now so firmly established that they had no further use for General
Gutierrez, unceremoniously dismissed him, this action, doubtless, being
taken at the instance of Colonel Perry and his fellow officers, who
feared further treachery and dishonor if the Mexican were permitted
to remain in command. His place was taken by Don José Alvarez Toledo,
a distinguished Cuban who had formerly been a member of the Spanish
Cortes in Mexico but had been banished on account of his republican
sympathies. A few weeks after General Toledo assumed command a Spanish
force, four thousand strong, under General Arredondo, appeared before
San Antonio. Toledo at once marched out to meet them. His force
consisted of eight hundred and fifty Americans under Colonel Perry
and about twice that number of Mexicans; so it will be seen that the
Spaniards greatly outnumbered the Republicans. Throwing forward a line
of skirmishers for the purpose of engaging the enemy, General Arredondo
ambushed the major portion of his force behind earthworks masked by
the dense chaparral. The Americans, confident of victory, dashed
forward with their customary _élan_, whereupon the Spanish line, in
obedience to Arredondo’s orders, sullenly fell back. So cleverly did
the Spaniards feign retreat that it was not until the Americans were
well within the trap that had been set for them that Toledo recognized
his peril. Then he frantically ordered his buglers to sound the recall.
One column--that composed of Mexicans--obeyed the order promptly,
but the other, consisting of Americans, shouting, “No, we _never_
retreat!” swept forward to their deaths. Had the order to retreat never
been given, the Americans, notwithstanding the disparity of numbers,
would have been victorious, but, deprived of all support and raked
by the enemy’s cannon and musketry, even the prodigies of valor they
performed were unavailing to alter the result. So desperately did those
American adventurers fight, however, that, as some one has remarked,
“they made Spanish the language of hell.” When their rifles were empty
they used their pistols, and when their pistols were empty they used
their terrible long hunting-knives, ripping and stabbing and slashing
with those vicious weapons until they went down before sheer weight of
numbers. Some of them, grasping their empty rifles by the barrel, swung
them round their heads like flails, beating down the Spaniards who
opposed them until they were surrounded by heaps of men with cracked
and shattered skulls. Others, when their weapons broke, sprang at their
enemies with their naked hands and tore out their throats as hounds
tear out the throat of a deer. Such was the battle of the Medina,
fought on August 18, 1813. _Of the eight hundred and fifty Americans
who went into action only ninety-three came out alive._ If the battle
itself was a bloody one, its aftermath was even more so, the Spanish
cavalry pursuing and butchering without mercy all the fugitives they
could overtake. At Spanish Bluff, on the Trinity, the Spaniards took
eighty prisoners. Marching them into a clump of timber, they dug a
long, deep trench and, setting the prisoners on its edge, shot them in
groups of ten. It was a bloody, bloody business. That our histories
contain almost no mention of the Gachupin War, as this campaign was
known, is doubtless due to the fact that during the same period there
was a war in the United States and also one in Mexico, and the public
mind was thus drawn away from the events which were taking place in
Texas. Indeed, had it not been for the war between the United States
and Great Britain, which drew into its vortex the adventurous spirits
of the Southwest, Texas would have achieved her independence a dozen
years earlier than she did.
Toledo and Perry, with all that was left of the “Army of the North,”
escaped, after suffering fearful hardships, to the United States,
where they promptly began to recruit men for another venture into
the beckoning land beyond the Sabine. Though the head of the patriot
priest Hidalgo had been displayed by the Spanish authorities on the
walls of the citadel of Guanajuato as “a warning to Mexicans who
choose to revolt against Spanish rule,” as the placard attached to the
grisly trophy read, the grim object-lesson had not deterred another
priest, José Maria Morelos, from taking up the struggle for Mexican
independence where Hidalgo had laid it down. In order to co-operate
with this new champion of liberty, Toledo, at the head of a few hundred
Americans, sailed from New Orleans, landed on the Mexican coast near
Vera Cruz, and pushed up-country as far as El Puente del Rey, near
Jalapa, where he intrenched himself and sat down to await the arrival
of reinforcements from New Orleans under General Jean Joseph Humbert.
