Chapter VII

AUSTIN.
(1842-1861.)

1. “THE REPUBLIC IS NO MORE.”

From 1842 to 1844 the Texan Congress held its meetings at Washington on the Brazos—the spot where, a few short years before, the declaration of independence had been adopted.

The nation born amid the gloom and uncertainty of that stormy time now stood forth proud in the consciousness of growing strength, free and full of hope for the coming years.

An armistice was signed with Mexico (1843) which left the Republic at peace. The Indians under the wise rule of the “Big White Chief,” Houston, made but few outbreaks. Year by year more fields were fenced in, more orchards and gardens were planted, more dooryards were set with vine and rose-tree.

Immigrants poured in. Many came from “the States”; but others crossed the wide seas to find homes in that fertile Texas whose story of struggle and triumph was in everybody’s mouth. Henry Castro, a French gentleman, who was consul-general for Texas at Paris, obtained in 1842 large grants of land from the Republic, and brought over five hundred families from France. These settled on the Medina River west of San Antonio. Another important colony came from Germany under the leadership of the Prince de Solms, and founded the thrifty town of New Braunfels on the Guadalupe.

The roads were white with westward-traveling wagons which stopped to pass the time of day, as it were, with all the little towns along the way. In those hospitable days small barrels of tar stood as a matter of course on the sidewalks. Long-handled dippers floated in the tar, so that the passing wagoner might help himself and ease his creaking wheels.

As for the wayside houses, their doors were always open to the wayworn mover and his family. The women and girls peering out from under the wagon cover, the boys trudging sturdily along by the driver’s side, the dog trotting in the shadow of the feed trough,—all these were to the free-handed pioneers as welcome as kinsmen.

The newcomers were often struck with amazement at the curious contrasts they saw on the frontier. “You are welcomed,” writes one traveler, “by a figure in a blue flannel shirt and pendant beard, quoting the Latin poets.... You will see fine pictures on log walls; you will drink coffee from tin cups on Dresden china saucers. Seated on a barrel, you will hear a Beethoven symphony played on a rosewood piano. The bookcase may be half full of books and half full of potatoes.”

But while the western border thus filling up with settlers was quiet and unmolested, there was serious trouble over on the eastern line. A band composed mostly of rough desperadoes from the old Neutral Ground roamed along the Sabine River, shooting and killing innocent citizens under the pretext of punishing theft, negro-stealing, and other offenses. They called themselves the Regulators. An opposition band, made up of men as reckless as themselves, undertook in turn to punish them, and to administer justice generally. These were known as the Moderators. Between the Moderators and Regulators, Shelby, Harrison, and the neighboring counties were kept in a state of terror. Honest men were afraid to venture out of their own homes; for no one could guess when or upon whom the so-called justice of these bands would fall. Bloody “courts” were held in the swamps, one day by the Regulators, the next, and perhaps on the same spot, by the Moderators, both equally cruel and lawless. Wild stories were told of certain leaders in either gang whose victims were always shot in the left eye; of others again whose weapon was not the rifle, but poison.

At one time more than a thousand men were engaged in this feud. In the summer of 1844 the Regulators and Moderators assembled under arms in fortified camps. An active campaign was carried on for some weeks, during which more than fifty persons were killed or wounded. Finally President Houston ordered out five hundred militia under General James Smith, and the two factions were disbanded. But it was a long time before the feud died out entirely.

In the fall of 1844 Anson Jones was elected President of the Republic. His Secretary of State was Doctor Ashbel Smith.

Dr. Smith, who was a learned and able man, came to Texas from Connecticut just after the Revolution, and was made surgeon-general of the army. During Houston’s administration, he represented the Republic at the courts of England and France. At this time all over Europe there was keen interest in Texan affairs.

Notwithstanding the glory of the young Republic, its people still wished to be annexed to the United States. They felt themselves too weak to contend against Mexico in case of another war, and too poor to keep up the army and navy, and provide for the expense of a separate government. But the United States again refused to receive them. Upon this, France and England offered through Minister Smith to compel Mexico to acknowledge the independence of Texas, provided Texas would agree not to unite with any other country.

This offer caused a sudden change of feeling in the United States. Her jealousy of foreign interference was aroused; and in the spring of 1845 the United States Congress passed resolutions admitting Texas into the Union.

