Chapter 7
William Travis: Catalyst of the Revolution
WILLIAM BARRET TRAVIS, not yet known by Stephen Austin, was exactly the type of person Austin feared would destroy the respectable American colonies he had worked so hard to create. And the Laws of 1830 would not simply limit future colonists to the many “Travis’ ” of America, they would be the impetus for one “Travis” to overturn stability in Texas.
The Travis, 22-years-old, was watched by most of Nacogdoches in 1831 as he rode into town. They scrutinized an attractive man: 5’9”, 175 pounds, light brown hair, blue eyes, with a reddish brown beard. The town people loved visitor-watching, almost as much as rumormongering, and quickly learned that the newcomer was a lawyer, heading for Anahuac to hang his shingle. The gossip mill went into high gear (and Rose learned more when he served under the man).
Travis, the eldest of eleven children, was born in South Carolina in 1809 – a few years before Jim Bowie and David Crockett went off (in vain) to fight in the War of 1812; six years after the Louisiana Purchase that so changed his country. (Travis had little in common with Bowie or Crockett: he was an unknown, a decade younger than one, two decades younger than the other, highly educated, a professional, not a brawler, certainly not a frontiersman.)
Trying to make his mark, Travis had obtained a formal classical education at Sparta University in Alabama, and then taught there; “read law” under one of the giants of the frontier bar; married one of his teen age students a few months before their first child arrived (in the tradition of the century, the bible entry date was adjusted to make an “honest woman” of the new bride); and he also purchased a newspaper, the Claiborne Herald, which he edited and published. The next year he was admitted to the bar.
He was not yet 20 but he was, or had been, a schoolteacher, publisher, lawyer, husband and father – and he failed at each and every endeavor. The newspaper failed, the law practice failed, the marriage failed and there were court judgments against him for his debts that would soon send him to debtor’s prison.
It was said that men went to Texas either because they owed money or were facing criminal charges. Travis was not only notably in debt but he was also a wanted man. The lawyer fled to Texas one step ahead of the law after he slew his wife’s suspected lover, also thought to be the father of her unborn child.
After visiting Nacogdoches and then making his courtesy visit to Stephen Austin in San Felipe, Travis headed east to the major port city of Anahuac on the northeastern end of Galveston Bay, due west of New Orleans. Travis had picked the port city because the new laws required custom payments at this port of entry for Texas and that meant work for lawyers. The U.S. even had a consulate in the area. Learning Spanish because the land grants were in that language, studying Mexican law in order to ply his trade, Travis planned to be a good citizen of Mexico and earn his fortune.
Hard worker, not a trouble-maker was the word on the streets of Nacogdoches about Travis. Maybe he wasn’t but trouble sure followed that man down the road. Anahuac was to become the scene of two pivotal revolts, each involving this young lawyer.
The First Revolt at Anahuac (May, 1832)
Anahuac! Bad choice of destination for Travis was the collective judgment of Rose and his buddies in the saloon: All the troubles with the Mexicans were coming to a boil in Anahuac. There Americans who arrived by boat were denied admission to Texas and were stalled (and enraged) as they sat and waited. There the soldados (soldiers) were garrisoned to enforce long-ignored (and anger-producing) customs duties. There Americans openly rooted for Antonio López de Santa Anna
to overthrow the existing Centralist government by a “liberal” uprising throughout Mexico. And there the anti-slavery laws created sanctuary for runaway slaves from nearby New Orleans (and surrounding areas), inciting nearby Southerners.
Bad choice, echoed Rose, over a glass of whiskey. It would take only a single spark to set off a large flame.
It wasn’t the rape of a settler’s wife by one of the convict-soldiers that started the fire; the rapist would be dealt with later. The outrage, to the Southerners in Anahuac, who prided themselves on chivalry and the reverence of women, was against a Texan who stood by ignoring her plight. The townspeople tarred and feathered the scoundrel and paraded him through Anahuac.
Col. Juan Bradburn, commander of the Mexican garrison in Anahuac, had to send his soldados to halt this breach of the peace. The ringleaders of this frontier justice, Bradburn suspected, were Travis and his law partner, Patrick Jack. Bradburn also knew that both men were forming a prohibited militia, under the guise of seeking protection from Indians.
The conflagration began when Travis was retained by various slave owners to file claims for return of the runaways, harbored by Bradburn. Travis, like Bowie and most Texas-Americans, was a Southerner from a slave state. His family had slaves and, as the lawyer in him argued, even the U.S. Constitution tolerated slaves. (The Civil War was 30 years away.)
