Texas

Geographically isolated and economically marginal, the province's sole reason for existence was as a buffer against encroachments, whether from European rivals or hostile Indians, into the more valuable interior of the viceroyalty.

Jesus F. de la Teja, 199516

For nearly a century and a half after shipwrecked Spaniard Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca traversed it in the 1530s, Texas remained without permanent European settlement. That only changed with the arrival of one of the foremost explorers of French North America, Rene Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. In 1682, La Salle followed the Mississippi from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. At the mouth of the Mississippi, he claimed for France the same land Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto had claimed for Spain 140 years earlier and named the area Louisiana, in honor of King Louis XIV of France. La Salle’s expedition resulted from the French observation that the British, moving from the east, and the Spanish, moving from the south, would soon eliminate the possibility of further French expansion into the Mississippi Valley.17

Louis XIV later appointed La Salle as commander of Louisiana and instructed him to establish a settlement on the Gulf of Mexico. In 1684, La Salle sailed from France with 300 men, women, and children in four ships, Le Joly, L’Aimable, La Belle, and St. Frangois.

La Salle’s colonists established a primitive settlement named Fort St. Louis, five miles up Garcitas Creek, which flows into an extension of Matagorda Bay northeast of Corpus Christi. Hard labor, privation, and sickness soon reduced the population of Fort St. Louis by one sixth. In January 1687, La Salle and seventeen of his men began walking to the Mississippi to seek assistance from other Frenchmen. Shortly after their departure, La Salle’s nephew berated some of the men in the group walking east. This criticism exacerbated old animosities among the frustrated Frenchmen accompanying La Salle. In response, they killed both the nephew and La Salle somewhere between the Brazos and Trinity Rivers. A few members of the group trudged on to French Canada to report the fate of the colony.18

Once the Spanish learned that La Salle had established a settlement in territory claimed by Spain, officials ordered that the settlement be located and destroyed. Five land and six sea expeditions set out in fulfillment of this order. On March 23, 1689, one these expeditions, led by Alonso de Leon, governor of Coahuila, left Monclova. De Leon’s expedition included eighty-five soldiers, twelve mule drivers, thirteen servants, an unspecified number of Indians, and more than 700 horses, 200 head of cattle, and pack mules.19

The Spanish found that after the remaining members of La Salle’s colony had been ravaged by disease, Karankawa Indians had killed the few adult survivors and appropriated their clothes, which they were wearing when the Spanish arrived.20

To check further French expansion, in 1690 De Leon and Fray Damian Massanet, a Franciscan from the Apostolic College of Queretaro, established the Missions of San Francisco de los Tejas and Santisimo Nombre de Maria. They located these missions, the first in Texas, among the Caddoan-speaking Indians in present-day Houston County in east Texas. In 1693, since no further French intrusions into the area had occurred, the Spanish abandoned these missions.21

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Texas was again devoid of European settlement. Even though Texas had been only temporarily occupied, the land and sea expeditions launched in response to La Salle vastly increased Spanish knowledge of the area. The Tejas people they encountered near the Neches River made a strong impression on expedition members. These Indians raised corn, beans, squash, and watermelon, and weeded their fields with wooden hoes. They sat on wooden benches and slept on raised canopy beds. The word that would become the name of the Lone Star State came from these Indians. The Spanish heard their word of greeting as “tejas,” which meant roughly “friend” or “our own people.” They soon used that term to refer to the region, and, Anglicized, it now refers to Texas.22

Despite the failure of La Salle’s colony, the French continued to strengthen their presence in central North America. In 1700, they established Ft. Mississippi, thirty miles below present-day New Orleans. This fort split in two the Spanish land claim that stretched from Florida along the Gulf Coast to Texas and on down to Mexico. It gave France a rival claim that ran orthogonally from the mouth of the Mississippi north to French Canada.23

The east Texas missions were rebuilt in the early 1700s to prevent French expansion. After the 1762 transfer of Louisiana to Spain, the French threat vanished, as did the raison d’etre for the Spanish presence in east Texas. The Spanish again abandoned their east Texas missions and ordered that the 167 Hispanic families in east Texas be relocated to San Antonio, where a presidio and missions had been established earlier.24