Tejanos in the 1835 Texas Revolution

By L. Lloyd MacDonald

A Texas historian presents a vividly detailed account of the 1835–36 battle for independence, shining new light on the experiences of Tejano rebels.

In the 1820s and ‘30s, thousands of settlers from the United States migrated to Mexican Texas, lured by Mexico’s promise of freedom. But when President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna came to power, he discarded the constitution and established a new centralized government. In 1835 and ‘36, Mexican-born Tejanos and Anglo-born Texans fought side by side to defend their rights against this authoritarian power grab. After Santa Anna silenced decent across Mexico, Texas emerged as the lone province to gain independence.

Offering a unique study of the role the Mexican-born revolutionaries played in Texas’s battle for independence, this account examines Mexico from the fifteenth century through the birth of the sovereign nation of Texas in 1836. Drawing heavily on first-person accounts, this detailed history sheds light on the stories and experiences of Tejanos and Texans who endured the fight for liberty.

Enhanced by maps and illustrations handcrafted by the author, this volume contributes an important perspective to the ongoing scholarship and debate surrounding the Alamo generation of the 1830s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781455615087

Book preview

Prologue

Texian-Tejano Identities Emerge

from Legacies of Colonial and Mexican-Texans

in the Texas Revolution

Time-honored memories, whether steeped in myth or reality, have kindled a deep and lasting interest in the unique events leading to Texas independence from Mexico in 1836, particularly in respect to the famous Battle of the Alamo. However, few of the exciting stories of those tumultuous times have centered on the worthy experiences of those many Texian revolutionaries who were of Mexican-Texan heritage. With few exceptions, neither has singular attention heralded the selfless feats of thirty-two ordinary family men from the environs of Gonzales who bravely chose to ignore mounting perils to answer Colonel Travis’s cry from the Alamo for help. Moreover, James Butler Bonham, Travis’s special messenger throughout the Alamo’s thirteen days of siege has received minimal notice for his loyalty and devotion to duty. When added to the better-known legacies of William Travis, David Crockett, and Jim Bowie, their stories will merge to define the inner character of the few who made rebellion possible. Once committed, they aimed for a lofty goal, one anchored firmly to unwavering principle, belief in the merit of their ambitious cause, and a willingness to see it through to a desirable end.

Faced with those uncertainties and deadly perils, lesser men would have quit the scene, or may never have saddled up at all. But, refusing to be intimidated by Santa Anna’s boastful claims, the Texian paladins, though novice to the ways of war, drew upon the store of courage and patriotic impulse they inherited from their fathers and bowed their backs in defiance. Nothing, they insisted, would hinder their plans to settle upon the remote home sites they had staked amid a vast sea of virgin lands, lands that for geological ages had served little purpose other than to hold back the ocean waters of Mexico’s huge gulf. Too often, in prehistoric times, calendared as Paleozoic and Cenozoic eras, it had failed the task, repeatedly allowing the mass of encroaching gulf water to bury, then mold, reshape, and redefine the ground it covered, before receding to wait patiently for one more chance to flood again. Eons later the land had been tossed, folded, lifted, and eroded to the shape of Texas. (In Spanish, pronounced Tay-hass, and sometimes spelled Tejas, the x and j being interchangeable.) The years 1821 through 1836 were critical to the memorial of those pioneers who would eventually choose to rally for a free and independent Texas, but independent thought began long before then.

In North America, it emerged from a crowded meeting hall in Philadelphia when, in 1776, a small group of thoughtful but defiant men gave new meaning to the definition of independence. Its embryo—a vibrant spirit of heart and mind, known to many as the Spirit of ‘76. Its legacy—the birth of a new nation dedicated to the promise of renewed life, personal liberties, and the universal right to unfettered happiness. Those valuable legacies became the inheritance of a generation of pioneers who later chose to venture to the far reaches of the frontier behind a new breed of courageous leaders, the empresarios of Mexico’s Texas (an empresario promoted and managed colonization).

The Texas colonists would prove to be a determined lot, confident and self-reliant. Though daring and independent, they were not troublemakers. Neither were they hotheads. For the most part, they were family men and their families were with them, sharing in the trials of a bold, new venture. What more would be needed to convince any doubters that these new Texian-Mexicans, while prompted by Stephen F. Austin’s influence, wanted to live peacefully within the Mexican system, not change it. They were attracted to Mexico’s most northern state for not only the abundance of available fertile land, but because of its new form of government—a constitutional Republic with guarantees similar to those they had known back home, in Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky, and the Carolinas.

