Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  The most alarming fact of all, however, was that the Coahuiltecans, once they were congregated into clean stone barracks at the missions, began to die. The death rate rose; the birth rate consistently fell. Disease had some bearing, but most probably this was the result of a terrible failure of morale. The Coahuiltecans were simply overwhelmed; their old way of life was being destroyed, and like many barbarians whose tribal structures and ethos are proven wanting in the face of superior power, they became apathetic. Mission life was miserable, with its incomprehensible moral strictures and eternal, backbreaking labor; if the Indian ran away, the soldiers would bring him back; if he ran too far, the Apaches would surely get him. Death was the only escape.

  By the middle of the century a total of five separate missions had been built in the San Antonio area, and at this time each mission had more than two hundred Indians. But this was the high water mark. There was never any successful second generation of mission Indians. Strength could only be maintained by recruitment of new Coahuiltecans from the brush, and the supply, always meager, soon gave out. Though ten-year plan after ten-year plan failed to produce a responsible, responsive native population, the friars grimly held on, and they got their concessions renewed time after time through the free use of their immense influence with the Royal government.

  The Spanish orders of the 18th century were probably the strongest and most vigorous element of their declining society, but even their determined refusal to accept reality was a symptom of a general Hispanic decline. While some of the best minds in Spain and New Spain investigated the Texas situation and reported that the missionary effort was failing, clerical influence continually prevailed, certainly for many decades after everyone knew all hope for success had gone.

  Generations of missionary priests and friars came out, grew old and died, and were replaced. There is no question that most of them came to hate their charges with what they themselves recognized was unchristian lack of charity. They wrote letters and reports filled with distaste. The passive Coahuiltecans were described as "vile, cowardly, treacherous, and lazy." They could not be trained to defend themselves or to help hold off the wilder Indians above the Escarpment. Ironically, one Spanish missionary, Fray Morfi, who wrote a history of the period, came to look upon the terrible Comanches with much friendlier eyes. With perfect, though unconscious, logic, the Spanish conquerors felt a greater affinity for the powerful warrior tribes than for the poor skulkers who came begging to their missions.

  The Spanish settlers requested by the Franciscans arrived in 1731. They were a group of ten families and five newly-marrieds, subsidized by the Crown and sent from the Canary Islands. There were fifty-six Spaniards in all. The origins of this group are obscure; apparently they were people who had been exiled to the Canary Islands from Spain, for political reasons. Life in these barren islands induced them to volunteer for the Texas frontier, at a time when almost no Spaniards could be persuaded to go. The King was pleased to grant their request; the government paid the entire costs of passage, and they were to be the vanguard of between two hundred and four hundred families in all.

  But in addition to the transportation costs, the King granted each settler the honor of hidalgo (from the old Spanish Fijo d'Algo, or son of someone important), which was a genuine title of gentility, to be held by him and his descendants in perpetuity. While this honor and reward was in accord with the Spanish desperation to settle the frontier, it was a considerable mistake. At this period, pride of birth was taken more seriously in Spain than anywhere in Europe, with the possible exception of Ireland, and the Canary Islanders took their new titles completely to heart.

  Being hidalgos in Spain, or even New Spain, was a considerable social asset—but at one swoop it removed the recipients from the nonaristocratic working classes and created a ridiculous situation on the San Antonio frontier. Men with the dignity of hidalgo were not expected to do common labor—but the Canary Islanders were sent to Béxar specifically to be farmers and raise crops to support the Spanish garrison. This meant they had escaped a hardscrabble life as dirt farmers in the Atlantic only to adopt a role equally difficult and barren.

