The French in Texas: History, Migration, Culture

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THE FRENCH IN TEXAS

FOCUS ON AMERICAN HISTORY SERIES CENTER FOR AMERICAN HISTORY UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN Edited by Don Carleton

THE FRENCH IN TEXAS History, Migration, Culture FRANÇOIS LAGARDE Editor

University of Texas Press, Austin

Publication of this work was made possible by the generous financial support of Essilor of America, Dallas. Additional financial support was provided by Tractebel Power, Houston.

Copyright © 2003 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2003 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819. ∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper).

L I B R A RY O F C O N G R E S S C ATA L O G I N G - I N - P U B L I C AT I O N D ATA

The French in Texas : history, migration, culture / François Lagarde, editor. p.

cm. — (Focus on American history series)

Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-292-74734-9 (cloth: alk. paper) — isbn 0-292-70528-x (pbk: alk paper) 1. French Americans —Texas—History.

2. French Americans—Migrations.

3. French Americans—Texas—Intellectual life. 5. Texas— Civilization.

4. Texas —History.

i. Lagarde, François, 1949 –

f395.f8 f74

2003

976.4'00441—dc21 2002008289

ii. Series.

Contents

Introduction FRANÇOIS LAGARDE

ix 1. The Wreck of Ships and Dreams: A New Look at the Explorer La Salle R O B E RT S . W E D D L E

1 2. Exploring the Texas Coast: Bellisle, Béranger, and La Harpe, 1719–1721 R O B E R T S . W E D D L E A N D PAT R I C I A R . L E M É E

20 3. Ambivalent Successes and Successful Failures: St. Denis, Aguayo, and Juan Rodríguez PAT R I C I A R . L E M É E

35 4. Athanase de Mézières and the French in Texas, 1750 –1803 F. T O D D S M I T H

46 5. French Pirates and Privateers in Texas R. DALE OLSON

60 6. Champ d’Asile, Texas BETJE BLACK KLIER

79 7. Heroes, Villains, Merchants, and Priests: The Alamo’s Frenchmen BETJE BLACK KLIER

98 8. Diplomacy, Commerce, and Colonization: Saligny and the Republic FRANÇOIS LAGARDE

107

9. Grounds for Emigration: Alsace at the Time of Henri Castro JANINE ERNY

124 10. Henri Castro and Castroville: Alsatian History and Heritage WAY N E M . A H R

128 11. French Catholic Missions in Texas, 1840 –1880: Propagation and Enterprise FRANÇOIS LAGARDE

142 12. Birth, Stock, and Work: French Immigration in Texas FRANÇOIS LAGARDE

157 13. French Artists in Texas M A RT H A U T T E R B A C K

178 14. Eugénie Lavender, née Aubanel: A Romantic on the Frontier M A RT H A U T T E R B A C K

192 15. Building Utopia in the Promised Land: Icarians and Fourierists in Texas J O N AT H A N B E E C H E R

197 16. Is There French Architecture in Texas? R I C H A R D C L E A RY

226 17. The Enduring Legacy of the French in Texas Education ANN MARIE CALDWELL

240 18. French Travelers in Texas: Identity, Myth, and Meaning from Joutel to Butor ALEXANDRA K. WETTLAUFER

255 19. “Grand Texas”: The Cajun Migration to Texas CARL A. BRASSEAUX

273

20. Raoul Josset and the 1936 Texas Centennial FRANÇOIS LAGARDE

287 21. Global Culture: French Economic Presence in Texas, Summer 2001 FRANÇOIS LAGARDE

293 Epilogue FRANÇOIS LAGARDE

309

Selected Bibliography 313 Contributors 321 Acknowledgments 323 Index 324

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Introduction FRANÇOIS LAGARDE

The French presence in Texas began more than three centuries ago, and that migration has continued ever since. But unlike German migration to the area, the French presence in Texas has been nearly invisible, so small that it takes a “Frog” to notice it. And except for Six Flags, the pirate Laffite, the Pig War, and perhaps Schlumberger or Alcatel, the history of French people in Texas is not well known today. This book tells that history. The boundaries of Texas were not well defined before the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, and equally ill-defined is the notion of who and what is “French.” French may refer to nationality, nativity, ethnicity, education, language, culture, parentage, allegiance, ownership, naturalization, and ancestry. An eighteenth-century, first-generation French explorer from Quebec, a 1910 Cajun from Beaumont, Texas, a black French citizen from Martinique, or a Parisian engineer of the past decade can all be called French, or francophone, but with quite different meanings. Today, one can encounter French citizens born in Texas from French nationals who have never been to France and do not speak a word of French, as well as people who have spent most of their lives in France but who are not French citizens. To be scientific, or even nationalistic, would reduce the definition of “French” to those only born and raised in France, but such a restriction would eliminate those who are not French by birth but by parentage, language, or culture. And since one does not wish to argue about illusory degrees of Frenchness, this book employs a broad interpretation, to include the French from France as well as their North American counterparts from Quebec to Louisiana and Texas. For the 1968 Hemisfair in San Antonio, the Institute of Texan Cultures published brochures on Texas “ethnic groups” (a somehow frightening expression), including a fine one entitled “The French Texans.” French Texan was better than Franco-Texan, considering that the institute had to match Hemisfair’s international flair with a multicultural, multi-ethnic history of Texas. The book included some individuals who were nativeborn first or second generation and therefore culturally American or Canadian and not French, as well as some French-born historical figures who had lived in Texas for only a few weeks. Some French Texans were rediscovered later, such as sculptors Raoul Josset and Emile Bourdelle or ix

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El Paso’s consular correspondent Jean-Marie Romagny. But the book brought together for the first time the French people who had left their imprint on Texas.1 In 1995, the remains of La Salle’s ship La Belle were found by archaeologists of the Texas Historical Commission, and the following year its cannons were uncovered, signs that a French past was being rediscovered. In March 2001, a symposium entitled “French in Texas: History, Migration, Culture” took place in Austin. There, “French” was related to everything French in Texas or about Texas, from the dreams and wrecks of La Salle, Champ d’Asile, and Reunion to the 1920s French pulp fiction on Texas cowboys and Indians, Alcatel’s growth in Dallas, Alliances Françaises, and the French campaign against the death penalty in Texas. In this book on the French in Texas we endeavor to offer a complete view of what some might think to be a minor note in the state’s history. But in truth, the French presence is woven deeply if subtly into the tapestry of Texas life and lore. It deserves further research, in particular on immigration during the twentieth century. The state seal of Texas displays each of the six national flags that have flown over the region during its history. The French flag is the second of the six, after Spain and before Mexico, and it recognizes La Salle’s landing at Matagorda Bay in 1685. Texas was French until La Salle died in 1687, and it became French for a second brief period —this time not represented on the fleur-de-lis flag — when Louisiana was returned to France in 1801 in the Treaty of Aranjuez and sold in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. These French claims on Texas were diplomatic and quite symbolic. But they bore important consequences on the history of Texas. After La Salle’s landing, the Spanish built missions and presidios in east Texas to stop the French from entering, and their actions had the effect of bringing Texas even more under Spanish control. Cavelier de La Salle became the first French official to reach Texas when in 1685 he led about 280 colonists. The extraordinary failure of this first French attempt to colonize Texas became a sort of Alamo in the historiography of La Salle and his companions, a defeat turned into a battle of heroes and martyrs. In the book’s overture, Robert S. Weddle portrays a dark and unflattering picture of La Salle, far removed from the legend and closer to the realities of Louis xiv’s century. The French continued trying to enter Texas by way of the Gulf coast but had little success, as Weddle and Patricia R. Lemée show in their precise histories of the explorers Bellisle, Béranger, and La Harpe. Many pioneers came at first from Nouvelle France, and the French entered Texas by land, from Natchitoches and the Red River. And as Lemée shows about Juchereau de St. Denis and F. Todd Smith about Athanase de Méz-

Introduction

xi

ières, the French and the Spanish collaborated more often than they fought when the latter controlled Louisiana after the Treaty of Paris. Unless war prevented it, trade and cultural exchange took place between these two European colonial powers and with some Indians during the eighteenth century. The French explorers and traders of colonial times were followed in Texas by adventurers seeking their fortunes in a land where force, rather than law, still ruled. R. Dale Olson offers an insightful portrait of the French pirates and privateers in Galveston during the 1810s. He does away with Laffite’s forged Journal and legend and follows the tortuous history of pirates Aury, Pierre and Jean Laffite, Lafon, Humbert, and You. Betje Blake Klier analyzes the tumultuous history of the exiled Bonapartists in east Texas in the light of diplomacy and world affairs and shows how opposition politics transformed Champ d’Asile into a French myth. France was the first country to recognize the independence of the Republic of Texas in 1839, yet the Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation did not bring an exchange of goods but instead a wave of immigration. Wayne M. Ahr shows that Alsatian-French migration to Texas began with the founding of Castroville in 1844 by Henri Castro’s colonists and that a cultural heritage has been preserved there until this day. The French ethnohistorian of Castroville, Janine Erny, outlines the living conditions in early–nineteenth-century Alsace that were grounds for outmigration. The French came at first as groups of colonists, exiles, missionaries, and socialist visionaries. Jonathan Beecher explains the splendid and failed history of the Icarians led by Etienne Cabet and of the Fourierists led by Victor Considerant, who attempted to build Utopia in the Promised Land. But if there is a French legacy of importance in Texas, it was bequeathed by the nineteenth-century French missionaries and nuns. French missionaries restored Catholicism in Texas after 1841. They built numerous churches and hospitals in a Texas that is today 25 percent Catholic. They also built schools and academies that evolved into today’s high schools and universities, and they made French instruction fashionable, as Ann Marie Caldwell shows. La Salle, Champ d’Asile, the pirates, and the socialists ended in relative failure; the first French group to succeed was that of the missionaries and the nuns. Not again until the second half of the twentieth century, when French economic activity would affect hundreds of thousands of Texans, would the French presence have close to the same level of influence. La Salle, St. Denis, Saligny, colonists, nineteenth-century immigrants, and engineers and entrepreneurs of today’s global market have come to

