Lone Star Nation (6 page)

Returning to Louisiana, Gutiérrez enlisted Augustus Magee, a clever young American military officer (third in his class at West Point) who had grown disaffected after being passed over for promotion. Gutiérrez and Magee led a band of a hundred men against Nacogdoches, which quickly fell. As news of the victory traveled back to Louisiana and beyond, it inspired more enlistments. “The business of volunteering for New Spain has become a perfect mania,” wrote William Shaler, an American merchant who tripled as an agent for the Madison administration and a political adviser to Magee and Gutiérrez. “I hear of parties proceeding thither from all quarters, and they are constantly passing through this village from Natchez. . . . I suppose the volunteer force cannot now be rated under 600 Americans, generally good soldiers, and there is every appearance of its becoming very respectable in a short time, equal even to the entire conquest of the Province of Texas.” In Shaler's mind, and presumably in the minds of these recruits, more than Mexican independence was at stake. “The volunteer expedition, from the most insignificant beginning, is growing into an irresistible torrent that will sweep away the crazy remains of Spanish Government from the Internal Provinces [Texas and its neighbors], and open Mexico to the political influence of the U.S. and to the talents and enterprise of our citizens.”

The expeditionary force rolled toward San Antonio, picking up additional volunteers among the Tejanos (Mexican Texans) and even various Indian tribes. It captured La Bahía in November 1812 without a struggle—which disappointed the bellicose Magee. “They are a rascally set of treacherous cowards,” he said of the Spanish soldiers. Although Magee fell ill and died, the invasion continued under Gutiérrez and Samuel Kemper, a Virginia carpenter who had come west in search of adventure and booty. The royalist forces counterattacked outside San Antonio, but the rebels soon put them to flight. Gutiérrez and the others camped outside the Alamo—a mission compound that had been converted to a fortress—while several hundred officers and men of the royalist army switched sides and joined them. On April 6, 1813, the victors, claiming to speak for “the People of the Province of Texas,” declared that “the chains which bound us under the domination of European Spain are forever dissolved. . . . We are free and independent.”

Born of the Mexican revolution, the fighting in Texas reflected the ferocity of that larger upheaval. After the conquest of San Antonio, several captured Spanish officers were executed, apparently with the approval of Gutiérrez. This offended and alarmed some of the Americans, who headed back to Louisiana. It also provoked quarreling among the remaining rebels, many of whom objected to the high-handedness of Gutiérrez in making himself “governor” and then “president protector” of the nascent Texas republic. More of his soldiers drifted away, leaving the rest unready to defend themselves against a fresh royalist army under General Joaquín Arredondo.

At the battle of the Medina River, south of San Antonio, Arredondo and the royalists crushed the rebels in the bloodiest battle ever fought in Texas. Of perhaps fourteen hundred rebels, including Americans, Tejanos, and various Indians, fewer than a hundred survived the battle and its aftermath. No quarter was given by the royalists; rebels captured were summarily executed, and those who fled were hunted down and likewise dispatched. The bodies of the vanquished were left unburied on the field as a lesson to any who might be tempted toward independence in the future.

Taking note of Arredondo's strategy was a slight young lieutenant of the royalist army, a nineteen-year-old with soft but penetrating brown eyes, curly dark hair, a rather sallow complexion for one who spent so much time out of doors, and a resigned, melancholic expression at odds with the martial career he had chosen. It was this last aspect that made Antonio López de Santa Anna irresistible to nearly all the women and many of the men he met—“decidedly the best looking and most interesting figure of the group,” said a later female visitor who singled him out of a crowd. This visitor, benefiting from some history, went on to say, “It is strange, and a fact worthy of notice in natural history, how frequently this expression of philosophic resignation, of placid sadness, is to be remarked on the countenances of the most cunning, the deepest, most ambitious, most designing and most dangerous statesmen.”

Santa Anna's cunning would take years to perfect, but his ambition was evident early. A creole from Veracruz province, the young man ached to achieve distinction beyond his family's modest station; to this end he joined the army, that traditional vehicle of advancement for those not born to privilege. His infantry regiment, commanded by Arredondo, fought Indians on the northern frontier until the revolution broke out, whereupon it turned to fighting the rebels. Santa Anna was undeniably brave; wounded in action against the Indians, he further distinguished himself for valor and vigor against the rebels in the battle of the Medina. Arredondo decorated the young man and marked him as one after his own heart.

