Martín and Patricia de León

Martín de León, c. 1920. [source]

Martín and Patricia
Martín de León was born to a wealthy family in what is now Tamaulipas  in 1765. Though his family usually educated their children in Europe, Martín decided not to go. Instead, he became a merchant and then joined the army. Because he was born in New Spain, he couldn’t rise above the rank of Captain. In 1795, he married Patricia de la Garza, the daughter of the Commandant of the Eastern Internal Provinces, a woman 10 years his junior. The couple settled in Tamaulipas and began ranching.

Ranching and Resistance
In 1805, Martín took a trip north to several cities in Tejas and decided to move the family ranch up to the area north of present day Corpus Christi on the Aransas River. The cattle were branded with the de León brand, EJ for Espirtu de Jesus. The brand was registered in 1807, the first cattle brand in Texas. Martín quickly became interested in creating a colony in the area, but his repeated requests were denied by the Spanish government, which questioned his loyalty, with good reason, as it turned out. The De León family sided with the Republicans during the Mexican War for Independence. The family spent most of the war in San Antonio, but returned to their ranch in 1816, as hostilities on the frontier died down. In 1823, Martín purchased cattle in New Orleans and drove then to Texas, adding them to the 5,000 head of cattle the family already owned.

Empresario
Martín had not given up on his idea of establishing a colony in Texas. In 1824, he petitioned the provincial government for permission to settle 41 families on and found a town on the Guadalupe River. His contract was approved, and since he was a Mexican citizen, he had almost no restrictions and several benefits, including exempting his colonists from taxes and duties for seven years. Patricia contributed $9,800, as well as cows, mules and horses that she had inherited from her father. The De León family arrived at the town site late in 1824 along with a few other families, and the rest joined them the following spring. The town was called Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de Jesús Victoria and the colony was named Guadalupe Victoria, after the first president of Mexico. Each family received a plot in town, a league – 4,228 acres- of grazing land and a labor – 177 acres – of arable land. While Martín set up the land, Patricia focused on the culture. She founded a school and a church, donating funds as well as furniture and other items. Though their house was rough, with dirt floors, Patricia brought beautiful furnishings from Mexico. The De León colony was the only predominantly Mexican colony in Texas, though it also included American and Irish families. Because the borders of the De León colony were undefined, they came into frequent conflict with surrounding colonies, especially the DeWitt colony. In 1829, Martín got permission to bring 150 more families and expand the colony, which brought more conflict with the DeWitt colony. However, in 1831, DeWitt’s grant expired and the De León colony was able to expand into the vacant land. By 1833, when Martín died in a Cholera epidemic, the colony had given out more than 100 titles, making the De León family the only empresarios in Texas other than Stephen F. Austin to fulfill their grant.

St. Mary’s Church in Victoria. Built on the De León homestead, donated by Patricia de León. [source]

Revolution and Heartache
Even without their patriarch, the De León family were ardent supporters of the Texas Revolution. Two son-in-laws served in the Texas army and much of the rest of the family contributed horses, mules, and supplies. Because of their support, the family was targeted by General Urrea when he occupied the area and two of Patricia’s sons, Fernando and Silvestre, were arrested. Despite their support, the time after the Texas Revolution was not an easy one for Tejanos. The youngest De León son was murdered by cattle rustlers and the family was forced to flee to Louisiana. They later moved to Tamaulipas, Patricia’s childhood home and Patricia sold some of the family’s land to help make ends meet. In 1844, Patricia returned to Victoria, only to find her fine furnishings spread among the newcomers. Despite the lack of welcome, Patricia spent the rest of her life in Victoria devoted to the community, particularly the church. When she died, Patricia donated her homestead to the Catholic Church. Today, St. Mary’s Church stands on the site. 

Angelina

Angelina by Ancel Nunn

Angelina was a young woman of the Hasinai tribe of the Caddo Nation. Around 1690, a group of Spanish priests established missions among her people in East Texas. She was baptized Angelina, though her birth name has been lost, and learned Spanish. She is mentioned by several Spanish and French explorers and traders as an interpreter and guide in the early 1700s. She worked with Louis Juchereau de St. Denis to found Spanish missions with her native Caddo people in 1716 and some credit her with helping to found the mission that would become the Alamo a few years later. Many of the Europeans described her as learned and wise. The Caddo are matrilineal and she may have held a position of status in the tribe. Her story has been romanticized over the years, much like other Native women who helped Europeans.

The only county in Texas named after a woman is named after Angelina.

