The History of Texas. Robert A. Calvert
to protect the expanse from foreign encroachment, for by the late 1570s and 1580s, English pirates such as Sir Francis Drake began sailing along the California coast. In 1598, therefore, Don Juan de Oñate led an expedition into what would become Nuevo México; the operation resulted in the founding of Santa Fe in 1609. The establishment of this permanent settlement initiated the Spanish government’s quest to impose its imperial authority over Texas.
Spain’s initial and strongest competition in the colonization of Texas came not from rival European empires but from indigenous nations of the region. As of the late seventeenth century (and later for that matter), Native American peoples comprised the land’s political and economic (as well as demographic) powers. In actuality, several Indian nations vied to claim the wide expanse, all of them competing for its natural (animal and plant) resources, material bounties (such as captives, guns, and livestock), or for the control of trade networks or potential intertribal coalitions. In their aim to settle Texas, therefore, the Spaniards found themselves one player among many–all intent on gaining dominion of the province’s resources.
Western Texas
For years, Jumano Indians had traveled to the Pueblo country in New Mexico to conduct trade. In 1629, the Jumanos asked the Spaniards they met there to visit them in their West Texas lands and instruct them in the religion to which they had been introduced by the “Lady in Blue.” According to some church historians, this personage was the Spanish nun Madre María de Ágreda, who asserted that she had spiritually visited New World lands through miraculous bilocation. Whatever the truth to the mystery surrounding this figure, the Spaniards responded to the invitation with an expedition to Jumano country in 1629 commanded by Fray (Father) Juan de Salas, and another one in 1632, led by the Franciscans.
Their desire to proselytize Native Americans notwithstanding, the Spaniards also held interests in more mundane things in Jumano country: namely, freshwater pearls (found in mollusks living in the western tributaries of the Colorado River) and the countless buffalo on the West Texas plains. Also appealing to them was the possibility that Jumano country might become a base for trading with the Caddo Indians; the eastern tribes, according to the Jumanos, comprised a wealthy population of many villages. In 1654, therefore, Diego de Guadalajara returned to Jumano country in search of pearl‐bearing conchas (shells) in the present‐day forks of the Concho River of West Texas. At that time, however, Spanish officialdom lacked the resources to pursue their plans to trade with East Texas Indians through the Jumanos.
Finally, approaches to West Texas were made in 1683 and 1684. By now, the Spaniards resided a bit closer to the Jumanos, for the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, in which the Pueblo tribes attacked and destroyed the Spanish settlements of the upper valley of the Rio Grande, had caused much of the Spanish population of New Mexico to take refuge in El Paso (modern‐day Juárez), where a Franciscan mission, which sheltered a small band of Jumanos, had existed since 1659. From this distressed and impoverished civilian settlement the Spaniards returned to West Texas when the Jumano Chief Juan Sabeata asked that priests be sent to his land in West Texas and, parenthetically, for assistance in countering threats from the Apaches. Responding to Sabeata’s request, Spanish authorities dispatched an expedition led by Juan Domínguez de Mendoza and Fray Nicolás López down the Rio Grande from El Paso to today’s Ruidosa, Texas, then into the San Sabá River area, where they established themselves at Mission San Clemente. From temporary quarters there, the expedition’s men slaughtered some 4000 buffalo. In fact, Sabeata’s primary motive in luring the Spaniards into Jumano country may have been to get the Spaniards to protect his people from the Apaches while the Jumanos hunted buffalo. The Jumanos then planned to carry Spanish goods and trade them with the Caddos of East Texas. But the Spaniards’ motivations went beyond converting Indians and shielding Sabeata from the Apaches. Aside from the previously mentioned desire to find pearls, acquire new sources of food or raw products (such as hides), and establish trading links with the Caddos, they sought to bring relief to the starving civilian community in El Paso. They also surmised that exploring West Texas might lead to an alternative site for settlement, for the El Paso region seemed unable to produce basic necessities. Whatever the motives for all involved, the Spaniards left after six weeks of hunting in San Clemente, returning to El Paso with a bounty of buffalo hides, promising the Jumanos to return at a later date.