Yet Santa Anna's ambition, besides spurring him to feats of arms, manifested itself in a compulsion to gamble. In time all of Mexico—including Texas—would be his casino; for now the gaming table was his venue, and his downfall. When he couldn't pay a gambling debt, he forged the signature of Arredondo to access army funds. The fraud came to light and Santa Anna was bankrupted and publicly humiliated.

The setback was temporary. Displaying the resilience that was the crucial complement to his ambition, Santa Anna redoubled his devotion to the royalist cause. He helped suppress a rebel invasion of Mexico launched by Francisco Mina from Galveston, on the Texas coast—which disposed him, beyond his experience at the Medina, to think of Texas as a breeding ground for brigands and pirates. (In fact the pirate brothers Jean and Pierre Laffite, operating out of Galveston, did abet and equip the Mina expedition and generally had a hand in most of the attacks against Texas during this period.) Santa Anna's actions were noted by the viceroy of New Spain, who tendered the thanks of the Spanish crown.

Returning to Veracruz province, Santa Anna directed the relocation of refugees from the revolutionary fighting there. The work went well, and he was happy to report the settlement of hundreds of displaced families. “All this is due to my activity, zeal, and hard work,” he said, displaying another trait—patriotic egotism—that would characterize his whole career. “I did not spare myself work, fatigue, or danger, however great, provided only that I could be useful to my country.”

C h a p t e r   3

The People of the Horse

D
uring the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while the Spanish were approaching Texas from the south and the Americans and French from the east, another people, more formidable than either the Europeans or the Americans, entered Texas from the north. The Comanches were a young tribe, an offshoot of the Shoshones of the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. Why the tribes separated is shrouded in myth. By one Comanche tradition a group of hunters quarreled over the carcass of a bear they had killed; unable to reconcile, the group divided, with each side taking its dependents: the Shoshones to the north, the Comanches to the west and south. Another version, handed down orally to the twentieth century, explained the split differently:

Two bands were living together in a large camp. One band was on the east side; the other was on the west. Each had its own chief. Every night the young boys were out playing games—racing, and so forth. They were having a kicking game; they kicked each other. One boy kicked another over the stomach so hard that he died from it. That boy who was killed was from the West camp. He was the son of a chief.

The father of the dead boy demanded vengeance, and both sides girded for battle. At the last moment, though, one of the tribe's old men talked the tempers down, and the western chief was persuaded to accept horses and other gifts in mitigation of his son's death. But he couldn't continue to live beside the easterners.

The chief had his announcer tell the people it was time to move camp. “We have had bad luck here. There has been hard feeling.” While they were still there, smallpox broke out. Then they broke up. One group went north; those are the Shoshones. The other group went west.

Whatever the occasion of the parting, the cause was deeper, as the mention of smallpox and bad luck at the end of this story suggests. In the late seventeenth century the effects of European settlement farther east were rippling out across the plains and mountains of the American West. Smallpox was one effect, and could be devastating. With mortality rates of two-thirds or more, the disease depopulated large tracts of Texas (as Moses Austin noticed in 1820, without understanding the cause) and of the surrounding area.

Firearms were another consequence of European contact, and likewise destructive of existing population patterns. French fur traders introduced guns to the Blackfeet and Crows, who had long been rivals of the Shoshones. With the weapons the Blackfeet and Crows drove the Shoshones from their old territory, pushing some north and others—the Comanches—down from the mountains onto the southern plains.

But the land the Comanches entered already had inhabitants, and, as with most peoples moving about the continent, the newcomers had to fight to carve a niche for themselves. It was at this point that the Comanches acquired their name. Like many tribes, they referred to themselves as simply “the People.” To their new Ute neighbors, however, they were “anyone who wants to fight me all the time”; rendered into Spanish, the Ute word became “Comanche.”