To be sure, a few repugnant demands were to be made of the colonials. One required all new immigrants to embrace and follow a single form of religious worship—in this case, the Roman Catholic Apostolic religion. Another, less daunting since only a few were affected, prohibited slavery. Even so, the new Texians were determined to learn to live peacefully and in compliance with the Mexican system. The many advantages offered by a promising new way of life seemed to outweigh the few perceived disadvantages. Besides, having always lived within a free Republic, this generation of colonists had a good sense of what made it work and of the part each of them would have to play to ensure that it would do so.

Their method—instill their demands with a generous dose of thoughtful consideration, one man of the other, and, in their dialogue, ply none other than friendly forms of persuasion. Those were known to be the keys—nothing novel—just a keen, commonsense approach to a reasoned belief that in any debate the winners and losers alike might see their way clear to willingly adjust, compensating for either the dissenting views of a few, or the dominant view of the majority. In a world of new ideas and political intrigue, they knew to give and take a little, needing oft-times to compromise and sometimes to yield entirely, all the while hoping that the same measures of understanding, tolerance, and respect might then be reflected in the mood and conduct of their new Mexican hosts.

The new ideas, freedoms, and advantages, following as natural benefits of a republican form of constitutionally endowed government, were altogether new experiences for the Mexican-Texans (Hispanics), seen by them at first to be nothing short of radical experimentation. To the Mexican citizen the realization of a truly self-ruling, independent movement had been much longer in coming. Centuries of domination and subjugation by the Spanish royalty, and many intervening usurpers and pretenders to the same crown, had molded the subjects of Nueva España (New Spain, including Mexico) into rather subservient pawns. For as long a time as could be remembered, the rigid, systematized social or class structure had controlled the lives, lifestyles, and welfare of everyone—from European Spain to the towering Andes of Peru and beyond, from the socially elite of the Spanish nobility to the lowly Indian peon. For them the Mexican Constitution of 1824 offered the greatest hope. Under its terms, everyone would have a chance to be what he wanted to be, to do what he wanted to do. Still, some Mexican-Texans wondered what would be left behind, and where might those changes lead? Only the future could foretell. That future looked promising, and it would deliver.

The 2000 United States Census reported the population of the State of Texas to be 20,851,820, made up of many ethnic variations. But, after the vast region that became known as Texas was first entered upon in 1528 by the Spanish explorer Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (whose family crest bore the head of a cow), the identities of its few occupants were then more easily distinguished. They were either European-Spaniards or American Natives—Indians. (The later French efforts to occupy the area were brief and unsuccessful.) Then, as additional races, cultures, and blends thereof were to either evolve or introduce themselves into Texas, appropriate and acceptable means of identifying the various factions of the growing society became somewhat more complex. To clarify their unique identity, an important segment of the Texas population, during the last decades of the twentieth century, adopted a term of self-identification—calling themselves Tejanos (Tay-há-no). In order to appreciate the appropriate meaning, origin, and use of the term Tejano, the background from which it derives must first be understood. Without that foundation, the motivation that influenced the manner and extent of the valuable contributions of Mexican-Texians in the events leading to Texas’s independence from Mexico in 1836 might continue to be sometimes overlooked.

The Tejano forefathers lived at a time when one such descriptive word would not have been adequate to properly characterize an entire population. They either favored, or gave consent, to a unique form of privileged society, one that served to promote jealousy, dissention, and distrust. Even then, the early Spaniards placed considerable importance upon a class system, which demanded that European-born Spaniards, known as peninsulares, or less respectfully gachupines, must hold all the highest positions in government, politics, the church hierarchy, and the military.

The criollos, of pure Spanish blood but born in the New World, or outside of Spain, were allowed to serve only in lesser posts. For that reason, many expectant mothers would return to the mother country, hurrying from whatever corner of Nueva España in which they lived, to give birth. Only then would their children be entitled to the highest recognition in the well-defined castas system. Because of the lesser status imposed on them, the criollos would privately express their disapproval by referring to the peninsulares in a derogatory derivation of the synonym gachupines. The resentment was ever present.