Bradburn feared new confidence about a future (Santa Anna) states-rights government would encourage insurrection over the slaves. These concerns were magnified after Travis, concealed in a large cloak, delivered a note, allegedly from an acquaintance of Bradburn, with a warning: One hundred men are preparing to cross the Sabine and attack the Anahuac garrison to recapture the runaways! The note proved false, but Bradburn suspected Travis of instigating the rumor to “make him give up the slaves.” The Commander arrested Travis, and when Pat Jack protested, he was also arrested.
Rose confirmed that he and his drinking buddies had been right about Travis and Anahuac when Col. Jose de la Piedras, Regional Commander at Nacogdoches (and Bradburn’s superior), began to send troops to buttress the port city garrison.
The arrest of Travis and Jack was just too much for the colonists at Nacogdoches and elsewhere. Responding to calls for help from San Felipe and other colonies, Rose joined an armed force of 300 men heading for Anahuac, almost two hundred miles away. Even the law-abiding Stephen Austin threatened to reduce the fort to rubble if the two lawyers were not freed.
Having now made sure that Travis’ rumor of insurrection would come true, Bradburn tied Travis and Jack to the ground and placed guards standing over them with muskets poised, ready to shoot them at the first sign of an offensive. Travis shouted for all to hear: “Forget us and blaze away upon the fort!” (The rescuers heard and declared Travis a man that “never shrunk but called on his friends to witness that he would die like a man.”)
As the imminent uprising intensified, Col. Piedras arrived and quickly negotiated a peace: the two men would be tried by civilian authorities (which never happened) and Bradburn was relieved of his command. Travis and Jack were released after having been imprisoned for almost two months. Rose and the other colonists returned to their homes.
Out of custody, Travis leafletted that “Americans know their rights and protect them” and would see that their guarantees were not “trampled under foot.”
Col. Piedras stayed to evaluate the problems in Anahuac. He became convinced that it was necessary to disarm these hothead Texans (many from his home base in Nacogdoches); he would issue that order when he returned. Then, unbeknownst to him, he would face another group of angry colonists, this time led by Bowie.
JIM BOWIE HAD BEEN IN TEXAS four years before Travis arrived. Where Travis was an unknown, a pauper and a fugitive, Bowie was a legend seeking his fortune. Always on the lookout for business opportunities, he was attracted by the potential of the new frontier.
When Bowie left Louisiana in 1827, he also rode into Nacogdoches. Unlike Travis’ unspectacular entrance, the town stopped moving when the famous duelist appeared. Rose looked down the road and saw a large, broad-boned, sandy-haired man, six feet of muscle, his right hand brushing up against a pistol, his left resting on a large knife. As Bowie passed the saloon, the blacksmith shop, the barbershop, townspeople poured into the roadway to gape.
Here was a trouble-maker, Rose’s friends noted . . . favorably, but he made no trouble – at least not yet. Bowie was in Texas for business, not personal brawls or revolution. From Nacogdoches, Bowie rode south to San Felipe, with a letter of introduction, to both pay his respects to Austin and learn how to choose and then acquire Texas land. Next he travelled to San Antonio de Bexar, which, a half century earlier, had been the capital of all of Spanish Texas but now was reduced to a small part of a state combined with Coahuila, its capital at Saltillo, over 200 miles below the Rio Grande.
To obtain Texas land grants in his own name required Bowie to become a Mexican citizen – so why not become a distinguished Mexican citizen! To this end, with another letter of introduction, Bowie formed an important alliance with Don Juan Martin de Veramendi, the Mexican Vice-Governor of the combined state of Coahuila y Texas. Veramendi, who sponsored Bowie’s citizenship, later became his partner in contemplated cotton spinning and weaving mills at Saltillo – and then his father-in-law as well.
Bowie had been quite a ladies man of “hectic affairs” with diverse women, including an aristocrat, a quadroon (mixed race) and one-time mistress of the pirate, Lafitte, and a Cajun “swamp girl.” But now he fell under the spell of Veramendi’s teen age daughter, Ursula, and resolved to settle down.
Bowie travelled back and forth from Texas to Louisiana on business but always found an excuse to visit with the daughter of the Vice-Governor. On one return, he broached marriage to Ursula and was not rejected; he also discussed the mills with her father. On his next trip to Saltillo, on September 30, 1830, Bowie was granted Mexican citizenship, conditioned (because of the recent 1830 Laws) on the mills. On the ride back to San Antonio with the Veramendi family, Bowie formally requested Ursula’s hand, was accepted and soon they wed.
