Texas in 1837: An Anonymous, Contemporary Narrative

TEXAS IN 1837

AN

ANONYMOUS, CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVE

Edited with an Introduction

BY

ANDREW FOREST MUIR

AUSTIN    ·    UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 58–7231

© 1958 by Andrew Forest Muir

utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form

Library ebook ISBN: 978-0-292-73398-5

Individual ebook ISBN: 9780292733985

DOI: 10.7560/780996

Published with the assistance of a grant from the Ford Foundation under its program for the support of publications in the humanities and social sciences

Manufactured in the United States of America by the Printing Division of the University of Texas

ISBN 0-292-78099-0

To the memory of my Mother

Annie Jane James

1878–1927

Acknowledgments

I HEARTILY THANK Mrs. Mary Jourdan Atkinson for her rigorous critical examination of the Introduction; my brother, Lawrence Windham Muir, for his assistance in verifying the text of the anonymous author’s Notes; and Edward Redington Baird for his competent drafting.

Contents

Illustrations

Texas in 1837 showing the route of the author (end papers)

Texas in 1834 (map)

San Jacinto battlegrounds

View of lower Buffalo Bayou as seen by Audubon

The steamboat Yellowstone

The Capitol at Houston

Plan of the city of Houston

Thomas William Ward

Mission of San José

Mexicans

Introduction: Landscape with Figures

THE REPUBLIC OF TEXAS was, in the spring of 1837, a fragile though boisterous infant. Its treasury was empty; indeed the word treasury was a presumption. Its national defense was less realistic than it had been during the spring campaign of 1836. Its land policy was largely unformed, its administrative agencies were undefined, and its economy had not yet reached the maturity even of predatoriness. Its population was made up in large measure of young males without the skills needed to build the most primitive community. So disproportionately masculine was the Republic that not until June, 1837, did Congress get around to providing means by which a couple might be married by the statutory officials of the Republic. ¹

Sam Houston, the first constitutional president, lived in a hovel in Columbia until April, 1837, when he removed to another in Houston.² Profane, flamboyant, bombastic, often drunk, nursing his own counsels, and frequently running roughshod over the Constitution and the legislative branch, he dramatized a leadership he did not always provide. Congress, its members given to love of liquor, gambling, and private speculation—which was joined in some with as much ignorance of political science, administrative practice, and economics as of grammar—was as capable of passing on the same day two bills each setting up wholly divergent county governments as the President was of approving both.³ The judiciary, except for one or two competent district judges and a few conscientious justices of the peace, partook more of the nature of a kangaroo-court system than of machinery designed to execute even a purblind justice. Yet in the best American tradition, there was hope, self-reliance, optimism, and a determination to create Utopia.

Into this milieu came a spectator with pencil poised over notebook, and out of the observations and hearsay he had jotted therein, he distilled an account published under the title Notes on Texas. These Notes—in twenty-five chapters⁴—appeared between September, 1838, and April, 1839, inclusive, in a monthly literary magazine, Hesperian, published in Columbus, Ohio.⁵ The author is nowhere identified by name, although in three places he is referred to as a Citizen of Ohio,⁶ and he thrice signed himself R.⁷ No reprinting of the entire work has appeared heretofore, but the first eight chapters were issued as a thirty-five-page pamphlet in 1926 by the Union National Bank of Houston under the misleading title Houston and Galveston in the Years 1837–8.

After the last of Notes on Texas had appeared in the Hesperian, the editor of that journal was moved to write:

Justice to the author requires that we should here state that the distance of his residence from our place of publication precluded his examining the proof-sheets of his Notes, some chapters of which have been marred by typographical errors. It was his intention to have transcribed all the manuscripts, before publishing them; but this he was prevented from doing, by other engagements, and the Notes as given to our readers are the first hasty drafts from the original memoranda. These things are mentioned not for the purpose of disarming animadversion, but merely to show the true cause of the marks of haste that are apparent in some of the chapters, and to account for the typographical errors in others.⁸

In this editorial note, it is clearly stated that the work as published was the author’s first hasty draft, no doubt, like most first drafts, whether hasty or deliberate, filled with minor inaccuracies if not indeed with major ones. Then, too, the printer, entering enthusiastically into the spirit of the venture, contributed his own share of typographical errors. To further the matter, the author’s handwriting was occasionally illegible, as evidenced, for example, by the printer’s setting up in one place Prisoners where the author must obviously have written Provisions.