Louis Juchereau de St. Denis

Bust of Louis Juchereau de St. Denis in Nachitoches, Louisiana. By Billy Hathorn – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, [source]

French Louisiana
Louis Juchereau de St. Denis was born in Quebec in 1674. In 1699 he sailed down the Mississippi River with a relative and was put in charge of forts along the Mississippi River and Gulf coast. During this time, he also led several expeditions to explore west of the Mississippi River and became friendly with the Natives, particularly the Karankawa and Caddo tribes. In 1713, he was sent to establish a fort on what was, at the time, the Red River in Nachitoches, Louisiana. St. Denis traded with the local Natives and even became friendly with the Spanish in their missions, just a stone’s throw to the west. The next year he left for an extended trip around the Hasinai Confederacy and all the way down to the Spanish posts on the Rio Grande.

Love and Captivity
When St. Denis arrived at San Juan Bautista in Coahuila, the commander, Diego Ramón, placed him under house arrest, unsure of what to do with the Frenchman illegally trading guns with Natives in Spanish territory. The 40 year old St. Denis must have been quite the charmer, because, while he waited for the decision to come from Mexico City, he successfully proposed to Manuela Sánchez Navarro y Gomes Mascorro, Ramón’s 17 year old granddaughter. News came in March of 1715 for St. Denis to travel to Mexico City to face charges. In August, he was exonerated of all charges. (It probably helped that word of his engagement to an extremely high class Spanish woman had reached Mexico City before he had.) The general junta of Mexico City then made St. Denis a guide and commissary officer for an expedition to found new missions in East Texas. St. Denis returned to San Juan Bautista, married Manuela, and set off for East Texas.

“Plano corographico de los dos Reynos de Nuevo Estremadua o Coaguila y el Nuevo Leon,” courtesy of the Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin (JBP 42, 1729). [source]

Return to French Territory
St. Denis returned to San Juan Bautista in April of 1717 with more French merchandise, but times had changed and the Spanish government would no longer overlook a Frenchman trading guns in Spanish territory, no matter his marriage to a Spanish woman. He was sent again to Mexico City, but escaped and returned to Nachitoches. Despite his pleas to become a Spanish citizen, St. Denis was forbidden from returning to Spanish territory. Eventually, Manuela joined him in Nachitoches and the couple had seven children together. In 1743, St. Denis was granted permission to retire from his command in Nachitoches and retire with his wife and children to New Spain. The Spanish, however, continued to forbid him from setting foot in Spanish territory and the family remained in Nachitoches. St. Denis died the following year. His descendants would continue to be influential in Louisiana and Texas.

Moses Austin

Portrait of Moses Austin [source]

Grandfather of Texas

Moving West
Moses Austin was a giant in the lead industry. When he was awarded the contract to roof the Virginia State Capitol, he began a journey to consolidate control over all parts of the lead industry in the country, founding the first American town west of, but not on, the Mississippi in the process. He helped to found the Bank of St. Louis, but when the bank failed, he lost all his money. Looking for a way to make it back, he used the newly signed Adam-Onis treaty as inspiration and headed to Spanish Texas in 1820.

Texas
Austin had a plan to bring Anglo colonists to the sparsely populated Spanish Texas. With the help of an old business acquaintance, he gained the Governor of Texas’s approval. The governor sent word to Mexico City and Austin headed home. When he reached Missouri, however, four weeks of wet weather had left him with pneumonia. Instead of resting, he spent all his time organizing the new colony and his health continued to deteriorate. He lived two more months, long enough to receive word that his request had been granted, and his death bed words were for his son.

“tell dear Stephen that it is his dieing fathers last request to prosecute the enterprise he had Commenced, that he had set his heart two much on it but for some wise purpose, god had prevented his travelling the rode he had planed out, he had opened and prepared the way for you and your brothers and that he felt a conviction you would be successful and independant in a few years”

Maria Austin to Stephen F. Austin, 8/25/1821

Carrying on the Dream
Though Stephen F. Austin was busy with his own work, he couldn’t ignore his father’s last request. He would have to renegotiate the terms with the new Mexican government in 1821, but Stephen Austin would make his father’s colony more successful than Moses Austin could ever have dreamed.

The San Antonio Missions

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  Mission Espada

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  Mission San Jose

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  Mission Concepción

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  Mission San Juan

You may remember the Alamo, but it was only one of a string of missions built along the San Antonio River in the 1700s. The other four, Mission Espada, Mission San Jose, Mission San Juan, and Mission Concepción, are now part of the San Antonio Missions National Historic Park and are all part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site

The Missions were an attempt to convert and “civilize” local Native tribes through prayer, discipline, and hard labor. Many Natives accepted the Missions’ strict discipline in return for protection from their now mobile enemies, the Comanche and Lipan Apache. Though the Missions were largely able to provide that protection, they also became epicenters for diseases which decimated the Native populations. Nearly all of the Native cultures in the area were destroyed by a combination of population loss, conversion by the Missions, and intermarriage with Europeans.

