Tamers of the Texas Frontier

By C. Herndon Williams

In the 1820s, Texas was a wilderness. Settlers thought it was uninhabited although rich with wild game. But many Native American tribes lived in Texas and were at war with the Spanish in Mexico. Mexico ignored Texas and did not try to inhabit this wilderness. Finally, in the late 1820s and early 1830s Stephen F. Austin was allowed to bring in three hundred Anglo settlers and Texas began to be civilized. But to start there was only one town, no roads, no bridges, no planted fields. Texas was starting from ground zero but started fast. They tamed the wilderness and fought the Indians. They got their independence from Mexico and became a Republic, soon a U S state. They established a stable government similar to the one in the US and developed the infrastructure for business and international commerce. In less than eighty years Texas had tamed the wild frontier and became a modern state in the United States. C. Herndon Williams has found forty-two stories that chart this progress.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Feb 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781439677193

C. Herndon Williams

Calvit Herndon Williams Jr. is a native Texan from Houston. His ancestors have deep roots in Texas from the 1830s colonial period: Alexander Calvit, John Hunter Herndon and Samuel May Williams. The author has a PhD in chemistry and worked as an environmental chemist, retiring in 2004. Then he began writing about stories he found in Texas history. He has two books of nonfiction by The History Press and a book of fiction about the evolution of dogs, self-published by Archway. This will be his third book with The History Press.

Book preview

Chapter 1

TEXAS AS A FRONTIER AND COLONY, 1827 TO 1835

EARLIEST TRANSIENTS: THREE ENGLISHMEN ACROSS TEXAS IN 1568

Three Englishmen walked across wild Texas in 1568 on an incredible journey from Mexico to Nova Scotia. This was about forty years after the Spaniard Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his two companions walked from Texas to the Pacific coast of Mexico. Their motivations were identical: they were trying to survive by walking to their countrymen in known locations. They had no other choice; there were no settlements in wild Texas other than those of Indians.

Cabeza de Vaca’s written account is well known and accepted. The Englishmen’s account, by David Ingram, is less well known and largely disbelieved. Ingram was an illiterate sailor, and his story was narrated in 1582, thirteen years after his return to England. But the overall content of Ingram’s story is supported by its historical context.

Ingram was a crewman on the third voyage of Englishman John Hawkins in 1567, pirating and seeking slaves on the west coast of Africa. With a cargo of some 500 captives, Hawkins’s fleet of six ships headed west toward South America on February 3, 1568. Hawkins had largely sold his cargo of slaves when he arrived at Vera Cruz, Mexico, on September 16, 1568. Here, he was attacked by a superior Spanish force and lost all but two of his ships. One of the remaining ships was so overloaded that Hawkins landed north of Tampico and forced 114 members of his crew to go ashore to lighten the ship.

Book cover image showing three Englishmen trekking across the uninhabited Texas plain heading east toward the Atlantic coast and home. E DeGolyer, The Journey of Three Englishmen across Texas in 1568 (El Paso, TX: Peripatetic Press, 1947).

These abandoned men were attacked by Indians, some killed and the rest stripped of their clothes before being let go. After another Indian attack, most of these sailors turned south to take their chances with the Spanish in Panuco. Miles Phillips, with the group that turned south, confirmed that David Ingram was in the party of twenty-four that continued north. Ingram was headed for the fishing grounds off the coast of Maine, known to be frequented by Europeans.

Miles Phillips survived Spanish captivity and reunited with Ingram later in England. Ingram and two companions, Richard Twide and Richard Browne, were picked up by a French fishing ship at Cape Britton in Nova Scotia eleven months later and taken back to England.

Ingram’s story circulated widely in England, and thirteen years later, Ingram was approached by Sir Francis Walsingham, who was seeking any information he could get on the New World. Ingram narrated his account, his two companions having died several years earlier. The written story was not published until 1589. In 1583, Ingram had returned to America with Sir Humphrey Gilbert to attempt to start an English colony in Newfoundland. Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement, was not founded until 1607.

While Cabeza de Vaca’s account of his experiences provided much useful ethnographic information about Texas and northern Mexico, Ingram’s story did not do the same for aboriginal North America or Texas. One problem was that Ingram seemed to mix up what he had seen in Africa and South America with what he saw on his long trek in North America. For example, Ingram recounted seeing elephants, penguins and hippopotamus, as well as copious quantities of gold, silver and pearls, on his journey. He also repeated a story told to him by the Penobscot Indians of a northern, Cibola-like city called Norumbega with wide streets paved with gold.

