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VOL. XVI*

JULY, 1912

No. 1

The publication committee and the editors disclaim responsibility for views expressed by contributors to THE QUARTERLY.

THE SPANISH OCCUPATION OF TEXAS, 1519-1690

HERBERT E. BOLTON

*

I. INTRODUCTORY

For a century and a half before they made definite attempts to occupy the region now called Texas the Spaniards gradually explored it, proceeding step by step from the borders toward the interior, and slowly formed ideas concerning its geography and its suitability for settlement. Viewed in this light, the final occupation of Texas at the end of the seventeenth century was by no means the sudden event, brought about by the chance settlement of the French on the Gulf coast, which it was once thought to be.

Though it is not commonly known, Texas had its share in the romance, and myth, and fable which everywhere attended the Spanish conquest in America. In Florida the Spaniards sought the Fountain of Youth; in South America the Gilded Man (El Dorado); on the west coast of Mexico the Isle of the Amazons; in Arizona and New Mexico the Seven Cities of Cíbola; on the California coast the Strait of Anian.1 Likewise, in Texas they searched for the Kingdom of Gran Quivira, where "everyone had their ordinary dishes made of wrought plate, and the jugs and bowls

*Volumes I-XV published as THE QUARTERLY of the Texas State Historical Association.

'Bandelier, The Gilded Man, passim.

were of gold"; for the Seven Hills of the Aijados, or Aixaos, where gold was so plentiful that "the natives not knowing any of the other metals, make of it everything they need, such as vessels and the tips of arrows and lances";2 for the Sierra (or Cerro) de la Plata (Silver Mountain), somewhere north of the Rio Grande;3 for the pearls of the Jumano country; and for the "Great Kingdom of the Texas," a people who, like the Jumanos, had been miraculously converted by the woman in blue, who lived next door to the Kingdom of Gran Quivira, were ruled by a powerful lord, had well built towns, each several miles in length, and raised grain in such abundance that they even fed it to their horses." All these various quests and beliefs had made the Texas country an object of interest to the Spaniards long before it became a field for political contest with France.

II. FOUR LINES OF APPROACH TO TEXAS, 1519-1678

There were four lines of approach to Spanish Texas, through the development of which a knowledge of the region was gradually unfolded: (1) From the east and south, by way of the Gulf of Mexico; (2) from the east, by way of the vast region known in early days as La Florida; (3) from the west and southwest, by way of New Mexico and Nueva Vizcaya; and (4) from the south, through the expansion of Nuevo León and Coahuila.

'Castañeda, Narrative, translated by Winship, in Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, I, 493.

Niel, Apuntamientos, in Documentos para la Historia de Mexico, Tercera Serie, tomo iv, 92. See also Benavides, Memorial, in Land of Sunshine, xiv, 139-140.

"Un cerro dicen que hay, que llaman el de La Plata, incognito a los que hoy viven, tambien lo seria a los pasados; es hacia el Norte." (León, Historia de Nuevo León [Mexico, 1909], 84. Diego Ramón explored the Cerro de la Platta, at the order of the viceroy, sometime before 1703. Hidalgo, Fray Francisco, "Relacion de la Quivira" [MS], 65.)

'See page 10.

"See note 4 page 8 for a statement concerning the miraculous conversion of various tribes in Texas.

"Declaration of Juan Sabeata before Governor Cruzate, of New Mexico, at El Paso del Rio del Norte, October 20, 1683. MS.

1. By way of the Gulf

In the course of the exploration of the Gulf coast and the search for a strait through the newly found land mass to the East Indies, Pineda, in the employ of Garay, governor of Jamaica, in 1519 ran the coast from Florida to Pánuco (Tampico) and back, and made a map which shows with substantial accuracy the entire shore line of Texas. Two years later, on the basis of this exploration, Garay was granted a province, called Amichel, comprising the whole Gulf coast from modern Alabama to Tampico, which he attempted to colonize at its southern extremity. In this he was forestalled by the master conquistador himself, Cortes, who in 1522 founded a villa at Pánuco.2 By 1528 two expeditions from this place explored the coasts northward beyond the Rio Bravo, or Rio Grande. On a later expedition, made in 1544, it is said, Father Olmos took back and settled at Pánuco the tribe of the Olives, thought by some to have been secured on Texas soil. In 1553 more than three hundred survivors of a wrecked treasure fleet were cast on the Texas shore five days' march north of the Rio Grande, and escaped toward Pánuco. In 1558 an expedition destined to colonize Florida was led from Vera Cruz by Bazares. In latitude 27° 30' he landed on the Texas shore; coasting eastward, in latitude 28° 30', he discovered and took possession of a bay which he called San Francisco, and which may have been the modern Matagorda Bay. Thereafter occasional voyages were made along the northern shores of the Gulf; but the Texas coast, instead of being one of the first portions of the Gulf shore to be colonized, as it would have been had Garay succeeded, was destined to be nearly the last, its settlement being deferred still two centuries after Garay's day.