As the original printing of the work is readily available to anyone wishing to consult it, I have endeavored in this edition to present the material in what I consider the most readable fashion. In order to distract as little as possible, I have silently expanded initials, modernized spelling, redivided paragraphs, rectified the glaring grammatical errors and all the orthographical errors, adjusted minor errors of fact when they were obvious slips of the pen and might be corrected by altering a word or two, and cleaned up the untidy punctuation. In justice to the author, it must be said that many of the misspellings appear to have been the result of the printer’s deficiency, but there are two that are of interest in placing the work in its temporal setting: the author consistently wrote prairy and musketoe. He always tried to spell proper names and foreign words phonetically, but in virtually every case, especially those in French, Spanish, and German, his transliterations missed the mark. The only significant error of this sort, though, was his writing Cibolo as Seawillow, a common rendering of the time that reminds one of the curiously named stream in Colorado, the Picketwire, which is no more or less than Purgatoire as spelled by a semiliterate frontiersman.

Although the publisher went to the trouble to copyright Notes on Texas and to intimate that the author might be induced, with the aid of additional information at his command, to elaborate them into a volume of octavo size,⁹ no separate printing ever fell from the press. By the time serial publication had begun, even though the Notes were regarded as the most intelligent, accurate, and impartial account of Texas, which has yet been given to the people of the United States,¹⁰ they were already outmoded. Events had outrun printing. An emigrant of 1839 who followed the advice that he found therein, except such parts as suggested farming as the surest means of obtaining a livelihood and winter clothing as a necessity, would have found himself in a box.

I regret that I have been unable to identify the author. The New Orleans newspapers of the time did not publish passenger lists of ships clearing that port, as did the El Dorado, on which the author came to Texas. The Telegraph and Texas Register was in the habit of running such lists for entering ships, but at the time the newspaper was published in Columbia, which had no direct communication with Galveston Island, and so took no notice of the El Dorado’s arrival. The passenger manifests of the New Orleans customhouse would be the most likely place to seek a lead, but the early records of that office, as it turned out, were sent some years ago to the National Archives in Washington, and the passenger manifest of the El Dorado is not among them.

Though his name is not available, a considerable body of information about the author is revealed in internal evidence. His surname probably began with the letter R. At the time of the publication of his Notes, he was a resident of Ohio, probably of Cincinnati, then a long distance from Columbus. He certainly was a Southerner, as his casual and unquestioning references to slavery indicate. And his prejudices were in the New England post-Calvinistic tradition. He referred to Sunday as the Sabbath, and he regarded the Pilgrims, a very trying collection of folk at best, as heroes. This conclusion is buttressed by his quotations from John Milton, whom the Puritan mind of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries regarded as the greatest English poet, and by his conspicuous neglect to quote Shakespeare a single time, despite his penchant for quoting, though he was familiar with the Shakespearean characters. His southern origin and his theological direction are confirmed in his comments on the first religious service in Houston. He describes Zachariah N. Morrell (1803–83), who delivered the sermon on that occasion, as the instructor of my youth and the companion of after life. Between 1816, when he was moved to climb into the pulpit, and 1835, when he left for Texas, Morrell preached as a Baptist elder in Pulaski, Tennessee.¹¹ The author of the Notes, then, must have lived in Pulaski before moving to Ohio. Since he was a youthful protégé of Morrell, he must have been born in the nineteenth century and was, therefore, a young man af the time of his visit to Texas. Whether he was still a Baptist when he wrote, or indeed had ever been a Baptist, would require additional information.

Despite his post-Calvinistic Weltanschauung, he appears to have been attracted to the doctrine of progress and to the Romantic movement, as witnessed by his allusions to improvement and his quotations from George Gordon, Lord Byron. A synthesis of post-Calvinism and Romanticism would indeed have been a difficult feat to bring off, but his numerous and curious references to a personal and purposive Nature suggest a possible alternative. In the United States there was and still is a sect of Baptists known as the Glassites, stemming from the Particular or Calvinistic Baptists of Scotland, who on their native heath combined the Calvinistic doctrine of man with a pantheistic nature doctrine similar to Swedenborg’s and in America Calvinistic soteriology with Romantic or Transcendental cosmology and theology.¹² Our author must have been a conscious Glassite or one who had reached an approximate position by his own devices.

His extended discussion of the law, especially the common law, with which he obviously had professional acquaintance, suggests he may have been an attorney.

Nowhere does he suggest the motivations of his visit to Texas. He may have been moved by curiosity, or he could have been in search of information about the person or the estate of some kinsman or client who had disappeared into the Texas Revolution.

