I entered this country in 1821, and commenced colonizing when it was a perfect wilderness, and have passed a laborious life; immense obstacles opposed our settlement, growing out of the uninhabited state of the country, hostile Indians, and other causes, but we have surmounted them all.
—LETTER FROM STEPHEN F. AUSTIN, 1828
The land lay before him with beckoning promise. In the summer of 1821, Stephen F. Austin had come to the foreign province of Texas for the first time. He and his party of about a dozen men rode on horseback for more than two months, trekking from Louisiana in warm sunshine. The more Austin saw of Texas—here in its eastern regions, where rainfall could be gentle and generous—the more he embraced it as the perfect spot for the prosperous settlement of American colonists. The meadows shimmered thick and green, the lowland forests teemed with tall hardwoods and pines, and the creeks flowed clear and strong. Wild game, buffalo and deer especially, roamed in abundance. The soil felt rich and fertile, the weather temperate and welcoming. Austin wrote in his journal that he found this earthly paradise to be “country the most beautiful I ever saw.”
Then he met the Indians.
On September 17, 1821, Austin and his explorers neared the Gulf of Mexico, close to the mouth of the languid Colorado River. A high-pitched sound arose from a thicket. To Austin it sounded like a “war whoop.” About fifteen men, wearing loincloths and clutching longbows and arrows, emerged from the brush. They were tall and muscular, with dark tattoos on their chests and arms, their bodies slathered with grease. Size and markings identified them as Karankawas, which no doubt filled Austin with dread. They were reputed to be the most savage of the coastal tribes. The wildest of stories said they killed those who strayed onto their turf, cooked them, and ate them. Austin was a slender, college-educated, twenty-seven-year-old land speculator with a background in banking and politics, not a hardened Indian fighter. But he told his company to prepare for battle and rode ahead to meet the warriors.
The one who appeared to be the chief spoke to Austin in Spanish and asked where he was from and where he was going. He urged Austin to come to his camp. Fearing an ambush, Austin refused. The chief laid his weapons on the ground, and five women and children walked from the brush. “This satisfied me they believed us to be too strong for them and therefore that they [would] not attack us,” Austin wrote, adding, “of their disposition I had no doubt if they thought they [could] have succeeded.”
For the next few minutes, the man who would come to be known as the “Father of Texas” studied the newfound land’s natives. “[Some] of the young squaws were handsome & one of them quite pretty,” Austin wrote. They wore animal skins around their waist, he said, but were otherwise naked. “Their breasts were marked or tatooed in circles of black beginning with a small circle at the nipple and enlarging as the breast swelled.” Austin gave the chief some tobacco and a frying pan, and the Karankawas offered advice on travel through the thick scrub. With that, Austin said, the two sides “parted apparently good friends.” The Indians ghosted back into the thicket.
Though he had shown goodwill—and ogled the women—Austin knew this friendship could only be temporary. He considered the Karankawas more animal than human. “These Indians . . . may be called universal enemies to man,” he wrote, because they would murder their rivals “and frequently feast on the bodies of their victims.” He could not imagine American settlers coexisting with them. Nor could he envision their being allowed to live. “There will be no way of subduing them,” Austin insisted, “but extermination.”
In that simple statement lay the birth of modern Texas. It also contained the murky origins of the Texas Rangers.
For the first Europeans who cut erratic paths across it, Texas came to hold little value. The Spanish traversed the region in the 1500s and 1600s, followed by French explorers who didn’t stay long. Spain established scattered missions there in the 1700s but considered it a backwater of high danger and low importance. The Marqués de Rubí visited Texas in 1766 for the king of Spain and found a thorny domain of hostile indigenes. “The country,” he wrote, “should be given back to Nature and the Indians.”
Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, and Texas came with it. But Mexico did not control Texas. At a time when 120,000 people lived in New York City, Harvard was nearly two hundred years old, and St. Louis thrived as a modern river port for steamboats, Texas remained a soaring emptiness that belonged to the Indians. The great sweep of the province, from the far western deserts to the deep eastern swamps, more than eight hundred miles across, held no more than a few thousand men and women of European heritage. However, the Native American population in the early 1800s probably exceeded twenty thousand, many of whom proved willing to attack newcomers. Because of “savage warfare which has desolated the land,” a Mississippi newspaper warned potential pioneers, Texas “presents almost literally a vast and noiseless desert.”
To the south, the fresh Mexican government flailed in turmoil, the nation’s economy barely functional. The country’s unsteady and revolving cast of leaders thought the best way to handle Texas and provide a check on the Indians might be to allow Americans to immigrate in limited numbers and pacify the territory. They also reasoned, paradoxically and incorrectly, that it might stall U.S. expansionism.
