Lone Star Nation (4 page)

Austin was overjoyed. “I returned from St. Antonio in the province of Texas five days since, after undergoing everything but death,” he wrote his younger son, James. “For these sufferings I have been fully paid by obtaining a grant for myself and family of land and also for 300 families. I shall settle on the Colorado within 2 miles of the sea and three days' sail from the Mississippi, where I shall lay off a town under the protection of the Spanish Government.”

During the next several weeks, with the promised land looming ever larger in his mind's eye, he devoted every waking minute and most of his dreams to this redemption of his life's work. He allowed almost no time to eat and scarcely more to sleep. For a while his excitement carried him forward, but then his body gave way. On June 8 Maria wrote Stephen regarding Moses' condition, saying that a doctor had been summoned and had blistered and bled the patient. The treatment worked, briefly. “I flattered myself he was much better. But, oh, my son, I greatly fear it was only a delusion. . . . His fever has returned this day with great violence. He breathes with much difficulty and seems in great distress both in body and mind.”

The end came before dawn a few days later. “His fever was higher on that night than it had been,” Maria related. “At four in the morning I discovered the St. Anthony fire was all over his face, and he had great difficulty in breathing.” She wanted to recall the doctor, but Moses demurred. “After a considerable exertion to speak, he drew me down to him and told me it was too late, that he was going, that he should not live 24 hours.” Summoning all his strength, Moses uttered a final message: “Tell dear Stephen that it is his dying father's last request to prosecute the enterprise that he had commenced.”

With this he slipped back into his fevered dreams of the land that would erase his failures and make everything right, and shortly expired.

C h a p t e r   2

El Camino Real

F
or much of the three hundred years that Europeans and their descendants had known of Texas, the land seemed cursed—by fate, by human folly, and by its very allure. In the early sixteenth century the mainland of North America was still largely unknown to the Spanish, the only Europeans in the region. Spanish conquistadors had landed in Mexico and in Florida, but what lay between was a mystery. Pánfilo de Narváez, a one-eyed veteran of the Mexican conquest, aimed to diminish the mystery—and claim a victory comparable to that of Hernán Cortés—by leading an expedition to the northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico. Narváez landed in Florida in 1528 and promptly demonstrated that he was no Cortés and Florida no Mexico. He lost touch with his supply ships and floundered about the peninsula; his troops grew hungry and sick and fell victim to Indian ambushes. Upon discovering neither gold nor other reason to stay, Narváez prepared to abandon the place. Showing considerable ingenuity but little real skill, the dwindling company constructed five makeshift boats, in which they set out to the west. None in the group could navigate, so they stayed within sight of the shore, passing Mobile Bay (as it would be called) and the Mississippi River (yet to be discovered), before encountering a heavy storm. The tempest drove the flotilla apart, with two of the boats wrecking on the beach and the others sinking at sea. The survivors initially numbered about eighty, but between exposure (it was November), hunger, disease, and hostility on the part of the local Indians, these four score were reduced to four, including Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, the treasurer of the Narváez expedition, and an African slave named Estevánico.

Whether or not these were the first non-Americans to set foot in what would become Texas, they were the first to record their visit, and what they recorded hardly inclined others to follow. Cabeza de Vaca (whose name commemorated a thirteenth-century battle in which an ancestor facilitated victory by pointing a bovine skull—“head of cow”—in the direction of a strategic pass) described an ordeal almost unbelievable in its rigors. The shipwreck left them with nary a stitch of clothing; they spent the next several years mostly naked and variously shivering, scratched, sunburned, and bleeding. They were almost constantly hungry. When nuts were in season, they lived on nuts for weeks at a time. When the prickly pear cactus yielded its fruit, this provided their sole sustenance. Captured by the Indians and enslaved, Cabeza de Vaca was required to dig with his bare hands for roots among the river cane. “From this employment I had my fingers so worn that did a straw but touch them they would bleed,” he wrote later. Nor were the roots any prize. “The food is poor and gripes the persons who eat it. The roots require roasting two days; many are very bitter and withal difficult to be dug.” And yet they formed a local staple.