All pictures by me.

Early Jews in Texas

While Jewish communities wouldn’t appear in Texas until the 1840s and 50s, the first Jews came to what was then Northeast Nueva España in the late 16th century. In 1579, Luis de Caravajal y de la Cueva was given an enormous land grant by the Spanish monarch. Neuvo Reino de Leon was a 200 league (not quite 1,000 mile) square that was anchored at its southeast corner in Tampico on the Gulf Coast. At the time, it was thought the grant might stretch all the way from the Gulf to the Pacific Ocean to the west and to Florida to the north

Map of Mexico and US showing the approximate area of Nuevo Reino de Leon. [source]

New Settlers for Nuevo Reino de Leon
Caravajal himself was the son of conversos, Jews who had converted to Catholicism to avoid persecution in Spain, as was much of his family. Typically, settlers in Nueva Espana were required to be cristianos viejos, or old Christians, meaning not conversos, also called cristianos nuevos, since conversos were forbidden from emigrating from Spain and Portugal. Cristianos nuevos included anyone whose ancestors had been conversos, regardless of how long ago they converted.  Needing settlers for the New World, Caravajal was able to get King Felipe II to waive the required documentation for cristianos viejos. Many of his family members and fellow conversos would travel with him to establish the new colony. Many of them would settle in San Luis, which would later be re-founded as Monterrey.

Since Spain had required conversion to Catholicism at pain of death or expulsion, many conversos had converted publicly, but still secretly practiced Judaism. Though Caravajal himself was a devout Catholic, many of his family members were secretly practicing Jews.

Charges of Heresy
Caravajal was a notorious boaster. Though he claimed to have explored the entirety of his grant and settled a number of cities, it became increasingly clear to the governors of Nueva Espana that he had done little to develop the grant. Instead, he seemed to spend most of his time raiding the Natives to capture slaves. He was arrested and taken to Mexico City for trial. There, he was brought up on charges of heresy by the Inquisition. There, the Inquisition convinced him it was his duty as a good Catholic to denounce the members of his family that had continued to practice Judaism. Caravajal would be sentenced to six years exile from Nueva Espana, but would die in prison before the sentence could be carried out.

Execution of Mariana de Carabajal at Mexico, 1601. From Palacio, “El Libro Rojo, reprinted in the Jewish Encyclopedia [source]

Trajedy
Unfortunately for his family, this would only be the beginning. In 1596 Luis de Caravajal the younger, Caravajal’s nephew and heir, was also charged. Tortured, he would implicate over 100 members of his own family, including his mother and siblings. Many of them would be burned in the main plaza of Mexico City in December of 1596.

A Lasting Influence
Despite this gruesome episode, many conversos continued to immigrate to Nuevo Reino de Leon, particularly from the 1640s on. There is still a strong Jewish population and tradition in Nueva Leon and other parts of the former Nuevo Reino de Leon today. In the Texas-Mexico border area, pan de semita is a popular food during the holiday season, made with a recipe almost identical to matzoh. Many immigrants to Texas came from the Mexican states that once made up Nuevo Reino de Leon. Though there were few settlements in Texas during these early years, many native born Texans can trace their ancestors back to these Sephardic Jews.

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

Portrait of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca [source]

Shipwrecked
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was one of the first Europeans to set foot in Texas. After the Narváez expedition was blown off course by a hurricane, the survivors created rafts to try to get back to Mexico. The rafts were separated and only a few of the men made landfall on the Texas coast. Of these, only four men, Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, and Estavanico, an enslaved Moroccan, finally made it back to Mexico.

Surviving and Exploring Texas
The local Native American tribes took the men in (Cabeza de Vaca says enslaved, but there’s some historical debate about that), and taught Cabeza de Vaca and the others their languages, customs, and how to survive. Cabeza de Vaca would eventually take on the role of faith healer, using Christian prayers and rudimentary first aid to effect his “miracles.” After several years on the coast, Cabeza de Vaca and the survivors began the long trek southwest to Mexico City, earning food and help from the various Native Americans with his healing. They finally arrived in Mexico City in 1536, more than ten years after they set out on the expedition.

Telling the Story
In 1537, Cabeza de Vaca returned to Spain and wrote his Relación, the story of his adventures in Texas. In the Relación, he describes many of the Native groups of Texas in a very sympathetic light and would go on to advocate for fair treatment of the Native peoples of the New World. He also described the climate, flora, and fauna of the region, providing the first written accounts of what would come to be Texas.

You can read the entirety of the Relación online, in Spanish here, or in English here.