Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  That callow youth from Claiborne who was always in a hurry for everything had come a long way. He was only twenty-five now, and yet he had learned restraint, patience, and most of all discretion. “Unless the people were more favorable to the plan than they are here,” he wrote Smith from San Felipe, “I should say let us remain quiet. For unless we are all united Texas can never sustain herself alone.” He may have gone along with the majority on his committee for the sake of unity, but he still favored a separate state government for Texas, as he always had, “provided we can be united and get it on peaceable terms.” In addition, while a few days before he spoke of “revolution” and sovereignty, now he tempered his aspirations and linked them only to what could be obtained by “peaceable” means. His own goals remained the same, but he was mature enough now to know that he could not have it all at once, and that the situation called for patience rather than petulance. Better not to attempt a separation at all, he reasoned, than to try it prematurely and fail, especially given the possible repercussions for Austin. Having discovered a political truth as old as government itself, he told Smith that “as long as people are prosperous they do not desire a change.” Nothing could be done for Texas now, of that he was certain. “I am, however, for Texas, right or wrong, and never will oppose anything for her benefit,” he concluded, but in the absence of unity on a vital issue like separation, “it would only be to make confusion doubly confounded to attempt to do anything.” He had learned one of the lessons that divided democrats from demagogues: The opinion of the people was more important than his own.28

  It was a lesson that Henry Smith never learned. Sensing in the decision of the central committee a criticism of his own conduct—which, after all, had been but to do as Travis advised—he proceeded to ignore both the voice of the committee and of the people. Unable to make up his own mind at first, once he set it on a course he could not change, and so he went ahead and called a referendum for November 8 on sending delegates to Béxar. The result humiliated Smith. Few even bothered to vote, and those who did soundly rejected the convention. It did not help that the committee issued a broadside condemning the idea, and privately Jack wrote to Austin that the hasty move would “kill Smith and his friends and check this present exertion for a state.”29

  At least Smith did not begrudge Travis going along with the majority, and after the debacle the younger but now much wiser lawyer tried to calm his agitated friend. “I am extremely sorry the people could not harmonize on the State question,” he told Smith, “but so it is.” Liberty and Nacogdoches delivered even greater majorities against the issue than did San Felipe. Travis confessed that the committee report had been unfair to Smith personally, but he tried without avail to prevent that. “My voice in the committee was only one against six,” he said. “I found myself almost alone. All my friends were opposed to my views.” Travis even began to offer fatherly advice, of the sort he had probably received himself not so many years before: “We must wait patiently for the moving of the waters. The course of events will inevitably tend to the right point, and the people will understand their rights; yea, and assert them, too.”30

  Attorney Travis could attest personally to the general prosperity now, for his own business seemed to explode in 1834. February and March had been busy months, and then by May his cases rose to the point that accounts due him totaled $4,860.99.31 Of course hard cash was still scarce in 1834, and barely one debt in ten was actually paid in coin.32 In fact, Travis the onetime debtor now found himself using the courts to collect debts owed to him—a happy, if ironic, turnaround.33 One client alone owed him as much as $2,400.00.34 His duties with the ayuntamiento took much-needed time away from his own paperwork, and in early May he employed a bookkeeper to make sense of his accounts. He bought two hundred writing quills and new ledger books for his practice accounts, and paid to have the front of his log office covered with clapboard siding. He even hired a French gardener, Pierre Blanchet, to work for $1.25 a day plus meals to plant a vegetable garden and dress up the ground around the rented house. By the end of May, considering that his business net now spread to Brazoria and Harrisburg and communities on the Colorado, he even toyed with taking on a partner, the brother of Benjamin Fort Smith, Bowie's possible childhood playmate.35