He spent slightly more than six months in Texas. He arrived at Galveston Island on March 22, 1837, and he was aboard the outbound Phoenix on October 5 and 6, when Racer’s hurricane struck the coast and completely inundated the island. Since the Phoenix rode out the hurricane in Galveston Bay, it is likely that the boat cleared a few days afterward. Presumably it did not enter New Orleans, for the marine intelligence of newspapers there fails to show its arrival during October.

In his six-month visit to Texas the author went up Galveston Bay, San Jacinto River, and Buffalo Bayou to Houston, where he lingered for some weeks, after which he set out for San Antonio. He appears to have retraced his steps in getting back to Galveston Island. Thus he saw nothing of east Texas, the lower Brazos and Colorado valleys, the planting areas on the upper Brazos, and the settlements between San Antonio and the Gulf of Mexico. His visit, restricted as it was to the spring and summer months and to a narrow though lengthy swath through the Republic, provided him with no firsthand information about the autumn and winter seasons or about a vast proportion of the then settled areas in Texas, to say nothing of the unsettled brush country, hill country, trans-Pecos region, staked plains, and cross timbers. Where he discusses these subjects, he is perforce obliged to use secondhand information, deficient at best and misinterpreted at worst. In describing what he saw with his own eyes, he is graphic and informative. In repeating hearsay, he becomes insipid. His generalizations are usually less significant and interesting than his particulars. This is transparent in his comments on persons. Some of his descriptions of individuals are excellent, but his group portraits are out of focus. When he discusses groups of people he engages in what the sociologists call stereotyping.

A man of at least an academy education—revealed in allusions to Homer, Vergil, and various English authors—he goes far afield in the discussion of earthy matters. A product of the old Southwestern frontier, where the fertility of soil was proportionate to its blackness and its ability to grow that timber which had to be laboriously felled to provide clearings in which to plant crops, he judged the potentialities of Texan husbandry by the preconceptions he had brought with him. Although he foresaw to an accurate degree the extent and indeed the nature of the future cattle industry of Texas, he nowhere showed the faintest comprehension of the direction agriculture was to take. On the positive side, though, because of his preconceptions, he failed to indulge in speculations about the exotic crops that some other travelers fancied: indigo, pineapples, white mulberry for silkworms, and prickly pears for cochineal. Indeed, his Texas is entirely devoid of cacti. Competent in describing inanimate nature—expanse of earth, sky, and horizon—and suggestive when sketching trees, he was incapable of or uninterested in portraying insects, reptiles, birds, mammals, and small plants. Apparently he was all but unaware of them, except at times when his delineations are overblown and inaccurate. The chameleon is not so brilliantly colored as he suggests, and he overrates the mockingbird’s powers of mimicry. Audubon saw more of the fauna and flora in a few hours from the deck of the United States revenue cutter Campbell in Galveston Bay than our author saw in a fortnight’s riding across the prairies. His deficient insight is nowhere more apparent than in his discussion of the navigation of Texan streams. While the critical nature and location of Buffalo Bayou¹³ eluded his grasp, he said far too much about floodtime navigation of the Brazos and Colorado.

Even in what appears to have been his own profession, the law, he discerned only chaos and overlooked the plausible union of the common and the civil law that was soon to produce the doctrines of community property and homestead exemption, the blending of law and equity, and the abandonment of special pleading, which have spread not only throughout the United States but, in part, to wherever the English language is spoken.¹⁴ But, then, he could not have foreseen the rise to brilliance of John Hemphill.¹⁵

Despite the author’s deficiencies, his Notes on Texas contain the best description of the Republic during its first year of more or less intact operation as an independent nation that has yet come to light. For this, one must be grateful.

I

Arrival in Texas—Galveston Bay—Laffite the Pirate—Mexican Prisoners—Shells—City of Galveston—Storm.

ON THE 22d of March 1837, the El Dorado , from New Orleans, with sixty human beings, landed in Galveston Bay, Texas, after a stormy and protracted voyage of two weeks. ¹ One of this number of persons was the author of these Notes. The sun had just set, as the vessel came to anchor. The sails were furled, and all anxiously gathered on deck to gaze upon the new scenes which were spread out before them. Skiffs or small boats were seen gliding in all directions from the shore, the oarsmen pulling with hearts of controversy, each eager to hear first what news had been brought by the strangers across the waters. Newspapers were demanded and perused with an interest which showed that the spirit-stirring scenes of a new country in the midst of a revolution were not sufficient to make the patriot or adventurer feel indifferent to what was taking place in other lands. The earlier immigrant extended a hearty welcome to his newly acquired countryman, as one who was to share with him the dangers of a new and turbulent country, while the latter seemed to regard the former as his friend and counsel in the novel scenes in which he was about to embark. We here learned the recognition of Texas independence by the government of the United States. ² The intelligence reached Velasco by a vessel which left New Orleans some days after the El Dorado. It infused new life into the bosom of every Texian when he was told that his country, which had always been regarded as the asylum of the outlaw and the desperado of every land, had at last received the countenance of one of the independent nations of the earth. The intelligence created great joy throughout the land. Cannon were fired at as many different points as they were to be found. Many, too, hailed the acknowledgment of independence as the first step toward admission into the Union of the States of the North, an event devoutly hoped for by every citizen of Texas.

