Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  The news Bowie had awaited so long finally came in March 1823. On February 28 Congress voted to confirm both the Sutton and Harper reports. A major milestone passed, and Bowie wasted no time in racing for the next. He already knew Milo Johnson, the deputy surveyor working out of the Washington, Mississippi, land office. Johnson lived near him in Avoyelles, and now Bowie hired him at the standard rate of one dollar a mile to begin surveying his claims along Bayou Maçon and elsewhere. The work occupied much of the next year, and occupied Bowie himself, since he had now to select the actual tracts on which he wanted to locate his floating grants.41 As Johnson completed each survey he sent it to the land office at Washington for the registrar to handle. Once that official approved the supporting documents filed by Bowie, and entered the survey in his plat book, the deed would be done. He need only issue a land patent to Bowie, and the land was his.

  Problems began to appear almost as soon as the first surveys reached Washington, Mississippi, for the register there now was Edmund Wailes, son of Levin Wailes, who had already spotted so many fraudulent claims in the Opelousas district. When Bowie's documents arrived, Wailes smelled the same scheme at work and simply let the papers accumulate in his office without acting on them. Months later his successor, George Davis, found them when he came to take over as surveyor of public lands south of Tennessee.42 But Bowie may not have known this for some time, since he rode out with Johnson overseeing the surveys and actually making his first sales. In June 1823 he sold a tract in Catahoula, and another in October, and then in December he sold four of the Bayou Maçon parcels, totaling altogether 6,431 acres, for which he received on paper $6,018. While he did not yet have his patents in hand, he sold the tracts on the basis of his personal bond for sums up to $20,000 that he would provide good and sufficient title on demand. He realized no money right away from the Bayou Maçon parcels, but took notes that would start to come due in February 1824. The only real cash to enter his pocket was $900 for the Catahoula ground.43 Still, it was a start.

  In the process he made more mistakes. Even though his forged grants specified Bayou Maçon, he persuaded Johnson to locate the actual surveys on more desirable Bayou Tensas, which ran parallel and a few miles closer to the Mississippi. To do so Bowie got Hiram Burch and Hugh White, two local squatters, to go before Justice of the Peace William B. Prince on December 5 to swear that locals regarded Bayou Tensas as a “leading fork” of Bayou Maçon and always had, and that thus the name applied to both. Bowie already knew Burch and White, and there was no difficulty in securing their marks to the statements. As for the justice of the peace, two days earlier Prince himself had bought 1,015 acres of that Bayou Tensas property from Bowie, which made it very much in his interest to help establish an explanation for the conflict in names. In fact, Prince, Burch, and White and all of Bowie's other purchasers in the area were squatters, now buying from Bowie what they hoped to be legitimate title to the land they lived on, and at a preferential price. Bowie profited, they profited, and only the government suffered. If the later suspicions of his superiors were correct, Milo Johnson also profited from knowingly locating surveys on the wrong bayou. Bowie simply bought his complicity with an out-right bribe.44

  From the beginning of 1824 onward, the pace of activity on Bowie's claims accelerated, but so did the mounting suspicions of the officials in the Washington, Mississippi, land office. Kenneth McCrummon, a surveyor with Wailes, saw by February 1 that Bowie's practices—though he was not yet certain that Bowie was the forger—went beyond just fraud, actually hindering settlement. No sooner did a legitimate settler choose a piece of what he presumed to be the public domain and make application for purchase, than “a promising nest of Tittle makers, preemption provers &c &c” came forward, presented a false Spanish grant, “and he is obliged to move as there is no way for him to combat a fraudulent tittle.” Some discouraged settlers simply gave up on Louisiana and went west, putting Bowie in the ironic position of unknowingly encouraging the settlement of Texas.45

