The Men Who War the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (9 page)

For their part, the American immigrants—particularly those who came after Austin’s Old Three Hundred—never totally accepted the fact that they were now in a foreign country with different laws and traditions; that their own rights and privileges as United States citizens were no longer applicable; that, indeed, they were no longer U.S. citizens but citizens of Mexico. Even in the United States, the Southern states were beginning to dispute the growing power of the American federal government, and a large percentage of colonists in Texas came from the South. The rigid Mexican system and the routine involvement of the military in many aspects of civil life seemed all the more alien and unacceptable. The possibility that the Americans themselves were the aliens was never seriously considered by the rank-and-file colonists.
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Historical and cultural differences were complicated by race. The Mexican, of varying shades from light olive to dark brown, was regarded as a backward, indolent, and irresponsible person, and the sooner Mexican territory was put into the hands of the pale, industrious Anglo-Saxons, the better for all.
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The attitude of the United States during this period did nothing to allay the fears of the Mexicans. Although Texas never, at any time in its history, belonged to France and was not part of Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, the scope of the purchase grew in Jefferson’s mind. Ultimately he came to believe that it did include Texas, and this profoundly influenced U.S. foreign policy for the next half century. The United States government became increasingly dissatisfied with the 1819 treaty with Spain that fixed the boundary at the Sabine River, and officials in Washington adopted the stance that the Mexican presence in Texas was an illegal occupation of American territory.

In 1825, as Austin was struggling with Indians and with the general administrative problems of his colony, the United States proposed relocating the boundary by offering Mexico $1 million for a border on the Rio Grande, or $500,000 for the Colorado. This was, in effect, a bid to buy Texas, which Mexico had never offered to sell. It was the first of several unwanted attempts to purchase the region, and Mexican officials became suspicious of Washington’s intentions regarding their country. These suspicions were carried over to the American colonists, whom the Mexicans began to see as part of a sinister conspiracy of territorial aggrandizement by the United States.
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Mexican suspicions deepened in the fall of 1826, when the colonists of the
empresario
Haden Edwards of Nacogdoches, near the Louisiana border, began defying the federal government. Soon the defiance broke into open revolt. On December 16, Edwards’s followers unfurled their own flag and proclaimed the Republic of Fredonia.

Shaken from its lethargy, Mexico reacted by dispatching troops to east Texas to put down the rebellion. Seeing his own situation threatened, Austin issued a proclamation condemning the “Nacogdoches madmen,” and the majority of the American colonists joined him in supporting the government.
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In fact, so many men went with militia units aiding federal forces against Edwards that Austin feared the settlements would be unprotected from depredations by the prairie Indians. To counter that threat, he ordered Abner Kuykendall to take eight rangers and patrol the country “between the Colorado and Brazos along the San Antonio road to detect any inroad of the Wacoes or other northern tribes[.]”
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The rebellion was suppressed, and Edwards was expelled. Nevertheless, the Mexicans began to see an American plot at every turn.
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MEXICO NOW TOOK
steps to strengthen its hold on Texas. Although the rights of the states and people were being suppressed throughout the country, specific actions were taken dealing with the American colonists. Tariffs were imposed on the imports on which the Texans depended for even the most basic goods. Further emigration from the United States was banned, and the settlements were garrisoned by federal soldiers, often convict troops who opted for the army instead of prison. These acts are considered among the first links in the chain of events that led to the rupture with Mexico.
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Even as relations deteriorated between the colonists and the government in Mexico City, Indian depredations continued on the frontier. In 1828 and 1829 there were numerous murders and thefts by prairie tribes. Indian war parties prowled the countryside, disrupting trade between the colonists and the Mexican interior. The settlers believed the time had come for some sort of decisive action.

The first organized war against these Indians broke out in July 1829, after a group of whites killed four Indians during a fight on the Colorado about twenty-five miles east of the present city of Austin. Retaliation was certain, and Austin called up two companies of fifty volunteers each. A third company was organized in Gonzales, seventy miles east of San Antonio, in response to murders and depredations in that area, and together the three companies moved up the Colorado looking for hostile bands. Near the confluence of the Colorado and the San Saba rivers, scouts reported a camp of Wacos and Tawakonis. The Indians, however, had spotted the colonists and fled, leaving much of their equipment behind. Capt. Bartlett Simms took fifteen men and chased the fleeing Indians several miles before overtaking their pony herd and capturing many of the animals. The volunteers returned home, hoping the loss of camp, equipment, and animals would discourage the Indians from raiding in the future.

This expedition seems to have ranged farther than any previously, and it was a learning experience. They spent thirty-two days on the march, reaching a point about 150 miles northwest of San Antonio, well beyond the pale of any settlement, Mexican or American. Poorly prepared, they ran out of provisions, and at one point lived for three days on acorns and wild persimmons.
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THE COLONISTS ALSO
faced danger closer to home. Despite the truce with Austin, the Karankawas continued sporadic raiding. In 1831 about seventy warriors attacked the home of Charles Cavina, one of the earliest of Austin’s Old Three Hundred.
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Cavina himself was absent, and the house was undefended. The Karankawas killed Cavina’s wife and three of his four daughters. A visiting neighbor named Mrs. Flowers was killed as she tried to escape. The fourth Cavina daughter, a girl of about five or six, was shot through with one of the Indians’three-foot arrows and left for dead. Mrs. Flowers’s daughter was also wounded. Both eventually recovered.

The Indians were sacking the house when Cavina arrived home with his black retainers. Being unarmed, they had to retreat and wait until the Indians left. Cavina then raised a company of about sixty men under the command of Capt. Aylett C. Buckner, a veteran Indian fighter, who tracked the Karankawas to a spot on the Colorado River. Nearing their camp, he sent Moses Morrisson ahead to reconnoiter.