  The partnership did not materialize for the moment, but Travis did take on another sort of person in the practice. On May 7 he added a new link in the chain of comparisons with his own mentor Dellet when Travis accepted a student to read law under him. Jonathan H. Kuykendall was the nineteen-year-old grandson of Adam Kuykendall, one of the elder Rezin Bowie's neighbors back in Logan County, Kentucky, a very intelligent (though almost cripplingly morose) young man just now glad to be alive. He started reading law with Luke Lesassier, but when that attorney fell ill, he agreed in February to go on a journey with Travis's friend Thomas McQueen. McQueen himself was an ill-fated fellow. He was taking to Monclova a commission from Samuel Williams to carry his petition for keeping the Sterling Robertson grant, but he and Kuykendall had scarcely gotten forty miles from Béxar when a party of Tawakoni or Comanche attacked. An arrow in his side knocked McQueen from his saddle, and as he was falling his own pistol discharged and shot him in the hip, while another arrow struck Kuykendall beneath his left eye, leaving its point lodged beneath the skin in an ugly wound. Kuykendall got McQueen back to Béxar just in time for him to die, and then “moody, restless and discontented,” he struck the bargain to read law under Travis for three years and receive room and board in return for helping in the practice.36

  It did not prove to be a well-made match, though Travis tried to meet his end of the bargain. With the arrow point causing Kuykendall's left cheek and throat glands to swell grotesquely, Travis paid his friend Dr. Robert Peebles, a member of the central committee, to operate on the boy and remove the barb. He paid fifteen dollars a month for Kuykendall to eat his meals at Connell's inn, where Travis himself frequently dined, and where he also paid for his new gardener to eat.37 He spent money for new pantaloons and shoes for Kuykendall, whose mood did not improve when, a month after the glum young fellow moved into Travis's home, Joseph Clayton settled an old feud by murdering his father, Abner Kuykendall, in the street in San Felipe. Clayton's conviction and hanging did not lift Kuykendall's spirits, as he found himself “driven to distraction” by his health and depression.38

  Young Kuykendall's tastes actually leaned more to poetry than the law, which he only agreed to take up when his father threatened to turn him out if he did not. Thus he was hardly the kind of apt pupil that Travis had been. He read Blackstone's Commentaries, just as Travis had for Dellet, and studied Spanish law as well, but he lacked his teacher's liking for the work. The boy's dark attitude must have grated on Travis from the first, and he complained about the quantity of office work that Travis gave him: It interfered with his preferred reading of Ovid and the other classical authors. Travis's practice was too big, and besides him mentor also set him to doing some of the work of copying documents for the ayuntamiento. “I soon found I had made a big bargain,” Kuykendall recalled. If anything, his experience with Travis left him with a prejudice against the law that he never lost, though when he left Travis after only a couple of months, he continued to read under William Jack in Columbia for a time. 39

  Still Kuykendall did not leave without gaining some respect for Travis, however much their personalities may have clashed. He confessed that he found his mentor “a laborious student, a good scholar, and a vary brainful young man.” Moreover, he was a good speaker at the bar, though more fluent than pleasant, for his voice seemed loud and his manner often harsh, like Dellet's. 40 Yet he gained enough success that the clients kept coming, and those whom he worked for in the past returned. Eli Holly's widow continued giving him the family's legal work, and Isaac Donoho engaged him to defend himself and Bowie in a suit. Though not often thrown together with Bowie, Travis had other business that occasionally called for him to see the land speculator on those now rare occasio
ns when he was in San Felipe. Bowie's old friend Warren Hall engaged Travis in Brazoria to oversee the purchase of twenty-three slaves from Peyton Splane, a $12,450 transaction that paid Travis a handsome fee, and may have told him of the early days with Bowie as well, since Travis occasionally stayed the night with Hall. In fact Travis did a fair bit of business for those who bought and sold “lifetime indentures.” Business came from San Antonio and even as far away as New Orleans.41

