Texas’s first governor is caught in an East Texas snowstorm (DRAWING BY JACK JACKSON)
ANGRY GOVERNOR AND MAN WITH A MISSION
The year 1691 marked the death of Alonso de León and the appointment of Domingo Terán de los Ríos as the first governor of Texas. One of the most dedicated soldiers in the early history of Texas would be replaced by a man who was far less able. Not many people in the present Lone Star State can name our first governor, and probably with good reason. Terán did not like Texas any better than most readers will like him. In fact, Terán came to hate Texas and everything about it. At the earliest opportunity, he headed back to Mexico. On the other hand, Father Francisco Hidalgo was a priest who truly loved Texas and its Indian population. This dedicated missionary made work among the Tejas of East Texas his passionate interest for most of his adult life. In looking at these early Texans, we see two men who could not have been much more different.
On January 23, 1691, Domingo Terán was chosen as the first governor of the province then known as Tejas. Terán should have been well suited for the job, because he already had experience as a frontier governor. Before accepting the Texas assignment, he had served as the chief executive of both Sinaloa and Sonora.
As governor of these provinces in northern Mexico, Terán had fought a number of Indian wars, and he showed a talent for discovering rich silver mines. Success had made him a very arrogant and bad-tempered man. Terán saw governing Texas, which was much poorer than Sinaloa and Sonora, as beneath his abilities.
Terán’s instructions as governor of Texas ordered him to set up eight missions among the Tejas natives and their neighbors. He was to resupply Mission San Francisco de los Tejas; he was to make sure there were no Frenchmen to the east of the mission; and he was to explore the country as thoroughly as possible.
The new governor was particularly upset that he had to share leadership of the expedition with Father Damián Massanet, who had founded Mission San Francisco in the previous year. Terán had command of the soldiers, but Massanet was in charge of the missionaries. When it came to setting up the eight missions, the governor could do nothing without the full approval of the priest. This restriction greatly irritated Terán, and he wrote the viceroy in protest. Still, Terán promised to do his best to make the expedition of 1691 a success.
Because Terán had orders to explore rivers and bays along the coast, he was to be supported by two ships. Those vessels were to sail from the port of Veracruz to Matagorda Bay, where the governor would make contact with them. The ships would also bring extra supplies, as well as fifty soldiers under the command of Captain Gregorio de Salinas Varona.
Terán himself left Coahuila on the march to Texas on May 16, 1691. In his party were fifty soldiers, ten priests, and three religious helpers for the missionaries. Terán’s second in command was Captain Francisco Martínez. Like all of Spain’s early expeditions into Texas, this one drove great herds of cattle, sheep, and goats. The animals would provide livestock for the new missions, and they could be butchered as needed if the Spaniards could not kill buffaloes for meat.
The plan was for the two ships to arrive at Matagorda Bay toward the end of April, and Francisco Martínez was to meet them at the bay with twenty soldiers. But in this day and age it was impossible to have good communication between the northern frontier of Mexico and the port of Veracruz. Terán ran into unexpected delays in Coahuila and did not leave for Texas until mid-May. So already timing was a problem.
Terán did not cross the Río Grande and reach Texas soil until late May. By 1691 the earlier expeditions of Alonso de León had named many of the rivers, as well as the province of Tejas itself. Terán was so filled with self-importance that he decided to rename every river and creek he crossed, as well as the province itself. He began by calling the Río Grande the Río del Norte (River of the North). The Nueces River became the San Diego, and so it went.
Early on, the 1691 expedition came to the site of present-day San Antonio. There Terán stopped on the banks of a small stream that was lined with cypress and oak trees. Peaceful Indians camped nearby, and the governor remarked that the location would be an ideal place to set up a mission. So Terán deserves credit for discovering this important spot in Texas, which he named San Antonio de Padua.