  By spring news of what was happening, especially with claims on the Sutton report, got to Graham in Washington, D.C. He ordered Principal Deputy Surveyor John Wilson not to perform surveys for anyone who could not show that the property they wanted surveyed was the specific land covered in their grants. There would be no more floating claims like Bowie's Bayou Maçon-Tensas grants.46 By October, as more information came into the land office at Washington, Mississippi, George Davis was thoroughly onto Bowie's fraud. “The manner in which the confirmation of many or most of those claims have been obtained,” he complained to Wailes, “as well as in relation to the testimony offered to influence, in some instances, their location, are both shocking and astonishing.”47 On October 21 Davis sent Wailes out into the field to survey more of the public lands, as well as to keep his eyes open for fraud. Meanwhile, the more Davis delved into the papers in his own office, the worse the situation looked. He now saw that land north of the Red River was definitely being converted to private ownership with no benefit to the government whatever. McCrummon reported to him that his own investigation of Bowie's actual grants had revealed serious anomalies. For one thing, he spoke with many residents who had lived for decades in the region, yet not one of them had ever heard of any of the supposed grantees. Moreover, it seemed highly suspicious that the grants covered the best land in the region, yet in the 1770s-1790s those areas were unknown and virtually unexplored. How, then, did the old Spanish governors miraculously manage to specify what would be decades later the most desirable locations?

  By mid-October McCrummon advised Davis that from Rapides to Natchitoches, the best informed people regarded the Bowie grants as frauds. “It is possible, and barely possible, that there may be some few valid and honest claims among them; but it is my opinion,” he said, “that the far greater part of these documents are base counterfeits.” Moreover, with a tendency to boastfulness that caused him problems more than once, James Bowie proudly exhibited some of his grants in the area, and men who saw them “speak publicly of them, not only as counterfeits, but very bungling counterfeits.” McCrummon warned that “the whole thing is ridiculed and contemned [sic] by every honest man in the northern district as a base attempt to defraud the government.” He strongly advised Davis to send all grants and title documents to Graham in Washington for careful scrutiny before issuing any patents, and Davis in turn advised Graham that “if all that I daily hear upon the subject be not mere idle stories, it will require but a little further indulgence by Congress to the persons for filing notices of claims to wrest from the government all the lands in that interesting district of Louisiana worth being surveyed.”48

  Bowie had been careless and overconfident. Just when he first realized his problem is uncertain, but by the last week of October, when he still had not been issued any patents despite having sent in a number of Johnson's surveys, he went to Washington, Mississippi, himself and confronted Davis. For two or three successive days he planted himself in Davis's office, at first no doubt polite but as time went on increasingly belligerent. When Bowie could not achieve his ends by charm and persuasion, he resorted to bullying and intimidation instead, a side of his nature noted by more than one man. Davis, however, stood his ground. He found Bowie “extremely anxious to obtain my approval of Johnson's locations in order to facilitate the sale of the lands.” Bowie's mode of operation was to find squatters already on good land, “and after the parties come to an understanding on the subject, the squatters are found ready to assist in the most iniquitous means of defrauding the Government—or so says report.” The squatters, “who seem to stand in the same relation to him that the Jackall does to the Lion,” were only too happy to give any manner of false witness that would secure them cheap land as their scraps from Bowie's feast.

  When Bowie showed his squatters' statements that Bayou Tensas was really called Bayou Maçon, and had been for some years, Davis pulled out a map that very clearly labeled it as Tensas, adding that his own familiarity with the popula
tion of the area convinced him that virtually all inhabitants knew it as such. Moreover, he said, standing firm, he refused to approve Johnson's survey and issue a patent “while a doubt remained in my mind.” He said he would refer the case, and all the documents on file, to Graham in Washington, D.C. That stopped Bowie momentarily. The less Washington knew of his dealings, the better. He did not even know that Harper's letter about his Lafourche frauds had gone astray, but he certainly did not want suspicion of his other grants to go abroad. Seeking a different route than bullying, and thinking to overawe Davis and still contain the problem locally, he went to Natchez and returned the next day with the young John A. Quitman, junior law partner of the widely influential William Griffith. Quitman sailed into Davis as if arguing a case before a jury, and Davis finally got them both to leave only by declaring that even an order from President James Monroe himself would not induce him to approve the surveys until he was satisfied of their propriety.49