  Since he lived on what was still a rugged frontier, Travis also more than once had to clean up the legal mess after a quarrel ended in murder, as with Abner Kuykendall. Feuds over a variety of issues were not at all uncommon. Morris Mays and Rawson Alley feuded for some time in the spring of 1834. Alley accusing Mays of stealing and rebranding one of his yearling calves. In April, Alley took the matter to J. W. Moore, the alcaldein Harrisburg, and four lawyers came into the case, Travis leading for Mays, and Pat Jack for Alley. They held court outdoors under the live oaks, with quite an audience present for the entertainment, as Ben Fort Smith volunteered to roast a couple of calves for lunch for the crowd. Travis entered a plea of not guilty for Mays, and then Jack helped Alley state his case, his best evidence being that one of his own cows was letting the yearling suckle. Despite Travis's best efforts at defense, his friend David Burnet, obliged by granting him a second hearing right after lunch. During the meal, and apparently at Travis's instigation, Smith took Alley on his way home. When Burner reconvened the court, there was no plaintiff, no evidence, and no case. Burnet decided that the branding had been a mistake and discharged the defendant, and the whole party enjoyed a chuckle at a dance that evening. Yet if Alley was temporarily mollified, it did not last, and in November he took his revenge and stabbed Mays fatally.42

  The trick Travis played typified his idea of fun, though not everyone appreciated his sense of humor, especially when it often came at the expense of someone else. Kuykendall saw how much Travis liked his own brand of prank, though adding that with the rest of the community in San Felipe, Travis was “not noted for either wit or humor.” He especially practical jokes like the one with Alley's calf. In the summer of 1834, not long after the Mays trial, a stranger appeared in Travis's office with a plan to build a steamboat to run the Brazos and asked the lawyer for his help. Obviously he had learned of Travis's leading role in the Wilson and Harris plan and expected the attorney to do the same for him. Unfortunately the current steamboat deal was bogged down in problems in New Orleans. It was supposed to start construction in April, but then the failure of a major banking house caused delays with their credit, and by May 18 William Harris told Travis dejectedly that “our prospects are more gloomy now,” and that the land that Travis and others had pledged might have to be sold just to satisfy debts to date, with no promise of the boat being finished. Even now he was under instruction to sell land for Wilson and the Harrises in order to raise more money.43 Consequently, Travis had little interest in another scheme that would only compete with his own, and when the visitor came back day after day, Travis decided to get rid of him entirely.

  Knowing a tall young fellow in the area who was otherwise unemployed, Travis hired him to start a quarrel with the annoying caller and then challenge him to a duel. When the fight had been picked and the challenge issued, the victim called on Travis, of course, told him to accept, and suggested having the fight at once. “I will be your second,” he said, “and you must fight with pistols across this very room.” The dupe protested that he had no experience with pistols, while his antagonist was most certainly a rugged fellow who had cut his teeth fighting the local natives. Travis comforted him that such men always stood behind trees when shooting at the Comanche and Tawakoni, “but bring one of them face to face with his antagonist without a protecting tree, and he will ingloriously back out.” That was enough to reassure the man, but when the time for the duel came, and Travis had secretly loaded the pistols only with powder, the man's nerve broke down as he stared across the office at the Texian. He dropped the pistol and refused to fight, pleading that he was a mechanic, not a killer, and asked Travis, as his second, to fight in his place. Travis harshly scolded him for his cowardice, and the man promptly left not only the office but San Felipe.44

  In that instance Travis's practical joke amused everyone, because it was directed at an outsider. When he turned his eye toward his friends, though, he met with less agreement as to just what was and was not funny. He could be prickly, too, and sometimes stood rather too much on ceremony, traits that combined with his sometimes unappreciated pranks could have led him to serious trouble of his own. In April he gave testimony that William Jack had grossly overcharged a client with a $5,000 fee, when $200 would have been more appropriate, not an act calculated to keep a friend or repay him for his efforts at Anahuac, and one that in some could have led to violence.45 Moreover, Travis could lose his temper, and was not yet so mature that prudence always governed his tongue. Late in 1833 he had a serious argument with his friend and landlord at the time, John R. Jones, and moved out in anger, though when this temper cooled they became close once more.46 At almost the same time that he defended Mays, Travis actually spoke so intemperately in front of the ayuntamiento that Williamson fined him twenty-five dollars for contempt, and a few weeks later his own client and friend Robert Mosely field suit against him for eighty dollars, which Travis thought “rascally.” In May his friend B. L. Burks actually became so angry with him that he cursed Travis to his face. 47