However, some of Ingram’s descriptions did ring true. Great plaines, as large and as fayre in many places as may be seen, being as plaine as a board could refer to the coastal plains of Texas. A kinde of Graine, the eare whereof is as big as the wrist of a man’s arme; the graine is like a flat pease, it maketh very good bread is a good description of maize or corn, which was unknown in England at the time.

Ingram also wrote about the dense population of Indian towns and villages that he encountered in North America. This contradicted the English idea of an empty landscape in America in the 1600s. However, recent research has found that 80 to 90 percent of the Indians living in America when Columbus arrived died within one hundred years due to European epidemic diseases. So, Ingram’s account may have been accurate for his time.

Some have questioned the plausibility of Ingram’s walking three thousand miles through wilderness in eleven months. So, in 1999, British writer Richard Nathan set out to retrace Ingram’s path from Nova Scotia to Tampico. He walked it in just nine months. So, it is possible—meaning that Ingram must have had a lot of Indian help along the way. Still, twenty-one sailors in the original group did not survive the journey.

THE FIRST LANDING SITES IN TEXAS WERE BEACHES AND RIVERBANKS

In the 1700s and early 1800s, a small number of shallow-water landings provided Gulf access to San Antonio, Goliad and the San Felipe colony of Stephen F. Austin. These landings usually amounted to only a beach or an inland riverbank with no pier. Two of these landings were Black Point and Copano on Copano Bay.

The Spanish authorities limited navigation access to Texas to control smuggling and piracy. The Spanish government did not permit immigrants to settle on the coast. The immigrants had to disembark and walk to their land grants. After 1836, all the early landings faded away.

The first landing of record in Spanish Texas was Copano on Copano Bay. It was only a beach, but it was used as early as 1750 to bring supplies into Goliad and San Antonio. It was officially opened in 1785 by the Spanish viceroy Don Jose Galvez. But the recorded history of Copano began only with the succession of shallow-draft schooners that had to anchor offshore.

These schooners were carrying Irish immigrants, who disembarked on the beach in the period from 1828 to 1834. At the time, there was only a customs shack occupied by two soldiers at Copano. The customs captain was living in Goliad, about forty miles inland. Copano was also the landing used by General Cos and the Mexican army in 1835 and 1836 during the Texas revolution.

Mesquite Landing, in Refugio County, was on the Guadalupe River near its junction with the San Antonio River. The Spanish army had a coast guard post there in 1766 and called it Rancho de los Mosquitos, after the plentiful insects. The filibuster James Long disembarked at Mesquite Landing in September 1821 during his attack on Goliad. Some of the early Irish settlers also arrived via Mesquite Landing. The later Chihuahua Trail from Indianola crossed the Guadalupe River by ferry at Mesquite Landing. The Guadalupe was considered navigable for thirty miles above Mesquite Landing, which remained active into the early 1900s.

The presidio and mission La Bahia were established by the Spanish in 1721 at the site of La Salle’s Fort St. Louis at the west end of Matagorda Bay. But the presidio and mission did not last long at that location, moving in 1726 farther inland along the Guadalupe River and, in 1745, to their final site on the San Antonio River. The mission and presidio became Goliad.

Prior to 1822, Stephen F. Austin tried to arrange to receive colonists and supplies at a site on Matagorda Bay. There was no pier there, so shipping ended up on the Brazos River. Bell’s Landing was founded in 1823 at the head of navigation on the Brazos River. It became the principal shipping point for the Austin Colony. The major exports from the Republic of Texas were cotton and sugar grown in Brazoria County and shipped via this river port to New Orleans.

There were other landings established on Matagorda and Lavaca Bays. An early landing was started by John Linn, who traded tobacco with Mexico. In 1830, Linn founded a landing on Lavaca Bay, called Linville, and it prospered as an entry port to Victoria. Linville was razed by the Comanche raid in 1840, which emptied the warehouse of its fine imported goods: ladies’ hats, umbrellas and bolts of cloth.

Contemporaneous with Linville, Lavaca Bay was also the site of three other landings in the early 1830s: Dimmitt’s Landing, Cox’s Point and Lavaca. Given the poor conditions of the roads in the early 1830s, river ports were established wherever small boats could navigate. In 1832, Texana was founded far inland where the Lavaca River joined the Navidad River, near present-day La Grange. Texana prospered into the 1880s, with traffic of fifteen to twenty small ships a week.

Map of Aransas Bay and Copano Bay showing present-day Bayside, where Bollaert would have gone ashore. James Barrera, National Atlas of the United States.

The number and tenacity of the landings used through 1836 shows the determination of the settlers to bring colonists and goods into frontier Texas and to establish commerce with New Orleans.

BOLLAERT’S VISIT TO SERENE COPANO IN 1842

Europeans and Americans were fascinated by the new Republic of Texas. An English visitor,