Then, as can be expected in the natural order of things, a commingling took place between many persons of Spanish blood and those of the various, and in many cases, ancient, civilized native tribes. In the Spanish social system, those of mixed European and Indian ancestry were identified as mestizos. They were expected to fill the needs of the working middle class and, in addition to contributing their several necessary trades and skills, became well established in tasks that comprised the lower echelons of government and the church (which, in the Spanish Colonial Empire, was only the Holy Roman Catholic Church).

Finally, the Indios, native Indians who formed the majority of the then population of Mexico. Even those belonging to the highly skilled and architecturally sophisticated Aztec, Mayan, or Toltec heritage were considered the lowest of the Spanish class structure. The laboring jobs in agriculture, mining, and common tasks were reserved for them, and it was not uncommon for one of that social order, through a form of peonage, to become indentured in laboring service to another for as long a term as ninety-nine years. This was an effective form of enslavement that was condoned, even encouraged, under Spanish law. Other Indios were forced by government edict into military service, shanghaied, where they were oft-times required to serve for years alongside conscripted convicts and other recruits who had little or no choice but to make up the lowest ranks of the Spanish army. Even then, the army offered the Indios the best opportunities for advancement and recognition within the restricted Spanish social order.

Such was the castas structure early developed and long enforced by the Spanish government in Mexico, and endured by its people for more than two centuries before the same rules were imposed after 1718 upon a new population in New Spain’s most northern province—Texas (Tejas). And it was the same class structure that Father Hidalgo, an early-day revolutionist, sought to reform in his "Grito de Dolores" (Cry of Dolores) of 1810. His dream of a government controlled in part by men of the mestizos class rather than of the elite peninsular would finally be realized in 1821, coming ten years after his murder. Soon after, the Mexican Republic opened its doors to emigration from the United States, knowing from years of inherited Spanish failures that population growth would have to come from the north. All previous efforts to entice Mexican people to emigrate from the interior of Mexico to lands north of the line they called Rio Bravo (Rio Grande) had met with only limited success. If the land called Texas was to be tamed—if it was to be developed—if it was to endure—it would have to be done, they decided, with a flood of Norteamericanos. So came the settlers from United States of the North, the new frontiersmen, to take up lands in geographic regions assigned their empresarios, and there to assimilate themselves within the wild, new country as Citizen-Mexicans of the Republic of Mexico.

Those settlers, the Norteamericano colonists, were, by many of the Mexican-Texans, called Anglos, or Americans, for lack of any better means of distinction, eventhough few of them would have claimed their lineage to be of Anglo-Saxon heritage. Whatever their heritage, Anglos are broadly defined by Webster’s Dictionary as being a Caucasian inhabitant of the U.S. of non-Latin extraction. Although, as Texas colonists they were no longer inhabitants of the United States, but rather of Mexico, the distinction was nonetheless continued by Mexican-Texans, even though the colonists had themselves become Mexican-Texans.

In any event, by 1835, twenty-five thousand Texian colonials, most all of whom had migrated from the United States, claimed Texas as home. Willing to face a myriad of possible consequences, they had surrendered to living the primitive lifestyle demanded of frontiersmen, scattering themselves throughout the roadless wilderness under the thatched-roof shelters of dog-run log cabins. Somewhat more fortunate were those colonists who crowded into a few isolated centers of population near busy river ports fronting on wide waterways to the open sea. They might have even dressed a little better—woven trousers in place of deerskin breeches, hats of beaver felt rather than of greased leather or bearskin. Ignoring the ten thousand or so aborigines, native Texans could then boast of only about four thousand citizens of Latino heritage, including Spanish, Corsican, and Mexican, all appropriately called Tejanos, most of whom, 2,400, lived in and around San Antonio de Béxar. The rest, 1,600, were divided between northeast Texas (Nacogdoches and Anahuac) and the southeast ranchero communities of La Bahia (Goliad), Victoria, and San Patricio (mostly Irish). The extreme southern tip of Texas, between the Rio Grande and Nueces River, was not then considered a part of Texas; hence, the population of that region, then a part of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, was not included.