The Comanches were fierce fighters, and grew even fiercer when they acquired horses. Like firearms, horses were a European introduction to North America, and, at least on the plains west of the Mississippi River, they were even more revolutionary. Before the advent of the horse, the tribes of the plains hunted buffalo but rarely traveled far to do so. Most were semi-sedentary, planting crops—corn, beans, squashes—in sheltered valleys and at the edges of the plains. The first horses reached the plains with Coronado in the sixteenth century; some may have escaped then, or been stolen. But not for another century were there enough horses to prompt a change of life among the plains Indians.

It was about the time the horses achieved this critical mass that the Comanches emerged from the mountains. The Comanches may have been driven from the mountains by better-armed enemies, but they were simultaneously pulled onto the plains by the promise of horses. Horses made almost everything about Comanche life easier and more rewarding. Before horses, the only beast of burden the Comanches employed was the dog, which, needless to say, could carry far less than the horse. The horse made the Comanches true nomads, freed from any particular place, roaming the plains from season to season.

Their new nomadism, in turn, allowed them to exploit the buffalo more fully than before; as the great herds migrated, so could the Comanches. The buffalo provided nearly everything the Comanches required: meat, marrow, and internal organs for food (and blood, in a pinch, for drink); hides for clothing and tenting; sinews for bowstrings and fasteners; hoofs and horns for glue and utensils; dung for fuel. And there was no end to the buffalo, which numbered in the scores of millions. In their mountain days as Shoshones, the Comanches—like most aboriginals (including those who captured Cabeza de Vaca)—were distressingly familiar with hunger; after they mastered the horse and emerged among the buffalo of the southern plains, they almost forgot the feeling.

But if the buffalo was the sustenance of the Comanches, the horse was their pride and joy. Comanche children—girls as well as boys—were raised to ride. They started out on their mothers' mares but by four or five years of age had ponies of their own. They raced one another across the plains and practiced shooting arrows from horseback, throwing lassos, and plucking objects from the ground at a gallop. (This last skill was especially valued in battle, for the Comanches refused to leave comrades on the field and frequently tore into the thickest part of a fight to scoop up their dead and wounded.) The horsemanship of the Comanche warrior was the envy of every rider he encountered. “He makes but an awkward figure enough on foot,” recorded one nineteenth-century observer, “though he is no sooner mounted than he is transformed, and with no other aid than that of the rein and heavy whip he makes his horse perform the most incredible feats.” Another, more literary witness described the Comanche cavalryman as “the model of the fabled Thessalian centaur, half horse, half man, so closely joined and so dexterously managed that it appears but one animal, fleet and furious.”

As well they might have, the Comanches loved their horses and valued them above all else. Horses constituted Comanche wealth and conferred Comanche status. A single warrior might own two hundred horses (of which he would actually ride but several and dote on a few). A chief could own a couple of thousand; a band of Comanches, several thousand.

No less than other forms of conspicuous consumption, the maintenance of such large herds came at a cost. The Comanches were nomadic not simply in pursuit of the buffalo but also in search of fresh grass for their horses. In addition, the desire to expand their herds continually tempted the Comanches to intrude upon territory claimed by their neighbors. Sometimes these intrusions resulted in roundups of mustangs—the feral descendants of Spanish escapees. But even for the Comanches, capturing and breaking the mustangs was a challenge; the same spirit, stamina, and wariness that made the mustangs such valuable horses to own and ride made them difficult to catch and break. (By credible accounts, Comanche horses were trained to be lookouts when their riders were busy butchering buffalo they had killed. The horses would twitch their ears alternately upon the approach of a wolf or other animal, together upon the approach of a human. “Thus many lives were saved,” said one Comanche.)

More to the point, there was little glory in catching wild horses. Their mastery of the horse left the Comanches with substantial spare time, which they learned to fill by raiding their neighbors. Raids were exciting; they were also a way for young men to earn distinction within the band. As brilliant as they were at riding horses, the Comanches demonstrated even greater virtuosity at stealing them. The most adept of the Comanches could creep into a well-guarded corral or stable, cut the ropes or hobbles securing the finest mounts, and be miles away before anyone noticed. For the Comanches, horse stealing was a form of coup: the stroke of bravery that marked the best men of the tribe.