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Texas mainly for economic reasons. Work was, and remains, the principal pull for French migration to Texas. Texas was a land of colonization where new fortunes could be found, and Texans and Europeans often cooperated, in contrast to the French colonial enterprise in Africa and South Asia, where colonizers and colonized more often than not fell into conflict. French migration to Texas is less understood than its history, if only because most immigrants have remained anonymous. François Lagarde traces the flow and progress of that migration over the past two centuries. As with the concept of “French,” the notion of “immigration” shows different faces, whether the emigrant becomes an immigrant and whether he or she is French-born or first-generation native. Immigration is a metissage, a transitive process, the stuff for psychologists and novel writers, wrote René Rémond.2 Emigration and immigration are of course related, but they tend to produce two very distinct stories. Immigrants evolve and experience change, acculturation, assimilation, and often naturalization. They were French or Alsatian or Norman and became American or Texan. To emigrate, to cut one’s roots to a homeland, used to take up to three months by sea. Now, it takes a day by air. But it takes a lifetime, and even two generations, to immigrate. Today, more than before, French people migrate, or reside temporarily and move again, rather than immigrate, or stay and die in Texas. Carl Brasseaux maps out and explains “French- or Creole-speaking” immigration of Cajuns and Louisianians to oil- and university-rich Texas. French-born immigrants and American-born Cajuns share, in that sense, the same economic pull. If French immigration has overwhelmingly been more economic than cultural, some French culture may nevertheless be encountered in Texas. From universities and museums and a Consulat de France in Houston to French companies, schools, restaurants, antique shops, and Bastille Days, French culture is present today in Texas. French art also can be discovered in Texas, just as an abundance of French literature and imagery on Texas is to be found in France. Dominique de Menil and John Schlumberger brought to Houston a beautiful museum and much art and culture, but their fortune made them an exception. The French collections of Sarah Campbell Blaffer and Marion Koogler McNay helped establish museums in Houston and San Antonio. There were, and are, French painters in Texas, among them Théodore Gentilz and Eugénie Lavender, as Martha Utterback explains in rich detail. There have been architects including Paul Cret, who designed the University of Texas campus in Austin in the 1930s. But acculturation erases origins, and Richard Cleary asks pertinently whether there is French architecture in Texas. French travelers from Théodore Pavie to Simone de Beauvoir have written about Texas, and Alexandra Wettlaufer finds how French identity invents an In-

xiii

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dian or Texan Other that is exotic and imaginary. To conclude this march through time, François Lagarde sketches a portrait of the contemporary French economic presence in Texas and of its invisible but powerful hand. Some French figures of Texas history or ethnohistory could have been presented here in more detail. Jean Jarry deserted La Salle and became chief of the Coahuiltecan Indians. When found by de Leon in 1688, he proclaimed his identity with a loud “Me francés! Me católico!” which is exemplary. The story of the Talon children who came with La Salle and who were made prisoners and became culturally Indian is well known and need not be repeated, but others should be researched. Xavier Blanchard Debray, a graduate of Saint-Cyr Academy, emigrated in 1848 and led a popular Confederate regiment during the Civil War. He is buried a few feet away from Stephen Austin and Ashbel Smith in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin. Emmanuel Domenech wrote wonderful books about his life as a missionary and explorer in Texas and Mexico and deserves a full study. Dominique de Menil and especially Brother Marie-Alain Couturier, who initiated the Rothko Chapel in Houston, also deserve full and non-hagiographic studies. Many French immigrants’ stories, for want of their history, could be remembered and told. The French in Texas make for an original bric-a-brac à la Menil, a collection of well-known and forgotten people, groups, events, books, works of art, and archives whose common denominators are France and immigration. France has been a powerful and colonial nation, and its interest in Texas was aroused when the country of La Salle and Saligny had a colonial empire. Texas was another potential colony for France, though not in a political sense; Texas was a place to send colonists and colonizing progressive scientists who carried out France’s so-called mission civilisatrice. The French in Texas have a past, a history long enough that it guarantees them a future in Texas. They also have a present as they migrate and immigrate. Like millions of other migrants today, they experience radical environmental and cultural change. May this book bring them comfort on their voyage. Notes 1. The French Texans (San Antonio: Institute of Texan Cultures, 1973). 2. René Rémond, Les États-Unis devant l’opinion française, 1851–1852 (Paris: Colin, 1962), 1:118.

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1

THE WRECK OF SHIPS AND DREAMS A New Look at the Explorer La Salle

R O B E RT S. W E D D L E

On April 4, 1687, Spanish navigators probing the inner shore of Texas’ Matagorda Bay came upon a small frigate aground on a peninsular sand bar. Partially submerged, her deck awash, and her masts and rigging having fallen into the water, she bore the sign the Spaniards were looking for: painted on her transom were three white fleurs-de-lis on a blue field, the insignia of the Royal French Navy. Here at last was tangible evidence of the rumored French invasion of Spanish territory led by Robert Cavelier de La Salle. The Spanish diarist penned a description of the derelict vessel, while crews of the two Spanish ships availed themselves of her usable gear and armament: masts, yards, booms, some cordage that had survived the elements, and five iron cannons. Then the Spaniards hauled in the French vessel’s single anchor, which had failed at the critical moment, and sailed away, unable to fathom what lay submerged below decks. Not for more than three hundred years would the ship be seen again and the secrets of her hold revealed to human eyes.1 In July 1995, the 1687 Spanish diary served to guide archaeologists of the Texas Historical Commission to the remains of La Salle’s ship La Belle (Figure 1.1). A little more than a year later, with the commission’s work of exposing the remains of the ship and its millions of artifacts well under way, another significant find occurred several miles away. An employee of the Keeran Ranch, while clearing brush along Garcitas Creek in Victoria County, discovered the cache of eight cannons that had belonged to La Salle’s feeble settlement—mistakenly called Fort-Saint-Louis—that existed from 1685 to late 1688 or early 1689. The commission, with authority from the Keeran Trust, geared up for another major project. Excavation of the first European settlement on the Gulf Coast between Florida and Tampico went on for two years, 2000 –2001. The site, long in dispute despite overwhelming evidence, at last was proved unequivocally, as the 1

2

1.1

WEDDLE

Texas Historical Commission’s archaeologists excavating the remains of La

Salle’s La Belle inside the cofferdam that was installed in Matagorda Bay. Texas Historical Commission, Austin, Texas.

outline of crude French buildings, adjacent to the Spanish post established later, unfolded beneath the archaeologists’ trowels.2 These two discoveries, yielding their trove of French artifacts, have focused new interest on the La Salle episode, which has often been treated as a mere footnote to Texas history. Displays of the three bronze cannons from the Belle —bearing the arms of Louis xiv—the cannons from the socalled Fort-Saint-Louis site, and myriad other artifacts in museums around the state have provided the “touch and feel” of history. The new contemplation of La Salle and his Texas venture has brought forth speculation as to what might have been the result if La Salle had succeeded. Perhaps, some have said, we would all be speaking French. But one might ask—if La Salle had succeeded at what? That is the very question that has eluded many of his interpreters. There has been a marked reluctance to meet such questions head-on; hence, a general sideswiping of history has shrouded La Salle and his exploits in mystery and in many instances made him out as more of a hero than he actually was. It is time now to challenge the mythical interpretations in an earnest search for the real La Salle.

The Wreck of Ships and Dreams

3

Space does not permit me to take on the interpreters in any detail. Suffice it to say that their inquiries often have lacked depth, due in part to the complexity of the subject. The picture is clouded also by some of the participants in La Salle’s enterprise who found reason for concealing the truth. This applies even to the one usually considered to be the most reliable source on the Texas episode: Henri Joutel. Joutel, it should be remembered, had close ties to the Cavelier family, and his narrative must be considered in that light. He closely guarded his own role as expedition historian, forbidding others to keep journals, and he is known to have destroyed the efforts of those who tried. On the way back to France following the assassination of La Salle, he left on the Mississippi a lad whom he described as having a loose tongue. Joutel himself then became an accomplice in Abbé Cavelier’s conspiracy to conceal La Salle’s death and the plight of the remaining Texas colonists until all possibility of rescue was lost.3

1.2

This portrait of a young Cavelier de La Salle appears in Pierre Margry, Décou-

vertes et établissements des Français dans l’ouest et dans le sud de l’Amérique septentrionale, 1614–1698 (Paris, 1879).