In the beginning, most Texas colonists from the United States called themselves Texians, or Texicans, but eventually, under the sovereign influence of the Republic of Texas, settled upon the long-lasting, two-syllable pronunciation Texan. Still, whenever it became appropriate to offer any distinction between the American colonists and their close neighbors of Mexican heritage, one leader of the Hispanic community, Juan Seguin, a descendent of both the early Spanish military presence and Canary Islanders, often identified his followers as Mexico-Texians, or Federalist Rancheros, Vaquero-Scouts, Texan Citizen, or Native-born Texans. Others often referred to Canary Islanders only as Isleños, ignoring their honorary title of nobility (Hidalgo). If any need for distinction between the various groups arose, it would have been for no other purpose than to clarify ethnic differences. All colonists from the United States who qualified as Mexican immigrants, as well as those Mexicans who moved north from central Mexico, together with the third generation of Canary Islanders and the descendants of early-day Spanish military families, would, within the years 1821 to 1836, all properly be called Texians, Texans, Tejanos, or Mexicans, interchangeable terms of nationality.

For that matter, until Texas established its independence from the Republic of Mexico in 1836, under which it was a part of the state of Coahuila y Tejas, responsible Mexican government officials often referred to all permanent residents of the state as Tejanos, regardless of their ethnic, cultural, or racial background. Repeatedly, in 1824 and thereafter, Jose Miguel Ramos de Arispe, a scholar and recognized contributor to the authorship of the respected Mexican Federal Constitution, in his correspondence with the members of the ayuntamiento (council government) of Béxar at San Antonio, referred to all citizens of Texas as Tejanos, even though the majority of them were American colonists. It is also known that in 1833, many Hispanic Texas leaders in and around Goliad (ninety-five miles down river from San Antonio) identified themselves as Tejanos, as did José Antonio Navarro, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, in writing to his friends. Colonel Almonte, of Santa Anna’s staff at the taking of the Alamo in March 1836, described all defenders of the Alamo in a generic sense, as "Diablo Tejanos (Devil Texans). Along the advancing line at the Alamo, the Mexican soldiers were heard to shout, Muerte a los Tejanos" (Death to the Texans), without regard to genealogy.

So, in keeping with the promise that the democratic Mexican Constitution of 1824 was intended to diminish or supplant the demeaning Spanish class system, so too was the reference to Texans and/or Tejanos originally intended to identify all citizens of Texas, whatever their racial, ethnic, or cultural heritage might be. In times past, the members of the various allied Indian tribes were known collectively as Tejas, prompting early Spanish explorers to also refer to them as Tejanos. With the word Tejano being the Spanish equivalent of the Anglicized word Texan, any restricted use would have to come through accepted practice, custom, and usage.

To say the least, all citizens of twenty-first-century Texas, whatever their heritage, are correctly identified as Texans, and need not be referred to in any other manner, particularly since Texas pride includes the distinction of having once been a sovereign Republic. Such was the sentiment of Herman Ehrenberg, a young German who will be among the few to escape the tragic massacre of Fannin’s men at Goliad. He kept a diary in which he noted that the Texas revolutionaries were no longer Germans, Scots, Irishmen, Americans or Tejanos—they were TEXANS.

In recognition that a significant part of the present day Texas population chooses to be identified by the succinct, beautiful, descriptive word "Tejano," in order to clarify and punctuate their prideful presence as Texas-born descendants of Latino heritage, they and their antecedents at the time of the Texas Revolution shall not only be Texans or Texians, but shall also sometimes be referred to in this story of history as Tejanos, and that title shall be reserved for them alone. Where necessary for additional clarification or distinction, those persons identified by many historians as Anglos shall, in addition, sometimes be referred to as colonials, American colonists, Texians, or Texans, or, in respect to those in Texas before 1836, as Texan-Mexicans.

The personal commitments of the Tejanos will merge with those of a Ranging company of thirty-two Texas colonials riding from the neighborhood of Gonzales under a claim of right—to join the small Alamo garrison at San Antonio. The intrepid James Butler Bonham will claim the same entitlement when he returns to the Alamo, fully expecting to be the last to enter. They will typify the hundreds of men destined to play important roles in staging the evolution of the Texas Republic. Immigrants such as Moses Baine of Ireland; John McGregor of Scotland; Lorenzo de Zavala, a Mexican scholar; and Herman Ehrenberg, the youthful German Prussian; not to mention the several school-age boys who, like the youngsters Billy King, Creed Taylor, and Juan Lopez, will eagerly join the fray. Perhaps as in no other generation of paladins, unique and memorable names will surface among the most notable of the participants: Erastus Deaf Smith, whose impairment since early childhood sharpened all other senses; Noah Smithwick, as formidable a gun-blacksmith as his stout name implied; Jesus Comanche Cuellar, famous for his years under Indian captivity; Three-legged Willie Williamson, whose intellect will overshadow the crippling effects of polio; and William Fairfax Gray, a visiting Virginian who will smartly chronicle his perceptive political observations. They and their compatriots will exemplify a common virtue in their denunciation and defiance of tyranny. In doing so, their unified promotion of unselfish acts of sacrifice will yield traits of valor common to them all.