Equally often, the Comanches resorted to violence and intimidation in their quest for horses. Starting in the mid-eighteenth century and continuing for a hundred years, Comanche raiders swooped south to the Rio Grande and beyond, terrorizing the inhabitants and seizing anything that could trot, canter, or gallop. As late as the 1840s, a traveler heading north from Mexico City toward the upper Rio Grande wrote, “For days together, I traversed a country completely deserted on this account, passing through ruined villages untrodden for years by the foot of man.” Referring to the previous twelve-month period, this same traveler asserted, “Upward of ten thousand head of horses and mules have already been carried off, and scarcely has a hacienda or rancho on the frontier been unvisited, and everywhere the people have been killed or captured.”

The Spanish first heard of the Comanches at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when reports of attacks on Apaches reached New Mexico. As the Apaches were regular enemies of the Spanish, the news that the Apaches had enemies of their own elicited considerable interest. For the next few decades intelligence regarding the Comanches remained indirect and irregular; a Spanish army officer investigating the 1720 destruction of a Spanish patrol near the Platte River wrote:

Each year at a certain time, there comes to this province a nation of Indians very barbarous and warlike. Their name is Comanche. They never number less than 1,500. Their origin is unknown, because they are always wandering in battle formation, for they make war on all the nations. They halt at whichever stopping place and set up their campaign tents, which are of buffalo hide. . . . After they finish the commerce which brought them there, which consists of tanned skins, buffalo hides, and those young Indians which they capture (because they kill the older ones), they retire, continuing their wandering until another time.

By midcentury the Comanches had reached Texas. In 1743 three Comanches passed through San Antonio de Béxar looking for Apaches. The visit evoked curiosity among the Spanish but terror among the Apaches, who by now knew the Comanches all too well. Indeed, so frightened by the invaders from the north were the Apaches that they took the singular step of asking for Spanish protection. The Franciscans interpreted the request as an answer to their prayers, as God employing the Comanches to bring the Apaches to the gospel. Fray Benito Fernández de Santa Anna, a leader among the Franciscans in Texas, urged the secular authorities to honor the Apache request, noting the “copious number of souls who, through the merciful intervention of Our Lord, may be converted to our holy faith.”

Those secular authorities, however, were skeptical. Some doubted the conversion of the Apaches. Others preferred keeping the Apaches as official enemies, for as enemies they might be captured and employed as free labor—slaves, in effect—at San Antonio and the other settlements. But Fray Benito and the Franciscans persisted, as did the Apaches, till finally the authorities gave in.

A mission was founded in the spring of 1757 on the San Sabá River, about 180 miles northwest of San Antonio. The Spanish had high hopes for the endeavor, which appeared to open a new chapter in the development of the Texas frontier. But troubles vexed the San Sabá mission from the start. The Franciscans fought among themselves, not least since the soldiers sent to guard the new outpost were taken from other missions, which now felt themselves neglected and vulnerable. But the most ominous—and puzzling—aspect of the situation involved the Apaches. After their initial enthusiasm for the mission, they cooled to the idea. For months they stayed away from the mission; when a large group of Apaches finally did arrive, its leaders made clear they were just passing through, on the way to a buffalo hunt.

In time the reason for the Apaches' reluctance grew evident. As the winter of 1757–58 approached, its north winds brought rumors of a major campaign by the
norteños,
as the Comanches and their allies were called, against the Apaches. Assessing the balance of forces on the northern frontier, the Apaches decided that the Spanish, with only several dozen soldiers in the presidio that accompanied the San Sabá mission, were no match for the Comanches, and they declined to make themselves more vulnerable by settling down at the mission.

The wisdom of this decision became evident in 1758. On the morning of March 16 a large group of Indians—at least a thousand—appeared at the mission, firing muskets and shouting contempt for the European interlopers. The leader of the missionaries and a Spanish officer tried to appease the war party but succeeded only in revealing how few the defenders were at the mission. Without warning the two were shot. “And then began a cruel attack against all,” recorded Fray Miguel de Molina, one of the survivors.

The destruction of the mission was appallingly thorough. Its nature and extent were described by a Spanish officer subsequently sent to examine the carnage: