Certainly it had an effect on Travis. “He was very ambitious,” said a close friend; “he hungered and thirsted for fame—not the kind of fame which staisfies [sic] the ambition of the duelist and desperado, but the exalted fame which crowns the doer of great deeds in a good cause.”73 Instead of that, here in Claiborne where he had hoped to become so much, he was laughed at, ridiculed, and disgraced.74 Moreover, with the court's judgments against him for his debts, the clerk would be issuing orders of arrest on March 31, the last day of the session. His brother-in-law William Cato had some experience with that sort of thing, and Travis himself knew that Alabama still sent debtors to prison.75 Within days, perhaps even hours of the ruling, he knew what he would do.
Years later, Claiborne old-timers recalled that “when a man committed a crime, he fled to Texas as that was such a distant country he was sure the law would not pursue him.”76 Certainly Travis knew about Texas. As a publisher he would have seen many of the same New Orleans newspapers that Bowie did, telling of the land and opportunity and amenable Mexican authorities. There were stories that land could be had “with great facility” at Austin's colony, and at a cost of less than four cents per acre, even that on credit.77 Just weeks before his trial, if Travis attended the regular meeting of the Masons, he would have met José de la Garza, one of the most prominent landowners in Béxar, then visiting in the United States and on his way to meet Alabama's governor.78 De la Garza must have told them all much of Texas, and the more he spoke, the more attractive it sounded—some-place new, where a man might start over, a place where those who came early, as Dellet did to Claiborne, might stand at the front of the community. And wherever there was a great deal of land changing hands, there was always a need for lawyers.79
The news would not be welcome to Rosanna. Just as proud as her husband, she also felt the humiliation of their situation, only now when he told her that he intended to leave her and go to Texas, she would be left behind with their toddler, Charles, and another child on the way, thrust on the charity of her family, to face the scorn of the community on her own. He promised that he would return to her when he had recouped his fortunes and could pay his debts, or else he would send for her and the children when he established himself in Texas. Loving him, she believed him. “I had not lost confidence in his integrity to me,” she explained, “however deficient he may have been to others I confided in his assurances to me.”80
She had little choice but to accept, and to keep his plan a secret as well, for surely he told no one that he intended to leave his family and run away from his debt.81 He no doubt did tell her, quite sincerely, that he intended to repay those debts when he could, but that was small comfort.82 Somehow he managed to gather a little hard cash to cover the expense of his journey. Hardly able to afford steam passage—and besides, all of Claiborne could see him if he boarded a steamboat for the trip to Mobile—he almost certainly readied his horse for a long trip.83 Sometime in the first two weeks of April 1831 he made his farewells, mounted, rode down to the ferry, and crossed the Alabama River, never to return.84
It had all started so well in Claiborne, and if ever a young man deserved to succeed for his energy, intelligence, application, and pure hard work, then surely it was William Barret Travis. But there was something lacking in him, as evidenced by the manner of his leaving. He was not yet a whole man. Ambition and brains were no guarantee of character. Only years and experience produced that, and of years he had scarcely enough to qualify as an adult, and a streak of impulsiveness, immaturity, and irresponsibility that argued against even that modest title. He wanted too much too fast and finished with nothing. When he came up against an angry man he preferred not to face, he turned his back on him, just as now he turned his back on his troubles, responsibilities, and even his wife and child. A much greater journey awaited him within himself than this long road to the Sabine, however. Travis needed to grow up. That being the case, what lay ahead was just what he most needed, for Texas in the days to come would have a way of making men.85
9
BOWIE
1827-1828
It was his habit to settle all difficulties without regard to time or place, and it was the same whether he met one or many.
WILLIAM H. SPARKS, 1881
Norris Wright's bullet gave James Bowie his first real encounter with mortality, though it would have been uncharacteristic of him to be sobered by his brush with death. If anything as he lay recuperating he thought only of finding his antagonist to finish the fight, and most likely without resort to the conventions of the code duello. He had no patience for a process so slow and deliberate as that. Bowie epitomized that species of American whom Tocqueville found “trusts fearlessly in his own powers, which seem to him sufficient for everything.”1 He would wade into Wright at first sight wherever he found him, and that would be an end to it. Wisely, once he learned that Bowie lived, Norris Wright kept his distance for the next several months, but in a small frontier community like Rapides, inevitably they must meet again, and Bowie would be ready this time.