Eastern Texas
The Spaniards did not revisit the Jumanos in West Texas, for they became preoccupied with increased French activity close to the Gulf of Mexico. By the early 1670s, the French were actively exploring the middle of the North American continent from their bases in Canada, and now they planned to install a string of trading stores and forts to stretch all the way from the Great Lakes to the mouth of the Mississippi. They made important headway in doing so when in 1682 René‐Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, traveled down the Mississippi and asserted title to all of the lands drained by the great river for France.
Promptly, La Salle made plans to lay more than symbolic claims to the Mississippi River basin. Intending to found a warm‐water port for the French fur trade at a site above the mouth of the Mississippi River (or perhaps, as some historians contend, plant a post there to help France capture some of the gold mines in northwestern New Spain), he left France at the head of four ships (the Aimable, the Joly, the Belle and one seized by Spanish privateers in Haiti). La Salle and his colonists, which included some women and children, arrived in the Gulf of Mexico late in 1684 (the same year that the Spaniards were active among the Jumanos in West Texas). Charting his course on the limited navigational knowledge of the seventeenth century and a reliance on hypothetically drawn maps, La Salle supposed that the Río Escondido (the modern‐day Nueces River in South Texas) was actually the celebrated Mississippi River, so in February 1685 he ended up on the Texas coast at Matagorda Bay. Following the wreck of the Aimable, his crew sailed back to France on the Joly, leaving La Salle in unknown territory with only one ship and his original 180 colonists rapidly diminishing.
On Garcitas Creek (in today’s Victoria County), La Salle founded a temporary colony. While his remaining ship (the Belle) lay at anchor in Matagorda Bay with the supplies destined for his Mississippi venture, the Frenchman undertook an exploration in late 1685 into the Texas interior to determine the reaches of Spanish settlements. This expedition brought his party toward the Rio Grande and into the trans‐Pecos region, with disastrous results. To La Salle’s dismay, the Belle had wrecked during this absence, and to salvage something for his ambitious enterprise, the tired explorer, at the head of a seventeen‐man party, decided to turn northward in the hope of reaching Fort Saint‐Louis on the Illinois River (which he had established earlier) and from there send word of his plight to France. This gambit also proved unsuccessful, and in March 1687 La Salle died near the Trinity River at the hands of his own frustrated men, five of whom in 1688 succeeded in reaching France via Quebec. In early 1689, Karankawa Indians wiped out the survivors (about twenty‐three) at La Salle’s fledgling settlement (known erroneously in Texas history as Fort St. Louis; in actuality, there never did exist a site or garrison in Texas that went by that name), sparing only a few children whom the Spaniards later recovered.
As unimpressive as it was, the French activity in the area nonetheless alerted the Spaniards to the danger of losing Texas and prompted them to initiate the exploration of the eastern periphery of the northern frontier of New Spain. Starting in 1686 and continuing until 1690, the Crown dispatched Alonso de León (north from Nuevo León) on several expeditions, his fourth one in 1689 taking him to the remains of La Salle’s ill‐fated colony on the Garcitas. The next year, the Spaniards explored past that location and made contact with the Caddo world, long regarded by the Spaniards as “the great kingdom of the Tejas” due to legends extolling the prosperity and magnificence of the Caddos.
Actually, the Caddos of what is now East Texas (Caddo communities spread into modern‐day northwestern Louisiana) consisted of about 10,000 people; among those belonging to the Caddo nation were the Hasinai Indians, whom the Spaniards referred to as the Tejas, the Spanish rendition of the Hasinai word for friend, from which the state of Texas is named. Encircled by tribes hostile to their way of life, the Caddos stood prepared to defend their territory against any group that might