A failed lead-mine operator named Moses Austin initially had persuaded Spanish authorities to permit the settling of families in Texas. After Moses Austin’s death, Stephen F. Austin—his son—worked with Mexican officials to allow the entry of American colonists, as many as three hundred families initially. Each settler had to pledge to follow the Catholic faith and abide by Mexican law. Male colonists over twenty-one could purchase acreage at a price far less than that of property in the United States. A sum that would buy eighty acres of arable land in the South would purchase more than four thousand acres in Texas.
This modest beginning set in motion events that, within a few decades, would radically alter American territory and help forge the nation’s history. From Mexico’s standpoint, it proved to be a catastrophic blunder.
The settlers began to trickle in not long after Austin made his first visit to Texas and had his encounter with the Karankawas. Most hailed from Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, or Tennessee. The first ones came to be called the “Old Three Hundred” families, while Austin held the grand title of their empresario. They and their successors homesteaded the river bottomlands of verdant south-central Texas.
Some historians have portrayed them as brave pioneers seeking the freedom and the room to pursue their expansive dreams. They were certainly brave, and they indeed sought freedom for themselves. But many of them dreamt of great tracts of rich land on which to grow cotton and of bringing their slaves to pick it. They envisioned nothing less than an unfettered extension of the Deep South’s plantation economy, a Mississippi of the West. Jared Groce came from Alabama with fifty wagons and ninety slaves, who cleared land for a cotton plantation on the Brazos River. “The primary product that will elevate us from poverty is Cotton,” Austin wrote, “and we cannot do this without the help of slaves.”
Texas already had a significant history with slavery. For years slavers used Galveston Island as a port of entry for their human cargo from Africa, often by way of Cuba. Many were smuggled into Galveston by the pirate Jean Lafitte, whose marauders seized them from Spanish ships. Lafitte operated such a thriving practice in selling slaves that he built a large barracks for them—holding more than six hundred captives—on the west bank of the Sabine River. Jim Bowie, destined to become a Texas martyr at the Alamo, made a handsome living in the trade. From 1818 to 1820, he and his brothers purchased slaves from Lafitte—for one dollar a pound, Bowie once said—and marched them in irons through the forests of East Texas, or floated them up the bayous into Louisiana. There the brothers resold them at a handsome profit. Altogether, the Bowie family figured, they made $65,000. That’s about $1.4 million in today’s money.
Lafitte abandoned Galveston in 1820, but a real Texas slave empire was about to take hold. By late 1825, the Austin colony recorded a total population of 1,790. Of those, 443 were slaves.
Not all the colonists enjoyed life as moneyed planters. Some were mere yeoman farmers who traveled by schooner from New Orleans to the mouth of the Colorado or the Lavaca River, where they were deposited at the edge of the wilderness with only the personal property they could carry. They proceeded inland by foot or in wagons, and built crude, mud-chinked log cabins that had dirt floors and no windows. These early settlements did not have schools, stores, or mills. Books were scarce, and entertainments homegrown. The pioneers lived off the game they could kill, including the flesh of wild horses when deer or turkey could not be found. With space on transit ships at a premium, many brought no plows with them, so they dug their crop rows with sticks.
Medical treatment could be medieval, as was customary across the frontier. Jesse Burnam, an odd-jobber who came to Texas from Tennessee in search of a warmer climate, recalled a man named Parker with a “terribly diseased” leg. “He begged us to cut it off,” Burnam said. After weeks of the man’s beseeching, Burnam said, he and three others “undertook the job with a dull saw and shoe knife, the only tools we had.” Using a horsehair rope as a tourniquet, they sawed off the limb. Complications set in, and eleven agonal days later the man was dead. But the patient had anticipated such an outcome, and the amputation had therefore been a comfort of sorts. “If I die,” he said before they removed his leg, “I don’t want to take it with me.”
Like many pioneers in the West, the new Texans found their new life to be a blend of spectacular tedium and abject terror. They had dropped themselves into a virgin, bountiful land of boundless opportunity, as seen in Austin’s pastoral visions. A “new country,” one early settler wrote, “rich in primeval beauty.”