4

WEDDLE

Putting the interpreters aside, we turn to La Salle himself. Concerning the leader and his short-lived Texas colony, answers are needed to some vital questions. Who was this man La Salle (Figure 1.2)? What really happened in his settlement? And why was the colony here at all? Who were the people who came here, and why did they come? What miscarriage of purpose caused the enterprise to come apart in such a gruesome tragedy? Where did their leader fail them? And how did he fail himself? What were the lasting results of his effort? I endeavor here to answer at least some of those questions. Robert Cavelier, styled le sieur de La Salle, was, in simplest terms, a dreamer. Driven by a burning ambition, he habitually sought the imagined prize beyond the horizon. Impatient with discipline—or advice, even—he often sought his goals without adequate planning or preparation. Hence, his priorities became hopelessly confused. Perpetually driven to be somewhere besides where he was, he was often absent when his presence was needed most. Disasters—and enemies, and creditors— arose naturally in his wake, attended repeatedly by the wreck of his ships—and his dreams.4 It was his natural traits—perhaps they should be called character flaws—that brought him to the Texas coast when he was seeking the mouth of the Mississippi River by sea. It was not by navigational error that he missed the Mississippi mouth but by a naive geographical assumption based on hypothetical maps and a flaming imagination. He acted on his belief that the Mississippi entered the Gulf of Mexico in what we know today as the Texas coastal bend. It was an easy concept for him to adopt— especially when goaded by two conniving abbots in France who manipulated him to their own purposes. They showed him how such convenient geography would appeal to the king and win the explorer the Royal Court’s support for his new expedition. The means to that support lay in adding a new dimension to La Salle’s plan for expanding his commercial empire by establishing a colony on the lower Mississippi and linking it to New France with a string of trading posts, all to be served by a port on the Gulf of Mexico. With Spain and France at war, King Louis xiv was looking anew at his old dream of seizing the mines of northern Mexico and winning freedom for French ships to sail the Gulf of Mexico, traditionally an exclusive Spanish sea. For such a plan, La Salle’s conclusion that the Mississippi River disgorged into the Gulf at the Texas coastal bend fit hand in glove. With the hundred soldiers carried on the ships and Indian auxiliaries brought down the Mississippi from the Illinois country, La Salle could conquer northern Mexico and make himself a hero. Abbé Claude Bernou, who had assumed

The Wreck of Ships and Dreams

5

the role of La Salle’s agent and who directed his moves, would fulfill his own ambition by being made bishop of the newly conquered territory. Such was the plan, based on a wholly unrealistic concept and imaginary geography.5 Totally unsuited for planning and executing any such enterprise, La Salle entrusted the recruitment of his soldiers and tradesmen to contractors more interested in his purse than in providing him with competent personnel. Aside from the engagés, or hired hands, there were gentleman volunteers along for the adventure, a few tradesmen bringing goods to barter with the natives, and individuals looking for expanded opportunity. Among the latter group, a well-documented example is the Talon family, consisting of the parents and five children with a sixth to be born at sea. Encouraged by the sieur d’Autray, who had seen the warmer climes of the lower Mississippi with La Salle in 1682, the Talons left their unproductive farm in Quebec province to return to France in time to join the new expedition.6 There were also a few young women—probably no more than five. Presumably, the opportunity they sought was marriage. Only one attained such an objective. Instead of opportunity, the colonists found a miserable existence in a squalid encampment beside an alligator-infested creek, surrounded by hostile Indians. The place never deserved, and never got, the name FortSaint-Louis, a creation after the fact by La Salle’s brother, Abbé Cavelier. There never was a palisade or, as Henri Joutel says, anything remotely resembling a fort. More than half the approximately three hundred persons who landed in February 1685 were dead within six months, not from an epidemic, as is often claimed, but from malnutrition, overwork, and “bad treatment”— a term that calls for close scrutiny in view of the testimony of the young man whom Joutel and La Salle’s brother the priest chose not to take back to France with them because he talked too much.7 What actually happened in this first European settlement in the entire region between present-day Florida and New Mexico is that a constantly diminishing band of French men and women struggled against tremendous odds to gain a temporary foothold in territory that was isolated and hostile. Betrayed and abandoned by their leader, who had become entangled in a web spun of his own deceit and ineptitude, they clung to hope until there was no hope. In the beginning, La Salle was firm in the belief that he was at the right place, which is to say, at the mouth of the Mississippi or one of its tributaries. Even though he found no landmark familiar to him from his 1682 canoe trip down the Mississippi, he maintained that a western branch of his river must flow into Matagorda Bay. With this idea firmly

6

WEDDLE

fixed in his mind, he ordered his two ships to enter the bay. In the effort, the store ship Aimable drifted outside the channel, ran aground, and broke up, spilling her precious goods into the sea.8 Nothing could have been of greater importance to the colony than the safety of the Aimable and her cargo. The pilots had advised against having the ship enter the bay at all. La Salle had many times complained of the captain’s lack of trustworthiness. Yet, ignoring all advice — as was his custom — he insisted that the ship be brought in. When the time came, he himself was ashore. From the beach he gave the signal for the ship to get underway. Then the disaster.9 The people, with the goods that could be salvaged, were put ashore on the exposed promontory of Matagorda Island to spend a miserable spring buffeted by onshore winds and in a state of war with a nearby Karankawa camp. A few weeks after the Aimable wrecked, the escorting naval frigate Joly set sail for France in compliance with her orders. Her task had been completed when she delivered La Salle to his chosen destination. There remained only the small frigate, or barque longue, the Belle, now the colonists’ only link with civilization and their homeland. Then the Belle, too, was lost. Severely handicapped by the first ship loss, La Salle had devoted the spring and summer of 1685 to locating and building a temporary settlement farther inland, where most of the company would remain until he had found the main channel of the Mississippi and the site for his permanent installation. His plans seemed to change with the wind. After moving all the supplies and equipment from the landing place to the new site on Garcitas Creek, he had trade goods, tools, arms, and provisions reloaded on the Belle to be taken to the main channel of the Mississippi — when he found it—for use in building the new settlement. Then he left the ship, first on an Indian chase, then on a whimsical westward march that can be judged only as an effort to reconnoiter the Spanish position. The vessel, her crew already reduced by Indians, lay dangerously exposed to the sudden winter northers. Poorly manned as the Belle was, La Salle left in command a notorious drunk and took off on a supposed tenday march that stretched to more than two months. During his absence, the enfeebled crew tried to move the ship, which became unmanageable when a brisk norther arose. Swept across the bay, she ran aground off Matagorda Peninsula, where her remains were found in July 1995, to tell a story that does not appear in the history books. With the loss of the Belle went the colonists’ last hope of retreat. La Salle, acting in character, determined almost immediately to travel northeastward to look for the Mississippi, which he hoped to ascend to

The Wreck of Ships and Dreams

7

his post on the Illinois River —the real Fort-Saint-Louis—without waiting to learn the fate of the little ship. The half-dozen survivors of the luckless Belle’s twenty-seven-man crew reached the settlement a few days after his departure.10 La Salle, his force riddled by illness, death, and desertion, returned in the fall. He brought five horses acquired from the Cenis, or Hasinai, Indians, laden with provisions for the colony. He undertook a second journey for the same purpose the following January, 1687, taking seventeen men while leaving approximately two dozen men, women, and children in the settlement— all the people who remained alive except for a few scattered deserters. On this second attempt to reach the Illinois, La Salle paid the toll for his failure as a leader. The bloodbath precipitated by his nephew, whom he had always given more authority than the brash young man could handle, claimed the leader’s life and five others.11 At “the post in the Baye Saint-Louis,” as La Salle referred to it, the months dragged by without word from the expedition that was supposed to bring rescue. “A year passed. Then it was two. No ship came, and no messenger arrived . . . to offer the colonists reassurance or hope, or to tell them that there was no hope.”12 Of what went on at the meager French settlement after La Salle’s final departure there is little record. Gabriel Barbier, the one-time Canadian coureur de bois (woods rover) and now a lieutenant, had been left in charge. The young woman he had married, whose name is not of record, bore their child in the summer or fall of 1688—the first known European birth in Texas. A picket fence was completed around the garden plot, making it safe from wallowing and rooting pigs. From the evidence at hand, it appears that the little enclave made the best of its circumstances for about two years, until early 1689. Few if any of the colonists had died. The neighboring Karankawa, long a threat, seemed to have turned friendly, until they treacherously attacked the colony and destroyed it. Only the five children carried away on the backs of the native women were spared, to live adventure-filled lives with few parallels, among Indians, Spaniards, and, again, French colonists.13 That is the short version of what happened at the meager, temporary, and unnamed French settlement on the bay that La Salle called SaintLouis. This, however, is only the middle part of the story. To this must be added a beginning and an ending: a beginning that searches out the character of the man who brought three hundred persons to settle here and, without ever having fought a major battle, reduced their numbers to a mere handful; and an ending that reveals how he abandoned the remain-

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ing colonists in their squalid settlement while he and his brother sought to save themselves and their goods. Serious questions arise concerning the leader. Robert Cavelier de La Salle was born in 1643 in the commercial city of Rouen, the capital of Old Normandy, where in 1431, during the Hundred Years War, an illiterate peasant girl known to history as Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in the town marketplace. Situated on the River Seine, Rouen was heavily involved in the maritime trade with New France, notably the fur trade that was vital to the expanding French colonialism of the period. La Salle would live out his life in the reign of Louis xiv, who had become king at the age of five, just six months before La Salle’s birth. As the France of the Sun King ascended toward economic, political, and military supremacy in Europe, furs from Canada were a significant stimulus to the economy and thus a critical factor in maintaining solvency— especially so at this time, with war the natural state.14 It followed, then, that the fur trade and Louis xiv’s imperial objectives would become significant factors in La Salle’s life and, through him, vital influences in shaping the history of Texas and the United States as a whole. Little is known of the childhood pressures affecting Robert’s personality. The middle son in the family of Jean Cavelier père, he seems to have been resented by his older brother, who was named Jean for the father. The friction between them, especially during the twelve years that both were in Canada, seems to suggest an intense sibling rivalry that may have colored the mature judgment of both. Jean Cavelier the elder was a successful textile merchant who did a significant part of his business with Rouen’s churches. There were thirty parishes and fifty convents in the city, and Jean Cavelier supplied them with altar adornments of expensive material. In high favor with the ecclesiastical establishment, he was elected master of the Brotherhood of Notre Dame. Did this relationship—seemingly as much business as religious—have anything to do with his sending two of his three sons, Jean and Robert, into religious orders? Both were remarkably unsuited for the monastic life. Robert, after his father’s death, rebelled and withdrew from the Society of Jesus. His Jesuit superiors, convinced that he was too headstrong and self-willed for such a calling, permitted him to do so. Jean, on the other hand, was ordained a Sulpician priest yet never seemed able to reconcile the spiritual life with his material objectives or the devious means he employed to attain them. Rhetorically, at least, Robert seems always to have held to strict moral standards. Yet his difficulty in personal dealings—his irrational response to criticism and offers of advice—possibly hints at authoritarian parents or other oppressive influences in childhood. In later years, he found occa-

