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Historical Background

The Spanish Conquistadors and Padres (continued)

TEXAS—REACTION TO THE FRENCH

Texas was the third major area to be penetrated by the Spanish. Despite sporadic interest by Spanish officials, it received little attention until the founding of San Antonio, in 1718. During the next century, only a few sparse settlements were made, and a handful of missionaries, soldiers, and settlers sought to link the vast province with the rest of New Spain.

As in Florida, Spanish settlement in Texas was in response to a French threat. In 1682, the remarkable French explorer René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, floated down to the mouth of the Mississippi, planted the gold and white banner of his country on the riverbank, claimed the entire river system for France, and named it Louisiana in honor of his sovereign, Louis XIV.

La Salle's next venture was an even more serious menace to Spain. Sailing from France and planning to establish a permanent post at the mouth of the Mississippi, in 1685 he landed instead on the Texas coast at the mouth of the Lavaca River. How could such an experienced explorer have missed his destination so far? Was his actual purpose, perhaps with the secret support of his inscrutable King, to move even nearer the Spanish mines of Nueva Viscaya, to the West?

In any event, La Salle erected Fort St. Louis and set out in a westerly direction, allegedly to locate the Mississippi's estuary, before turning northeast and headed back to the Illinois country for provisions. Some of his discouraged followers, however, assassinated him somewhere in east Texas. A few survivors made their way back up the Mississippi to Canada; the remainder of the complement at Fort St. Louis succumbed to disease, starvation, and the Indians.

Spanish authorities, learning from coastal Indians of the threat to their northern outposts, began a frantic search by land and water. On his fourth overland expedition, in 1689, Capt. Alonso de León located the French post. Finding it deserted, he burned it to the ground to obliterate any trace of French occupancy on Spanish soil.

In the heat of the alarm over the French, Father Damian Massanet, who had accompanied De León, had little difficulty in obtaining official support for the establishment of a mission among the friendly Tejas Indians, a branch of the Caddo Confederation, in east Texas. Emissaries of the Tejas tribe, whose very name was translatable as friendly, had witlessly invited the Spanish into their midst. In 1690, De León and Massanet founded the San Francisco de los Tejas Mission. The following year they began an offshoot, Santísimo Nombre de Maria, a few miles away. Domingo Teran de los Rios, appointed "Governor" of the province, crossed Texas bringing additional priests and supplies.

Two years later the disillusioned Indians—among the most civilized in North America—drove the padres out. But a combination of a zealous priest and a forward Frenchman was to bring Spain rushing back into Texas shortly after the turn of the century. Father Francisco Hidalgo, one of the Franciscans who had been at the Tejas mission, feared for the souls of his Indian converts in east Texas. When Spanish authorities failed to support his return, he sent a message to the French, then ensconced at the mouth of the Mississippi, praying that a priest be sent to the Tejas to minister the sacraments to the handful of faithful. Nothing could have delighted the French commander more than this invitation. In 1713, he dispatched a young French woodsman—the clever and charming Louis Juchereau de St. Denis—to the Spanish outpost on the Rio Grande.

Carmel Mission, California, in 1839. Mission activities included farming and stockraising. From a multivolume series, published during the years 1841-54. (Courtesy, Bancroft Library, University of California.)

St. Denis did not intend to save Indian souls; he sought trade with the northern Spanish settlements. In the next 4 years, he pursued one of the most romantic adventures in the history of the North American frontier. Arriving in July 1714 at San Juan Bautista on the Rio Grande—opposite modern Eagle Pass—he was promptly arrested for trespassing. But his silken tongue and gracious manners won the friendship of the post commandant and he began ardently to court his daughter, or niece. A jealous rival for the girl's hand, however, quickly caused his detention and he was sent to Mexico City.

With facile grace, St. Denis convinced the Viceroy that, although born a Frenchman, he was at heart a Spaniard. The Viceroy not only released him but appointed him cocommander of a Spanish expedition returning to east Texas to set up a presidio and mission field. The sizable expedition of friars, soldiers, and friendly Indians, under the joint command of Domingo Ramón and St. Denis, moved across Texas. During the autumn of 1716, it founded six missions, scattered from the Neches River eastward to present Louisiana, as well as the presidio of Dolores near the midpoint of the chain. No sooner were the Spaniards well established than St. Denis became a Frenchman once again. He hastened to a cache of trade goods that he had left on the Red River, erected a trading post at Natchitoches, and entered into an entirely illegal commerce with his Spanish friends.