While in bed he determined to make that leather scabbard to wear on his belt, and when Rezin visited him after the fight, he brought something to fill it. Some years earlier at his Avoyelles plantation, Rezin had stood at his forge and fashioned a hunting knife, perhaps using an old file for iron stock. He hammered out a straight blade one and one-half inches wide and just over nine inches long, put it to a grinder to hone a keen edge on one side, and then added a crosspiece separating the handle from the blade. Not at all ornamental and entirely utilitarian, it showed the stains and wear of long use. But with a good edge it made a deadly weapon all the same, and now he gave it to James. In the next encounter with Wright, if there was one, his brother would lose no precious time on a misfiring pistol or opening a clasp knife. When finally he arose to walk the streets of Alexandria once more, James Bowie wore his brother's knife at his belt, where it remained every day thereafter.2
Bowie had been lucky to survive Wright's bullet, but then James seemed charmed by good fortune, and as he recuperated his luck held elsewhere. Through a remarkable chain of misunderstandings and oversights—aided perhaps by a forged letter from Graham written by Bowie—George Davis went ahead and allowed the surveys of seven claims in Terrebonne on the Harper report. By April 1827 Bowie started registering transfers of the titles from the Martins to himself, and once he had the surveys in hand, he owned clear title to at least 17,600 acres. When an incensed Graham learned of the error, he could do nothing but start an investigation and threaten to ask President Adams himself to issue a special executive order to stop Bowie. And meanwhile, as usual, Bowie removed almost all of the original papers from land office files by showing a power of attorney from Robert Martin. His only slip was failing to do the same for the one claim on file for William Wilson.3
At the same time affairs looked bright for Bowie elsewhere. On January 28, 1827, old Reuben Kemper died at his home on the Calcasieu. That removed him, at least, as an obstacle to Bowie pursuing his supposed de la Français heirs' claim to that forty thousand dollars or more due to Kemper from the government.4 As for more immediate availability of money, prospects improved for everyone in the region that year. After the depression of the early 1820s, planters in the western parishes sought to shift capital control away from the usurious New Orleans banks. Finally, in its 1826 session, the legislature approved a charter for the Consolidated Association of the Planters of Louisiana. Since most farmers were land rich and cash poor, the Planters Bank, as it came to be called, pioneered in accepting land as collateral for loans. The original shareholders elected Hugh de la Vergne controller and sent him and an associate to New York and England seeking two million dollars in investment capital, which they finally got from the house of Baring Brothers in London. Though Bowie was not an original shareholder, he soon became one. A planter acquired shares by pledging land, and shareholding in turn entitled him to apply for loans. Bowie used his newly acquired Terrebonne property to
gain him shares, and soon had need for a loan, as his spending habits had not changed.5 With fall approaching he faced court action by Wilfred Dent for a $1,990 debt, and even his smooth tongue could not find a way to avoid confessing the validity of the judgment.6 Thus he parlayed his fraudulently acquired land into a tool to work for him even before he found buyers.
On the horizon in Rapides, meanwhile, all the years of mounting frustration, resentment, jealousy, ambition, and more finally came to a head. Once more financial recession loomed. The wave of land speculation of the past several years left many overextended and indebted, their property, like the Martins', about to be seized in judgment. “The weight of debt must sooner or later force a change of owners of most of the property in the Parish,” John Johnston warned his brother in July, “which will bear in its train distrust, hatred, malevolence, jealousy and all of the concomitant discord.” This only exacerbated the personal animosities among the several factions in the parish, and now they gelled into two camps. On the one side stood the Wells brothers, chiefly Samuel and Montfort, and Bowie's old friend Warren Hall. General Cuny loosely allied with them as well, perhaps in part because of an $11,750 mortgage that he owed Montfort Wells.7 On the other stood Robert Crain, Dr. Thomas Maddox, Alfred Blanchard, and Norris Wright. Chances were that by late summer of 1827 none of them knew the true origins of their feud. Crain and Cuny had a long-running disagreement.8 The Wellses and Wright, of course, harbored grudges over recent and past elections. Hall and Wright were also enemies thanks to old insults and Hall's friendship for Bowie. Dr. Maddox, though long friendly with Samuel Wells, had recently been pulled by loyalties to his other friends, and Wright especially could be counted on to feed him poisoned information about his own antagonists. Bowie, of course, harbored his own feelings toward Wright.9
Ostensibly the final explosion began when friends on both sides urged the Wells brothers and Hall to meet Maddox, Wright, and Crain on the dueling field and finally settle their differences. The confrontations began when Montfort Wells and his second, Hall, met to fight Crain and his second, Wright. Rather than shoot, however, they shouted. Wells was so nearsighted that he demanded a distance of no more than ten paces between the duelists, but the two seconds, already enemies, grew so angry in the negotiations that they issued their own challenges, and Maddox and Wells left with no fight after all. Wells responded by simply aiming a shotgun at Maddox a few days later on an Alexandria street, but he missed, and the fact that his brother Samuel was sheriff saved him from arrest and prosecution. That only strained the Samuel Wells-Maddox friendship, though each tried to avoid an open break. John Johnston declared by July 13 that Rapides had become a “scene of constant warfare,” with the end of the turmoil not in sight.10
