight its enemies the Wacos and Tahuacanies—every honorable and ardent impulse Therefore that can animate the bosoms of free men burns in yours and urges you forward to meet the enemy—the defence of your firesides—of your wives and children, your friends—yourselves—your property and your country. . . .

The depredations of your enemies the W[acos] and T[awakonis] indians and there [
sic
] hostile preparations, has driven us to the necessity of taking up arms in self defence. The frontier is menaced—The whole colony is threatened—under these circumstances it became my duty to call the militia to the frontier to repel the threatened attacks and to teach our enemies to fear and respect us. . . .
⁵

The plan was to form an alliance with the Cherokees, Shawnees, and Delawares and simultaneously attack the main villages of Wacos and Tawakonis along the Brazos and at the headwaters of the Navasota River. But the military authorities in San Antonio vetoed the alliance because they did not want the Cherokees, Shawnees, and Delawares to feel the whites depended on them. Austin therefore was forced to postpone a major campaign, but kept the rangers in the field for frontier defense.
⁶

BESIDES INDIANS, THE
settlers had to contend with “border ruffians,” Mexicans, Frenchmen from Louisiana, and the occasional desperado fleeing the law in the United States. Most of their activities involved horse theft, a serious offense because the horse was the only reliable means of transportation. Although the American colonists had the legal right to handle all but capital cases, the colonies had extended to the point that they were more conveniently located to the formal legal system in San Antonio than in the beginning. Nevertheless, the settlers preferred to mete out punishment on their own. There was a growing distrust between the Anglo-Saxons and the Mexicans, and the Anglo-Saxons were not convinced the Mexicans would issue punishment, particularly when their own people were involved. In one early instance, a Frenchman and a Mexican were detained for stealing horses, and Josiah Bell,
alcalde
of the Brazos settlement, instructed Gib Kuykendall to take them to San Antonio. En route, he ran into Moses Morrisson “and one or two other Americans” who were returning from the city. They advised him to take the prisoners back to the Brazos because “the Mexican authorities would set the prisoners at liberty without punishment.” He returned them to the settlement, where they were flogged and expelled without the benefit of Mexican authority.
⁷

Despite their dim view of Mexico’s system of justice, the colonists of Austin’s original Old Three Hundred generally were law-abiding and attempted to coexist with the people of their adopted country. There was enough distance between the American settlers along the Brazos and Colorado and the Mexicans in San Antonio and Goliad that most contact was official and cordial. Austin himself noted:

The settlers have done their duty, and have been much clearer from internal dissensions, than could be expected, under all the circumstances. They have uniformly been unshaken in their fidelity, and ready and willing to discharge their obligations as Mexican citizens; they have borne, with the most inflexible fortitude, all the privations to which their situation exposed them, and have contributed largely in laying a foundation for the future prosperity of Texas, by commencing the settlement of its wilderness.
⁸

Nevertheless, the basic cultural differences, combined with what they often saw as abandonment and in difference on the part of the authorities, created tensions between the American colonists and their Mexican counterparts. The problem was aggravated by the newer
empresarios,
as the American land-grant colonizers were called, who were far less discriminating than Austin as to whom they allowed to enter their colonies. These new arrivals never abandoned cultural prejudices inherited from their ancestors as far back as Elizabethan conflicts with Spain. The Mexicans, having been under Spanish rule at that time, viewed the same history from the opposite direction and upheld a legacy of Castilian intolerance against the English-speaking world. The American felt it a solemn duty to bring a Protestant-based “Christian order” to a world of Spanish chaos.
⁹
Conversely, the Spanish language often used—and still uses—the word
católico
(Catholic) as a synonym for “Christian” and the word
cristiano
(Christian) as a synonym for the Spanish language itself.
¹⁰

The friction was not entirely one-sided, for the Mexicans contributed their share to the growing atmosphere of suspicion and contempt. Despite the guarantees of political liberty contained in a federal constitution adopted in 1824 and the good intentions of those who framed it, three centuries of autocratic Spanish rule had left Mexico better prepared for despotism than popular sovereignty. A liberal faction advocated a republic of semiautonomous states modeled on the United States that offered personal liberty and limited the influence of the great landholders and the church. The powerful conservatives, made up of the great landholders, urban elite, monarchists, and clergy, wanted a strong central government that maintained their ancient privileges. As the conservatives gained control, the federal government became increasingly authoritarian, and state governments existed primarily to ratify federal degrees. State officials in Saltillo, now capital of the combined state of Coahuila-Texas, were quick to support whatever faction held power in Mexico City, and representatives to the state assembly were chosen by electors rather than by direct vote. The system went directly against the traditions of personal freedom the American immigrants had brought from their native country.
¹¹