The Spaniards then continued on to the Guadalupe River near present-day New Braunfels, where they encountered some two thousand Indians on horseback. These natives, mostly Jumanos and Cíbolos, had recently visited East Texas. They carried news from Mission San Francisco de los Tejas, and much of it was bad.
Smallpox raged at the mission, and one of the three Franciscan priests had died of a fever during the previous winter. The Jumanos and Cíbolos seemed to be familiar with Christianity, because many of them wore religious items such as the images of saints and crosses. Nevertheless, in the middle of the night there was a stampede resulting in the loss of fifty Spanish horses. In the morning, the Indians were suspiciously gone. Terán blamed the Jumanos and Cíbolos for the loss of his mounts, and the incident did not improve his attitude toward Indians.
Near present-day Austin, Terán camped on the Colorado River for more than two weeks. During that time, Francisco Martínez took a troop of twenty soldiers and marched off to Matagorda Bay to meet the two supply ships. But the ships, which were supposed to have been there by late April, had not arrived.
Martínez waited at the bay for five days. During that time, he found two French children, Jean-Baptiste Talon and Eustache Bréman, who had been kidnapped from La Salle’s colony by Karankawa Indians. Both of the children, like those found by Alonso de León, were covered with tattoos and had to be ransomed for horses and tobacco.
By this time, it was near mid-July, and the ships were still not in view. On July 12 Martínez gathered up the two children and began the march back to the Colorado River. On the afternoon of that very day, the two ships dropped anchor at Matagorda Bay. Missing the connection with the supply vessels by a matter of hours would cause no end of trouble and worry for Domingo Terán.
When Captain Martínez reached the main camp on the Colorado, he asked permission to return to the bay immediately. His request sparked a heated argument between Terán and Massanet. The priest insisted that there be no more delays in setting out for East Texas. This was especially important, since bad conditions were known to exist at Mission San Francisco de los Tejas.
Massanet reminded the governor that in matters relating to the missions he held the upper hand. So Terán was forced to break camp and continue the march toward East Texas. The pace was too slow, however, to suit the missionaries, and they complained bitterly about it. On this portion of the journey, it is important to remember that the Terán-Massanet expedition did not follow the Camino Real, the King’s Highway established by Alonso de León. Instead, it traveled to the north of the old road.
Because of the delays caused by the unsuccessful march to Matagorda Bay, it was late July into early August, and the weather was hot and dry. Nevertheless, the expedition faced swarms of mosquitoes night and day. As it approached East Texas, the weeds and trees were loaded with bloodsucking ticks and itchy chiggers. It was so dry that even a river as large as the Brazos had almost no water, and what still ran was “more salty than the sea.”
In the drought and heat of the Texas summer, the large herds of sheep and goats that accompanied the expedition began to die of thirst and exhaustion. Terán slowed the pace to try to save as many animals as possible, but this decision greatly irritated Father Massanet.
When the expedition reached the Trinity River, the priests refused to stop and camp there. Instead, the padres pushed on without permission toward Mission San Francisco de los Tejas. Among the nine missionaries recruited by Massanet was a young and enthusiastic priest named Francisco Hidalgo. For Hidalgo, his true calling as a missionary to the Indians of East Texas was about to begin. Needless to say, the lonely padres at Mission San Francisco were delighted at the arrival of their Franciscan brothers.
The priests who stayed at San Francisco de los Tejas in 1690 had set up a second religious outpost named Santísimo Nombre de María, about five miles east of the original mission. But the Tejas Indians did not respond well to either of the missions. At no time would the natives agree to live away from their own houses and villages.
In a short time, Terán and the full expedition arrived at the location of the first Spanish mission in East Texas. The governor camped in one of the few open areas among the pines of East Texas, but the undergrowth and nearby trees were again loaded with bothersome insects. In the heat of August, Terán came to hate this primitive campsite, and he was determined to leave the province as quickly as possible.