President Jones then submitted the question to the people. A convention met at Austin in July, 1845, to frame a constitution for the State of Texas. In October the final vote was taken. It was almost unanimous for annexation.

In February, 1846, President Jones gave up his authority to J. Pinckney Henderson who had been elected governor of the new state. This impressive ceremony took place at Austin, where the capital had been finally established. President Jones in his farewell address said:

“The Lone Star of Texas, which ten years since arose amid clouds, over fields of carnage, and obscurely seen for a while, ... has passed on and become fixed in that glorious constellation which all freemen and lovers of freedom must reverence and adore,—the American Union. Blending its rays with its sister States, long may it continue to shine.... May the Union be perpetual; and may it be the means of conferring benefits and blessings upon all the people of the States, is my prayer. The first act in the great drama is performed. The Republic of Texas is no more.”[32]

Many eyes must have grown dim as the closing sentence of this address was pronounced. Memories must have crowded thick and fast upon those veterans who listened, hearing at the same time in a dream the call of bugles and the roll of drums, the ring of sabers, and the echo of those daring voices which called into being the Republic of Texas!

Sam Houston and Thomas J. Rusk were elected United States senators. Rusk, who was a native of South Carolina, was one of the signers of the Texan declaration of independence. He was Secretary of War under President Burnet, and fought gallantly in the ranks at the battle of San Jacinto. After General Houston’s resignation he was made commander-in-chief of the army. Rusk had taken an active part in the war against the Cherokee Indians. Later he had been chief justice of the Republic. He had devoted himself for many years with great unselfishness to the interests of the Republic. He continued to serve the State with the same fidelity.

He died by his own hand in 1857. Grief at the death of his wife was the cause of this fatal act.

2. ACROSS THE BORDER.

Mexico was indignant at seeing Texas, which she still claimed as one of her provinces, about to enter the Union. As soon as the Annexation Bill was passed by the United States Congress, Don Juan Almonte, formerly aide-de-camp to General Santa Anna, now the Mexican minister at Washington, D.C., was recalled, and preparations for war were begun on a grand scale in Mexico.

In the meantime, the United States government had sent General Zachary Taylor to Corpus Christi on the Texas coast, with four thousand troops. He was ordered to march westward and take up a position on the Rio Grande River, the boundary line between Texas and Mexico. He was further ordered to confine himself to Texas soil unless the Mexicans should attempt to cross the river.

In the spring of 1846 General Taylor began his march across the country, “which appeared like one vast garden wavy with flowers of the most gorgeous dyes.”[33] Then came a desert-like waste in which there was neither water nor any growing thing. “The sand was like hot ashes, and when you stepped upon it, you sank up to the ankles.”[33]

But the region beyond the desert was fertile and inviting. At the Sal Colorado, a stream thirty miles east of the Rio Grande, some Mexican soldiers appeared. They insisted that all the country west of the Colorado belonged to Mexico, and declared that if the Americans attempted to cross that stream they would fire upon them. General Taylor paid no attention whatever to their threats. He led his troops over the Sal Colorado without further trouble and continued his march toward the Rio Grande.

There the war began in real earnest. The first battle was fought at Fort Brown (now Brownsville), opposite Matamoras. The Americans were victorious. Two other successful engagements, Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, took place on Texas territory. Then General Taylor, having received large reinforcements, entered Mexico and marched upon Monterey, the great interior city of northern Mexico.

About this time Santa Anna, who had been in exile and disgrace, returned to Mexico, and was immediately made commander-in-chief of the Mexican army.

Texas furnished her share of men for the war upon her hereditary foe. Governor Henderson himself entered the campaign as a major-general of volunteers; ex-President Lamar and Edward Burleson served upon his staff. Albert Sidney Johnston commanded a regiment. “Jack” Hays and George T. Wood, afterward governor of Texas, were also in command of regiments. Ben McCulloch carried into the war a company of rangers.

The Texans were in the van in every battle. At the storming of Monterey they especially distinguished themselves by their daring and high courage. A participator in the siege of the city says: “In order to dislodge the skirmishers from the housetops, the Texans rushed from door to door, breaking through buildings and inside walls; and, mounting to a level with the enemy, picked them off with their rifles. Meanwhile those in the streets charged from square to square amid sweeping showers of grape, cheered on by Lamar, Henderson, and Jefferson Davis of the Mississippi regiment.” The next day “the artillery on both sides raked the streets, the balls striking the houses with a terrible crash, while amid the roar of cannon was heard the battering instruments of the Texans. Doors were forced open, walls were battered down, entrances were made through stone and brick, and the enemy were driven from point to point, followed by the sharp crack of the Texan rifles.”