'Lowery, The Spanish Settlements within the Present Limits of the United States, 149-153; Navarette, Colección de Viages, iii, 147-153, where the Pineda map is reproduced.

"Called San Estévan del Puerto. Bancroft, Mexico, II, 94-101.

'Prieto, Alejandro, Historia, Geografía y Estadística del Estado de Tamaulipas (Mexico, 1873), 16, 60; Bancroft, Mexico, II, 267; Orozco y Berra, Manuel, Geografía de las Lenguas, 293, 296; Shea, J. G., History of the Catholic Missions (1855), 45-46; Vetancur, Crónica (1697), 92. There is a confusion of the names of Olmedo and Olmos in this connection.

'Lowery, Spanish Settlements, 352-357. Barcía, Ensayo Cronologico, fol. 28 et seq.; Shea, op. cit., 49.50.

2. By way of Florida

Incident to the early attempts to explore and conquer La Florida from the east, the survivors of two shattered expeditions, seeking refuge in the settlements of Mexico, entered what is now Texas, crossed large stretches of its territory, and gained the first knowledge sent to Europe of the southern and northeastern interiors. As has been intimated, so far as the crossing of Texas is concerned, both of these explorations were accidental.

Reference is made, of course, to the well known journeys of Cabeza de Vaca and Moscoso. In 1528 Cabeza de Vaca and some two hundred companions, survivors of the Florida expedition led by Narváez, were cast on the southeastern shore of Texas. After spending six years on Texas soil, and enduring the hardships of enslavement by the Indians, Vaca and three others made their way westward across the whole southwestern border of the present state of Texas, entered northern Chihuahua, and finally reached Culiacán, in Sinaloa. In 1542 Moscoso led the survivors of the De Soto expedition into Texas near the northeastern corner, westward or southwestward to a point thought by Mr. Lewis to have been in the upper Brazos, and back across the Red River by essentially the same route.2 This journey gave the Spaniards some knowledge of the geography of northeastern Texas and of the Caddoan group of Indians then, as later, inhabiting the region. It is remarkable, in this connection, that a map based on Moscoso's exploration shows the Nondacau, Nisone, Ays, and Guasco tribes in the same general location as that in which they were found a century and a half later.3

3. By way of New Mexico

The third line of approach, that from the west and southwest through New Mexico, was till the later seventeenth century the

'Bandelier, The Journey of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (Trail Makers series); Hodge, The Narrative of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, in Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528-1543. For various critical articles relative to the route of Cabeza de Vaca, see the early files of THE QUARTERLY.

With regard to the district traversed the present writer hopes to have something to say at a later time.

Lewis, The Narrative of the Expedition of Hernando de Soto, by the Gentleman of Elvas, in Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528-1543.

principal one, and for this reason until 1685 western Texas was much better known than the southern portion, lying nearer Mexico, or than the eastern portion, commonly regarded as "old" Texas.

The Coronado expedition.-Just before the Moscoso party entered northeastern Texas, another band, led by Coronado, entered its northwestern border. Coronado had come, by way of the Pacific Slope, to New Mexico in search of the Seven Cities of Cíbola. Disappointed at what he found, and hearing while in the Rio Grande valley of a great kingdom called Quivira to the northeast, he set out in search of it across the Llanos del Cíbolo (Buffalo Plains), going, it is believed, from the upper Pecos River southeastward to the upper Colorado, thence north across the Brazos, Red, Canadian and Arkansas rivers, eastward into central Kansas, and directly back to the Pecos. In the course of the expedition, northwestern Texas was traversed in four distinct paths, and the Spaniards learned of the Llanos del Cíbolo and of the wandering tribes of Plains Indians who followed the buffalo for subsistence.1

Incidental crossing of southwestern Texas.-After the Coronado expedition interest in our Southwest lagged for nearly four decades, when the Spaniards again gave it their attention, this time approaching it by way of the central Mexican plateau, across what is now northern Chihuahua and up the Rio Grande or the Pecos. In the course of the renewed exploration and the colonization of New Mexico, in the last two decades of the sixteenth century, several expeditions incidentally crossed the western extremity of Texas, between the Pecos and the Rio Grande. Of these expeditions the ones best known are those made by Father Rodríguez in 1581, Espéjo in 1582, Castaño de Sosa in 1590, Bonilla and Humaña about 1595, and Juan de Oñate, the colonizer of New Mexico, in 1598.2 All this region was then a part of New Mexico, and the exploration of it was made chiefly incident to the development and exploitation of the more interesting Pueblo region in the upper Rio Grande valley.

'Winship, George Parker, The Coronado Expedition; Castañeda, Narrative of the Expedition of Coronado, edited by Hodge, in Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528-1543. The route, as outlined above, is that marked out by Hodge, op. cit., map.

"Bancroft, Arizona and New Mexico, 74-128; De León, Historia de Nuevo León, 92-95; Niel, Apuntamientos, 91-92.

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