They are sought the distance of two or three leagues, and so great is the want these people experience that they cannot get through the year without them. Occasionally they kill deer, and at times take fish; but the quantity is so small and the famine so great, that they eat spiders and the eggs of ants, worms, lizards, salamanders, snakes, and vipers that kill whom they strike; and they eat earth and wood, and all that there is, the dung of deer, and other things that I omit to mention; and I honestly believe that were there stones in that land they would eat them. They save the bones of the fishes they consume, of snakes and other animals, that they may afterward beat them together and eat the powder.

Poverty did not in any way ennoble the natives. “The majority of the people are great thieves; for though they are free to divide with each other, on turning the head even a son or a father will take what he can. They are great liars, and also great drunkards, which they become from the use of a certain liquor.”

In light of his ordeal, Cabeza de Vaca had reason to be biased against the Indians, and readers of his account might have been justified in applying the appropriate discount. Yet, oddly, he developed an affection for those among whom he suffered, realizing the duress under which they lived, for having shared it. “They are a merry people, considering the hunger they suffer; for they never cease, notwithstanding, to observe their festivities and areytos. To them the happiest part of the year is the season of eating prickly pears; they have hunger then no longer, pass all the time in dancing, and eat day and night.” The mere thought of the prickly pears carried them through the other seasons, and they sought to hearten Cabeza de Vaca and his comrades similarly. “It occurred to us many times while we were among this people and there was no food, to be three or four days without eating, when they, to revive our spirits, would tell us not to be sad, that soon there would be prickly pears when we should eat a plenty and drink of the juice, when our bellies would be very big and we should be content and joyful, having no hunger.”

Eventually the Spaniards' condition improved. As an exotic, Cabeza de Vaca was assumed to have peculiar powers, including the ability to heal; when some early patients fortuitously improved, he won a reputation and a following. This afforded him greater freedom to move about unsupervised, yet it also increased the reluctance of his hosts to let him go. Finally, however, he and the other three broke away. They traveled south and west along the Texas coast, then north and west up the Rio Grande, then south and west again until they reached the Pacific Ocean—some eight years after their shipwreck.

Although the emergence—or resurrection, as it seemed—of these last survivors of the Narváez expedition appeared little short of miraculous, the account they gave of their experience did nothing to encourage further expeditions toward Texas. The lesson of Narváez and Cabeza de Vaca—a lesson that gained a wider audience after 1542, when Cabeza de Vaca's account was published—was that Texas was a worthless land best left alone.

Yet the author wasn't quite so discouraging about other parts of the territory north of Mexico. In his description of the upper Rio Grande, Cabeza de Vaca dropped intriguing hints of mineral wealth. “Throughout this region, wheresoever the mountains extend, we saw clear traces of gold and lead, iron, copper, and other metals,” he wrote.

This
was what the Spanish wanted to hear, and Cabeza de Vaca's words were sufficient to set in train a great expedition to the mountains of Arizona and New Mexico. The leader of the expedition was Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, who headed north to find the asserted treasure. The Coronado expedition was a triumph of logistics, endurance, cruelty, and avarice. Coronado moved a thousand-man army and herds of horses, mules, cattle, and sheep across some of the most barren stretches of North America. His soldiers conquered several villages and terrorized many others. The expedition ran into the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River and crossed the windswept plains and struggling streams of the Texas panhandle, Oklahoma, and Kansas. On the plains the Spaniards saw buffalo and prairie dogs, and noted the natives' ingenious strategy for navigating the featureless tablelands. “Early in the morning they watched where the sun rose,” explained Pedro de Castañeda, the expedition's chronicler. “Then, going in the direction they wanted to take, they shot an arrow, and before coming to it they shot another over it, and in this manner they traveled the whole day.”