General Ampudia, who had so basely betrayed the trust of the Texans after their surrender at Mier in 1843, was in command of the Mexican forces. After three days of desperate fighting he surrendered the city of Monterey to General Taylor.

The officers commissioned by Taylor to draw up the articles of capitulation on the American side were Generals Worth and Henderson (governor of Texas) and Colonel Jefferson Davis.

Texas furnished above eight thousand soldiers for this war, and the “murderous ring of the Texan rifle” was heard on almost every field.

In New Mexico, where there was considerable fighting, the cannon taken from General McLeod in the fatal Sante Fé expedition in 1841 was discovered by the American soldiers, where it had been hidden in the mountains. “It is,” says the record, “a six-pounder, bearing the ‘Lone Star’ of Texas and the name of her ex-President, Mirabeau B. Lamar.” The Americans adopted it as a favorite, and used it in firing their morning and evening signals. The Lone Star, they declared, brought them good luck.

The war ended in the storming and capture of the city of Mexico by General Winfield Scott, commander-in-chief of the United States army. Santa Anna, once more defeated and humbled, hid himself with the remains of his army in the mountain passes of Mexico.

In one of the last battles of the war Colonel Samuel H. Walker was killed. This dashing young Texan, had been again and again selected by General Taylor for dangerous service, and his gallantry was a by-word in the army. He had been one of the unfortunate Mier prisoners, and was among those who overpowered the guard at Salado and escaped, only to be recaptured. In the death-lottery he had drawn a white bean, and had afterward endured the miseries of the Castle of Perote. In the neighborhood of that prison he fell mortally wounded, but flushed with victory, and soon afterward expired. “Few men were more lamented. When the cry ‘Walker is dead’ rang through the company, the hardy soldiers burst into tears.”[34]

Mexico signed at Guadalupe, Hidalgo, a treaty with the United States (February 2, 1848), and abandoned forever all claim to Texas.

The governors who succeeded Henderson in Texas from 1847 to 1859 were Governors George T. Wood, Hansborough P. Bell, Elisha M. Pease, and Hardin R. Runnels.

Early in Governor Wood’s administration a disagreement arose between Texas and the United States over Sante Fé and the surrounding country. This had been a part of Texas, but was ceded in 1848 by Mexico to the United States with New Mexico. When the United States took possession of it Texas protested, and much ill-feeling followed. For a time it seemed as if the state which had just got into the Union would march out again.

But the question was settled during Governor Bell’s term of office. The disputed territory was bought by the United States from Texas for the sum of ten million dollars.

During these years Texas grew in prosperity; all boundary questions were settled, and the public debt was paid. Settlements sprung up to the very border. This, however, caused fresh trouble among the Indians, who from time to time fell upon isolated settlements, burning the houses and killing the settlers or carrying them into captivity. As late as 1847 two hundred Lipans on the war-path swept the western frontier. In 1848 the Indians in Texas killed one hundred and seventy persons, carried twenty-five into captivity, and stole six thousand horses.

The Texan rangers were ordered out by Governor Wood to protect the frontier. The Comanches, the fiercest of the western tribes, were finally defeated by the rangers under Colonel John S. Ford. Their chief, Iron Jacket, was killed in a desperate hand-to-hand combat with Captain S. P. Ross. The chief’s tall form was found, after death, to be encased in a fine coat of scale armor, supposed to have belonged to some Spaniard in the days of the conquest of Mexico. Hence his name, Iron Jacket, and the belief that he could not be killed by the bullet of the white man. Iron Jacket’s little son Noh-po was carried to Waco, where he was raised by the Ross family. During the administration of Governor Pease, the legislature gave the Indians twelve leagues of land and built for them several new trading-posts along the frontier. Later they were all removed to the Indian Territory.

Two million dollars were set aside by the state for a permanent school fund; and a quantity of land was voted for the support of the deaf and dumb, the blind, the orphan, and the insane.