  The Canary Islanders refused it. They arrived in the San Antonio region expecting to find a town, and a subservient population over which they might become an elite. They found instead they were expected to build the town, or villa, and to plant crops, all without Indian labor, which the padres icily refused to let them use. They arrived convinced they were an upper class, but totally without funds, and found there was no lower class that could be induced to support them. The attitude of the settlers is indicated in one's signature: "I, Juan Leal Goraz, Spaniard and noble settler by order of His Majesty (whom God guard) in this Royal Presidio of San Antonio de Véjar and Villa of San Fernando, Province of Texas, or New Philippines, and present Senior Regidor of the said Villa, also farmer." The occupation, dirt farmer (labrador), is tacked on at the end, almost as an afterthought, and also where it would do the least social damage. Unfortunately for the colony, Goraz and the others approached their function in the same way.

  Fray Morfi told the story of one settler who observed to his son that in this mild Texas region the rabbit made no burrow, and this meant that there was no need for men to build houses or cultivate fields. From that day forward the son did no labor, and he raised his own children in the family philosophy.

  Instead of carving a flourishing community out of the wilderness, the new settlers tended to go native. They became hunters, fishers, loafers, and in some cases, thieves. It was possible to raise a few beans without much effort, and also the ubiquitous Spanish cattle now dotted the fields around Béxar. The Spanish could eat without great difficulty and, meanwhile, enjoy what was indeed a splendid climate, amid beautiful scenery.

  The two-sided war between missionaries and soldiers now became three-cornered. The Canary Islanders wrote bitter letters to the Viceroy, protesting the fact that the religious hogged most of the good land, and also unreasonably kept the tame Indians out of the labor economy and even let their cattle roam about untended. The friars wrote that the settlers were "indolent, given to vice" and unworthy of the blessings of this new land. The Franciscans were particularly incensed that the Crown had spent 80,000 pesos bringing the Canary Islanders to San Antonio—such government monies could have been better spent on the Church. The settlers slyly reported back that the friars weren't getting anywhere with the Indians, and what went on in the missions should be thoroughly investigated. Although there were several mission churches in the vicinity, they demanded their own parish church, and priest.

  There were other additions to the population. A few Indians became sufficiently Hispanicized to take up a life similar to that of the elite. Some settlers wandered north from New Spain, mostly "so-called Spaniards." More than one soldier was forced by the friars to wed an Indian woman, and the mestizo community slowly grew.

  The Canary Island elite tended to marry only within itself, and quickly deep social cleavages, which hardly reflected economic status, opened up. These were actually no more than an extension of the intricate class and caste systems of Spanish America, which by the 18th century were approaching India's in complexity. Spaniards born in the old country outranked everyone else, though they themselves were graduated according to birth and station. Next came criollos of pure race, unfortunately born in the colonies, also graduated. Below the undeniably Spanish elites, there opened up a bewildering complexity of various kinds of mixed bloods, with pure indios, not theoretically, but actually, at the bottom. There were also people officially listed as Spanish, but not socially accepted as such. The Spanish census listed each person by rank and supposed racial mixture with what can only be called appalling clarity; not accidentally, the official terms used by the Spanish empire eventually became regarded in themselves as insults.

  Isolated, unable to trade with French Louisiana by official decree, and unable to make an Indian base upon which to expand an agricultural community, th
e admitted gem of Spanish Texas held its own but hardly flourished. It stayed deeply divided, among missionaries, soldiers, settlers, and villagers of differing degrees of Hispanidad. After two generations of original settlement, a Spanish census listed the population as 1,700. Between three and four hundred were Spanish, loosely interpreted; the rest were Indians, mestizos, and culebras. This last was a Spanish word for mulatto, but it most likely referred to an admixture of Spanish, or Spanish-Mexican, with Coahuiltecan. There were more culebras listed than mestizos, but there were almost no Negroes on the Spanish frontier. Mestizo, meanwhile, was gradually coming to mean a Hispanicized Mexican Indian, regardless of social origin. The biggest difference between a mestizo and a true Indian was the use of Spanish, and his clothes.

  In the 1770s, Fray Morfi described the Royal Presidio and Villa as a group of wretched shanties, with a "few good buildings." The Commandant General of the Interior, De Croix, reported that the settlers of San Fernando "live miserable lives because of their laziness, captiousness, and lack of means of support, all of which defects show themselves at first sight." De Croix found no start at any kind of public education, and no professional men. There was neither doctor nor lawyer. A series of Spanish government officials visited or inspected what was now the capital of Spanish Texas, and few had much good to say about it.