Jim Bowie, married to a captivating, loving wife, was happier than he had ever been. “Mrs. Bowie was a beautiful Castillian lady, and won all hearts by her sweet manners,” a friend remarked. “Bowie was supremely happy with her, very devoted, and more like a kind and tender lover than the terrible duelist . . . .” He also anticipated a life of wealth and ease, aided by his alliance with upper class Mexicans, who catered to his prominent father-in-law.
Bowie built a home for his family in San Antonio de Bexar, known either as “San Antonio” or “Bexar” – pronounced “Bear.” (The Mexicans spelled it “Bejar” and pronounced it “Bey-har.”) The Alamo was a half mile outside of San Antonio.
Bowie vowed to spend the remainder of his life as a devoted husband and father of a child soon to be born.
The Battle of Nacogdoches (August, 1832)
But the Travis-related events at Anahuac only a few months earlier, which had begun unplanned, even unled, were now about to spread to Nacogdoches, as Austin sent word to Bowie at San Antonio that his “services were greatly needed.” Troubles were brewing because Col. Piedras, after returning from Anahuac, had ordered the colonists to surrender their weapons. If the mini-revolt at Anahuac caused Piedras to worry and act, the euphoria of that victory at Anahuac emboldened the Nacogdoches colonists to resist. Austin hoped that a word from the revered Bowie, with backing from Austin, could quell the imminent explosion.
On July 31, 1832, Bowie rode out of San Felipe to Nacogdoches but, even at a gallop, he arrived after the battle began. A few hundred men, local (including Rose) and from nearby settlements, had left their homes and given Piedras an ultimatum to rescind his order and accept the Constitution of 1824. The Commander scoffed as the Texans marched to the center of town for the Battle of Nacogdoches. The Mexicans attacked with their calvary but were repulsed. They attacked again and were beaten off again, this time suffering heavy casualties.
By the time Bowie arrived it was the night of the day of the two failed Mexican cavalry charges.
On the evening of August 2, 1832, Rose saw Bowie walking vigorously toward him. He waited, apprehensively. The duelist came up to Rose, offered his hand and boomed: “Bonjour, mon ami. Je suis Jim Bowie. Vous êtes Monsieur Rose?”
Rose was speechless. This was the famous Col. James Bowie, honoring Rose by addressing him in his native tongue. Though many settlers had learned to speak French in Louisiana, none showed such respect in conversation with Rose. Bowie had won this man in those first few moments.
Bowie clapped Rose on the shoulder with his large hand and invited him into the saloon for whiskey and talk. Rose knew that until recently many of his townspeople had followed the “Peace Party” under Stephen Austin. They had sought not war with Mexico, not even independence – merely democratic statehood in a Mexican republic, a course between submission and revolution.
But Rose’s neighbors weren’t feeling friendly to the Mexicans after the disarmament order. And Bowie was about to disavow his instructions from Austin. The battle having already begun, not only had Bowie decided they must win . . . and win decisively; he had also taken over command of the insurrection, which was why he was now talking to Rose. “I require a seasoned veteran tonight,” he said. “Piedras will run and I want a man at my side who will not. I need you, Rose! What do you say, old man?” asked Bowie, 36, of the 47-year-old Frenchman. Rose could only nod his assent, so overcome by the honor was he. They would do battle together in Nacogdoches – where each had been defeated in the past.
By nightfall, as Bowie had predicted, the Mexicans were in full retreat, evacuating the town. For speed and stealth, Bowie picked a small unit consisting only of Rose and 17 others to give chase.
Taking a shortcut, the 19 colonists cut off over 300 Mexicans at the Angelina River (near Rose’s home), 20 miles away, and attacked on horseback. Firing rifles and pistols as rapidly as possible to create the impression of a larger force, the Texans, though outnumbered 15 to 1, routed the enemy army into a panicky stampede, until Bowie caught up with Col. Piedras and he was persuaded to surrender. (Only afterwards did the Mexican Commander learn the size of the Texas patrol and “wept . . . that it would cost him his life for [his] government to know that he had surrendered to such a small force.”)
Bowie marched the enemy back to Nacogdoches, once again victorious despite overwhelming odds. The army was allowed to leave under Parole of Honor (a pledge never to return), to be escorted by Bowie out of Texas.
Before he departed from Nacogdoches, Bowie met with Rose who savored their victory. Bowie told his new friend that “this was just a skirmish. The Mexicans cannot truly do battle with us so close to the U.S. border,” he emphasized. “The real conflict is yet to come when we fight nearer their frontier at San Felipe, Gonzales, and Goliad . . . and finally at San Antonio, at the Mexican border.” He gave Rose a piercing look. “Then you will see war. A Revolution for all of Texas is coming. Be ready when I call for you.”