A new state capitol, a Land Office, and other public buildings were erected at Austin.

In 1857 there was an uprising of Texan wagoners against the Mexican cartmen, who were engaged in hauling goods from the coast towns to San Antonio. Mexican labor was much cheaper than any other, and a large number of these teamsters, who were honest and reliable, were employed by merchants and planters. The Texan wagoners, failing to drive out Mexican cartmen by threats, raided them on the roads, drove off their oxen, broke up their carts, and in some instances killed the drivers.

Governor Pease, by ordering out a company of rangers to protect the Mexican teamsters, finally put a stop to the “Cart War,” as it was called.

No other trouble marred this bright period. “Our inhabitants,” said Governor Pease, in his message to the legislature in 1855, “are prosperous and happy to a degree unexampled in our former history.”

3. DYING RACES.

The Indian tribes who possessed the fair land of Texas when the white man first set foot on its soil were rapidly dying out. Some were already extinct, having left hardly a trace to show where their villages and wigwams had once stood. The Cenis, that noble nation which welcomed La Salle and nursed him tenderly when he lay for months “sick of a fever” in their midst, and who sheltered the fleeing fugitives from Fort St. Louis,—these had entirely passed away. So had the kindly Coushattis, the friends of Lallemand’s colonists; and the Orquisacas, the Nacogdoches, and all those gentler tribes by whose help the Franciscan friars had built the earliest missions. Gone were the music-loving Wacoes from the banks of the Brazos; and from the Trinity the corn-growing Tehas.

The fierce Carankawaes, once the terror of the coast and long believed to be cannibals, and the Kiowas, called the _red-eyed_, had melted before the coming of the pale-faces, as the snow melts under the April sun.

But remnants of the warlike western tribes remained. The Comanches, the Apaches, and the Lipans still hovered like dark clouds about the frontier. They called themselves _Nianis_ (live Indians); and though they were taken away by the government from their hunting-grounds and penned up in a Reservation (that is, upon lands reserved or set apart for them), they continued every now and then to swoop down upon their old haunts, where every rock and bush and hillock was familiar to them. Even within the past twenty years the borderman dared not be too far from his rifle.

But the Texas Indian was passing. His tribes were dying out, as the Mohicans, the Powhatans, and the Alabamas had died out before them.

With the Red Man, another race, as wild, as noble, and as free as his, was as slowly drifting to its end.

When La Salle sailed up a certain pleasant stream in 1685, he called it _Les Vaches_ (the cows), from the number of buffalos grazing on its banks. They roamed the vast prairies and the shaded timberland, from the utmost verge of the country on the north and west to the salt waters of the Gulf. The herds were so large that the thunder of their hoofs startled the air and their trampling shook the ground.

As the Indian retreated westward, the shaggy buffalo followed his moccasined foot; as the savage warriors, who were as the sands of the seashore for numbers, dwindled away, so dwindled the buffalo herds.

4. THE TEXAS RANGER.

The daring and ever-watchful foe of the Texas Indian, the dashing and ever-ready hunter of the Texas buffalo, was the Texas ranger. He, too, is passing away before the march of civilization, and fast becoming a memory only; but a memory which will live forever in song and story, with the brave, the generous, and the noble of all times.

The first company of Texas rangers was formed in 1832; but it was not until the administration of President Burnet (1836) that this arm of the service was regularly organized and put into the field.

They became at once a power, and they have since played an important part in the history of the state. Mounted upon a swift horse, with a _lariat_ (rope) coiled about the high pommel of his saddle and a blanket strapped behind him; with his long rifle resting in the hollow of his arm, and the bridle held loosely in his hand; erect and graceful, the brim of his slouch hat hiding the sparkle of his keen eyes,—the Texas ranger is a striking and picturesque figure. But he is more than that. For fifty years and more he has been the terror of Indian and intruding Mexican, of thief and desperado, of lawlessness and crime.

The rangers are subject to the call of the government. “But no tap of spirit-stirring drum or piercing fife, no trumpet call or bugle sound was heard on the border,” in those early days. A rider passed from settlement to settlement, from home to home; there would be wiping of rifles and moulding of bullets. Oftener than otherwise it was the wives and the sisters and the sweethearts who moulded the bullets and packed the wallets, while the men ground their knives and saddled their horses. Then with a hurried good-bye, the rangers were mounted and away; now on the bloody trail of the Comanches, now tracking the fierce Lipans; to-day protecting a lonely frontier cabin, to-morrow helping the Mexican teamsters in the cart war.