Chapter One

The Stage Is Set

Subjugation, Tolerance, or Revolution: The Road to Decision

By 1528, the Spanish Royal Crown had amassed a far-reaching empire, claiming almost half of the known world as its own. In that same year, the sea-faring soldier of fortune known by the name of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, while seeking to ensure his family’s unique title of nobility, Head of a Cow, added to the Spanish territorial gains. He did so, not by the same resourcefulness, energy, and design seen in men like Columbus, DeSoto, or Cortes, but by happenstance, a quirk of fate. Following a disaster at sea, Cabeza de Vaca washed ashore near Galveston Bay (Gulf of Mexico) with about seventy shipwrecked Spanish soldiers at his side and, through those accidental means of discovery, laid claim to the vast land area that would soon be known as Texas. At its zenith, Texas included all of the coastal gulf plains between the mouths of the Rio Grande and the Red River (from Mexico to Louisiana) and reached far to the west past Santa Fe and north into Wyoming, an enormous piece of real estate. Even then, it was dwarfed in size by the huge region later claimed by the French as neighboring Louisiana. And the small print of the French land deed boasted far more, albeit with timidity, claiming the Rio Grande to be Louisiana’s southern border instead of the Red River. If proven true, all of Texas would be French domain. To further complicate matters, two centuries after Cabeza de Vaca reached the safety of "Cortes’ Nueva España," Napoleon Boneparte made his presence known in the New World. He, better than most, knew the Spanish coffers to be near empty. And, taking full advantage of his influence as counsel to Spain’s weak monarch, Charles IV, Napoleon seized the moment to retrieve Louisiana from among lands earlier ceded by France to Spain, then, peddled it to the U.S. president Thomas Jefferson for the then sizable sum of $15 million.

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Leading to these events, any perceptive onlooker during the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries would have seen the converging interests of the two world class powers to be centered upon the rather primitive desolate wilderness called Texas. Their collision course was sure to lead to bigger prey. None, however, but a mystic Nostradamus could then claim to have foreseen a tangle of events leading to colossal geopolitical changes in the New World, prompted finally by emerging claims of national independence—first by the Republic of Mexico in her severance from Mother Spain—then Texas, in its hard fought delivery from the clutches of Santa Anna’s despotic rule of Mexico. It would eventually end with annexation by the fast maturing United States of America. A great deal of the future was yet to be lived before those realizations would come to pass.

Throughout the seventeenth century, Spain and France, sparring all the while, remained bent on territorial gain, whether by peaceful addition or through conquest, it seemed not to matter. They both had repeatedly vied for the same land opportunities and had little or no trust for one another. Yet, until her right to possession became seriously threatened, Spain would openly neglect her northernmost province of Nueva España (Texas) for more than one hundred years. Then, just as a child might reclaim a deserted toy when picked up by another, when France began to view that neglect as tantamount to sovereign waiver, the Spanish Crown again became aggressively possessive. Still, the French, in subtle and passive competition with Spain, salted always with a bit of political intrigue, would continue to yern for a piece of Texas, but for reasons quite different from Spain’s motives for having it.