In 1718, Martín de Alarcón stopped along the San Antonio River on his way to supply the east Texas outposts. Establishing there a halfway post between the Rio Grande and east Texas, he founded the presidio of Bexar and the mission of San Antonio de Valero, which came to be known much later as the Alamo.

In 1719, the sudden appearance at Los Adaes—the easternmost mission—of a French soldier from Natchitoches caused a wildfire panic. Padres and soldiers alike fled to Bexar seeking safety from what they imagined to be a French attack. Chagrined and embarrassed, Spanish officials appointed the capable Marqués de San Miguel de Aguayo as Governor and captain-general of Texas and sent him into the region with a formidable force of soldiers to reoccupy and strengthen it. In 1720, the beautiful San José y San Miguel de Aguayo Mission was founded in his honor at San Antonio. The Marqués went to east Texas in the summer of 1721. To prevent any further French incursions, he reestablished the six missions and the Dolores presidio and established a presidio at Los Adaes a few miles away from the French settlement of Natchitoches. Then, to extinguish forever any claim France might have to Texas, he marched down the coast and erected a mission and a presidio on the very site of Fort St. Louis, which 30 years earlier De León had burned to the ground.

When Aguayo left Texas in 1722, there were four presidios, nine missions, and small clusters of settlers at San Antonio and at Los Adaes. For the next half-century, Spain's hold on the region was stubborn—if shaky and unsure. In 1731, the Spanish relocated three of the east Texas missions at San Antonio. That same year, a shipload of Canary Islanders, consisting of about 15 families—the first civil colonists in Texas—arrived after a tortuous overland trek from Vera Cruz and settled at San Antonio. For about the next two decades, no major developments occurred. In 1749, the Spanish moved the mission and presidio known as La Bahía del Espíritu Santo back from the mouth of the Lavaca River to the site of Goliad. Six years later, they founded the mission Rosario nearby.

Spanish Franciscans endeavored, without success, to establish missions at the mouth of the Trinity (1756); on the San Gabriel River, in central Texas (1751); on the San Saba River, 100 miles farther west (1757); and near the headwaters of the Nueces (1762). None of these missions lasted more than a few years, but the one at San Sabá had the most tragic history. Its purpose was to attempt to convert and teach agricultural methods to the terrifying Apaches, who were struggling with the even more frightening Comanches—intruding into west Texas from the north.

In 1758, the year after the founding of the mission, a horde of Comanches swooped down, destroyed it, and massacred the missionaries and their pitiable Tlascalan Indian charges—most of whom had been imported from northern Mexico. Frightened troops in the San Luis presidio across the river were unable—or unwilling—to come to the mission's aid. The next year the Comanches decisively defeated on the Red River a punitive Spanish expedition, consisting of 500 soldiers and Indian allies, which had moved into Comanche country. The reconstructed stone walls of San Sabá stand today as a memorial to the fierce might of the "Lords of the South Plains"—the Comanches. Spain was never able to defeat or contain these Indians, whose raiding range soon extended even farther south and separated San Antonio from the settlements in New Mexico.

By the middle of the 18th century, Spain's occupation of Texas reached its acme. Soon thereafter interest and strength began to wane. In 1762, the year before Florida passed to the English by the Treaty of Paris, Spain acquired western Louisiana from France. The eastern frontier of New Spain thus moved to the Mississippi and the fear of French encroachment in Texas ended. For this reason, and in the interest of economy, the Spanish authorities completely abandoned the east Texas mission field in 1773. They even ordered the settlers at Los Adaes to move to San Antonio. Before long, some of these settlers insisted on returning to east Texas, even though they had no military protection. In 1779, some of them founded Nacogdoches. By the end of the century, Spanish Texas had shrunk to this feeble village in east Texas, the presidio-settlements in the Goliad vicinity and at San Antonio, and a handful of scattered missions.

During the next two decades, these isolated settlements figured in the movement for independence from Spain. Filibustering expeditions, organized by Mexican patriots, adventurers professing the Mexican cause, or pirates, several times ranged into Texas, captured settlements, and clashed with Spanish forces. When, at last, in 1821, Mexico achieved independence, Texas passed with hardly a tremor from Spanish control; the royal Governor, Antonio Martínez, simply turned his coat about and raised the Mexican tricolor over the 100-year-old plaza of San Antonio. Even before then, however, the preliminary American penetration of Texas that augured independence from Mexico in 1836 had already begun.