Humbert, a Frenchman from the province of Lorraine, was a graduate of
the greatest school for fighters the world has ever known: the armies
of Napoleon. In 1789, when the French Revolution deluged France with
blood, he was a merchant in Rouvray. Closing his shop, he exchanged his
yardstick for a sabre and went to Paris to take a hand in the overthrow
of the monarchy, for he was a red-hot republican. His gallantry in
action won him a major-general’s commission, and four years later the
Directory promoted him to the rank of lieutenant-general and gave him
command of the expedition sent to Ireland, where he was forced to
surrender to Lord Cornwallis. Napoleon, who knew a soldier as far as
he could see one, made Humbert a general of division and second in
command of the ill-fated army sent to Haiti. But Humbert’s republican
convictions did not jibe with the imperialistic ambitions of Napoleon,
and the former suddenly decided that a life of exile in America was
preferable to life in a French prison. For a time he supported himself
by teaching in New Orleans, but it was like harnessing a war-horse to a
plough; so, when the Mexican junta sought his aid in 1814, the veteran
fighter raised an expeditionary force of nearly a thousand men, sailed
across the Gulf, landed on the shores of Mexico, and marched up to join
Toledo at El Puente del Rey. The revolutionary leader Morelos, who was
hard-pressed by the Spaniards, set out to join Toledo and Humbert,
but on the way was taken prisoner and died with his back to a stone
wall and his face to a firing-party. The same force which ended the
career of Morelos continued to El Puente del Rey and attempted to cut
off the retreat of Toledo and Humbert, but the old soldier of Napoleon
succeeded in cutting his way through them and in 1817, dejected and
discouraged, landed once more at New Orleans, where he spent the rest
of his days teaching in a French college, and his nights, no doubt,
dreaming of his exploits under the Napoleonic eagles.
The same year Humbert returned to New Orleans another soldier of the
empire, General Baron Charles François Antoine Lallemand, followed by
a hundred and fifty veterans who had seen service under the little
corporal, set out from the same city for that graveyard of ambitions,
Mexico. Baron Lallemand was one of the great soldiers of the empire
and, had Napoleon been victorious at Waterloo, would have been rewarded
with the baton of a marshal of France. Entering the army when a
youngster of eighteen, he followed the French eagles into every capital
of Europe, fighting his way up the ladder of promotion, round by round,
until, upon the Emperor’s return from Elba, he was given the epaulets
of a lieutenant-general and created a peer of France. He commanded the
artillery of the Imperial Guard at Waterloo and after that disaster
was sent by the Emperor to Captain Maitland, of the British navy, to
negotiate for his surrender. With tears streaming down his cheeks,
Lallemand begged that he might be permitted to accompany his imperial
master into exile. This being denied him, he refused to take service
under the Bourbons and, coming to America, attempted to found a colony
of French political refugees in Alabama, at a place which, in memory
of happier days, he named Marengo. The experiment proved a failure,
however; so in 1817 he led his colonists into Texas and attempted to
establish what he termed a _Champ d’Asile_ on the banks of the Trinity
River. But the Spanish authorities, obsessed with the idea that every
foreigner who appeared in Texas was plotting against them, despatched
a force against Lallemand and his colonists and drove them out. The
next few years General Lallemand spent in New Orleans devising schemes
for effecting the escape of his beloved Emperor from St. Helena,
but Napoleon’s death, in 1821, brought his carefully laid plan for
a rescue to naught. In 1830, upon the Bourbons being ejected from
France for good and all, Lallemand, to whom the Emperor had left a
legacy of a hundred thousand francs, returned to Paris. His civil and
military honors were restored by Louis Philippe, and the man who a few
years before had been pointed out on the streets of New Orleans as a
filibuster and an adventurer died a general of division, commander of
the Legion of Honor, military governor of Corsica, and a peer of France.