In the eight years since he had been placed in command of the very first ranger company, Morrisson had become an experienced Indian fighter. Slipping quietly up to a bluff overlooking the Indian position on the riverbank, he leaned over to get a better view. But the bluff crumbled under his weight, and he slid some forty feet into the middle of the startled Indians. He managed to keep hold of his rifle, and before the Karankawas recovered from their surprise, he dove into a hole in the riverbank and opened fire.

Buckner’s men heard the shots and hurried to the rescue, charging into the Karankawas, firing indiscriminately and killing men, women, and children. One man killed a mother and her baby with a single shot that passed through both their bodies. Some of the Indians swam across the river, but were shot down as they tried to crawl up the opposite bank. Altogether between forty and fifty were killed, and one eyewitness later claimed the river was tinted red from their blood. This was the last real engagement between the colonists and the Karankawas. Never a large tribe, they appear to have been devastated by their losses in this fight, and they gradually faded from history; within a generation they were extinct.
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With the coastal tribes subdued, the colonists began turning their attention toward the western prairies, and beyond to the Great Plains. They were now undergoing a metamorphosis. Despite their brief tenure, they were being transformed by this land, becoming a new people. They no longer identified with the United States, but neither were they truly Mexican. The Mexicans still might consider them Americans, but they were rapidly becoming a different people. They began calling themselves “Texians,” the first stage of a process that would create the classic Texan.

THE INDIAN THREAT
aside, the Texans were optimistic, particularly now that it appeared relations might be improving with the government. A liberal general, Antonio López de Santa Anna, vocal in his support for constitutional rule, rose up in revolt against the current regime in Mexico City. Although Austin questioned Santa Anna’s sincerity, he nevertheless violated his usual rule of staying aloof from Mexican politics and urged the colonists to declare for the general as the alternative to continued anarchy.
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By now, Austin no longer wielded the power he originally had held. Bastrop was dead. The colonists were electing their own officials, and quarrels had broken out with some of the newer American colonizers. Land fees, from which much of his income was derived, had been nullified by the government, and he had sold off much of his holdings to pay debts. His old sense of grandeeism was gone. Whether or not he benefited, the great Texas enterprise was a success, and for him that had become enough. The colonists no longer turned to him for governing authority, but for wisdom and experience, and he was determined to use that wisdom and experience in their best interests. Meanwhile, in Mexico City, the government was undergoing yet another reorganization—Santa Anna had won.
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If this period has left any common historic bond between Texans and Mexicans, it is their joint loathing for Santa Anna, the man who more than any other influenced events for the next two decades. In Texas, he is remembered as the butcher of the Alamo, Goliad, and Mier. In Mexico, he is viewed as an opportunist at best, and at worst as a traitor who sold out his country for his own wealth and comfort.
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All of these images are true. It is doubtful whether he ever had any cause other than himself, and his entire life seems to have been centered around his own aggrandizement. Even toward the end, when he had outlived his enemies and existed in poverty and exile, he continued to feed his own vanity, portraying himself as a misunderstood patriot whose only motive was love of country.

Yet for all his well-known faults, Mexico continued to turn to him for leadership during national crises. The reason is not as complicated as it might seem. During three centuries of Spanish rule, the army was the only means by which colonial subjects could advance; every important civil position was filled by administrators sent from Europe. Independence meant the departure of virtually the entire governmental machinery, and the army filled part of the void.
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Against such a background, in which the military habitually intervened in civil affairs, Santa Anna was simply the best Mexico could do.

At the time he seized the government, he was thirty-eight years old, dissipated, and obsessed with money and fame. But he was also shrewd, and could be patient when he wanted to be. Now he was patient as he represented himself as the liberal who only reluctantly had seized power to save the nation.
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Soon, however, he realized there was strong opposition to reform, and he quietly began working with the conservatives and the clergy. Assuming executive power, he dissolved the national congress and the state legislatures and strengthened the privileges of the church. A new, handpicked
Congreso Nacional
ratified his actions, repudiating the 1824 constitution. Santa Anna was absolute master of Mexico.
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Mexicans did not quietly accept Santa Anna’s dictatorship. Opposition in Puebla, a state southeast of Mexico City, had to be suppressed by military force. Then Zacatecas, a mineral-rich northern state, rebelled and called up five thousand troops against the new central government. Santa Anna put down this rebellion with particular ferocity, allowing his troops to sack the wealthy city of Zacatecas. Then came Coahuila’s turn. The army arrived before the state could organize a rebellion and arrested Governor Agustín Viesca and his staff as they tried to transfer the government to San Antonio in Texas. The Texas members of the state legislature managed to escape and make their way home.
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Now Santa Anna turned his attention to Texas. Already he had received Stephen F. Austin, who was in Mexico City to present theTexans’views on their future. After an initially cordial relationship, Austin was jailed for eleven months, and under house arrest for another six months before being allowed to return home. In 1835, soldiers sent to Anahuac in east Texas to collect customs duties clashed with local citizens. The colonies organized committees of public safety, and by autumn, when Austin arrived back in Texas, many believed armed resistance to Santa Anna was the only option. As Mirabeau B. Lamar, later president of the Republic of Texas, wrote, “The Gov[erno]r of the State was a prisoner, the Constitution was broken down, and all Coahuila overrun by the military.”

When they learned that Santa Anna’s brother-in-law, Maj. Gen. Martín Perfecto de Cos, was en route to San Antonio with additional troops, the Texans organized a convention to prepare the state for defense. Before it could assemble, however, the citizens of Gonzales clashed with federal troops. News of the fight created so much excitement that few were aware when General Cos arrived in San Antonio with substantial reinforcements. As far as Santa Anna was concerned, Texas was in rebellion.
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