The History of Texas. Robert A. Calvert
upon their arrival, for they saw them as potential allies and trading partners. The fact that the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe accompanied de León and the Spaniards as they approached Caddo villages helped introduce them as friends, for in the Caddo kinship gender‐based system, women symbolized peaceful intent. The Caddo leaders responded by sending parties of men, women, and children to greet the Europeans (such was their standard ritual whenever outsiders neared their communities) as their own indication of friendship. Following this reception, the Caddos invited the visitors into their village, where women (in exercise of their matrilineal roles) brought to the ceremonial courtyard foodstuffs–the fruits of their toil as agricultural laborers. The Spaniards, for their part, reciprocated with gifts such as garments, blankets, and tobacco.
With trust thus established, Caddo and Spanish expedition leaders set about discussing matters of mutual benefit. The Caddos offered no resistance when de León and Fray Damián Massanet moved to set up two missions (one of them being San Francisco de los Tejas, the first Spanish mission in Texas, 1690) among the Caddos. The Spanish perceived the Tejas (Caddos) as a particularly stable tribe that adhered to religious beliefs that recognized the existence of but one supreme being. Moreover, they ascertained that the Caddos traded widely, exchanging their bows and pottery, as well as salt and other goods, with representatives of other bands, among them the Jumanos. So many Indians from such great distances arrived in the Caddo villages in order to barter that the priests quickly envisioned the Caddo kingdom as the ideal setting for disseminating the Christian message in New Spain’s Far North.
Despite these seemingly auspicious circumstances, the Caddos did not prove to be willing converts nor indulgent hosts. For one thing, Christianity actually clashed with their religious beliefs and spiritual traditions. For another, the Spaniards had disrupted their traditional way of life. When Domingo de Terán, who had been named governor of what became the province of Texas, visited the Caddos in 1691 intending to found additional missions, his livestock indiscriminately trampled and fed upon the Caddos’ new farm harvests. This, along with the soldiers’ degrading treatment of women and imprudent overtures by the missionaries who violated Caddo protocol, made the Caddos resentful, leading the tribes’ members to retaliate by attacking the interlopers’ domesticated stock. Finally sensing hostility, the Spaniards retreated to Coahuila, leaving behind only a few missionaries to continue the work of Christianizing. But those few persons–who obviously resisted the Caddo convention that “outsiders” acceptance into their society entailed marriage–could not convince the Caddos of their good intentions, so by 1693 the Spanish had departed East Texas.
The departure proved temporary, for events from within and outwith New Spain forced a return to Caddo land. Father Francisco Hidalgo, who had worked with Massanet among the Tejas, desired to resume the work he had helped begin in East Texas. In addition, the French renewed their activity along the mouth of the Mississippi to thwart English plans to move westward from the Atlantic to the middle of the continent. When the French established themselves at Mobile Bay in 1702, then farther west at Natchitoches, in what is now western Louisiana, it gave the Spaniards cause for alarm.
Although several motives had brought the French to the border of Texas, trade ranked high on the list. This became evident when in 1713, a French Canadian named Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, who had been trading successfully with Indians in Louisiana, appeared in Natchitoches with an array of merchandise and a determination to seek markets among the Spaniards.
Setting out across Texas, St. Denis and a small detachment of French and Hasinais headed for New Spain proper. They arrived at San Juan Bautista on the Rio Grande (some thirty miles downriver from today’s Eagle Pass on the Mexican side) on July 19, 1714, where Captain Diego Ramón quickly arrested them, detaining the encroachers until word arrived from the viceroy early the next year that the Frenchmen should be taken to Mexico City for official interrogation. Once in New Spain’s capital, St. Denis gave a revealing account of his purpose: the French had received a letter from Father Francisco Hidalgo the previous year describing the Tejas and asking if the French would support a mission for the Indians. St. Denis disclosed that the Tejas yearned for a continuation of Christian missionary work, especially that of Father Hidalgo. As for trade, St. Denis declared that he saw no legal bans against commercial intercourse between French and Spanish territorial possessions.
Whatever the pretext, the viceroy saw no real justification for the French intrusion, so he immediately ordered Captain Domingo Ramón (the son of Diego Ramón) to make preparations to convert East Texas into a buffer zone by rebuilding the Spanish missions there. Assigned as second‐in‐command of this expedition was none other than St. Denis, who had adroitly persuaded the Spaniards that he now planned to set up stead on the Texas frontier and assist the Spanish in the work of Christianizing the Tejas. Although room for distrust existed between the Spanish viceroy and the Frenchman, both found mutual benefit in their alliance. The Spaniards hoped to take advantage of St. Denis’s knowledge of the Texas terrain, his command of Indian languages, and his knack for befriending certain Indians nations so as to repair fractured terms with the Caddos and establish a prosperous trade in East Texas. According to some historians, however, St. Denis’s subsequent marriage to Captain Diego Ramón’s step‐granddaughter at San Juan Bautista lay at the heart of his defection from the service of France.
Settlements
Such was the course of events in the early eighteenth century that placed the Spaniards permanently in Texas. In February 1716, Captain Domingo Ramón and St. Denis crossed the Rio Grande headed for East Texas at the head of about seventy‐five people, among them twenty‐six soldiers and several Franciscan priests (including Father Hidalgo). Upon the Europeans’ arrival, the Tejas and other Caddos greeted them warmly, for they regarded St. Denis as their friend, and consequently believed the Spaniards would, as did the French among them, abide by Caddo custom of entering their kinship system by marriage (with Caddo people) and establishing family residence within the village proper. In late June, therefore, the explorers set up base at a site close to the Neches River. They immediately constructed a temporary presidio, then four missions close by it, among them Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Nacogdoches, situated near present‐day Nacogdoches. With the erection of the missions and presidio by the summer of 1716, the Spaniards had succeeded in accomplishing two objectives: revitalizing missionary work among the East Texas Indians, which Father Hidalgo had sought; and laying claim to the region, the objective pursued by the Spanish government in order to ward off French encroachment.
But this was not the end of New Spain’s Texas enterprise, for now New Spain’s central government pushed ahead with plans to solidify the Spanish position on the northern periphery. At the beginning of 1717, Captain Ramón and Fray Antonio Margil de Jesús established two more missions farther east of the original foundations, inching the missionaries closer to the French post of Natchitoches. These settlements struggled. The missionaries and soldiers faced stark conditions, receiving little help from the Crown in the way of supplies, food, clothing, and weapons, and then getting practically no assistance from the Caddos they had been dispatched to convert, for the Spaniards were still not inclined to establish residence among Caddo society as custom mandated. Another expedition, led by Martín de Alarcón, marched from Mexico City toward the Río San Antonio in 1718 to found a military post called San Antonio de Béxar and a mission they named San Antonio de Valero. The new presidio and mission would serve the purpose of Christianizing the Coahuiltecan Indians, who had long eked out a marginal existence in their ancestral territories and were presently under attack by marauding bands of Apaches coming down from the plains. Additionally, the presidio‐mission complex midway between the Rio Grande and the East Texas frontier line would become a supply station. The result was the peopling of what became the original municipality of San Antonio. Around this site, the Spaniards constructed the Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo in 1720 and three others in the 1730s. In 1721, the Spaniards secured control of the Bay of Espíritu Santo (or La Bahía) by building a fort that they hoped would serve as a Gulf Coast deterrent to Frenchmen desiring to initiate sea trade west from Louisiana. They also reasoned that the garrison would temporarily store provisions to be brought into Texas from Vera Cruz by ship. In 1749, however, the Crown moved the presidio and mission (built in 1722) of La Bahía inland toward the San Antonio River at the site of modern‐day