Terán’s best hope of a quick retreat from Texas lay at Matagorda Bay. Surely, he reasoned, the supply ships must be there by now. But ever since the Río Grande crossing back in May, almost no rain had fallen during the Texas summer. Because there was little grass for the horses, almost all of the animals were too weak to ride.
When the expedition finally reached its destination in East Texas, Terán had planned to rest the horses and let them graze to regain their strength. Unfortunately, the summer drought was so severe that the countryside had been stripped of vegetation by vast herds of buffaloes. So when the governor left for the coast, most of his soldiers either walked or rode more hardy mules. Accordingly, it was a sorry-looking group of men who set out for Matagorda Bay.
Terán traveled west to the Guadalupe River on the Camino Real, established in the late 1680s by Alonso de León. Still, he complained about everything. The old route was so crooked, in his words, that “only a sleepwalker could have opened such a road.” Upon reaching the Guadalupe, the governor left the trail and began the final leg of the march toward Matagorda Bay.
As he marched toward the Texas coast, Terán began to think of a way to get out of Texas, quickly and for good. If the ships were not in the bay, he intended to follow the coast back to Mexico. Should the ships be there, he would get aboard one of the vessels and sail to Mexico.
The ships were indeed anchored in Matagorda Bay, where they had been since narrowly missing contact with Francisco Martínez back in mid-July. Far from being able to board one of the ships, Terán had orders from the viceroy to return to East Texas. Once there, he was to explore lands northward to the Red River.
Terán added the fifty men brought aboard the two ships to his command and began the march back to East Texas, which he had hoped never to lay eyes on again. He left the bay on September 27, and the drought continued for several more days. And then rain came in torrents, as it often does in October.
Texas’s first governor is caught in an East Texas snowstorm (DRAWING BY JACK JACKSON)
Beyond the Brazos River, Terán and his men had to slog through a sea of mud. They waited days for streams to go down, so the men and animals could cross safely. Everywhere what had recently been dry and dusty soil had been replaced by what seemed like endless marshes.
When the governor finally reached the second mission in East Texas, he was in a black mood. His best hope was to carry out the viceroy’s orders as quickly as possible and then leave Texas. So Terán hastily organized an expedition to the Red River, and it left on November 6.
Father Massanet accompanied the Red River outing, and he had high hopes of setting up several missions along the banks of the river. This, however, was a troubled march, hampered by freezing rain and more than a foot of snow. Within a week, both horses and mules began to play out, and Terán was afraid that his entire army would soon be on foot.
There was so much rain and melting snow that the Sabine River ran at flood stage. When he reached this stream, Terán had to build a wooden bridge to cross it. Two days later he had to construct a second bridge to cross open water. This was followed by three straight days of freezing rain that brought the expedition to a standstill.
Leaving most of his men in a makeshift camp, Terán chose a few of the strongest and pushed on to the Red River. There he found Kadohadacho villages and determined that these natives were willing to become Christians. However, the weather was so bad that even Father Massanet agreed that he could not set up a single mission.
The return march to the encampment began on December 8. Because of melting snow, Terán recorded even worse conditions than on the outward trek. Twenty of the mules died, and the rest were too weak to ride. So the proud Spaniards were forced to travel on foot through rain, mud, and snow. Bridges they had already built on the outward march were covered with water, and new ones had to be built. Then the expedition was hit by a new batch of freezing rain and snow. It finally staggered into Mission Santísimo Nombre de María on December 30, 1691. This entire march makes one tired just reading about it.
In early January 1692, Terán made preparations for another march to Matagorda Bay. He had formed such negative impressions of East Texas that he believed the area was not fit for human habitation.
After resting a few days, Terán demanded fresh mounts from the horse herd at Mission San Francisco. When the padres refused to hand them over, the governor rounded up the animals and took them anyway. His actions sparked terrible arguments with Father Massanet and worsened already bad relations. However, when Terán set out for Matagorda Bay on January 9, 1692, six of the Franciscans left with him. These missionaries had found life in East Texas too discouraging.