The rangers, during the war of the United States with Mexico, were noted for their courage and gallantry. “I have seen a goodly number of volunteers in my day,” a war correspondent wrote of them at that time, “but the Texas rangers are choice specimens. From the time we left Matamoras until we reached this place (Reynoso), the men never took off their coats, boots, or spurs. And although the weather was rainy and two fierce northers visited us, there was not a minute when any man’s rifle or pistol would have missed fire or he could not have been up and ready for an attack.”[35]

Another writer describes the rangers in camp: “Men in groups, with long beards and mustachios, were occupied in drying their blankets and cleaning and firing their guns. Some were cooking at the camp-fires, others were grooming their horses. They all wore belts of pistols around their waists and slouched hats, the uniform of the Texas ranger. They were a rough-looking set; but among them were doctors, lawyers, and many a college graduate. While standing in their midst I saw a young fellow come into the camp with a rifle on his shoulder and a couple of ducks in his hand. He addressed the captain: ‘Ben,’ he said, ‘if you haven’t had dinner, you’d better mess with me, for I know none of the rest have fresh grub to-day.’

The “captain” was Benjamin McCulloch, famous in the annals of the rangers. He is thus described by Samuel Reid, one of his own men:

“Captain McCulloch is a man of rather delicate frame, about five feet ten inches in height, with light hair and complexion. His features are regular and pleasing, though from long exposure on the frontier they have a weatherbeaten cast. His quick, bright blue eyes and thin compressed lips indicate the cool and calculating, as well as the brave and daring, energy of the man.”

McCulloch was a Tennesseean by birth. His father served under General Jackson during the Creek war. Ben followed the trade of a hunter until he was twenty-one years old. In those days the settlers depended chiefly on bear meat for food. If a man were a poor marksman he sometimes went without his breakfast. But young McCulloch was a fine shot; he often killed as many as eighty bears in the course of a season.

He came to Texas with David Crockett. A fortunate illness kept him at Nacogdoches until after the fall of the Alamo, where Crockett perished. He served in the artillery at the battle of San Jacinto, and was one of the first to join the “ranging service.” He was in almost all the expeditions of his time, and engaged in nearly all the fights.

The most noted ranger of this period, however, was Colonel John Coffin Hays, familiarly known as “Jack” Hays. Samuel Reid says of him:

“I had heard so much of Colonel Hays that I was anxious to meet the commander of our regiment. On this occasion I saw a group of gentlemen sitting around a camp-fire. Among them were General Mirabeau Lamar, Governor Henderson, and General McLeod, all distinguished men of Texas whose names are enrolled on the page of history. As I cast my eyes around the group, I tried to single out the celebrated partisan chief; and I was much surprised to be introduced to a slender, delicate-looking young man who proved to be Colonel Jack Hays. He was dressed quite plainly, and wore the usual broad-brimmed Texas hat and a loose open collar, with a black handkerchief tied carelessly around his neck. He has dark brown hair and large, brilliant hazel eyes which are restless in conversation and speak a language of their own not to be mistaken. His forehead is broad and high. He looks thoughtful and careworn, though very boyish. His modesty is extreme.”

Colonel Hays was also a Tennesseean. He emigrated to Texas when but nineteen years of age. His talent as a leader showed itself early; and at the age of twenty-one (1840) he was placed in command of the frontier, with the rank of major. He soon became famous as a fighter of the Indians, by whom he was both feared and admired. “Me and Blue Wing,” said a Comanche chief on one occasion, “we no afraid to go anywhere _together_, but Captain Jack _great brave_. He no afraid to go anywhere _by himself_.”

His regiment of rangers which included McCulloch’s company was foremost in every battle of the war with Mexico. His word was law with his men. Off duty he was a gay and pleasant companion; the rangers called him Jack, but there was something about him which kept them from taking any liberties with him.

The rangers continued to serve the state after peace was made with Mexico. In 1862 the legislature passed a law for the protection of the frontier. This law provided for the raising of ten companies of rangers of one hundred men each. Each company was to be divided, and the two detachments stationed about one day’s ride apart, just beyond the settlements.