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sion to complain of the treatment accorded him by his brother Jean and “the little love he has for me.” Jean, in fact, was known to betray his brother’s trust. In Canada, when delegated to sell La Salle’s furs and apportion the proceeds among all his creditors, he appropriated the entire amount to satisfy his own claim. Yet the brothers often lived in close proximity—not to say harmony— especially during the Texas episode. It was after La Salle’s death in the Texas wilds that the most egregious index to his brother’s character manifested itself in the lies he told. Indeed these falsehoods may have cost the lives of the remaining colonists.15 The young La Salle’s withdrawal from the Society of Jesus seems to typify his life’s pattern: he had to soothe his itching foot and slake his thirst for adventure while chasing visions of greatness and glory. He pursued his aims impetuously. Always impatient with discipline, he took giant steps without adequate preparation or regard for the consequences. As the Jesuit father superior might have told him, La Salle never knew quite as much as he thought he knew— of geography, navigation, or the mood and temperament of his followers. He paid dearly for his lack in each of these areas. Having left the Jesuits in the spring of 1667, La Salle went almost immediately to Canada, where his brother Jean had preceded him by less than a year. Accepting from the Sulpicians a land grant on the Saint Lawrence River above Montreal, where Lachine now stands, he made himself a partisan in the rivalry between that order and the Jesuits. The Jesuits aimed not only for religious domination in the colony but also for monopoly of the fur trade without the corrupting influence of coureurs de bois, the vagabond trappers who were inclined to lead undisciplined lives. La Salle, always given to suspicion, often saw Jesuit connivance in many of the reverses that came his way from multiple causes. At his seigneury on the Saint Lawrence, first called Saint-Sulpice, La Salle got his first experience as a colonizer. Within two years, however, he sacrificed all his gains to outfit an expedition to seek the great river to the west that he had heard of from the Seneca Iroquois, believing that it might offer a link to the Pacific Ocean and China. This was to be his life’s pattern: to sacrifice the sure thing for a chimera, to mortgage his very being, as it were, for a chance at the imagined bonanza beyond the horizon. Always a challenge to present-day understanding is that period’s limited knowledge of the North American interior. To comprehend La Salle’s initial concept of the Ohio or Mississippi flowing to the Pacific—widely shared in that time and place—one must understand that no European since Hernando de Soto had seen the Mississippi, and none had seen the mouth of the Ohio. The Mississippi River’s western branch, the Missouri, which rises in southwestern Montana, had never been glimpsed by white

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men. With news of the western river, La Salle, typically, sprang to action, selling his property at Saint-Sulpice to finance an expedition. To his displeasure, he found himself joined to a band of Sulpicians seeking a mission field and hence in a subordinate role to the two priests who headed it. Abbé Gallinée, in his journal, made caustic remarks about him that echoed the Jesuit superior of the young La Salle’s novitiate days: his claimed abilities with the Iroquois language proved woefully inadequate, and he was not as well prepared for the undertaking as he had pretended. In short, he never knew quite as much as he thought he knew.16 A question has often been raised as to why La Salle’s character and capabilities exhibited during his exploration of the Great Lakes region seem to have diminished on the Texas expedition. Such a question surely arises from a failure to examine the complete record. In New France, he was often the subject of ridicule. His inability to learn from his mistakes, his refusal to heed advice, his inclination to blame others for his failings, his irrationality—all these characteristics dogged him throughout his career, in Canada as well as Texas. His own knowledge and abilities, at the same time, never quite measured up to his own claims; nor was he ever able to be the tower of strength that he imagined. In reality, he was destined to be the pawn of superior intellects who viewed him as a useful tool. When the opportunity arose, La Salle separated himself from this 1669 expedition and went his own way. He was not seen or heard from for almost a year. Thenceforth to the end of his life, his career is shrouded in deceit and obfuscation. Claims on his behalf rest on falsified documents written by others to serve their own ends. La Salle’s own writings were often designed more to mislead than to tell the truth. Claims that La Salle went on to discover the Ohio River after separating himself from the Sulpicians or that he discovered the Mississippi before Jolliet and Marquette —claims made by himself or others —are generally considered false. In Quebec in August 1670, he was chosen by the intendant Jean-Baptiste Talon to explore the river believed to lead to the South Sea, or Pacific Ocean. He had not reported to Talon fifteen months later; hence, the Jolliet-Marquette expedition went down the Mississippi, proving that the great river flowed not to the Pacific Ocean but to the Gulf of Mexico. Claims that La Salle, during his long absences from the settlements, had reached the Mississippi before Jolliet and Marquette now are generally rejected. Present-day Canadian colonialists tend to deny such claims out of hand, while crediting La Salle with nothing more than a far-ranging and often illegal fur-trading enterprise. His contemporaries alleged that after 1673 he became a front for le Comte de Frontenac’s illicit fur trade, thereby helping the destitute governor-general of Canada recoup his fortunes and providing La Salle with a convenient stepping stone to grander

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achievements. With Frontenac’s letter of introduction, he voyaged to France in 1674 and was granted Fort Frontenac, on Lake Ontario at present-day Kingston, Ontario, as a royal concession, tantamount to control of the fur trade.17 Loans from friends and family enabled La Salle to fulfill his obligation to the king and effect the physical improvement of Fort Frontenac. Meanwhile, he firmed his hold on the fur trade and plotted his future course. He built four small sailing vessels to serve the trade. The young Norman was well positioned to make a fortune, but others saw him as a trip-wire to their own ambitions. Virtually all the traders in the colony, excluded from what they perceived as Governor Frontenac’s monopoly, aligned themselves against him. Fearful of La Salle’s insatiable ambition, they thought him bordering on madness. His seemingly quixotic objectives at first had caused him to be ridiculed as a dreamer. As his vision brought forth action, he became a serious threat. With malicious diatribe and false rumor, or worse, his enemies — some within his own ranks — sought to destroy him. With Fort Frontenac as a springboard, La Salle looked more and more toward the Mississippi and planned his strategy: first to overcome the Niagara Escarpment, the huge drop-off between lakes Erie and Ontario, to enable navigation on the Upper Lakes; then to build trading posts through the Illinois country; and finally to reach the mouth of the Mississippi and open a port on the Gulf of Mexico. Thus he would avoid shipping his furs by way of the freeze-prone Saint Lawrence and its dangerous rapids. Furtherance of the plan required that he again voyage to France and seek an audience in the Royal Court. He did so in 1678. For the second time, he was forced to bribe a royal official. He accrued enormous debts, making himself a pawn to his creditors, but he received the license he sought, expressed in the vague terms he desired. The king’s priorities were put forth in verbiage that shaped the destiny of La Salle and his future colonists. Said the royal order: “Our heart desires nothing more than the exploration of this country, in which it appears that a road may be found for entering Mexico.”18 Did Louis le Grand’s rhetoric influence La Salle’s understanding of the Mississippi and the location of its mouth? Probably not, for his conclusions appear to be genuinely grounded in the geographical uncertainty of the times. Yet when the king’s royal desires and La Salle’s confused hypothesis came together, a spark glowed. It was quickly fanned to flame by an ambitious priest, Abbé Claude Bernou, who envisioned a bishopric for himself in newly conquered French territory. When we study the scene as La Salle moved toward the execution of his plan, we see his failings as a leader and distinct warning signs of the

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tragedy in the offing. He manifested scant regard for those who followed him. These men — either the rowdy and undisciplined coureurs de bois or recruits who had come directly from France with no inkling of the rigors they would face —were apt to be overdue for their pay. The leader’s exacting demands, and perhaps the influence of his enemies as he was wont to claim, often caused them to desert. On at least four occasions, attempts were made on his life. The first came during the rebuilding of Fort Frontenac, when one of his domestic servants poisoned his food. It is said that his strong constitution saved him. Later, in a march across frozen wilderness in the Illinois country, a soldier raised his gun to shoot him in the back. At the Illinois village, his food was poisoned again. Forewarned by the Fort Frontenac incident, he had brought an antidote from France. Then a band of deserters with avowed intent to kill him resisted with deadly fire his attempt to arrest them. All a prelude to the fatal ambush in the wilds of east Texas.19 Perhaps an even clearer signal is seen in the wreck of the Griffon, the sailing vessel that La Salle had built above Niagara Falls to navigate the Upper Lakes and take him toward the Illinois country. Rigging for two ships had been brought from France in 1678: one, the Griffon, was to be built on Cayuga Creek, a tributary of the Niagara River above the falls, and the other on the Illinois River for descending the Mississippi. Then began the wrecking of ships and dreams, which very nearly sounded the death knell for La Salle’s enterprise. Credit the man’s remarkable tenacity for its survival. The first shipwreck occurred on Lake Ontario near the mouth of the Niagara River. La Salle had left the little vessel, which carried the rigging for the ship to be built above the falls, anchored offshore with the pilot in charge. He himself ascended the escarpment to seek a site for building the new ship. Pilot and crew chose to sleep on shore; the craft—foreshadowing the wreck of the Belle —dragged anchor during the night and crashed on the rocky coast. This was the first of four shipwrecks that afflicted La Salle’s efforts, each one after he had left it in the charge of a pilot or captain he did not trust. Yet it was they who were to blame, never himself.20 Despite this loss, the Griffon was built and launched on Lake Erie and sailed through the lakes to Green Bay on Lake Michigan, loaded with the furs that—had they reached their destination—would have been his financial salvation. But La Salle, eager to proceed to the Illinois, sent the ship back toward Niagara at the time of equinoctial storms in the charge of the same pilot whose bad judgment had caused the first wreck. Predictably, a storm arose; ship, crew, and cargo perished in Lake Huron. Reaching the Illinois villages, La Salle began building Fort Crèvecoeur—forerunner of Fort-Saint-Louis-des-Illinois—and the vessel in-