This second march to the bay was much worse than the earlier trek. The ice and snow of the previous December had melted and flooded streams. It took the governor and his party ten days just to cross the Trinity River. There followed days of slogging through mud and standing water. Meanwhile, Terán’s scouts brought back reports that the “country ahead resembled an immense sea.”
Terán’s army encountered such heavy rains that the men could not find dry wood to build campfires or warm themselves. Soldiers had to eat cold food and sleep in wet clothing, and then the fresh horses taken from the mission began to play out. So the footsore soldiers had to walk. Terán himself became increasingly angry and declared the country so bad that “no rational [sane] person has ever seen a worse one.”
Terán’s attitude hardly improved upon reaching the Navasota River. The stream was so swollen that he had to build rafts. Then, in attempting a crossing, Terán’s craft overturned, dumping him and his baggage into icy water. The expedition finally reached its goal, arriving at Matagorda Bay on March 5.
Terán had seen quite enough of Texas. He boarded one of the two ships for a quick return to Mexico, but his troubles were far from over. While waiting in the bay for favorable winds and tides, six men drowned in a boating accident. When the ships finally tried to get underway, the men on board found the vessels trapped in mud. To free them, it was necessary to lighten the cargo by throwing sea chests, barrels of powder, and gun carriages overboard. This worked, and after a brief voyage to the mouth of the Mississippi River, the ships ran with the wind toward Mexico. On April 15, 1692, Texas’s first governor arrived at the port of Veracruz and once again set foot on the soil of Mexico.
Francisco Martínez did not have the good luck to return home by ship. He had to march the soldiers and priests back to Coahuila by land, which he successfully did. Because Martínez had been with León on two of his marches into Texas, he probably used the Guadalupe River crossing near present-day Victoria and then continued on to Monclova, Coahuila. He arrived there well after Terán had stepped ashore at Veracruz.
Domingo Terán de los Ríos did very little to earn recognition for himself in Texas history. He was ordered to found eight new missions but established none. In fact, he weakened Mission San Francisco de los Tejas by forcibly taking many of its healthy horses. Don Domingo also did not investigate lands to the east to see if Frenchmen were there, as he was likewise ordered to do. Worse, his impressions of Texas were so negative that they helped keep Spaniards out of the province for years to come.
As mentioned early in this chapter, Terán applied new names to almost every creek, river, and campsite he encountered in Texas. He even suggested a new name for the province. Tejas, named after Indians in East Texas, was not good enough for a self-important governor. Instead, don Domingo suggested that Texas be named Nueva Montaña de Santander y Santillana.
Fortunately Terán’s suggestion was ignored, for if accepted it would have messed up Texas legends and songs beyond repair. Can you imagine Big John Wayne in a western movie having to say, “Now you listen up, pilgrim! I’m from Nueva Montaña de Santander y Santillana, and we don’t tolerate that down there”? Or how about having to sing “The eyes of Nueva Montaña de Santander y Santillana are upon you,” or, even worse, “The stars at night are big and bright, deep in the heart of N.M. de S. y S.”? In the end, Spanish officials displayed good sense. They stayed with “Tejas,” which eventually came to be spelled “Texas.”
Let us now turn our attention from Domingo Terán to a good man who truly loved Texas and its native population. In Texas history, he is far more important than our ill-tempered first governor. This “man with a mission” remained at San Francisco de los Tejas in 1692. He, perhaps more than anyone else, would make certain that Texas remained Spanish, not French.
Although Francisco Hidalgo is Texas’s most dedicated missionary, we know very little about his early life. He was born in Spain, most likely in 1659, and probably was an orphan. At fifteen he chose to enter the Franciscan Order and later became a priest.
In 1683 Father Hidalgo crossed the Atlantic to help set up a college of Franciscans at Querétaro, a town located about ninety miles to the northwest of Mexico City. The college, named Santa Cruz (Holy Cross), was founded to help spread the Catholic faith among Indians in the New World.