The command of this regiment was given to Colonel J. H. Norris. He went at once to the frontier. He distributed his soldiers from the Red River to the Rio Grande, with orders for each company to send a scout every day from one station to the next, the scout to return the following day. This plan gave a patrol scout from Red River to the Rio Grande every day. In addition to this, each company kept out a flying scout all the time.

“This,” remarks an old ranger (E. L. Deaton), “was a busy year for both rangers and Indians.”

On the 8th of January, 1864, five hundred rangers, under Captains Gillentine, Fossett, and Totten, met and defeated two thousand Comanche Indians on Dove Creek in what is now Tom Green County. This was one of the last pitched battles fought with Indians on Texas soil.

In later years the rangers have served as a sort of state police. Many a stronghold of cattle thieves has been raided by them; many a nest of desperadoes has been broken up; many a bitter neighborhood feud has been settled.

At the present time (1896) there are about two hundred rangers in the service. They furnish their own horses, and receive forty dollars a month; their rations and their arms being supplied by the state.

Some of those noted for steady nerve and daring courage among the ranger captains of earlier and later times are Colonel “Rip” Ford, Lawrence Sullivan Ross (since governor of Texas, and called by his old comrades “Sul” Ross), Colonel “Buck” Barry, Lieutenant Chrisman, Sergeants J. B. Armstrong and L. P. Selker, and Captains Tom Wright, Jesse Lee Hall, and L. B. McNulty.

5. A CLOUD IN THE SKY.

In the spring of 1848 there appeared on the streets of Austin a young man wearing a costume which attracted much attention. It was composed of gray stockings and knee breeches, with a black velvet tunic and broad-brimmed, gray felt hat. The rather dashing-looking stranger was evidently French, but he called himself an Icarian. He was, in fact, on his way from New Braunfels, where he had been living, to Icaria, a new settlement near the Cross Timbers in Fannin County.

This settlement was founded by Etienne Cabet (Ca-bā), a Frenchman who dreamed of establishing a community where nobody would be rich and nobody would be poor, but all money and other property would be held in common. Devotion to women and children, honesty, and the ability and willingness to work for the good of the brotherhood were the chief rules of the fraternity. They numbered in France in 1847 many thousand persons of all classes.

Cabet obtained from the Peters Immigration Company in 1847 a million acres of land in North Texas. The land was given to him on condition that a settlement should be made upon it before the 1st of July, 1848. In January, 1848, the first cohort, numbering sixty-nine persons, embarked at Havre, France. They arrived at Shreveport, Louisiana, the following April. From there they marched on foot to their chosen home in Texas, carrying firearms, household goods, and provisions.

“Oh, if you could see Icaria!” they presently wrote back to the brotherhood in France. “It is an Eden. The forests are superb; the vegetation rich and varied. We have horses, cows, pigs, and chickens in abundance.... Many Texans come to see us. They are good-natured and very honest. We camp and sleep out of doors. We lock up nothing and are never robbed.”[36]

Houses were built and fields ploughed and planted. By midsummer the Icarians in their cosy hamlet were on the lookout for the second cohort of colonists. But before it arrived the cholera broke out in Icaria. Many of the settlers died; nearly all those who were left abandoned their homes in a panic and returned to New Orleans, where Cabet himself joined them with several hundred recruits from France. A new and more fortunate Icarian settlement was finally made in Missouri.

A few years later (1853) a procession, also composed of French emigrants, passed along Main Street in Houston. They had just landed from the steamboat _Eclipse_ on the bayou at the foot of the street. At their head walked a tall gentleman in a velvet coat and three-cornered hat. He carried a drawn sword in his hand, and the tricolored flag of France floated above his head. His long white hair streamed over his shoulders. The whole company, men, women, and children, sung the Marseillaise hymn as they marched along.

The tall gentleman was the Count Victor Considerant. He had come with his followers from France to Texas to found a Phalanstery, a community much like that already attempted by Cabet. His watchword was “Liberty and Equality.” The faces of the emigrants lighted with joy as they traveled away over the prairies, following this beautiful vision.

They founded their town on the east fork of the Trinity River, in Dallas County, and called it Reunion. But the brotherhood soon fell to pieces. The emigrants scattered over the country, finding it pleasanter to own homes in a land of true liberty and equality, than to live by the count’s fine theories.