Originally, Spain was interested in Texas only for its potential wealth in gold and silver, hoping to match the riches stolen from the naïve Peruvians and enslaved Aztecs. For whatever reason, the coastal Indians had led Cabeza de Vaca to believe the existence of fabulous riches quartered in seven gleaming cities of gold, chief among them being a beautiful city called Cibola. By 1540, the viceroy of Nueva España could wait no longer. Yielding finally to his own curiosity and, as alter ego to the Spanish Crown, he sent Francisco Coronado, a renowned conquistador, to either find the rich bonanza of wealth or learn the truth of its existence. Coronado set out in force and, in time, covered hundreds of miles of open country never before seen by his own brand of civilization; however, the fabled Cibola was found to be a sham. The seven cities of gold did not exist. Extensive explorations throughout the American Southwest proved to Coronado and his three hundred armor-clad soldiers that there were no cities of gold in Norteamérica. Neither were precious metals to be found among the pueblos west of Santa Fe. In Texas, there were no signs of untold riches. Not only were there no streets paved with gold, there were no streets of any description. No well-defined communities existed – none since the departure from the Texas high plains of the Antelope Creek People three hundred years before. Now there were only a few Indian campsites, inhabited one day, abandoned the next. Coronado found the level of civilization among the native tribes to be most primitive, nothing close to equaling that of the architecturally sophisticated Aztecs of central Mexico, or even the farsighted agrarian Pueblo Tribe near Santa Fe. His detailed report to the disappointed viceroy said as much.

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Once the disheartening results of Coronado’s excursions became known, the Spanish valued Texas as nothing more than a buffer zone between Nueva España’s Mexico and the Norteamericanos (including the persistent French in Louisiana). The Spanish Royal Crown could not contemplate, nor would it tolerate, the thought of a neighboring French Dominion bordering northern Mexico at the Rio Grande. It would be akin, they believed, to allowing a fox to enter the hen house.

Contrary to Spanish motives for preserving its northernmost province, the French viewed Texas as a valuable trading opportunity. A few Frenchmen, the most notable being Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, an early day prototype of a traveling salesman, had already traded successfully and profitably with several native tribes, including the Adaes and the Nacogdoches, along the Sabine River in eastern Texas. With St. Denis roaming loose up and down El Camino Real for almost two years, his motives for claiming nothing more than the opportunity for friendly trade became suspect. To the Spanish mind, he could be trying discreetly to find and reestablish René Robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle’s long lost Fort St. Louis. True perhaps, for St. Denis’s French mind never doubted that a profitable trade route could extend deeper into Texas to reach not only the friendly, productive Indian tribes of Caddo, Hasinai, and their confederates, but the more volatile coastal Indians as well. He had learned their motives, their desires, and he knew the friendly tribes, all being relatively small, had wisely formed an alliance to ensure their mutual protection from the larger, more warlike tribes, the Apache and Comanche. Those docile Indians did not expect the title of their friendly pact to one day be adopted as the name of a new sovereign nation. This alliance, called Tejas by its members, in time quietly and unceremoniously died away, but in its wake the name lived on in Spain’s most northern and remote province, the sparsely populated place they now called Texas.

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Why Is it Called Texas

Throughout their repeated excursions into the vast area now known as the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, the Spanish explorers, when possible, kept detailed accounts of their adventures in which they often identified different land locations by the names of the Indian tribes that were important to the occupation of those lands. Hence, the northern Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Chihuahua have long endured. So has Texas (also of Indian derivation), However, the evolution of its name needs additional explanation.

After Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the first known Spanish explorer, washed ashore near Galveston in 1528, he and his few surviving companions were forced to remain with and among various Indian tribes for seven years. Later, without benefit of recorded notes, he remembered only that the Indians in the valley of the (Trinity) River were very friendly. By his remark, he may have influenced subsequent interpretations.

Relying on Cabeza de Vaca’s reported experiences, between 1686 and 1690 Alonso de Leon, along with Fray Damián Massanet, made five visits to Texas, concentrating on contacts with the several relatively small tribes between the Brazos River and the Louisiana border (northeast Texas). Among those tribes were the Caddodaches, Caddo, Anadarko, Kadohadacho, Hasinai (Asenay), Nacogdoche, Naconiche, Atakapas, and Nebedoches. They were known to have formed an alliance in order to afford mutual protection from the more numerous warlike Comanche, and the sometimes troublesome Apache.

Fray Massanet, and later a missionary named Francisco de Jesús María, who worked among the Nabedoches tribe with Fray Hidalgo, are reported by Juan Agustin de Morfi to have made phonetic translations of the meanings of key Indian words. Through them it is known that the word Tejas and its variations of spelling (Tayshas, Texas, Teysas, Texias, Techi, and Thecas) was used by the allied tribes, particularly the Hasinai, to denote the friendship between and among themselves. It was therefore not the name of a particular tribe but rather identified the friendly alliance of the many peaceful tribes that participated in the Caddo and Hasinai confederations. The name Tejas personified the combined strength of the several tribes much in the same way that NATO allies the Western powers. In recognition of their unique status, the first Christian Mission established in Texas in 1690 was named San Francisco de los Tejas. It was located along the Neches River southwest of the east Texas town of Rusk. From then on, the reports and records kept by subsequent expeditions of the Spanish Crown consistently referred to the geographical area of its most northern province as Tejas (Texas), and its use became universal, with the accepted meaning being friends, friendly, or friendship.