  The situation rapidly got out of control, and then only a day or two later, Davis discovered the fatal error that James Bowie himself had unwittingly introduced into his documents. Studying two grants in particular, one to Francisco Adante from Miró in 1788, and another to Juan Gonzales from Miró the following year, something finally connected in Davis's mind. He remembered both from his own recollection and from talks with longtime residents of the district, that Bayou Maçon was really French for Bayou Mason, so called because the noted frontier outlaw Samuel Mason, whose dark deeds were still told and retold, supposedly lived on it for a time around 1803. The problem was, if Bayou Maçon only got its name subsequent to 1803, how could it have been named in a Spanish grant in 1788, fifteen years earlier? Whether the location of the grants was Bayou Maçon or Bayou Tensas no longer mattered. Here was proof absolute of rank forgery. Moreover, despite the fact that the grants were in the names of Gonzales and Adante, Davis now informed Graham that “the real claimant is, however, named Bowie.”50

  This smelled of disaster. In the Sutton report six claims totaling nearly 8,500 acres, almost a fifth of his hoped-for domain, made specific mention of Bayou Maçon in the forged grants. The obvious disqualification of the Adante and Gonzales claims equally revealed the others as forged as well. Worse, the suspicion that he lay behind them jeopardized all the rest of his claims, and the name “James Bowie” at last came to the attention of the big authorities in Washington. He could forget ever having the Maçon surveys confirmed now, and maybe the others, too. On a wider front, the exposure of land fraud throughout Louisiana was becoming public. Even as Bowie remonstrated and bullied Davis in his office, Wailes reported from Alexandria the discovery of “a certain class of land claims, founded on the basest and most palpably fraudulent documents of title, embracing immense tracts of the most valuable public lands in the State.” He had seen many of their documents, some of them no doubt Bowie's for the land near Alexandria, and found the Spanish grants to be almost laughable in their clumsiness. “There is a certain combination of individuals in the State, composed of persons whose characters have ever been suspicious, and who have suddenly risen from indigence to the possession of titles for immense bodies of valuable lands.” He advised Graham to make very careful inquiry before Congress acted on any more reports from any of the land registrars in Louisiana.51

  The best Bowie could do now was to try to contain the damage. Sutton still held office as land registrar. If the surveyor Davis insisted on sending his papers to Graham for adjudication, then the only thing to do was to remove all originals from Sutton's files, leaving him with nothing but clerk's copies, from which no one could make any comparisons of handwriting.52 Sometime in the next few months, either without Sutton's knowledge or with his active connivance, Bowie got all of his original papers out of the Washington, Mississippi, land office. It was too late to halt suspicion of the balance of his claims, but at least the move erected an impassable roadblock to further investigation of his documents. And after all, Congress had approved all his claims on the Sutton report more than a year before, and as long as his other forged grants contained no obvious anomalies like the Bayou Maçon slipup, then he might still be able to proceed with surveys on the rest and save the bulk of his scheme. James Bowie was not beaten yet.

  But it was time for a move all the same. Avoyelles had always been a backwater. It was convenient to his oversight of the surveys on Bayou Tensas and his Catahoula claims, but that work was almost finished now, with most of those properties virtually lost anyhow. After four years of living with his brother Stephen's family, he was ready to be out on his own once more. It was time for a change, and for a man of business and ambition in that region, there was only one place to go: Alexandria. Rapides led all the other western parishes in population, capital, and manufactures. The most influential men lived there—Johnston, Isaac Thomas, the Wells family, Kemper, and more, men whose company Bowie needed to cultivate. A recently completed brick courthouse and a new bank, the first in the region, had just opened in the city, evidence that Rapides was moving out of the recent depression. Bowie would need access to cash loans and credit if he hoped to expand his operations.53 Most important, the major share of his claims north of the Red River sat on the bayous just a few miles upriver from the city. He must watch over and nurture their progress and try to avoid the mistakes of the past. On October 20, 1824, he went to the Avoyelles courthouse in Marksville and registered a formal change of domicile to Rapides.54 His plans for himself were still big, and it was time to move in circles in which opportunity equaled his ambitions, for already his vision had begun to extend beyond the horizons of Louisiana.