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tended for descending the Mississippi. The loss of the Griffon, which was to have brought the rigging for the new ship, doomed the effort. Ultimately, after many other hardships, La Salle descended the Mississippi in canoes carrying fifty-three Frenchmen and Indians. The descent was marked by confusion from the beginning. His only compass broke. The sun was often hidden by clouds or fog. The faulty astrolabe yielded latitudes grossly in error. Below the mouth of the Ohio River, the Mississippi ran a serpentine course that would have been confusing under the best of circumstances. During a three-day pause at the Arkansas Indian villages, La Salle, in the name of King Louis xiv, made a formal claim that included the entire Mississippi River drainage as well as northern Mexico and Spanish-claimed Texas. The act was to be repeated on April 9 above the Mississippi’s multiple mouths. During the entire journey, La Salle relied on the period’s conjectural maps whose features dated from the previous century. Below the Arkansas, he was baffled at not finding the Bay of Espíritu Santo at the designated latitude. In the river’s lower reaches, when the sun appeared and the voyagers regained their sense of direction, it was apparent that the stream ran east to southeast near the Gulf, not south as maps of the period indicated (see color illustration 1, a map dated 1656, as compared to the later maps, dated 1703 and 1705, in color illustrations 2 and 3). The means of computing longitude by celestial observation was a century in the future. Since the river he was following did not fit the map portrayal, La Salle concluded that it was not the same as the Río del Espíritu Santo. He thought that his river matched the Río Escondido, in the approximate position of the present-day Nueces River, which flows into Corpus Christi Bay.21 It was a conclusion that appealed to Louis xiv’s imperial heart—offering “a road for entering Mexico.” It was a delight to Abbé Bernou, who had volunteered in 1678 as La Salle’s “agent” and had since been promoting the schemes of the renegade Spaniard Peñalosa while passing Peñalosa’s ideas to La Salle. Bernou and his friend Abbé Eusèbe Renaudot had taken over the writing of La Salle’s memorials to the king. Having sought to polish the explorer’s image for their own purposes, they are responsible for most of the false claims made on the explorer’s behalf, principally that he discovered the Ohio River in 1669 and reached the Mississippi ahead of Jolliet and Marquette.22 It is important to note that La Salle, anxious to offer a plan that the king would accept, overstepped himself, then was led a step further by the two abbots and perhaps by trying to outshine the Peñalosa scheme being pushed by Bernou. Well received at court, this scheme called for invading Mexico and seizing the mines of Nueva Vizcaya. The time was op-

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portune, for Spain had declared war on France the previous autumn. Ultimately, Peñalosa was left out of it, and La Salle’s Gulf of Mexico expedition became, in its intent, a military operation. It was confounded by an enormous geographical blunder: the Mississippi was supposed to have its mouth near Mexico; the mining province of Nueva Vizcaya, which embraced at least part of five present-day states of western Mexico, was to be reached by going up the Red River. La Salle’s four ships made good their departure from Rochefort on August 1, 1684. The number of vessels was reduced to three at Saint-Domingue by a loss to Spanish pirates. As the little fleet proceeded west through the Caribbean Sea in late November, La Salle made it clear to Captain Beaujeu that his destination was the far end of the Gulf of Mexico. With his ships gathered in the Texas coastal bend, he kept insisting that he was where the king had sent him. From Beaujeu he wanted nothing more than the cannons and other iron in Le Joly’s hold. Yet there was no recognizable landmark. While still believing his river nearby, he could not immediately say where. He chose Matagorda Bay as a likely outlet for one of the Mississippi’s distributaries and there sought to establish a beachhead.23 Then came his third shipwreck. In typical mode, La Salle had gone ashore and left an insubordinate and perhaps drunken captain to take the ship into the bay through the shallow and narrow channel. His dereliction would repeat itself in grander dimensions with the Belle. One huge question remains: Why, with La Salle’s experience at wilderness travel, were he and any survivors unable to reach the Illinois fort in time to send help to the beleaguered little band at the post on the Baye-Saint-Louis? It has been implied, or even argued, that La Salle intended returning to the Texas settlement after seeing his brother safe at the Illinois fort and well on the way to Canada. The Abbé Cavelier himself sought to put such a spin on the plan. The facts, however, do not support it. The record of La Salle’s journey up to the time of his death and the subsequent trek of five men who returned to France by way of Canada clearly reveals La Salle’s intent and his brother’s. The key is in the five horses obtained on the previous trip to the Hasinai. The French writer Marc de Villiers has likened the expedition’s departure to moving day; La Salle, he says, carried away what remained of the trade goods, his money, and that which had belonged to the deceased. If rescue was the intent of this march, why were not the horses used for mounts and riders sent toward the Mississippi and Fort-Saint-Louis of the Illinois? The personal belongings of the Caveliers apparently were considered more important than the lives of the men and women who remained in the settlement and who, for all intents and purposes, were being abandoned to their fate.24

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As the march inched forward, the concerns of the Caveliers were emphasized. At each stream crossing, the horses were unburdened, their packs carried over by the men. It was grueling work that caused even the compliant Joutel to complain. “Although we had the horses,” he says, “we were obliged to carry our own little bundles, for M[onsieur] de La Salle had brought his whole wardrobe and his papers; M[onsieur] Cavelier, a number of church ornaments, even to a dozen vestments, as well as his belongings and food. We had the burden of leading the horses without benefiting from them.” 25 Soaking rains added to the misery. Each stream crossing was a nightmare. The men, walking in makeshift shoes of rawhide, had to go ahead with axes and cut a path wide enough for the horses to pass with their packs. Days were spent slaughtering buffalo in much larger numbers than needed for meat. The hides were added to the horses’ burdens until they could carry no more. When a horse was injured, double marches were decreed; the pack was left behind, and, after a half-day’s march, other horses were sent back to retrieve it. While precious time was being lost for the sake of the brothers’ goods, the clock was ticking on the lives of the abandoned colonists. Among the marchers, tempers grew short. Small wonder that violence erupted. La Salle was shot down by the perpetual troublemaker Pierre Duhaut, and five others died in the eastern Texas wilderness at a place yet unknown (Figure 1.3). Claims of being able to identify the site on the basis of Joutel’s journal rest on shaky ground, for Joutel went for long stretches without giving either distance or direction of travel. While sick men and deserters remained among the Caddoan tribes, six others reached the Mississippi, still leading the horses carrying the Caveliers’ goods. Thence they had to travel up the river by canoe. The horses and the goods they carried, brought this far at the expense of inconceivable hardship and suffering—perhaps even the lives of the leader and five other men—had to be left behind. The greed of La Salle and his brother exacted an exorbitant price. Here among the Arkansas Indians, the travelers left Pierre Barthélemy, the lad who talked too much. His loose tongue, however, was not effectively silenced. His story of La Salle’s erratic behavior and cruel abuse, though generally ignored by historians, has survived. La Salle, dissatisfied with the work of his carpenters, Barthélemy says, assaulted them with crowbars. Alleging feigned illness, he killed the sick in their beds; he put out one man’s eyes, “not to mention those whom he had hanged . . . those he had court-martialed and shot.” Should these accusations be regarded as the smear attempt of a disgruntled, puerile individual? Or testimony of

1.3

In Jules Verne’s Découverte de la terre: les Grands navigateurs du XVIIIe siècle

(Paris, 1870), the illustrator imagined Father Anastase Douay leaning over the fatally shot La Salle.

17

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one who dared to speak the truth that Joutel and Abbé Cavelier could scarcely allow? 26 The abbé, meanwhile, took no notice of the high cost of his greed thus far. He proceeded with the four others to Canada and France, conveying the impression along the way that his brother remained alive and well. He involved his traveling companions in his deception. Even after reaching France, he concealed the truth from the Sulpician superior, his kinsmen, and the Royal Court until he had secured his property and his brother’s. With La Salle’s assets well within his grasp, he shared nothing with the explorer’s other creditors. Litigation over the defaulted obligations went on well after La Salle’s death, and probably after the abbé’s as well.27 Now, back to the question What if La Salle had succeeded? Actually, his failure had been ordained long before his death, long before the collapse of the Texas colony. Failure was written into the very nature of his enterprise, based as it was on an erroneous concept of unknown geography. Indeed, failure was implicit in the nature of the man himself. Yet, though he failed at what he set out to do, the results of his efforts surely exceed anything that this dreamer of dreamers could ever have envisioned. The mark he left on the North American continent will endure forever. If we are looking for a bona fide hero, however, we must look elsewhere. The real heroes of this episode are the French men and women who, against all odds and with scarcely a glimmer of hope, held on to the ragged little post built of stakes and ship timbers on a bluff overlooking the Rivière aux Boeufs, otherwise known as Garcitas Creek. Embodied in them was the true spirit of France—and of Texas. Notes 1. Juan Enríquez Barroto, “Diary of the Voyage . . . for Reconnoitering the Mexican Gulf” (Biblioteca del Palacio Real, Madrid, ms. 2667), trans. Robert S. Weddle in Robert S. Weddle, ed., La Salle, the Mississippi, and the Gulf: Three Primary Documents (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987); archaeological data from excavation of the Belle, Texas Historical Commission. 2. Curtis Tunnell, “A Cache of Cannons: La Salle’s Colony in Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 102, no. 1 (July 1998). 3. Henri Joutel, “Voyage de M. de La Salle dans l’Amérique septentrionale en l’année 1685, pour y faire un establissement dans la partie qu’il en avoit auparavant descouverte,” in Découvertes et établissement des Français dans l’ouest et dans le sud de l’Amérique septentrionale, ed. Pierre Margry (Paris: D. Jouaust, 1876–1886), 3:449; Jean Couture, “Relation de la mort de M. de La Salle,” in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 3:601– 606.