Without such universal acceptance, the name of the state might have been Amichel, as intended by Alonso Álvarez de Pineda, the first European to see Texas from the limited view at the mouth of the Rio Grande; or the New Kingdom of the Philippines, as initially intended in 1694; or worse still, the long name of Nuevo Reyno de la Montaña de Santander y Santillana, as proposed by Don Domingo Terán de los Rios in 1691.

Finally, a Frenchman who converted to Spanish citizenship in 1781, Andres Benito Courbiere, serving as interpreter for the Spanish Regular Army at San Antonio, defined Tejas as meaning, in Indian language, round silver dish-like medals, which were worn by the tribes in the Tejas (Hasinai) confederation to distinguish themselves from any who were not a part of the friendly alliance.

In any event, whether through definition, interpretation, custom, and/or usage, the state motto friendship signifies the original understood meaning of the word T exas, as used by the Hasinai Indians and their allied tribes. The state’s name is appropriately derived from the same origin.

To be sure, during the earliest years of New World exploration and conquest, Spain’s distrust of French motives relative to her interest in Texas gained in validity. While Spain’s attention to Texas had been lax, France made a tangible move to occupy and tame a part of the wilderness, but did so under the mistaken belief (so it was said) that she was intending to retrace the earlier tracks made by her emissaries two years before on Louisiana’s coastline. The so-called mistake took place in 1684 when the renowned French explorer René Robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle, while in search of the yawning mouth of the Mississippi River (a sight he had seen once before), crashed two of his battered ships against the shores of Matagorda Bay, smack in the heartland of the Texas Gulf Coast. A far distance from the Louisiana he was looking for. The third tall ship, without so much as dropping anchor, quickly parted ways; turning her bow toward Florida, she sailed away. Perhaps unwittingly, de La Salle had missed his intended destination by no less than ten river outlets to the open sea and five hundred statute miles. Looking about, he at once recognized his mistake but shrugged it off with, C’est la vie (such is life). Choosing to make the best of it, he planted the French Fleur-de-lis flag just inland from the sprawling Matagorda Bay at the mouth of Garcitas Creek. As far as he knew, a like flag, the one he raised at the mouth of the Mississippi two years before, might still be flying. Now crowded in as a close neighbor to the unpredictable Karankawas, he founded a settlement with the two hundred remaining passengers and crew. He then redefined the reason for their presence, calling them now French Colonials. Further, in keeping with traditions long observed, de La Salle sheared a patch of pine forest from the land and, centering it in the clearing, built the semblance of a French fort, within which were added a few primitive dwellings and a small church. He meant the settlement to be a base from which he could explore the country and cultivate friendships with the Indians. Failing in fresh imagination, he called the new site Fort St. Louis, repeating the same name he had given another of his explorations at a place much farther to the north in Illinois, where the wide Missouri River joins the mighty Mississippi.

Texsa.tif

Map of Texas

When word reached Mexico’s viceroy that the brazen French were trespassing upon Spanish soil, his anger rose in aristocratic fury. In his quickness to react, he was slow to learn of de La Salle’s unexpected reversals. Even while he prepared the Spanish response, the rest of the story, still unknown to him, was playing out on the banks of Matagorda Bay. Soon after establishing, the French Colony had promptly fallen on hard times. Disease, possibly the small pox they brought with them, killed many. An equal number died at the hands of hostile Indians. De La Salle was himself murdered by his own men when they bolted in revolt of his authority. Then the most lucky of the French, all who had survived the melee, were enslaved by the Karankawas—all, that is, but the cannibalized few. Ignorant of those tragic events, the Spanish knew only one thing for sure; the Royal Crown’s claim to all of Texas had to be firmly reestablished. Regardless of the circumstances, the French must be permanently evicted, while allowing no evidence of their earlier presence to remain for others to see.

Spain Renews Her Claims

Not until then, between 1686 and 1690, did Spain move