The next man to strike a blow for Texas was Don Luis de Aury. De Aury
was a native of New Granada, as the present Republic of Colombia
was then called, and had played a brilliant part in the struggle
for freedom of Spain’s South American colonies. He entered the navy
of the young republic as a lieutenant in 1813. Three years later he
was appointed commandant-general of the naval forces of New Granada,
stationed at Cartagena. At the memorable siege of that city, to his
generosity and intrepidity hundreds of men, women, and children owed
their lives, for when the Spanish commander, Morillo, threatened to
butcher every person found alive within the city walls De Aury loaded
the non-combatants aboard his three small vessels, broke through
the Spanish squadron of thirty-five ships and landed his passengers
in safety. For this heroic exploit he was rewarded with the rank of
commodore, given the command of the united fleets of New Granada, La
Plata, Venezuela, and Mexico, and ordered to sweep Spanish commerce
from the Gulf. Learning of the splendid harbor afforded by the Bay of
Galveston, on the coast of Texas, he determined to occupy it and use it
as a base of operations against the Spanish. Accompanied by Don José
Herrera, the agent of the Mexican revolutionists in the United States,
De Aury landed on Galveston Island in September, 1816. A meeting was
held, a government organized, the Republican flag raised, Galveston
was declared a part of the Mexican Republic, and De Aury was chosen
civil and military governor of Texas and Galveston Island.
Here he was shortly joined by two other adventurers: our old friend,
Colonel Perry, who had escaped to the United States after the disaster
of the Medina, and Francisco Xavier Mina, a soldier of fortune from
Navarre. Mina’s parents, who were peasant farmers, had destined him for
the law, but when Napoleon invaded Spain, young Mina threw away his law
books, raised a band of guerillas, and harassed the invaders until his
name became a terror to the French. He was captured in 1812 and, after
several years in a French prison, went to England, where he made the
acquaintance of a number of Mexican political exiles, who induced him
to take a hand in freeing their native country. In September, 1816,
Mina’s expedition, consisting of two hundred infantry and a battery
of artillery, sailed from Baltimore for Galveston, where he found De
Aury with some four hundred well-drilled men and Colonel Perry with a
hundred more. In March, 1817, the three commanders sailed for the mouth
of the Rio Santander, fifty miles up the Mexican coast from Tampico,
and disembarked their forces at the river bar. The town of Soto la
Marina, sixty miles from the river’s mouth, fell without opposition,
and with its fall the leaders parted company. De Aury returned to
Galveston, but, finding the pirate Lafitte in possession, sailed away
in search of pastures new. Mina, ambitious for further conquests,
marched into the interior, capturing Valle de Mais, Peotillos, Real
de Rinos, and Venadito in rapid succession. At Venadito, however, his
streak of good fortune ended as suddenly as it had begun, for while his
men were scattered in search of plunder a Spanish force recaptured the
town and made Mina a prisoner. So relieved was the Spanish Government
at receiving word of his capture and execution that it ordered the
church-bells to be rung in every town in Mexico and made the viceroy a
count.
When Colonel Perry learned of Mina’s plan for marching into the
interior with the small force at his disposal, he flatly refused to
have anything to do with so harebrained a business and, with fifty of
his men, started up the coast in an attempt to make his way back to
the United States. As the disastrous retreat began in May, when water
was scarce and the heat in the swampy lowlands was almost unbearable,
they suffered terribly. Just as the little band of adventurers reached
the borders of Texas and were congratulating themselves on having all
but won to safety, a party of two hundred Spanish cavalry suddenly
appeared. Perry, throwing his men into line of battle, received the
onslaught of the lancers with a volley which checked them in mid-career
and would doubtless have ended the contest then and there had not the
garrison of the near-by town sallied out and taken the Americans in
the rear. Clothed in rags, scorched by the sun, parched from thirst,
half starved, surrounded by an overwhelming foe, gallantly did these
desperate men sustain their reputation for valor. Again and again the
lancers swept down upon them, again and again the garrison attacked
them in the rear, but always from the thinning line of heroes spat a
storm of lead so deadly that the Spaniards could not stand before it.
Blackened with smoke and powder, fainting from hunger and exhaustion,
bleeding from innumerable wounds, the adventurers fought like men who
welcomed death. The sun had disappeared; the shadows of night were
gathering thick upon the plain; but still a handful of powder-grimed,
blood-streaked men, standing back to back, amid a ring of dead and
dying, held off the enemy. As the darkness deepened, a single gallant
figure still waved a defiant sword: it was Perry, who, true to the
filibusters’ motto that “Americans never surrender,” fell by his own
hand.