  5

  CROCKETT

  1824-1829

  Jackson is a hero, but Crockett is a horse. Here is to General Jackson in the next presidents chair, loco Crockett in his seat in Congress, and loco Alexander in the corn field.

  DAVID CROCKETT, 1827

  What Crockett needed to do when he came home from that last session of the legislature was stay put, work his farm, and try somehow to put his personal affairs in order. His Rutherford Fork place was now in the newly formed Gibson County. In April he leased another tract of land on the south fork of the Obion, not far from his original squat, and that only doubled the acreage he needed to tend.1 His family's poverty left them wholly dependent upon his hunting for meat and the produce of their land for fruit and vegetables, and for the next year and more only the wolf bounties and animal hides brought any real money into the rude dogtrot. Circumstances denied them even the most modest luxuries, and instead of pewter or iron cutlery, when they sat at table the Crocketts dined with rough forks that he made from split cane.2

  It was no time to run for Congress. The sitting representative from western Tennessee, Adam Alexander, wrong-footed himself in 1824 when he voted in support of the tariff law that actually increased the already controversial rates of the 1816 law. Unfortunately both laws heavily favored manufacturers, which did absolutely nothing for the rural occupants of Alexander's district and, if anything, only resulted in their paying higher prices for anything they bought that had to be imported. Along with many others that year, Alexander's vote made him vulnerable, and Crockett's friends urged him to challenge the incumbent. In fact Crockett needed little coaxing. He actually announced his candidacy months before the campaign began, issuing a circular letter in the district sometime in 1824, perhaps even before the end of his legislative term. He had tasted politics and public approbation and liked them every bit as much as a good chase for bear. There is no reason to suppose that the idea of seeking a larger preserve in which to continue the hunt did not occur to him well before any friends asked him to run. Besides the repudiation that his election to Congress would deliver to those who looked down on his poverty and lowly origins, a seat in the national legislature would also put him right where his pet issue of vacant land must ultimately be decided.3

  All his pro forma protestations to the contrary, Crockett would not have been Crockett had he not hungered
for the office long before being offered the plate. He later protested that he resisted all entreaties for some time, and perhaps he did, though he might just as well have been practicing the prevailing ethic that called for a public pose of modesty and reluctance. Moreover, such a pose suited Crockett's own view of himself as a man pulled into public affairs by the acclamation of his people rather than by any ambitions of his own, of which he surely possessed an abundance. “I know'd nothing about Congress matters,” he claimed. If he had any inclination to seek reelection to the legislature, he decided to put that off in favor of the congressional race, implying that in the end, and against his will, “I was obliged to agree to run.”4

  It might have been better had he declined. A race for Congress needed money, far more than he had ever spent on his assembly seat and abundantly more than he could command now. Popular as he may have been in his assembly area, he was largely unknown in much of the rest of the eighteen-county congressional district. Moreover, Alexander showed skill as a local politician, enjoyed influential friendships, and had good connections to the seemingly all-powerful Jackson. Then, too, Crockett brought certain liabilities to the contest, most notably a bill he had introduced in the last legislature to change the meeting days of the county courts in West Tennessee, and also a suggestion that a brigade of East Tennessee militia be shifted to west Tennessee, apparently instead of raising an additional militia brigade in the west. Moreover, by his independence he had in some degree offended both Jackson and his law partner Judge John Overton, and their leader in the legislature, Felix Grundy. Crockett was about to get a lesson in what happened when a new boy on the block tried to play by his own rules, though whether or not he would learn that lesson was an entirely different matter.