It was also given to floods (or drought), pestilence, and terrible heat. The marshy river bottoms near the Gulf Coast were home to relentless swarms of disease-carrying mosquitoes, several varieties of poisonous snakes, and—something new to immigrants from the Appalachians and the Ozarks—alligators. Pioneers told and retold campfire tales of alligators on the prowl at night for humans. It was said the beasts would steal into settlements, clamp their powerful jaws onto sleeping children, and drag them screaming back to the river. In these stories the creatures were reported to have a special preference for the flesh of young girls.
Alarming as such threats might be, the presence of Indians caused the colonists much more concern. A number of tribes considered this part of Texas their homeland: Cherokees, Tawakonis, Wacos, Tonkawas, Delawares, and Caddos among them. According to official state history, the Caddos even gave the place its name: Tejas, their word for “friends.” It was the tribe’s most significant and ironic legacy, given that its members were forced off their land and onto reservations in Oklahoma.
Some Indians and settlers engaged in peaceful if wary cooperation, but conflict was the most common outcome. To a tribe in need of horses, white families’ stables made for easy pickings. For them it was as natural as capturing wild mustangs—and far easier. In much the same way, some Indians did not distinguish between settlers’ stockpiled belongings and salvage that washed ashore from the Gulf. To them it was all bounty for the taking. The white families of course regarded this as theft.
It soon became an article of faith among many newly arrived Texians, as they called themselves, that all Indians were thieves. Mere suspicioned intent could be punishable by death. Pioneer Abraham Alley, a French Huguenot from Missouri, recalled sixteen Wacos and Tawakonis approaching a Colorado River settlement in 1826 “professing friendship.” Because they were on foot, he said, “it was believed they had come down to steal our horses,” though no such theft had been attempted. That night, as the Indians slept nearby, Alley and a party of white men crept to the edge of their camp and opened fire. The Indians leapt to their feet and began to run. “Nearly all the Indians fell, either on the spot or within a few hundred yards,” Alley said. “The Indians were so completely surprised that it is believed they did not shoot an arrow at us.”
Any notion that the two cultures would share Texas was rarely held—and, at any rate, was doomed. “Our people were troubled by a continual sense of insecurity arising from their proximity to a race who had been the enemy of the white man for three centuries,” wrote John S. Ford, later a Ranger captain. Ford spoke the truth, but a more important factor than insecurity loomed: territory. The settlers wanted the dirt these Indians lived on.
The Karankawas felt the full effects of this first. These wandering bands, traveling by foot or in dugout canoes, subsisted on deer, bison, fish, shellfish, and turtles. They had lived on or near the low, sandy barrier islands of the Gulf Coast for at least several thousand years, probably more. The first recorded instance of Karankawas setting eyes on Europeans occurred in 1528. That was when lost Spanish explorers who were trying to float from Florida to Mexico on pine rafts washed ashore in Texas, naked and starving. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, one of the survivors, lived with the Indians for a few years—some as a slave—before making a long, tortured walk to Mexico.
A French expeditionary force arrived in the late 1600s and built a fort in the heart of Karankawa country. The Indians attacked it around 1687 and killed everyone except five children, who were taken captive. In the mid-1700s and early 1800s, the Spanish made numerous attempts, via their Texas missions, to convert the tribe to Christianity. The Karankawas proved resistant to catechism and scripture. In 1819 the Indians fought and lost—at least according to legend—an engagement with pirates from Jean Lafitte’s headquarters on Galveston Island. The pirates had kidnapped some Karankawa women. All such encounters took their toll, through either deaths in battle or disease, but the tribe managed at least to survive. Then the Americans showed up.
Texas settlers had seen Indians before, but not like these. They stood larger than most—“magnificently formed,” one nineteenth-century ethnologist recorded, “and approaching perfection in their bodily proportions.” To protect against mosquitoes, they smeared themselves with alligator fat and shark oil, which gave off a strong odor of musk. Many displayed the ornate tattoos that had captured Stephen F. Austin’s gaze. They wore loincloths of fur or buckskin if they wore anything at all. Rattlesnake tails decorated their plaited hair. Though the Karankawas had a distinct and complex culture, most colonists saw them as primitive brutes. “Their words, or rather grunts, seemed to issue from some region low down,” reported one early writer, “and were uttered in spasmodic jerks, apparently without any assistance from the tongue or lips.”
And, as Austin had observed, they were said to be man-eaters. This was no doubt an exaggeration. Like many tribes, they may have engaged in ceremonial cannibalism of their defeated enemies, but the stories related by settlers—however apocryphal—evoked atavistic horror. One told of a Karankawa raid on a colony in which warriors abducted a small girl. “After proceeding some distance,” went the account of pioneer John R. Fenn, “they camped, killed the child, and proceeded to eat her, first splitting open the body, then quartering it, and placing the parts on sharp sticks and cooking them.” Settlers attacked the Indian camp during the “diabolical and hellish orgie,” Fenn said, and killed all the Karankawa except “a squaw and her two small children,” who escaped. Several white men found them sitting beneath a tree. “They consulted a little while,” Fenn’s report continued, “and then decided it was best to exterminate such a race.” The men killed all three and left the bodies where they lay.