This kind of violence was all too common on the southern frontier. A traveler some years later remarked that “the darkest side of the southerner is his quarrelsomeness, and recklessness of human life.” Men fought duels over the smallest slight, real or imagined. Their ready resort to such violence may have been in part a cultural artifact from their Scottish and Irish ancestors, encouraged by the inability to accept questions or challenges to authority instilled in Southern men by slavery, and enhanced by a frontier society in which justice and retribution by officialdom could not be counted on to be either swift or appropriate, especially when lawmen themselves—like Wells and Wright—were often parties to feuds. Add competition in land speculation, ambition, and greed, and the mix inevitably led to crowded dueling fields and wayside ambushes.11
Meanwhile Wright and Hall announced their fight for July 26. The origins of their feud may have gone all the way back to 1821 and Hall's trial and acquittal, which almost led to a duel with the judge in the case.12 In any event none of these men now seemed content to settle their differences one-to-one. Rather, they went in small gangs. When Wright left Alexandria on July 21 to meet Hall, he took Crain, Maddox, and six others with him, along with an arsenal of four rifles, one double-barreled shotgun, and seven braces of pistols. “What their intentions are I am unable to say,” Samuel Wells cracked in droll and disingenuous fashion. He should have been more sobered just before their departure by a visit from Crain, who handed him a challenge from Maddox, proposing a meeting on August 5. Though Wells wanted to avoid fighting Maddox, he felt he had no choice but to accept. He suggested a more convenient date, however, privately hoping to delay until October, by which time he hoped they could have adjusted their differences. “It has been unnecessarily brought on,” he lamented, and all grew out of public debate over the fault for the breakdown of the Maddox-Montfort Wells duel. “I regret exceedingly to be thrown in collision with Dr. Maddox, he is an honest upright peacable citizen—we had hitherto been on terms of extreme intimacy, and if he had been left to pursue his own feelings and disposition, we never should have fallen out.” Now it was too late.13
The anticipated Hall-Wright fight became a spectator event, with some two hundred or more people turning up to watch. They saw no duel, however, but what one termed “a most farcical tragedy.” Hall waited at the appointed place on time, with Bowie acting as his second, but never even saw Wright. After loading a steamboat with men, guns, knives, and surgeons and taking them all across to the Mississippi side of the river, Wright sent his principal second to settle the final details. There followed twenty minutes of discussion over the propriety of Bowie acting as Hall's second, no doubt objected to by Wright's second since Bowie and Wright had their own unfinished business, and he could not be counted on to act fairly under the circumstances. Hall looked increasingly nervous during it all, and when no resolution ensued, the fight fizzled, and Wright left claiming the victory though he had never set foot on the field. An enraged Hall demanded another meeting and issued a public challenge. “War has again been declared in Rapides,” old Overton told Senator Johnston. Everyone awaited the Samuel Wells fight with Maddox, while the two principals began practicing their marksmanship. “They are both spending their time in killing trees,” said a cynical observer. Soon enough their targets would have flesh.14
Throughout August, Rapides hummed with talk of the anticipated fight. Both antagonists and would-be spectators had been disappointed in two previous duels. Everyone banked on this fight really taking place, and at the same time the war talk inflated it to such proportions that most expected the fighting to spread beyond just Maddox and Wells. After some negotiating they agreed to meet in or near Natchez in mid-September, with no final agreement on place, date, or terms yet fixed. Gradually the antagonists traveled east. Maddox, accompanied by Wright and Crain, arrived in Natchez on September 16, lodging with Maddox's fellow physician John Nevitt.15 Wells arrived the next day, with his second, Maj. George McWhorter, and his physician, Dr. Richard Cuny. Rather than cross over to Natchez immediately, they lodged in the Alexander House at Vidalia, immediately on the west side of the Mississippi. James Bowie came with them, as did Gen. Samuel Cuny and Thomas J. Wells. Word of their arrival reached Maddox quickly enough, and that same evening in Natchez their opponents began to talk of the impending duel turning into a general melée.
Bowie remained in Vidalia the next day, when Wells went to Natchez and met with Maddox. They agreed to fight in the morning, Wells specifying a partially wooded sandbar on a bend a few hundred yards upstream from Natchez on the Mississippi side of the river. Because of the mutual fear of the meeting turning into a free-for-all, they also agreed that only three men on a side should be present on the field, the principals and their seconds and surgeons. By now more friends of Maddox—or more properly friends of Crain and Wright—arrived, including Alfred Blanchard and his brother Carey, and with the two parties growing larger, each man brought his own animosities to add to the mix, and the danger of the affair getting out of hand increased dramatically. In the negotiations for the meeting, Wright had made it clear that he did not wish to see someone from the other party on the field, meaning Bowie, while some believed they had heard Crain announce that he would shoot his old foe
General Cuny on sight.16 Boast and probably drink raised the blood of both camps, each man supporting and encouraging the determination of his partners. Only a miracle could prevent a tragedy on the morrow.
Bowie simply watched these preliminaries, being there in no official capacity but simply as one of the “friends” of Wells. Finally, on the late morning of September 19, he turned participant when he and the others stepped into a small skiff at Vidalia and rowed across the river. When they reached the sandbar they found that they had arrived before their opponents, and tied their boat to the beach and walked inland a bit to shade themselves in a stand of willows. The late summer day, already over eighty degrees, grew warm. The sky was clear, the humidity rising by noon, when at last Bowie saw Maddox and at least ten men with him, plus some of their servants, approaching on horseback. They stopped and dismounted some distance away from the Wells party, and then Maddox, Crain, and their friend Dr. James Denny walked down to the sandbar to join Wells, McWhorter, and Dr. Cuny.
Three Roads to the Alamo Page 26