Using Querétaro as his base, Hidalgo began to preach in the raw mining towns that were nearby. He evidently had great skills as a speaker, and at times he attracted enthusiastic listeners numbering more than three thousand. Father Francisco also had great success in getting sinners to change their evil ways. One of his fellow priests remarked that Hidalgo was so skilled as a preacher that he could settle long-standing feuds between individuals and their families. Wherever he went to preach, he brought forth “general confessions … on every hand.”
Father Hidalgo Preaches to the Indians of East Texas (DRAWING BY JACK JACKSON)
In his sermons, Father Francisco revealed the talents of a gifted teacher. He told appropriate stories and used simple illustrations that were easily understood by his audiences. His sermons, nonetheless, were so moving and powerful that those seeking forgiveness were often reduced to floods of tears.
Some five years after his arrival in Mexico, Hidalgo decided to carry his Christian message to the northern frontier town of Monclova in Coahuila. Along the way, he learned to live off the land and toughen his body by sleeping on the ground when it became dark.
From Monclova, Hidalgo moved on to a mining camp called Boca de Leones (Mouth of Lions) in Nuevo León. Most of the men at Boca de Leones worked in nearby silver mines, but Father Hidalgo “sought a different kind of wealth.” His goal, simply stated, was to convert all Indians to the Catholic faith.
While at Boca de Leones, Hidalgo was joined on the frontier by his fellow Franciscan, Damián Massanet. Father Damián soon founded a new mission about halfway between the mining camp and Monclova. This religious outpost was called Mission San Bernardino de Caldera, and it was from here that Massanet was called upon to join Alonso de León in the search for La Salle’s colony in 1689.
Francisco Hidalgo was not permitted to join the León-Massanet expedition of the following year, which established the first Spanish mission in East Texas. Instead, his Franciscan superiors assigned him to a new outpost that was an offshoot of Mission Caldera. However, when Domingo Terán led ten priests into Texas in 1691, Father Hidalgo was one of that number. Once he reached East Texas, Hidalgo knew he had found his calling among the Tejas Indians, and he would not think of leaving the mission in 1692. When Domingo Terán left on his second march to Matagorda Bay, Hidalgo was not one of the six Franciscans who departed with him.
When Terán and Francisco Martínez reached Mexico, the Spanish knew they would have to quickly resupply the four priests who had remained in East Texas. By then, however, only San Francisco de los Tejas remained. The same floods in early 1692 that made travel so unpleasant for don Domingo and his army had washed away the second religious outpost.
Chosen to lead the supply expedition was Gregorio de Salinas Varona, the newly appointed governor of Coahuila. Salinas was a good choice for the job, because he had served under Alonso de León in 1690 and Terán after Salinas’s arrival at Matagorda Bay with the two ships in 1691. His journey to East Texas was along the Camino Real marked by León, because that was the only route he knew.
The Salinas party reached Mission San Francisco on June 8, 1693, and made a quick turnabout. After just six days, Salinas headed home along the same road. Half of the priests in East Texas had become completely discouraged by the reluctance of the Tejas Indians to accept the Christian message. The natives would not attend Mass, and they had come to believe that the baptismal waters were fatal. This mistaken belief was rooted in the Indian observation that when missionaries applied holy water to the heads of critically ill Indians (called last rites), the natives almost always died soon thereafter.
Since the Indians understandably refused to live at the missions or give up their old ways of life, religious work among them required lots of patience and faith on the part of the Franciscan padres. Fathers Hidalgo and Massanet had those qualities, but two of their fellow missionaries did not. When Salinas took the road back to Mexico, two of the four Franciscans departed with him. That left only Hidalgo, Massanet, and a few soldiers to carry on the work of the mission and keep a Spanish presence in East Texas.