Many descendants both of the Icarians and of Count Considerant’s colonists are to be met with in North Texas.

Sam Houston succeeded Runnels as governor in 1859. When he took his seat at Austin, clouds from more than one quarter were gathering in the clear sky of Texas. Roving bands of Indians from the Territory came across the border and murdered in cold blood a number of families. At first they stole in, made their raids, and dashed back in a single night. But they grew more and more bold and insolent, until the governor was obliged to send the rangers to their old work of watching the frontier.

Lawrence Sullivan Ross, afterward governor of Texas, was at this time a lieutenant in the ranging service. He was a gallant and dashing soldier. During a raid on the Indians, on Pease River (1860), he rescued Cynthia Ann Parker, a white woman, who had been carried away by the Comanches, when but nine years of age. She had been a captive twenty-four years and had forgotten her native tongue. She was the wife of Peta Nocona, a Comanche chief, and the mother of several children. Lieutenant Ross returned her to her kindred with her little daughter Ta-ish-put (Prairie Flower). But she was not happy among these long-unknown white people; she pined for her dusky adopted kinsmen; and four years after her rescue she died, little Ta-ish-put soon following her to the Happy Hunting-grounds. Inanah Parker, one of her sons, became a Comanche chief.

During this period a Mexican bandit named Cortina crossed the lower Rio Grande into Texas at the head of four hundred men. Their object was plunder, and in their forays a great many innocent people were killed. The governor appealed to the general government at Washington for protection along the Mexican border.

The War Department in response ordered Colonel Robert E. Lee (afterward famous as commander-in-chief of the Confederate States army), then stationed at San Antonio, to attack the bandit and drive him out, crossing the Rio Grande, if necessary, in pursuit.

Some United States troops, with several companies of rangers, were at once put in the field, and Cortina’s band was soon broken up.

These troubles were light, however, compared with those which were about to follow.

The two sections of the United States, the North and the South, had for some years been drifting apart. Their views differed widely on several important questions, particularly the question of states’ rights, and there seemed to be no chance of a mutual agreement. In 1860, at the time Abraham Lincoln was elected President, the Southern States determined to withdraw from the Union. They believed that each state had a right to withdraw or secede from the Union whenever that Union became for any reason undesirable to it, as the individual members of a family may leave the paternal home if they wish to do so. But the Northern States did not agree to this. They believed that the Union should be preserved, and that the states should be held together—even by the power of the sword.

South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union. Texas, on hearing of this news, was filled with excitement. Military companies were formed all over the state; the air was thick with the flutter of secession flags; the ground echoed the tramp of awkward squads drilling under the eyes of officers as awkward and inexperienced and enthusiastic as themselves.

Governor Houston, as well as some other patriotic and true-hearted Texans, was bitterly opposed to secession, but his voice was lost in the loud clamor of public feeling.

A convention was held in Austin in January, 1861. A declaration of secession was drawn up and submitted to the people (February 23). Texas by a large majority voted herself out of the Union, which she had entered fifteen years before.

There was wild rejoicing over the state. The capitol at Austin was brilliantly illuminated, bonfires were lighted, bells were rung, the Confederate flag was run up on all public buildings, and the work of mustering troops into the Confederate States army instantly began.

All state officials were required to take the oath of fealty to the new government. Governor Houston, true to his convictions, refused to do this. When the day came for the ceremony (March 16), the hall of representatives was filled to overflowing. “The presiding officer, amid a profound silence, called three times: ‘Sam Houston! Sam Houston! Sam Houston!’ but the governor remained in his office in the basement of the capitol whittling a pine stick, and hearing the echo of the noise and tumult above his head. Houston was declared deposed from his office, and Edward Clark, the lieutenant-governor, was installed as governor.”[37]

Houston left Austin and retired to his place near Huntsville. To the end of his life he continued to declare that, although opposed to the war of the States, his sympathies were with Texas. “My state, right or wrong,” he said. One of his sons entered the Confederate army with his consent and approval.

He died July 26, 1863, at the age of seventy years. His last words, whispered with dying lips, were: “Texas! Texas!”

And Texas, forgetting all her differences with him, and remembering only his ready and gallant services in her hours of need, mourned his loss as that of a well-beloved son.