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4. For a discussion of these traits see Robert S. Weddle, The Wreck of the Belle, the Ruin of La Salle (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), ch. 3. 5. Claude Bernou to Eusèbe Renaudot, April 11, 1684, in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 3:82–84; Weddle, Wreck of the Belle, 88. 6. See Robert S. Weddle, “The Talon Interrogations: A Rare Perspective,” in La Salle, ed. Weddle, 209–224, and Ann Linda Belle’s translation of the interrogations from the French, “Voyage to the Mississippi through the Gulf of Mexico,” in La Salle, ed. Weddle, 225–258; Marcel Lussier to the author, conversation, October 8, 1999. 7. Joutel, “Voyage de M. de La Salle,” 191; Weddle, Wreck of the Belle, 196–198. 8. Peter H. Wood, “La Salle: Discovery of a Lost Explorer,” American Historical Review 89, no. 2 (April 1984), assesses La Salle’s geographical confusion responsible in part for his landing in Texas rather than at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Record of the lawsuit that later grew out of the wreck of the Aimable is in Amirauté de La Rochelle, Série B/6015, photocopy and transcript by Pauline Arseneault (in possession of the author). 9. Jean-Baptiste Minet, “Journal of Our Voyage to the Gulf of Mexico,” trans. Ann Linda Belle in La Salle, ed. Weddle, 108–109, 111; “Procès verbal de Sieur de La Salle sur le naufrage de la flûte l’Aimable” (March 1, 1685), in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 2:555–558. 10. Joutel, “Voyage de M. de La Salle,” 227–232. 11. Different accounts of La Salle’s murder are given by Joutel (“Voyage de M. de La Salle,” 324–325) and Pierre Talon in response to the interrogations (“Voyage to the Mississippi through the Gulf of Mexico,” in La Salle, ed. Weddle, 234–335). Joutel’s version is the one most often relied upon, as Talon’s was little known until 1985, when the interrogations were published in translation. Talon was only eleven years old when La Salle was slain. 12. First quote in “Procès verbal,” April 18, 1686, 548. Second quote in Weddle, Wreck of the Belle, 213. 13. Alonso de León, “Autos y diligencias,” April 22, 1689 (Center for American Studies, University of Texas at Austin, transcript); in La Salle, ed. Weddle, 237–238; Weddle, Wreck of the Belle, 250 –251, 253. 14. Weddle, Wreck of the Belle, 21–24, 29; Nancy Mitford, The Sun King (London: H. Hamilton, 1966), 29; Judith A. Franke, French Peoria and the Illinois Country, 1673–1846 (Springfield: Illinois State Museum Society, 1995), 59. 15. Concerning the brothers’ relationship see especially The Journal of Jean Cavelier, ed. Jean Delanglez, 28–30; La Salle to “one of his associates” (Thouret), September 29, 1680, quoted in Weddle, Wreck of the Belle, 60. Jean Cavelier’s behavior that deprived the colonists of any chance of rescue is told by Joutel, “Voyage de M. de La Salle,” 464–534, passim. 16. “Récit de ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable dans le voyage de MM. Dollier et Gallinée,” in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 1:112–133. Frances Gaither, Fatal River: The Life and Death of La Salle (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1931), 47. 17. For example, see Conrad Heidenreich, “Early French Exploration in the North

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American Interior,” in North American Exploration, ed. John Logan Allen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 2:131. 18. “Lettres patentes, Saint-Germain-en-Laye,” May 12, 1678, in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 1:337. 19. Renaudot, “Histoire de M. de La Salle,” in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 1:389–390; Weddle, Wreck of the Belle, 270 n. 6; “Relation de M. de Tonty,” in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 1:581, 583; “La Salle Arrête Ses Déserteurs,” in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 2:103–108. 20. La Salle to Thouret, September 29, 1680, and La Salle letter, August 22, 1681, in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 2:67, 229. 21. Minet, “Journal,” 42–43; Wood, “La Salle,” 309 –310. 22. Renaudot, “Entretiens de Cavelier de La Salle sur ses onze premières années en Canada,” in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 1:345–401; Bernou to Renaudot, April 11, 1684, in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 3:82–84. The conniving abbots and their dealings with the vengeful Spaniard Peñalosa, as well as La Salle’s relationship with Captain Beaujeu of the Royal Navy ship Joly, are treated more fully in Weddle, Wreck of the Belle. 23. Joutel, “Voyage de M. de La Salle,” 105–106; Minet, “Journal,” 89; Journal of Jean Cavelier, ed. Delanglez, 504; La Salle to Beaujeu, Petit Goâve, November 23, 1684, in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 2:521–522. 24. Marc de Villiers du Terrage, L’Expédition de Cavelier de La Salle dans le Golfe du Mexique (1684–1687) (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1934), 172–173; Journal of Jean Cavelier, ed. Delanglez, 145 n. 67. 25. Joutel, “Voyage de M. de la Salle,” 274–276. 26. “Relation de la mort de La Salle suivant le rapport d’un nommé Couture,” in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 3:601– 606. Compare Francis Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, reprinted in France and England in North America, ed. David Levin (New York, Library of America, 1983), 2:1013 n. and 1028 n. 27. For fuller treatment of Jean Cavelier’s conduct see Weddle, Wreck of the Belle, 245–250. See also Journal of Jean Cavelier, ed. Delanglez, 33.

2

EXPLORING THE TEXAS COAST Bellisle, Béranger, and La Harpe, 1719 –1721

R O B E RT S . W E D D L E A N D PAT R I C I A R . L E M É E

It was a horrible mistake that in 1685 brought the French colony of Robert Cavelier de La Salle to the Texas bay known today as Matagorda. Spaniards looking for the French settlement reached the bay and named it San Bernardo. La Salle had named it Baye-Saint-Louis, but in time the French altered the Spanish name and called it Baye-Saint-Bernard. Although La Salle’s colony quickly vanished, the site gained focal importance for French and Spanish alike.1 The Spaniards looked upon their Bahía de San Bernardo as crucial to stemming French encroachment. The French, laying claim to Baye-SaintBernard and its environs on the basis of La Salle’s failed settlement, viewed it as the launching pad for carrying out a scheme of long standing. The French had harbored this secret design ever since the Spanish renegade Peñalosa had excited the royal fancy as to the ease with which France might claim the Mexican mineral region and avail itself of wealth from the Spanish mines.2 In peacetime, the means to that end was contraband trade. In time of war, it was military aggression. Although no invasion of the Spanish mining region was accomplished, the threat was ever present, and the French passion for Spanish silver—by trade or by conquest—enduring. In time of peace or war, the French clung doggedly to their claim on La Salle’s old settlement site and their intention of repossessing it, the Bourbon Family Compact and various peace treaties notwithstanding. The territory first occupied by the French, the Royal Court insisted, belonged to the French. Yet the precise location of Baye-Saint-Bernard eluded them, and the most knowledgeable French navigators proved themselves unable to find it. French aspirations, nonetheless, had their effect on Spanish policy. Spain’s attempts to settle in Texas, from La Salle’s time there (1685–1689), 20

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came most often as a reaction to French intrusions. When the perceived French threat abated, Spain’s interest in the province waned. When the French reentered the picture, new Spanish entradas were launched and new settlements founded. Hence, the Spanish frontier moved forward and back in a series of indecisive and self-defeating thrusts. A major retreat occurred in 1719 when, at the outbreak of the War of the Quadruple Alliance, the Spanish missionaries withdrew from eastern Texas out of fear of a full-scale French invasion. In various ways, the French sought to press their advantage. Thus began a new round of French exploration of the Texas coast, most of it aimed at taking possession of “La Salle’s bay.” The renewed exploration in the western Gulf of Mexico consisted of three episodes: the adventures of François Simars de Bellisle as a castaway among the Attakapan Indians of the Galveston Bay region; the coastal reconnaissance of Captain Jean Béranger, who found Aransas Bay but failed to spot Matagorda; and the effete expedition of Jean-Baptiste Bénard de La Harpe, who, sailing to fortify “Baye-Saint-Bernard” on a ship captained by Béranger, chose the actual Galveston Bay as his destination.