The two priests knew their situation was shaky, and Father Massanet quickly wrote the viceroy, asking for help. In his letter, Massanet stated that unless certain conditions were met and met soon, the entire mission project would have to be abandoned. He called for a presidio to be built near the mission and staffed with enough soldiers to protect the priests and enforce discipline on the Indians.
On August 31, 1693, the viceroy and his advisers decided that it would be too expensive to build a presidio in far-off Texas and staff it with soldiers. Since all efforts to bring the Christian message to the Tejas had so far failed, Salinas must make still another march to East Texas. The purpose of this expedition would be to close down Mission San Francisco and bring the two missionaries safely back to Mexico.
The rescue effort, however, never reached Texas. Salinas was delayed by bad weather, and at the same time relations with the Tejas became dangerous. Led by their chief, named Bernardino by the Spanish, the Indians threatened bloody rebellion if the Spanish did not leave.
Even Hidalgo and Massanet had to admit failure. Secretly, they and the soldiers packed sacred objects and buried military cannons. On the night of October 25, 1693, Mission San Francisco de los Tejas was set on fire by the priests themselves. Burning the mission may seem strange, but it ensured that the Christian chapel would not be profaned (misused) by the natives.
As flames consumed the mission, Hidalgo, Massanet, and a few companions fled in the night toward the safety of the coast. Unfortunately, this small group of Spaniards did not have an experienced guide. They wandered in the wilds of Texas for forty days before one of the group finally got his bearings and led them to safety in Mexico. Spain’s first missionary effort in East Texas had ended on a very bad note.
Hidalgo and Massanet did not reach Monclova in Coahuila until February 17, 1694. Both priests were soon sent to their missionary college at Querétaro, and Texas was not occupied by Spaniards for the next twenty-two years. Part of the reason for this were the negative impressions of the province that were formed in the minds of men such as Texas’s first governor, Domingo Terán de los Ríos. Captain Gregorio de Salinas Varona shared that view. His experiences in Texas led him to remark that East Texas would not be a fit place for Spaniards to live, because in going there one would suffer “a thousand discomforts.”
This unfavorable view of Texas was not shared by Francisco Hidalgo. From the moment he left Texas in October 1693 until he returned in 1716, Father Hidalgo was truly a “man with a mission.” That “mission” was twofold—it was a goal and it was a commitment to work in his own mission among the Tejas Indians.
It took Hidalgo the better part of twenty-five years to accomplish those objectives. During that time, he never lost sight of bringing a Christian message back to the Tejas. In finally accomplishing that goal in 1716, Father Hidalgo’s actions bordered on treasonous relations with the French. That story and later years in the life of this dedicated missionary are best related in the following chapter on a French cavalier, Louis St. Denis, and his Spanish bride, Manuela Sánchez.
Materials used in preparing this chapter are described below. You can find more information about these sources in the Bibliography at the end of the book.
The best information on Domingo Terán may be found in Robert S. Weddle’s The French Thorn: Rival Explorers in the Spanish Sea, 1682 1762. Carlos E. Castañeda’s Our Catholic Heritage in Texas, 1519–1936 contains admiring words about Father Francisco Hidalgo. For Terán’s route across Texas, see William C. Foster’s Spanish Expeditions into Texas, 1689–1768. Donald E. Chipman and Harriett Denise Joseph’s Notable Men and Women of Spanish Texas has a more detailed biographical sketch of Hidalgo.
Quotes in this chapter are from the following sources: Robert S. Weddle, The French Thorn: Rival Explorers in the Spanish Sea, 1682–1762; Lino Gómez Cañedo, editor, Primeras exploraciones y poblamiento de Texas (1686–1694); Juan Domingo Arricivita, Crónica seráfica y apostólica del colegio de propaganda fide de la Santa Cruz de Querétaro en la Nueva España, Part 2; and Robert S. Weddle, San Juan Bautista: Gateway to Spanish Texas.