But they found no riches. Referring to an author who had enthusiastically elaborated upon the report of Cabeza de Vaca, a weary Coronado wrote Antonio de Mendoza, the viceroy of New Spain: “I can assure you that he has not told the truth in a single thing that he said, but everything is the opposite of what he related.” Coronado realized that Mendoza would be disappointed, and he said that he was, too. “God knows that I wish I had better news to write to your Lordship, but I must tell you the truth. . . . You may be assured that if all the riches and treasures of the world had been here, I could not have done more in his Majesty's service and in that of your Lordship.”

The failure of Coronado to find gold cooled the ardor of the Spanish regarding the northern frontiers of Mexico. To the extent they maintained interest at all, it was directed toward the pueblos of the upper Rio Grande. Texas languished in the Spanish imagination and was all but ignored in Spanish policy. Spanish soldiers and travelers occasionally wandered across portions of Texas, accidentally or driven by circumstances beyond their control; a 1680 revolt in New Mexico scattered missionaries, soldiers, and civilian refugees down the Rio Grande to the vicinity of modern El Paso.

But as long as Spain had the hemisphere more or less to itself—and to the indigenes—it ignored Texas in favor of regions better blessed with removable wealth. The planting of English colonies on the eastern coast of North America in the seventeenth century lifted the Spanish gaze above Mexico, but the prophylactic efforts it inspired were directed primarily at Florida, closer to the site of the Protestant infection. The French—fellow Catholics yet rival imperialists—with their settlements in far Canada, registered hardly at all upon the viceroys and other overseers of New Spain.

The situation changed in the late seventeenth century, when the intrepid but unbalanced French explorer and entrepreneur La Salle sledded and canoed from Canada to the Mississippi River, and down the great river to its mouth. Following the custom of the day, he claimed for King Louis XIV the valley of the Mississippi and all its tributaries, and christened it Louisiana.

Such a feat would have satisfied most men, but La Salle burned with ambition augmented by financial ruin, brought on by unwise investments in the fur trade and by La Salle's general lack of business savvy. He prepared to plant a colony near the mouth of the Mississippi, which would win him royal favor and allow him to corner the commerce of Louisiana. With a fleet of four ships and 280 sailors and colonists he left France in the summer of 1684. One of the craft was captured by the Spanish (with whom the French had recently been at war and who failed to receive, or simply ignored, the news that the war had ended), but the other three penetrated far into the Gulf of Mexico, till then a Spanish lake. Perhaps puzzlingly to a later generation, finding the largest river of North America posed a genuine challenge. The details of determining longitude still defied the best explorers and navigators (and would do so till the invention of accurate chronometers almost a century hence), with the consequence that La Salle did not know where either he or the river was. Complicating matters further, in its lower reaches the big river split into a number of smaller streams, no one of which was irrefutably impressive.

As a result, La Salle erred badly in picking a spot for landing. He entered Matagorda Bay—six degrees of longitude and four hundred miles west of the Mississippi—thinking he was
east
of his goal. The landing itself was a fiasco. One of his ships foundered in the shallow channel; most of its stores were lost. Indians captured several of the colonists, commencing a chain of hostilities that sapped the numbers and morale of the colonists. Provisions dwindled, but when the captain of La Salle's fleet volunteered to sail to the West Indies for relief, La Salle rejected the offer, telling him to depart and not return. After the captain left, taking some disaffected colonists with him, La Salle's last vessel was blown ashore and wrecked, stranding the colonists.

They planted crops, which succumbed to drought. Water ran short; scurvy set gums bleeding. Dysentery and other infectious diseases decimated the ranks of the men, women, and children. A rattlesnake claimed the life of one colonist; another man drowned setting a fishnet. An alligator ate yet another. “It seemed as if there was a curse upon our labors,” recalled one of the survivors.

Yet the worst of the colony's troubles was La Salle himself. He acted as judge, jury, and executioner—literally, when he convicted and hanged an attempted deserter. “No one tells him anything,” remarked an expedition engineer. “This is a man who has lost his mind.”