  Life for the average man in Spanish Texas was probably summed up succinctly and with unconscious brilliance by an 18th-century resident of San Antonio, who described his youth in these words: "We were of the poor people . . . to be poor in that day meant to be very poor indeed, almost as poor as the Saviour in His Manger. But we were not dissatisfied . . . There was time to eat and sleep and watch the plants growing. Of food, we did not have overmuch—beans and chili, chili and beans."

  English-speaking historians have been as fascinated with the inner contradictions and inner social weaknesses of Spanish Texas as other schools of observers have been with the internal decay of the Roman Empire.

  Certainly, the weaknesses of a declining Spanish state, a clerically influenced society, a rigid and at times ridiculous class and caste structure, economic ineptitude, the reluctance of families to emigrate to the frontier, and the determination to be an elite of those who did, all played an immense part in the failure to incorporate the New Philippines, or Texas. There were other problems as well. Spanish centralism broke down in practice, if not in theory, when extended over vast distances. The wonderful Spanish-colonial phrase, Recibidas, obedicidas, y no cumplidas ("Received, obeyed, and not carried out") of the governors and viceroys showed what happened to even sensible instructions of distant authority.

  Furthermore, Texas was not in reality a contiguous province of New Spain. In the 18th century, Spanish settlement had not yet reached the Bravo, or Rio Grande, when fear of the French sucked missions and presidios north. Several hundred miles of despoblada, burning brush and cacti-studded near-desert, separated Spanish civilization in Mexico from the Texas oasis and capital of San Antonio. Settlement had to leap a very harsh frontier, which was not much populated even by the 20th century. Then, Spanish settlements were isolated. Only a forest-and-farm-oriented race could have spread through the thickets and hills of Texas. The Spanish were Mediterranean, and thought in terms of colonias, or town-sites, in the Roman pattern. Economically, these could not be supported.

  But what is too often overlooked is the single, major reason for Spanish failure to hold Texas—just as a French historian pointed out that it is generally overlooked, in delving into Rome's internal woes, that the Empire was assassinated. The Spanish transmitted the horse to Apachería, and through it, to the Comanches, and unhappily created the most fearsome light cavalry—the Plains Indian—the world had ever seen.

  The Spanish never even began to solve the Indian problem on their northern frontier. In fact, over the years it grew worse. Eventually, every frontier community from New Mexico through Texas lived in intolerable danger, both from the bold strokes of far-riding Comanches and the incessant guerrilla warfare of the scattered Apaches. The settlement of Texas was halted, and the settlement of New Mexico and great parts of northern New Spain was delayed and harassed for generations. Hundreds of Spanish colonists were killed in the north, and more thousands along the fringes of Old Mexico. Indian war parties were plunging as far south as Jalisco by the mid-18th century. Literally hundreds of thousands of horses and cattle were stolen or destroyed.

  This was a problem the Spanish themselves never liked to face. By 1720, they had more armed men stationed in Texas than they had employed for both the conquests of Mexico and Peru, empires that had contained millions of natives. The fact that some twenty to thirty thousand horse Indians could not only halt but rip and shred the power of Spain was hardly to be admitted. Yet this, again and again, was exactly what the most far-seeing men Spain sent out to the frontier tried to get the authorities to concede.

  These men were aware that the frontier was not advancing—it had already begun to retreat. The Marqués de Rubí, writing his report from the inspection of 1766, desperately tried to get the government to distinguish between the real and the "mythical" frontier. There was a tremendous difference between what Spain claimed and what Spaniards held.

  The great failure of the missions was twofold. First, they could only be planted among the nonwarlike tribes, and instead of forging them into a strong, Hispanic base able to defend the land, contact with Spanish culture soon exterminated these. Second, the Spanish success in Mexico and Peru had come about because the Spanish were able to conquer the dominant people, or Amerind tribe, who already overawed all the rest. The dominant tribes in Texas were the Apaches and Comanches. The Spaniards were never able to conquer the first, and the second gave them the greatest defeat they ever suffered at the hands of natives in the New World.