If true, these were but piecemeal efforts at extermination. Some Texians believed that to deal decisively with such enemies they would need a special force.
The first American settlers in Texas had no courts and no police. Resolution of civil disputes often fell to a community’s alcalde, who functioned as a sort of mayor and justice of the peace, though some cases were decided by mob rule. One Texian immigrant circulated poetry critical of Stephen F. Austin, referring to the empresario as a villain. Dwellers of Austin’s colony tarred and feathered the man, after which they banished him from the region. More serious criminal matters might be handled with backcountry justice. Robert Kuykendall, an Arkansas fur trader who had come to Texas in 1821, helped capture two Mexicans suspected of murdering two men and stealing their horses. Kuykendall and his party executed the Mexicans, decapitated them, and stuck their heads on poles. This warning to other thieves worked, said his nephew: “The ‘border ruffians’ ceased their depredations within the bounds of Austin’s colony.”
When it came to Indians, the Mexican government provided little in the way of troops, but instead made each male colonist subject to militia duty. Securing the settlements and “chastising” Indians thus fell to a mixed bag of civilians who were part citizen soldier, part home guard, part corps of minutemen. “It was a comical sight,” a German visitor said as he watched colonists assemble. “They were more like a gang of robbers about to undertake a raid than disciplined soldiers who risked time, money and life to protect their fellow citizens from future invasions of redskins.” But they grabbed their rifles when needed, responded to threats, and retaliated for attacks.
The goal was protection, but they also brought about through force the colonists’ expansion into what had been Indian territory. These engagements did not unfold like the battles of classic Hollywood cinema and pulp westerns’ purple prose, with men on horseback thundering across sweeping vistas. In East Texas, the first encounters with Indians took place on brushy riverbanks, over foggy lowland marshes, and along hidden creeks that ran in slow dark currents. These looked more like the savage wars of rival clans in old-country bogs.
From the first days of Austin’s colony, the Texians and the Karankawas had failed to mix well. The scattered tribe of perhaps two thousand constituted no small threat to the settlers, and the settlers to them. Deadly encounters were generally isolated and small, but continual. In 1822 two white men were ambushed and killed while bringing corn up the Colorado River by raft. A company of colonists led by Robert Kuykendall, intent on retaliation, gathered near a Karankawa settlement on Skull Creek, a lowland tributary of the Colorado. Young volunteer John H. Moore crept close to the camp and heard “the beating of bamboo root” used to make a sort of bread. Then came the sound of a child crying.
Moore returned to the company of twenty-two men and told them what he had found. “We made our way to the bottom, got between the creek and the Indians, and surprised them, driving them out into the prairie,” he said. The Texians fired their long rifles, mowing down the men, women, and children who ran into the clearing. “Twenty-three were left dead, without the loss of any of the whites,” Moore said. The Texians, who had no provisions, scalped the Indians and ate their food. “We all felt it was an act of justice and self-preservation,” Moore said. It may also have been monumental. “This was,” Moore said, “the first [major] fight with the Indians in Austin’s colony.”
Despite such a resounding victory, Kuykendall and John Jackson Tumlinson, alcalde of the Colorado District, thought settlers needed more help. In early 1823 they wrote the Mexican provincial governor seeking permission to raise a volunteer company for the “protection that we so much need.” With the governor’s approval, they formed a ten-man squad commanded by a U.S. Army veteran named Moses Morrisson—“a young man of worth and bravery,” Tumlinson wrote. Later in 1823, Stephen F. Austin proposed the hiring of men to “act as rangers for the common defense,” augmenting the militia. Many therefore consider Morrisson’s men the first Texas Rangers.