Simars de Bellisle Bellisle’s coastal sojourn, the result of bungled navigation and therefore wholly unplanned, represents both a sidelight to the “Pensacola War,” as it was thought of in America, and a prelude to La Harpe’s confused attempt to fortify Galveston Bay. As an ensign on the ill-starred ship Maréchal d’Estrées, Bellisle sailed on August 14, 1719, from the French port of La Rochelle, destined for a near-death experience in the Texas coastal wilderness. Besides troop reinforcements for the colonial conflict centered on Mobile and Pensacola, the vessel carried a number of slaves, as well as convicts and vagabonds intended as Louisiana settlers. The ship captain, Gervais de La Gaudelle, in his attempt to reach Mobile, set a high-water mark of inept seamanship and navigation. He overshot SaintDomingue, entered the Gulf through the Florida Straits, and sailed on west without registering either Mobile Bay or the Mississippi River. Proceeding along the shoal-studded western Louisiana coast, Maréchal d’Estrées gouged bottom several times before running fast aground. Bellisle’s subsequent adventure establishes the location as Galveston Bay, where he and four other young officers—none of whom had ever been in Louisiana —asked to be put ashore. Hoping to walk to the nearest French settlement rather than hazard further bungling by the ship’s captain, they were stranded when the grounded vessel struggled free and sailed away, leaving them to an uncertain fate.3

2.1

In M. Bossu’s Nouveaux Voyages aux Indes Occidentales (Paris, 1768), Gabriel

de Saint Aubin illustrated Bellisle’s departure from his Indian matron in a highly fictionalized manner. The amputated arms in the foreground seem to indicate that the Hasinai Indians were cannibals, which they were not. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

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Ill-equipped for wilderness survival, the five men found themselves entrapped in a coastal morass. Four of the five died of starvation. Bellisle, remaining near the coast, saved himself by foraging for oysters, bird eggs, and worms. Thus he passed the winter. As summer approached, he espied Indians on an island in the bay and, eager for human contact, hastened to join them. Instead of the friendly welcome he had hoped for, Bellisle was assaulted and stripped of his clothing; yet the natives assuaged his gnawing hunger with bird eggs. Forced to remain with his Akokisa (Attakapan) captors, he was frequently abused and subjected to hard labor. The bad treatment intensified the following winter. A slave of the entire camp, Bellisle carried wood and water for anyone who demanded it and was beaten if he objected. An Indian woman who took him as her husband is said to have preserved his life, yet she was as fond of beating him as the others were. Forced to run on foot to keep pace with the mounted Indians on a buffalo hunt, he was beaten if he fell behind. He was forced to watch in horror as his hosts cannibalized a Toyal Indian killed in battle.4 Bellisle at last managed to pass a written message through other Indian tribes to the Hasinai, who rescued him from the Akokisa and took him to Louis Juchereau de Saint-Denis at Fort-Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Natchitoches on February 10, 1721 (Figure 2.1). He proceeded to Biloxi and then to Mobile, where he arrived the following April 5. Officials of the Company of the Indies must have listened with interest to his account of his captivity in “the most beautiful country in the world” and the expansive bay where his ordeal began. Here surely was the Baye-Saint-Bernard, the Baye-Saint-Louis on which La Salle had settled and which France still claimed by right of his abortive effort.

Jean Béranger The Company of the West (later the Company of the Indies) had made known, by means of an order to Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville on August 26, 1718, its desire “to establish a manned post” at the BayeSaint-Bernard.5 Bienville, whose resources seem always to have been inadequate for the tasks demanded of him as commandant-general of Louisiana, hesitated in the face of stiffening Spanish resistance. Earlier the same year, a Spanish expedition had been organized at Veracruz for the purpose of occupying San Bernardo but was diverted to meet a more serious French threat in Florida. The War of the Quadruple Alliance then intervened. The truce, signed February 20, 1720, brought no end to French designs on the environs of La Salle’s former colony; both the company and the Royal Court held fast to the claim. A new expedition sailed from New Orleans the following August with San Bernardo Bay as its intended destination.

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Whether, as La Harpe says, a new order to occupy the site reinforced the previous one of August 26, 1718, is not clear. The exact purpose of the voyage on which Bienville sent Captain Jean Béranger remains in doubt: whether simply “to investigate the situation at this bay” or actually “to establish a post” remains in question.6 Whichever the case, Béranger set sail with two vessels, a Biscayan longboat and the ship Joseph, as he tells it himself, “for the discovery of Saint Bernard Bay.” 7 Béranger, who had come to Louisiana on Iberville’s first voyage, probably was the most seasoned and capable mariner serving the Louisiana colony. From 1699 to 1722, he made seventeen voyages between France and America. After 1722 he no longer made Atlantic crossings but continued in the service of the Company of the Indies, making trading voyages among the islands of the Antilles. At some point, he voyaged to Veracruz for supplies and attempted to prove the feasibility of sailing up the Mississippi to Illinois, an effort that was frustrated by flood-borne detritus. He was to meet frustration also on two successive voyages to the western Gulf of Mexico.8 An important member of Béranger’s thirteen-man crew as he set sail to find La Salle’s bay was the engineer Valentin Devin, a skilled cartographer whose labors in the colony over a period of years appears to have brought more credit to others than to himself. His work on the forthcoming voyage, nonetheless, exemplifies his facility for presenting exquisite detail.9 Probably on August 23, 1720, Béranger sailed from the anchorage at Biloxi with the Joseph. At the end of the Mississippi Delta, in 28°50' north latitude, he set his course to “skirt the whole west coast” of Louisiana. “Twenty-two leagues” from the Mississippi, Béranger sounded a bay no more than five feet deep, herein identified as Terrebonne. Dodging the shoals that at times kept him out of sight of land in dangerously shallow water, he described the coast in a way that enables identification with present-day map features: “twenty-five leagues” from this first bay to the point at which the shoreline inclines northwestward for “fifty leagues” to latitude 30° (actually about 29°45' in the vicinity of Calcasieu Pass), then bends southwestward. “Some days” after reaching the latter change in coastal configuration, he came to a bay he took for San Bernardo — or so he claimed later. An east-southeast wind, driving heavy swells, forbade any attempt to anchor, lest the ship be driven aground. Indeed, the Joseph stood at the very place at which the Maréchal d’ Estrées had suffered her misfortune, leaving Bellisle and his shipmates to take their chances on shore: not San Bernardo (or Matagorda) but Galveston Bay. That such a misconception became fixed to the extent that it completely frustrated French designs on San Bernardo will be shown in due course. It seems certain that Béranger, fearful of being driven on the

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lee shore, at this point hauled off to deeper water; consequently, he passed the entrance to Matagorda Bay without sighting it. “Thirty leagues” from the previous bay, in latitude 27°45'n, he found “a rather pretty bay” with nine feet of water at the entrance and anchored within. Devin’s detailed map renders unmistakable the identification of Aransas Bay.10 The entrance, Aransas Pass, is more than forty nautical leagues from Galveston Bay but scarcely over fifteen from Pass Cavallo, the natural entrance to Matagorda Bay. This distance measurement, taken with reports of the subsequent La Harpe expedition to Galveston Bay, make it clear that Béranger never saw San Bernardo (Matagorda) Bay at all. From the anchorage at the tip of San José Island, a boat crew went ashore for water but scrambled back on board without their casks when Indians approached. The captain, nevertheless, sought a parley. To his observations we owe much of what is known about the Karankawa and specifically the Kópano (Copano), one of the five principal Karankawan tribes. Presenting them with prized gifts of clothing, knives, and hatchets, he noted that their diet consisted chiefly of crabs, oysters, and fish, sometimes eaten raw or dried without salt for the winter food supply. Their bread was an unappetizing (to the Europeans) concoction of acorns and crabs mixed with ashes. These dwellers of the barrier islands were at war with mainland tribes. They therefore were cut off from the abundant game —bison, deer, bear, and turkeys — on the mainland shore. They showed no interest in guns but prized the metal hoops from the abandoned water casks for tipping their arrows. The native men were large and robust, according to Béranger, their physique revealed by their total nakedness. The women covered themselves with scraps of deerskin. Men and women, in the captain’s judgment, were inclined to roguishness. Even after receiving presents, they plundered the French sailors who ventured ashore. The women rummaged their pockets for whatever they could find. Not the least bit timid, the Indians showed no hesitancy to board the French ship, as many as forty-five coming at one time. When the captain had a cannon fired at a flock of pelicans, they showed no fear. Seeing some knives like those the Spaniards were known to give to their subject Indians, Béranger concluded that he was not far from “the coast of Leon [Nuevo León].”11 There on San José Island just inside Aransas Pass, Béranger spent five days careening both the Joseph and the Biscayan longboat. To caulk the leaky seams, he may have availed himself of tar that flows from oil seeps in the Gulf floor in great blobs that have been known to wash up on this beach since Hernando de Soto’s time. Béranger refers to “a large amount of well-refined and very light dry resin” found all along the island.12 From this “Pointe du Carenage” he sailed north “five leagues,” through

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what is known today as Lydia Ann Channel and thence into Aransas Bay, to anchor off Live Oak Point (Pointe du Chêne). The distance places the anchorage near the Kópano’s village, also described as being “five leagues” northeast of the anchorage, on the bay that was to bear their name. Although the village is described as “permanent,” the animal skins that covered the dozen spacious round huts could be folded like tents and carried away quickly. At the door of each hut stood a sentry with strung bow, evidence of their state of war. Béranger’s mémoire is filled with vital information on the Karankawan tribe he visited and its environs: a description of the natives’ pirogues, or dugout canoes, made by hollowing out a log with fire; their harpoons, with lines of whip coral, used to take large fish; the natural history of this coastal area, including informative descriptions of a rattlesnake and how the Indians regarded it, and an unusually large water snake; and a “little dictionary” of one hundred Karankawan words.13 While Béranger occupied himself thus, Devin sketched the map that was to prove for latter-day interpreters that the location was Aransas Bay, entered by the pass of the same name, between San José Island (which he called Isle St. Louis) and Mustang Island (named Isle d’Orleans). Dating his map October 1720 —while he was still aboard Béranger’s vessel— Devin captioned his work in a way that indicates clearly his belief that this really was the Baye-Saint-Bernard, or Baye-Saint-Louis, once occupied by La Salle (see Figure 2.2). Béranger, on the other hand, offers no identification of this bay in his 1728 mémoire but claims to have passed Saint Bernard’s Bay “thirty leagues” before arriving here. It is inconceivable that the captain had not seen Devin’s map and given his approval at the time it was drawn. Obviously, he had second thoughts; his identity of Galveston Bay as Saint Bernard came only after he had heard Bellisle’s description and visited the place with La Harpe in August 1721. When he and Devin explored and mapped Aransas Bay, both of them assuredly believed it to be the bay occupied in the previous century by La Salle. La Harpe claims that Béranger left five men there in the belief that it was Saint Bernard Bay;14 if so, the captain himself fails to mention it. He did, however, bury a lead tablet engraved with the French coat of arms at the base of a live oak tree to mark the French claim. Inability of French navigators to find and identify La Salle’s bay was by no means due to poor navigation. For want of French exploration of the northern Gulf shore, they had no maps to guide them. From the time of the discovery, Spain had closely guarded its geographical data; even the master charts kept in the Casa de Contratación in Seville were destroyed when superseded, and no verifiable example remains today. Spanish cartography itself developed slowly, especially in the northern Gulf. The

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27

Valentin Devin’s 1720 map of Aransas Bay reflects the mistaken belief of both

himself and Captain Jean Béranger that it was actually the bay where La Salle had landed. They later identified Galveston Bay as “La Sale’s bay”— never finding the bay they sought, which was Matagorda. Archives Diplomatiques, Ministère des Affaires Etran-gères, Paris.