Probably the most remarkable of this long list of adventurers was the
Jean Lafitte whom De Aury found in possession of Galveston. A Frenchman
by birth and an American by adoption, he and his brother Pierre had,
during the early years of the century, established on Barataria
Island, near the mouth of the Mississippi, what was virtually a pirate
kingdom, where they drove a thriving trade with the planters along the
upper river and the merchants of New Orleans in smuggled slaves and
merchandise. Although both the State and federal authorities had made
repeated attempts to dislodge them, the Lafittes were at the height
of their prosperity when the second war with England began. When the
British armada destined for the conquest of Louisiana arrived off the
Mississippi, late in 1814, an officer was sent to Jean Lafitte offering
him fifty thousand dollars and a captain’s commission in the royal
navy if he would co-operate with the British in the capture of New
Orleans. Though Governor Claiborne, of Louisiana, had set a price on
his head, Lafitte, who was, it seemed, a patriot first and a pirate
afterward, hastened up the river to New Orleans, warned the governor
of the approach of the British fleet, and offered his services and
those of his men to Andrew Jackson for the defense of the city. His
offer was accepted in the spirit in which it was made, and Lafitte and
his red-shirted buccaneers played no small part in winning the famous
victory. They were mentioned in despatches by Jackson, thanked for
their services by the President and pardoned, and settled down for a
time to a lawful and humdrum existence. But for such men a life of
ease and safety held no attractions; so, about the time that De Aury’s
squadron sailed for Soto la Marina, Lafitte, with half a dozen vessels,
dropped casually into the harbor of Galveston and, as the place suited
him, coolly took possession.
By the close of 1817 the followers of Lafitte on Galveston Island had
increased to upward of a thousand men. They were of all nations and all
languages--fugitives from justice and fugitives from oppression. Those
of them who had wives brought them to the settlement at Galveston, and
those who had no wives brought their mistresses, so that the society
of the place, whatever may be said of its morals, began to assume
an air of permanency. On the site of the hut occupied by the late
governor, De Aury, Lafitte erected a pretentious house and built a
fort; other buildings sprang up, among them a “Yankee” boarding-house,
and, to complete the establishment, a small arsenal and dockyard were
constructed. To lend an air of respectability to his enterprise,
Lafitte obtained privateering commissions from several of the revolted
colonies of Spain, and for several years his cruisers, first under one
flag and then under another, conducted operations in the Gulf which
smacked considerably more of piracy than of privateering. In 1819
Lafitte was taken into the service of the Republican party in Mexico,
Galveston was officially made a port of entry, and he was appointed
governor of the island.
By the terms of the treaty whereby Spain, in 1819, sold Florida to
the United States, the latter agreed to accept the Sabine as its
western boundary and make no further claims to Texas. Though this
treaty aroused the most profound indignation throughout the Southwest,
nowhere did it rise so high as in the town of Natchez. From Natchez
had gone out each of the expeditions which, since the days of Philip
Nolan, had hammered against the Spanish barriers. To it had returned
every leader who had escaped death on the battle-field or before a
firing-party. In it, as a great river town enjoying a vast trade with
the interior, was gathered the most reckless, lawless, enterprising
population--flatboatmen, steamboatmen, frontiersmen--to be found in
all the Southwest. So, when Doctor James Long, an army surgeon who had
served under Jackson at New Orleans, called for recruits to make one
more attempt to free Texas, he did not call in vain. Early in June
Long set out from Natchez with only seventy-five men, but no sooner
had he crossed the Sabine and entered Texas than the survivors of
former expeditions hastened to join him, so that when Nacogdoches was
reached he had behind him upward of three hundred men: veterans who
had seen service under Nolan and Magee, and Kemper, and Gutierrez, and
Toledo, and Humbert, and Perry, and Mina, and De Aury. At Nacogdoches
Long established a provisional government, a supreme council was
elected, and Texas was proclaimed a free and independent republic.