They were by no means aristocrats, but neither were they blackhearted gunslingers or the sort of grifting flotsam that tended to drift into the West and disappear. Young to middle-aged and possessed of roving ambition, they were second- and third-generation Americans attracted to Texas by the lure of property and the chance for a fresh start. Morrisson, thirty, had lived in Missouri. John Smith was a twenty-eight-year-old farmer with one horse. Pumpry Burnett, in his late twenties, had journeyed to Texas from Tennessee. Samuel Sims, in his early thirties, was a land surveyor who had been born in Tennessee. William Kingston, one of twelve children, came from Illinois. Caleb Bostwick had been a carpenter in New York. John McCrosky, thirty, was a farmer, as was Jessie Robinson, twenty-three. Others in the company were John Frazer, listed in district records as a forty-one-year-old farmer and schoolmaster, and Aron Linville, a forty-one-year-old farmer. The men, who wore no uniforms, furnished their own horses and muzzle-loaded long rifles. They apparently received no special training.
However historic, their venture as proto-Rangers was less than auspicious. Though assigned to build blockhouses—small forts made of logs—at the mouth of the Colorado River, they spent much of their time hunting for something to eat. Two months into their mission the blockhouses remained unbuilt. “We are obliged continually to keep a party out Hunting as we cannot procure provisions from the settlement,” Morrisson reported. The men had nearly exhausted their meager stocks of ammunition, so they could neither defend themselves nor kill more game for food. They were ordered to return to their settlements, and there is no record that they were ever paid for their service.
Worse, the two pioneers instrumental in the formation of these early Rangers soon met with misfortune. Tumlinson, the alcalde, was en route to San Antonio to secure aid and ammunition when Waco Indians ambushed and killed him. Kuykendall, whom some consider the captain of these first Rangers, suffered blindness and paralysis after he was struck in the head—perhaps by a tomahawk—during a subsequent fight with Karankawas. A frontier doctor treated him by drilling a hole in his skull, a technique known as a trepan that dates to prehistoric times. It worked about as well for him as it worked for the cave people. Kuykendall died at age forty.
Over the next few years, companies similar to Morrisson’s formed and disbanded erratically. Skirmishes with the Karankawas occurred so frequently that settlers took to shooting the Indians on sight. The beleaguered tribe, with the help of a Catholic priest, reached a peace agreement with the colonists. The Indians agreed to abandon their original territory along the lower Brazos, Lavaca, and Colorado Rivers—land the whites wanted—and stay west of the Guadalupe River. But the arrangement did not work, and the Indians began drifting back onto their old turf. Responding to settlers’ complaints, Austin wrote to a Mexican official in 1825, claiming that the Karankawas had broken the peace agreement. “I have been compelled in view of the security of our people,” Austin wrote, “to give positive orders to the Lieutenant of the Militia . . . to pursue and kill all those Indians wherever they are found.”
Austin’s instructions were fulfilled in a climactic 1830 battle near the mouth of the Colorado. Karankawas had raided the farm of Charles Cavinagh, an original settler in Austin’s colony. They killed his wife and three daughters, as well as a young girl who was visiting. A force of about sixty Texians, men who could be seen as another slice of Ranger ancestry, trailed the Indians to their camp on the river’s low, wooded banks.
The commander of the original band of Rangers, Moses Morrisson, crawled to a small plateau overlooking the unaware Karankawas—a strategic vantage until the ground gave way and he tumbled into the Indian camp. J. W. Wilbarger, in his 1889 collection Indian Depredations in Texas, gave this account of the ensuing battle: Morrisson “clung to his gun . . . and crawled into a hole in the bank, where he fought and killed five of the Indians.” Hearing the gunfire, the rest of the Texians charged the camp. “The Indians had their squaws and papooses with them, and some of them were killed by the promiscuous firing that ensued,” Wilbarger wrote. Those Karankawas who were not hit plunged in panic into the river and swam to the other side. The Texians reloaded and fired again at the fleeing Indians. “Even after they had succeeded in reaching the opposite shore many were shot and fell back into the stream,” Wilbarger said. “An eyewitness of the scene says that the river was literally red with blood.” The Texians had killed about fifty Karankawa men, women, and children.
Wilbarger’s rendition may have been inflated—a common complaint against him—but there is no doubt the tribe now had entered its death spiral. About thirty-five or forty who weren’t slain were forced to work as field slaves for the settlers. Some colonists, it was said, took women home as sex prisoners—though the Texas men referred to them as “housekeepers.” Other members of the tribe succumbed to alcohol or disease. And, according to Texian lore, a few surviving warriors murdered their women and children, then retreated to a hidden island. There they wailed in grief and starved themselves to death.
Before long, the Karankawas were all but extinct, fulfilling Stephen F. Austin’s prophecy: the extermination within decades of a people who had lived there for millennia.
The Anglo empire of Texas now began to assume its natal shape. But from the settlers’ perspective, many other tribes needed elimination before the nascent empire could expand and thrive. The Texas Rangers would be built for that.