  Undoubtedly much of the trouble lay in Travis personality, though some of his manner may well have been modeled after Dellet's. “Though generally recognized as both able and honest, Travis was not a very popular man,” thought Kuykendall during their time together. “His brusque manner often gave offense and some times provoked insults upon which he turned his back.”48 Ephraim Roddy, an attorney at the new village of Washington, thirty miles up the Brazos from San Felipe, found Travis “very irascible,” and not very well disposed to take in good humor having a joke turned on him. When Roddy turned some particularly effective sarcasm on him while they argued a case in Washington, Travis became visibly irritated, indicated the knife in his belt, and banteringly—but with some temper—suggested that he might like to use it on his opponent. Roddy reached into his pocket and drew out his only weapon, a small pen knife for carving quills, and addressed the judge. “Your Honor, owing to the discrepancy of our weapons I cannot do opposing counsel much bodily harm, but if he insists upon it, I will try” The explosion of laughter among the witnesses defused the tension at once, and Travis apparently saw the foolishness of the situation well enough to back down in good grace and stand a round of drinks afterward. The two remained friends, and Travis even did a fair bit a fair bit of business for the man who made him look foolish, but when they met again in court and this time Travis won, he could not help gloating in his diary that “I whipped old Roddy.”49

  In fact, if anything Travis had a reputation for walking away from confrontations, evidence enough that he became involved in at least a few. Reuben Potter knew him slightly, but knew others of long acquaintance with the lawyer, and he recalled a prevailing impression that Travis “had been in civil life habitually cautions in avoiding broils and personal collisions, so much so that the rougher class of his contemporaries took for signs of timidity what I believe merely indicated a cool temper and guarded deportment.”50 Kuykendall agreed. “He certainly was not a man of impulsive physical courage,” he said of Travis. “It required a strong moral stimulus to rouse his combativeness.”51

  Yet his friends and associates also saw another side of his nature, a touching generosity that few forgot. He consistently encouraged religion, whether he tried to find a Bible for the wife of a friend, sent a Sunday School book to two little girls, personally attended the preaching of a new Cumberland Presbyterian minister, Sumner Bacon, or gave a visiting priest a borrowed cot and a place to sleep in his house and personally paid the padre's board at Connell's.52 The product of a better-than
-average education himself, Travis actively supported efforts to educate the children of Texas. He encouraged the establishment of a new “classical and English” school at Columbia, opening in October 1834, and lent his name as a character reference for the proprietor.53 With touching regularity he gave small sums of money to children, even to a slave boy named Jared and a local native child, for them to buy candy. He gave donations to local charities.54 He sent books to some children, and bought shoes as a gift for the child of Jonathan Peyton.55 Beyond question he saw in those little ones the son, Charles, he had not seen for more than three years, and the daughter he never saw at all. When community organizations tried to start in San Felipe, he proved an eager participant, whether it was the San Felipe Club, a men's group that sometimes let its debates turn violent, or the jockey club, whose members as often as not relived the local horse races in lively discussion in Travis's office while the lugubrious Kuykendall looked on.56 More than once he sat up through the night with a sick or dying friend. Texians did not forget that.57

  Even if they found him abrupt and humorless—or his idea of wit not to their taste—none could deny that Travis was a member of the community of whom they could be proud. He kept his house and office neat, a nice little patch of potatoes, cabbage, and peppers growing in his garden outside. He made a good impression when seen on the streets. He almost always wore new boots and pantaloons—Travis was partial to pantaloons and treated himself to several pairs—a colorful coat set off by a black cashmere shawl, and a sparkling white hat. He ate at the best boardinghouses in town, such as they were, and rode a handsome new bay horse named Shannon that cost him eighty dollars.58 Like any affluent professional gentleman of property, Travis also had slaves, though he hired as often as he bought, and generally looked on his blacks as an investment to provide lease income. Besides Jared, Travis bought a fifty-year-old man named Jack from Eli Holly's estate, another named Simeon, and a young girl named Eliza, whom he would hire out to others. Jack, at least, gave him trouble by getting drunk, and Travis had no compunction about whipping him for his behavior. After renting Joe for quite some time, Travis eventually bought him, and this slave he kept to himself, though early in the year he did briefly consider selling him.59