The want of accommodations on shore made it necessary for all to remain for the night in the vessel, a sad disappointment to many who, tired of confinement and the smell of bilge water, were anxious to be once more on land and to make their first acquaintance with the soil which was to be the theater of their future toil and enterprise.

On the clear and beautiful morning of the 23rd, at an early hour, all were ready to disembark. The vessel had anchored some distance from shore owing to the shallows which put out from the land, and the long boat was launched. Notwithstanding the light draft of our boat, we were compelled to wade thirty or forty yards before we reached the dry part of the island. These shallows put out into the bay from the land at nearly every point in the harbor and present great obstacles to commerce, which can only be surmounted by the construction of docks at an immense expense.

The eastern extremity of Galveston Island lies in latitude 29°10′, longitude, Washington, 17°30′.³ It is thirty-six miles in length from northeast to southwest, averaging three miles in breadth. This strip of land lies opposite the bay formed by the waters of Buffalo Bayou, San Jacinto, and Trinity and forms a good harbor by arresting the surges of the gulf. The east pass is a half mile in width, and the water upon the bar at its deepest point does not exceed fourteen feet.⁴ The water upon the west pass is still less, and at no point is it deeper than six or seven feet. The whole island presents rather a dreary and forbidding aspect, with nothing to relieve the eye or diversify the prospect except three lone trees upon its southeastern side, about midway, and which stand as the only beacon to the mariner along this solitary and monotonous portion of the Gulf of Mexico. Pelican Island, which lies to the north and northeast, is even more somber and desolate in its appearance than Galveston. The entire view of the country as you enter the harbor is discouraging and reminds one of the marshes and lagoons of the Mississippi. The surface of Galveston Island is low,⁵ so much so that there have been times when it has been nearly covered with water through its whole extent by the violence of the winds and tide. The soil in some places is rich alluvial, and a great part of the island is covered with a grass that is found in all the prairies of the West. Water, not entirely free from a brackish taste, is to be found by digging a few feet into the sand and sometimes in pools upon the surface.

The island has the reputation of being healthy, on account of the constant and refreshing breezes from the ocean, and my own experience during the sickly season fully confirms the prevailing opinion. During the summer, many invalids collected at this point from every part of Texas to embark for the United States, and in a short time all revived under the salubrious influence of the climate, notwithstanding most of them were compelled to bivouac in exposed parts of the island or find quarters on board the different vessels which anchored in the harbor. So soon as suitable accommodations are provided, doubtless the island will be an asylum for the afflicted of every part of Texas. The mosquitoes are, however, extremely annoying and in some parts of the island almost insufferable.

It was here that Lafitte, the pirate, whose exploits both poetry and romance have failed to render more extraordinary than history itself, once made his rendezvous—it was here, upon the green turf looking

O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea⁶

that this extraordinary man planned the many expeditions which have placed his name at the head of all corsairs and carried terror through every portion of the southern seas. At Bolivar Point, north of Galveston, are still to be seen the remnants of forts and other fortifications which were once in the possession of the outlaws. In traveling over Texas, you still meet with some whose eyes sparkle at the mention of Lafitte and who regard their old commander as the greatest of modern heroes.⁷ When this scourge of the ocean retired from his career of infamy, the pirates which he headed were scattered in all directions, and if report can be relied upon, many of them penetrated the interior of the country to avoid the arm of justice.

After we were fairly upon the island, our attention was attracted by the appearance of a number of Mexicans, taken prisoners at the battle of San Jacinto. When we came up, they were standing in a circle about one of their own countrymen who seemed to act the part of a commissary in dealing out to each a small portion of beef. The number did not exceed one hundred. The appearance of the men struck me as singular, and they were entirely different in all respects from what I had expected. Their complexions varied from the African jet to the copper color of the North American Indian. Their vast physical inferiority to the Anglo-Saxon was most striking, and such was their effeminate, squalid, and unsoldierlike appearance that it gave occasion to a friend to remark that it would be good policy in the government to keep this portion of the vanquished legions of Mexico upon the island for the benefit of immigrants, who, from this specimen, could entertain no feeling