  A party of mounted Comanches visited San Antonio de Béxar (as the community of San Antonio de Valero, San Fernando de Béxar, and nearby missions was coming to be called) soon after it was founded, but the first real trouble came from the Apaches, now being pushed back down on the Edwards Plateau. Soon, Lipan Apaches were harrying the wretched Coahuiltecans, and undoubtedly Apache pressure forced many to accept mission life. Then, in 1730, a large band of Lipans attacked the garrison of the presidio. Two soldiers were killed, thirteen wounded, and the survivors driven into the villa. The Apaches ran off sixty head of cattle and enjoyed an enormous barbecue.

  Reprisals were called for; the Spanish always made a policy of answering an Indian raid with a punitive expedition, to demonstrate the power and implacability of imperial Spain. Commandant Bustillo y Cevallos surprised an Indian camp west of San Antonio, probably on the San Sabá River, a branch of the Colorado. Bustillo attacked, and a great many women, children, and warriors were killed. Bustillo claimed "two hundred," but Fray Morfi sneeringly called this report "exaggerated" in his History of Texas.

  This did not end the Apache troubles. San Antonio was continually raided; horses and cattle were lost, individuals picked off. The Spanish retaliated when they could, and captured a number of Apache women and children. Then, a party of Lipan Apaches came boldly into the mission at San Antonio. They would have nothing to do with the Spanish Longknives, but they wanted to treat with the Brown Robes, the padres.

  The Apaches told the priests that they desired a mission in their own country, which was on the San Sabá, far to the northwest. They wanted only peace. They offered to buy back the captives they had lost, and asked the padres' good services with the soldiers. The missionary priests were overjoyed—there had never been a chance of planting a mission in Apachería before. Although the soldiery grumbled, nothing could dampen the clerical enthusiasm, and in a few years, viceregal authority was granted for a new presidio and mission: San Luís de las Amarillas, to be erected in the country of the Lipanes.

  In April 1757, soldiers under Colonel Diego Ortiz de Parilla and five priests set out from San Antonio for the San Sabá. Here, in the heart of what was consider
ed Apachería, the mission was built of logs, surrounded by a palisade, and the presidio erected a few miles away. This expedition seemed to have three purposes. One was to convert the Lipans, to reduce and remove a great threat to settlement; another was to extend Spanish power further out from San Antonio: A third hope is explained by the persistent rumor of rich silver mines in the vicinity—a rumor of the Lost San Sabá Mines that has never entirely died away. Supposedly, some silver was mined and freighted on muleback to San Antonio. But then and later, no conclusive evidence ever existed. Coronado was not the last man to believe in mythical treasures.

  The Lipan Apaches had been meek enough in Béxar, but now, in their own country, they put the Spanish off. They stated they could not congregate just yet; it was the hunting season. Later, it was something else. The priests persisted, and hopefully, kept the mission open. The Indians seemed to be waiting for something, and the Spanish, with very limited intelligence of what was actually happening on the far frontier, decided to be patient.

  In retrospect, what was happening was very clear. The Apaches, mauled by Spanish power on the south and shredded by a terrible force from the north, with keen intelligence hoped to get both their enemies involved. They had lured a presidio-mission not just into Apachería but beyond the vague borders of Comanche country. They were eagerly waiting to see what the Comanches would do about it.

  A few months after the San Sabá mission was established, a friendly Indian brought word of a terrible calamity that was going to befall. Worried, the Spanish alerted their entire frontier—but when nothing happened during the summer and fall, they relaxed. Winter passed, the grass sprang out green and lush across the plains to the north, and early in March 1758, the moon waxed huge and full. Both priests and soldiers were delighted with the ephemeral beauty of the land. Neither knew Comanches—or that when the grass was full and thick, and the moon threw light to ride by, Comanche warriors could range a thousand miles.