CHAPTER XVI
A SEARCH FOR A SILVER MINE (1831)
AND THE "BOWIE INDIAN FIGHT"
While the American traders were bent upon opening a trail through the desert country of the Southwest Indians—the Kiowas, Comanches and Apaches—into northern Mexico, American settlers had entered Mexico itself.
Moses Austin, born in Connecticut, but lastly a lead merchant in those same mines of Washington County, Missouri, where Major Andrew Henry the fur-hunter also was working, heard of the rich lands of the Spanish province of Texas. Major Henry thought mainly of beaver-fur—a get-rich-quick business that took what it might out of a country and left little in exchange. Moses Austin was a merchant and a manufacturer—in Missouri he turned his lead into shot, bars and sheets, and shipped his product to New Orleans. Now in 1820 he determined to settle Texas with American farmers.
Toward the close of the year he obtained from the Spanish governor, at San Antonio the capital of Texas, a grant of land. He died before he had removed there, himself; but his son Stephen Fuller Austin led the first settlers, gathered at New Orleans, in December, 1821. They located up the Brazos River in southeastern Texas.
The government of Mexico was glad to have the sturdy Americans upon its frontier, to act as a bulwark against the Indians. All Texas, like the Ohio Valley, was the favorite range of hard-fighting tribes; from the cannibal Karankawas (six feet tall, and wielding long-bows that no white man could draw) on the Gulf coast in the south, to the widely riding Comanches and Apaches in the north, with the Wacos, the Tawakonis, the Caddos, and others, in between.
The Spanish soldiery had made little progress against them. The Mexican settlements were few, the missions built by the Spanish priests had been destroyed; from San Antonio in the west to Nacogdoches in the east the country still belonged to the red warriors.
They began to pillage and kill the Americans. Texas was another Kentucky. But as in Kentucky and the Ohio Valley the Americans pushed on and on. They were not the kind to quit.