Realizing, however, that he could not hope to hold the territory thus
easily occupied for any length of time unaided, Long despatched a
commission to Galveston to ask the co-operation of Lafitte. Though the
pirate chieftain received the commissioners with marked courtesy and
entertained them at the “Red House,” as his residence was called, with
the lavish hospitality for which he was noted, he told them bluntly
that, though Doctor Long had his best wishes for success, the fate of
Nolan and Perry and Mina and a host of others ought to convince him
how hopeless it was to wage war against Spain with so insignificant
a force. Upon receiving this answer, Doctor Long, believing that a
personal application to the buccaneer might meet with better success,
himself set out for Galveston. As luck would have it, he reached
there on the same day that the American war-ship _Enterprise_ dropped
anchor in the harbor and its commander, Lieutenant Kearny, informed
Lafitte that he had imperative orders from Washington to break up the
establishment at Galveston. There was nothing left for Lafitte but to
obey, and a few days later the rising tide carried outside Galveston
bar the _Pride_ and the other vessels comprising the fleet of the last
of the buccaneers, who abandoned the shores of Texas forever.[B]
Doctor Long, thoroughly discouraged, returned to Nacogdoches to find a
Spanish army close at hand and his own forces completely demoralized.
Surrounded and outnumbered, resistance was useless and he surrendered.
Though Spanish dominion in Mexico was now at an end, Doctor Long and
a number of his companions were sent to the capital, where for several
months he was held a prisoner, the vigorous representations of the
American minister finally resulting in his release. The Mexicans had
no more intention than the Spaniards, however, of permitting Texas
to achieve independence, which, doubtless, accounts for the fact
that Doctor Long, who was known as a champion of Texan liberty, was
assassinated by a soldier in the streets of the capital a few days
after his release from prison. But he and the long line of adventurers
who preceded him did not fight and die in vain, for they paved the way
for the Austins and Sam Houston, the final liberators of Texas, who, a
few years later, crossed the Sabine and completed the work that Nolan,
Magee, Kemper, Gutierrez, Toledo, Humbert, Perry, Mina, De Aury, and
Long had begun. As for Lafitte, the most picturesque adventurer of them
all, he sailed away from Galveston and, following the example of that
long line of buccaneers of whom he was the last, spent his latter years
in harrying the commerce of the Dons upon the Spanish main. Along the
palm-fringed Gulf coast his memory still survives, and at night the
superstitious sailors sometimes claim to see the ghostly spars of his
rakish craft and to hear, borne by the night breeze, the rumble of his
distant cannonading.
“The palmetto leaves are whispering, while the gentle trade-winds blow,
And the soothing Southern zephyrs are sighing soft and low,
As a silvery moonlight glistens, and the droning fireflies glow,
Comes a voice from out the cypress,
‘Lights out! Lafitte! Heave ho!’”
WHEN WE SMASHED THE PROPHET’S POWER
WHEN WE SMASHED THE PROPHET’S POWER
It is a curious and interesting fact that, just as in the year 1754 a
collision between French and English scouting parties on the banks of
the Youghiogheny River, deep in the American wilderness, began a war
that changed the map of Europe, so in 1811 a battle on the banks of the
Wabash between Americans and Indians started an avalanche which ended
by crushing Napoleon.
The nineteenth century was still in its swaddling-clothes at the time
this story opens; the war of the Revolution had been over barely a
quarter of a century, and a second war with England was shortly to
begin. Though the borders of the United States nominally extended to
the Rockies, the banks of the Mississippi really marked the outermost
picket-line of civilization. Beyond that lay a vast and virgin
wilderness, inconceivably rich in minerals, game, and timber, but still
in the power of more or less hostile tribes of Indians. Up to 1800
the whole of that region lying beyond the Ohio, including the present
States of Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, and Missouri,
was officially designated as the Northwest Territory, but in that year
the northern half of this region was organized as the Indian Territory,
or, as it came to be known in time, the Territory of Indiana.
The governor of this great province was a young man named William
Henry Harrison. This youth--he was only twenty-seven at the time of
his appointment--was invested with one of the most extraordinary
commissions ever issued by our government. In addition to being the
governor of a Territory whose area was greater than that of the German
Empire, he was commander-in-chief of the Territorial militia, Indian
agent, land commissioner, and sole lawgiver. He had the power to adopt
from the statutes upon the books of any of the States any and every
law which he deemed applicable to the needs of the Territory. He
appointed all the judges and other civil officials and all military
officers below the rank of general. He possessed and exercised the
authority to divide the Territory into counties and townships. He held
the prerogative of pardon. His decision as to the validity of existing
land grants, many of which were technically worthless, was final,
and his signature upon a title was a remedy for all defects. As the
representative of the United States in its relations with the Indians,
he held the power to negotiate treaties and to make treaty payments.