The History of Texas. Robert A. Calvert
the Indian converts had been transformed into productive citizens who could now function adequately as Spanish subjects. Although a couple of missions remained under the care of the friars toward the end of the Spanish period, the process of secularization proceeded, not culminating until the 1820s.
Several factors contributed to the desertion of the missions. Certainly, the last years of the eighteenth century had sorely tried Spanish tenacity. Carlos III was succeeded by a son lacking in wisdom, and political affairs on the European continent, starting with the French Revolution of 1789, soon engulfed Spain in shifting alliances with France and England. War with both Great Powers distracted attention from Spain’s commitment in the New World and diverted monies from New Spain back to the mother country.
Working alongside these developments were newer philosophical trends that questioned the program of missionization. Since the sixteenth century, Christianization had posited the equality of Indians with the rest of humankind. On that premise, Spain had sought to convert indigenous New World populations. The antichurch sentiment buoyed by the Enlightenment, however, wrought bad times for the missionaries. By the late eighteenth century, the Franciscans and the other regular clergy found themselves facing new demands for the secularization of missions. Despite protests from the friars, the intellectual currents of the late eighteenth century undermined efforts to continue missionary work in the name of the state.
Even at the local level, several factors worked against missionary activity in Texas. First, the economic stability of the province depended on a steady, marketable commodity, and livestock seemed to fit the bill closely. As their numbers grew, the pobladores began to covet the mission cattle, and government officials simultaneously saw the potential for increased tax revenue in transforming mission lands into private property. Second, the neophytes played a part in the breakdown of the religious institutions. From the beginning, the mission concept did not make for a happy arrangement between Europeans and Native Americans. Priests and presidial soldiers lorded over literally hundreds of charges, disciplining them with intimidation and cruelty. Confinement to the compound increased the chances of falling victim to everyday illnesses, as the pileup of rubbish and the accumulation of human waste served to breed germs responsible for diseases such as influenza. Mission life for the Indians further meant dehumanization and the abandonment of traditional lifeways and religious beliefs, not to mention their shameless exploitation at the hands of ranchers and presidial officials. Assimilation offered little hope, as it never entailed full acceptance into Spanish society. Some mission Indians rebelled by resisting the work expected from them by the missionaries, responding as other forced laborers have by feigning illness, turning to gambling or abusing alcohol, sabotaging work implements, intentionally showing up late for work, destroying sacred articles, and deriding the priesthood. Others only pretended to comply with Christian teachings, all the while putting on a front and retaining their loyalty to time‐honored customs and old religious precepts. Escape seemed the best alternative to their discontent, and it became the most visible sign of resistance. By the late eighteenth century, few potential Indian converts remained. As the program of secularization ended, the friars, despite all their work and numerous accomplishments for the Church and the Crown, could claim to have Christianized or Hispanicized only a small fraction of the total Native American population in Texas.
As for the indios bárbaros, they gave the settlers little respite. The presidial soldiers, upon whose shoulders lay the responsibility of maintaining the peace, never devised truly effective measures to ward off the Texas Indians. In many ways, their inability to carry out their purpose emanated from the design of the presidio system itself. Troops in command of large forts were not effective against such highly mobile enemies as the mounted Comanches and Wichitas, who attacked farmers in the fields, struck civilian settlements, raided ranches for horses (which they exchanged for guns available from westering US citizens), and harassed the neophytes who took refuge among the Spaniards. Moreover, many presidial installations were in constant need of repair, and their commanding officers often lacked good administrative skills. Militarily, the posts were understaffed, underequipped (with weapons not upgraded regularly), and often outfitted with horses unfit for service. Shortages of food and proper uniforms and the meager salaries awarded soldiers became perennial problems. Amid such conditions, morale among presidial personnel understandably remained low.
Finally, in the 1780s, the Crown returned to its earlier policy of trying to appease the Apaches by giving them gifts and rewards, also applying this to the Comanches and the other Norteños. Actually a tactic to divide and rule by playing one tribal band against another, this official bribery aimed to reduce the Indian forces, create animosity among them, and waylay intertribal alliances. For a time it worked, as a relative peace, albeit one punctuated by destructive clashes, ensued for roughly the next three decades.
The Comanches, in particular, ruthlessly attacked the settlements into the early decades of the nineteenth century. They did so determined to preserve the viability of their extensive trade system. Now, as Americans pushed westward from the Louisiana Territory, the Comanches could barter stolen livestock from Texas for dependable goods manufactured in the United States. Through this trade with the Americans, the Comanches came to see them as their allies, the Spanish as their enemies. Through their gift giving and other considerate gestures, the American frontier traders and merchants won acceptance into the Comanche cultural kinship world, one that associated charitable acts with friendship. Whereas Americans, as expressions of kinship commitment to foster trade, willingly gave the Comanches functional weapons and various articles deemed by Indian leaders as status worthy, the Spaniards generally rejected any such considerations, maintaining their policy of not trading firearms to Indians. Thus, the Comanche enmity toward the Spanish only grew, and the Indians continued their vicious assaults upon settlements in the Texas colony.
Notwithstanding the tribulations on the eastern, northern, and western frontiers, the three civilian settlements in south‐central Texas that traced their origins to the 1710s remained in place as the nineteenth century dawned. San Antonio, now the provincial capital, had a population of 2500 near its chain of five missions and in the town of Béxar. Some 700 persons lived in Goliad’s surroundings, and about 800 lived in Nacogdoches. A few more pobladores populated two new towns established to counter the threat of Anglo American aggression from the United States: Salcedo, founded in 1806, was situated on the Trinity River, near the old outpost of Bucareli; and San Marcos de Neve, founded in 1808, was located north of today’s city of Gonzales. Neither community thrived. Salcedo’s population was listed as ninety‐two inhabitants in 1809, but no one lived there by 1813. San Marcos de Neve had a population of sixty‐one in 1808, but a flood in June of that year, followed by Indian attacks, persuaded the luckless settlers in 1812 to relocate.
Trade with other frontier areas remained brisk, giving a needed boost to the province’s fledgling market economy. Residents of Nacogdoches continued to violate government trade regulations, swayed by the demand for their goods east of the Sabine River; indeed, contraband trade seemed a necessary mode of survival for the isolated community. Natchitoches, Louisiana, was scarcely one hundred miles away, which seduced men like Antonio Gil Ybarbo, who carried on such a lucrative extralegal business that the government ultimately investigated and arrested him. Military troops dispatched to Nacogdoches in the mid‐1790s hardly discouraged the contraband ventures. Neither were commandants able to prevent foreigners from migrating into the area. Soon after its founding, Nacogdoches had a population composed of various ethnic groups engaged as merchants, Indian traders, and ranchers, many of whom took Spanish wives and acclimated themselves to Spanish‐Mexican culture. It was there that the only American trading company in Spanish territory functioned. With the endorsement of the royal government, the enterprise of Barr and Davenport, having commercial connections to close‐by New Orleans, sought to pacify the neighboring Indians and supply the needs of local soldiers.
For people in the interior, economic activity remained agrarian based, with ranching persisting as the most secure means of making a living. The business of trading horses and mules picked up within the province as well as between Louisiana and Texas during the 1770s, in part due to the success of the British colonies in their struggle for independence. Texas rancheros around San Antonio and La Bahía engaged in illegal intercolonial trade by exchanging their livestock for tobacco and other finished goods that made their way into Louisiana from the