It was during the Christmas holidays of 1821 that the first settlers,
led by Austin in person, reached the Brazos River and made their camp
upon the chosen spot. Their Christmas and New Year’s dinners were not
composed of dainties, we may be sure; but there was, no doubt, joyous
roasting of wild game over the glowing camp-fires, and there was good
honest fun and innocent merriment in plenty among these first Texans!
Their leader left them at once and proceeded to Matagorda Bay to meet
the _Lively_, a small schooner which had been sent out from New Orleans
with supplies for the settlement. She had also carried eighteen
colonists.
The _Lively_ had not arrived, nor was she ever heard of afterward. It is
supposed that she was lost at sea, with all on board. To add to Austin’s
disappointment, some provisions brought on a former voyage of the
_Lively_, and hidden in the canebrakes on the banks of the Brazos, had
been stolen by the Carankawae Indians. He returned empty-handed to his
people.
They were in no wise cast down by the news he brought. They were already
making clearings, cutting down trees, burning underbrush, building
cabins, and laying off fields. They were at the same time obliged to
keep guard day and night against the Indians who prowled about, always
on the lookout for a chance to steal or to murder.
Austin, cheered by their courage, set out for San Antonio to report to
Governor Martinez. There he learned that a revolution against Spain had
taken place in Mexico. His contracts, in the new order of things, might
be worthless. He therefore journeyed on to the city of Mexico, twelve
hundred miles distant. Much of the way he traveled with but one
companion. The country was full of robbers and cut-throats, and, in
order to escape their clutches, the two men disguised themselves as
beggars, going on foot, sleeping in the open air, and eating the
coarsest food. He found the country in such a tumult that it was over a
year before he could get his grant renewed and return to his colony.
Meantime, other settlers had come in, some making their way slowly by
land with ox-teams, stopping sometimes for a whole season to raise and
harvest a crop of corn, and then moving patiently on. “Children were
born in these movers’ camps,” says one writer, “and the dead were buried
by the roadside.” Others came in ships from New Orleans and Mobile, and
even from the far New England coast. In 1822 the _Revenge_ and the _Only
Son_ came into Galveston harbor and landed at Bolivar Point over a
hundred immigrants. They found Mrs. Long in the forlorn little fort
where her husband had left her, still waiting and hoping for his return.
It was from these pitying and kind-hearted pioneers that the heroic wife
learned of the assassination of her husband. In their company she and
her children left the place of so much suffering.
The first crop of corn—turned into the virgin soil with wooden
ploughs—had been gathered; a little cotton had whitened the patches
about the cabin doors, and the spinning-wheels were already busy. The
familiar low of home-returning milch-cows was heard at sundown along the
winding footpaths. One of the settlers (Randall Jones) had gone to
Louisiana, taking with him a negro lad. There he traded the boy for
sixty head of cattle, which he drove across the country to the
settlement. Another colonist brought out some pigs and a few goats.
These domestic animals gave a homelike appearance to the strange land.
The settlement was thriving in spite of hardships. But these hardships
were almost without number. There was neither salt, coffee, nor sugar.
Meat was to be had only by hunting, and oftentimes deer and buffalo were
hard to find and, on account of the Indians, dangerous to follow. True,
there were great numbers of wild mustangs.
There were no horses in America before the discovery of Columbus. The
Texas mustangs were the product of the cavalry horses brought from
Europe to Mexico by Cortez in 1519. They had multiplied, almost
unmolested, during the three hundred years they had roamed prairie and
forest. These mustangs were always fat, and when nothing better was to
be had they made tolerable food.
There were, of course, no stores where anything could be bought; the men
went dressed in buckskin; the women in coarse cloth woven by themselves.
There was no mail, news from the outer world—from the dear ones left
behind in the far-away “states”—came only when a chance traveler arrived
with an old newspaper or possibly a letter in his saddle bags. There was
neither school nor church.
But in those rude cabins dwelt honesty, high courage, and unbounded
hospitality. In business every man’s “word was as good as his bond.”
There were no locks on the doors, robbery being unknown. Everything,
even to life itself, was ever at the service of friend and neighbor. The
nameless traveler, welcomed without question, shared, as long as he
chose to stay, the fireside and table of his host.
Of such stuff were the first Texans.
Austin returned from Mexico in July, 1823. He was welcomed with
affectionate joy by his colonists. He was accompanied by his father’s
friend, the Baron de Bastrop, commissioned by the government to assist
him in laying off the town, surveying lands, and issuing titles.
The town was named by Señor de la Garza, who had succeeded Martinez as
governor of Texas. He called it San Felipe (Fa-lee′pā) de Austin, in
honor at the same time of his own patron saint and of its founder.
Other towns soon sprung up over the province; for grants for other
settlements had been sought and obtained from the government. Austin got
permission in 1825 to bring out five hundred additional families.
Immigrants flocked in, eager to share in this cheap and fruitful
paradise. The names _Columbia_, _Brazoria_, _Gonzales_, _Victoria_, _San
Augustine_, and other towns and settlements, began to be familiar to the
tongue.
Some Irish colonists founded on the Nueces River, near its mouth, a town
which they named St. Patrick in remembrance of the patron saint of
Ireland. To the Spanish-speaking people of Texas it soon became known as
San Patricio, and so it is still called.
A large tract of land was granted to Hayden Edwards, a Kentuckian, in
the neighborhood of Nacogdoches, the old gateway of Texas history. But
things did not go as smoothly there as in Austin’s colony. It was too
near the Neutral Ground, which continued to harbor outlaws and
adventurers of all kinds.
The land, moreover, was claimed by the Mexicans and others who were
already settled upon it. The quarrels between these and the newcomers
became in course of time so bitter that the Mexican government, during
an absence of Hayden Edwards in the United States, took back his grant
and ordered him and his two brothers to leave the country.
Edwards had put all of his private fortune into his venture, and this
act of tyranny goaded him and his colonists to fury. Finding vain all
their appeals to the governor, they took up arms and declared they would
make of Texas an independent republic. They called themselves
Fredonians; and banding together, they entrenched themselves in the old
stone fort at Nacogdoches. Thence they sent an appeal to Austin’s
colonists for help. Both Austin’s colonists and the Cherokee Indians,
upon whom they counted for support, refused to join them. News came that
a Mexican army was marching against them; their own fighting force was
less than two hundred men. They saw the weakness of their position; and
the Fredonian war, as it was called, ended after a skirmish or two, in
the surrender of the Fredonians. Edwards and his colonists left Texas,
and returned angry and disgusted to Louisiana (1826).
This was a small foretaste of Mexican justice. But troubles far graver
than the Fredonian war were at that moment brewing for Texas.