Spanish search for La Salle’s colony brought forth a new effort, but the resulting maps were either lost or came slowly to French hands. On-site mapping by the French in La Salle’s time is limited to the small-area sketches by Jean-Baptiste Minet, who, with the settlement scarcely begun, returned to France on the royal frigate Joly in 1685. The efforts of Béranger and La Harpe to find Matagorda Bay, therefore, were almost as much a shot in the dark as La Salle’s to find the mouth of the Mississippi River from the Gulf.15 Additionally, Béranger fails to make mention of any effort to visit the real Saint Bernard Bay on his return voyage. The weather may have been a factor again, as the Joseph was severely mauled by the sea during her twenty-day transit. The voyage ended on November 20, 1720, having revealed nothing of “the situation at Saint Bernard Bay.” Already a scheme was being formulated in France for settling “the Baye St. Bernard or the mouth of the rivière del Norte [Rio Grande]” and for sending Louis

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Juchereau de St. Denis at the head of a force to raid livestock herds in the northern Mexican province of Nuevo León. The plan evidently was designed to gain leverage in treaty negotiations for the final settlement of the War of the Quadruple Alliance. For reasons never fully explained, it was not carried out.

Bénard de La Harpe Bellisle, meanwhile, was still a slave captive of the Akokisa. Having finally gained his freedom, he at last reached Mobile (on April 5, 1721), the day after Béranger had sailed for Haiti for supplies. Yet the two were soon to be joined in the expedition led by La Harpe, who four months later was named commandant of Saint Bernard Bay. La Harpe, with a force of twenty men, was to sail on the ship Subtile, commanded by Béranger. Bellisle, with his intimate knowledge of the Texas coast and its Indians, was to serve as interpreter and ensign. The young officer, who had described the bay of his captivity to Bienville in such glowing terms, assured the commandant-general that he could find it again by water or land and offered his services as guide.16 La Harpe had arrived in Louisiana in August, 1718. Before the end of the year he left New Orleans to establish a post among the Upper Nasoni on a Red River tributary in present-day Bowie County, Texas, for trading among the Caddoan tribes. In keeping with company and crown aspirations to obtain Spanish silver through trade, he proposed a commercial relationship to the Texas governor, Martín de Alarcón, but received in return a warning that he was violating Spanish territory. Following the outbreak of the war in 1719, the Spaniards withdrew from eastern Texas, closing the door on any hope La Harpe might still have had for trade through the Franciscan mission settlements. He therefore sought to expand his Indian trade into present-day Oklahoma by exploring northwest as far as the Arkansas River but withdrew to New Orleans in October 1719. He afterward returned to France in ill health. Upon his return to Louisiana, he was given the command of Saint Bernard Bay at the end of July 1721.17 With this reinforcement of previous orders of the king and the company for the settlement of the bay, Bienville issued detailed instructions to La Harpe on August 10, 1721. La Harpe was to embark on the traversier commanded by Béranger with only twenty soldiers and limited supplies. On reaching the bay, he was to take formal possession, set the royal arms on a post, and erect a fort defended by cannon and swivel-guns. Should he find Spaniards or other foreigners in possession of the site, La Harpe was to in-

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form them of the French claim on the basis of La Salle’s 1685 occupation, order them to leave, and repel them by force if necessary.18 La Harpe, perhaps in retrospect, considered it an impossible assignment. Nevertheless, little time was lost in preparations, for the Subtile sailed less than a week later. Bellisle’s presence on the voyage was crucial; so was that of Devin, the engineer-mapmaker. On August 27, “a hundred leagues west of the Mississippi,” the ship reached the bay at which Bellisle and his unfortunate companions had disembarked. The captain computed latitude 29°12', which, allowing for error of about ten minutes, indicates Galveston Bay. (He had marked Aransas Pass in 27°45', about five minutes off.) Neither Béranger nor Devin, in discussing the voyage later, acknowledges error in his conclusions at the bay visited the previous year. Devin, in his 1724 petition for advancement, relates that he was ordered “to make a voyage to the baye de St. Bernard, where I went with le Sr. Béranger, as shown on that map.” The following year, he recalls, he was sent on two voyages, which gave him knowledge of “the whole coast west of the Mississipy.” On those occasions he had given particular attention to noting soundings and suitable anchorages.19 Béranger, on the other hand, identified the present location as Saint Bernard Bay and the place at which Bellisle had met his misfortune—by implication the one he had so identified the previous year and passed up because of dangerous winds and shoals. La Harpe and Bellisle, while exploring the bay to the mouths of the San Jacinto and Trinity rivers, encountered Bellisle’s former captors, who “were very much surprised at seeing their slave again.” Two dozen Indians of both sexes followed the boat back to the ship, and the captain put on a show for them by firing a cannon. Several days later, the Subtile hoisted anchor and sailed “four leagues” into the bay. Thence, La Harpe, Bellisle, and Devin went with ten soldiers to seek a site for the post on the northwest shore. At the mouth of the San Jacinto, they encountered Indians, some in dugout canoes and others mounted on Spanish horses. At a cluster of native huts farther up the coast, they went ashore among 150 natives, to whom La Harpe offered his proposal to establish a French settlement. The offer was coldly rejected— out of fear, Béranger believed, that the visitors had come to avenge the harsh treatment given Bellisle. The women pounded their thighs and wailed, while the men debated the Frenchmen’s fate. It was impossible, La Harpe noted, to learn anything of the men Béranger had “imprudently left on this coast” the previous year. After the natives had relaxed this threatening stance, the visitors resumed their exploration of this “most beautiful land that one can imag-

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ine” and reached the mouth of the Trinity. La Harpe deemed the area suitable for settlement in every way except the attitude of the Indians.20 When the Frenchmen withdrew, La Harpe, having enticed a number of the Akokisa aboard the vessel, took nine of them captive at bayonet point. He took them to Biloxi with the hope that on seeing the settlement they would be more inclined to welcome a French post in their own land. The ship captain later voiced his disapproval of this kidnapping but apparently made no move against it. Béranger, in fact, seized the opportunity to compile another word list from the captives. His work distinguishes the peoples encountered on the 1721 voyage from those met the previous year, that is, the Attakapan of Galveston Bay from the Karankawan of Aransas Bay.21 The voyage returned to Biloxi on October 3, 1721. The nine captive Indians fled at first opportunity to make their way back to their homeland through unknown country and tribes hostile to intruders. La Harpe excused his failure to establish a post because of the few men at his command and the hostility of the Indians. Bienville, however, was skeptical. Reporting La Harpe’s return to the company directors under date of October 4, he warned that La Harpe’s glowing report of the territory should not be entirely accepted, and he alleged that the officer excused himself for failing to carry out his orders because of his unwillingness to face the inconveniences.22 Two days after the voyage returned, a ship arrived with Swiss and German colonists. La Harpe responded quickly by urging that they be settled at Saint Bernard Bay. His suggestion bore no fruit, for the same ship evidently brought orders for abandonment of the Saint Bernard project. In the end, La Harpe had doubts that the bay he had visited really was Saint Bernard; because of its good port, the streams that fed it, and the fertility of the soil, he believed it an even better choice for settlement. Had his advice to send the new arrivals been heeded, he lamented, his voyage would not have been fruitless.23 La Harpe was to have no further involvement in coastal exploration. Evidently on the basis of his 1719 exploration, he was chosen to lead a new expedition to the Arkansas to see if it was navigable. The journey began on December 10, 1721, and ended at Biloxi on May 25, 1722. The following year he returned to France to live at his native Saint-Malo.24 For Bellisle, disappointment followed the Galveston Bay voyage. He wrote almost immediately to the company proclaiming himself the discoverer of “Baye-Saint-Bernard” on the basis of his sojourn there among the Indians. La Harpe, he related, was claiming the discovery as wholly his own. If Bellisle’s claim ever received any official notice, it has not come to light. He nevertheless remained in the Louisiana colony until

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1762, serving on various expeditions to the interior and at various outposts. He acquired a plantation near New Orleans and became a member of the Superior Council of Louisiana and the New Orleans town commander. Not long after his return to France, he died in Paris on March 4, 1763, at age sixty-eight.25 Devin, who remained in the colony until 1735, also was destined for disappointment. Notwithstanding his achievements as engineer and cartographer, professional advancement came slowly. Although he worked with the engineers whose names are well known, his own name appears infrequently in the colonial record. Citing his work under Pierre Le Blond de La Tour, sieur de Pauger, and others, he petitioned the Company of the Indies in 1724 for a lieutenant’s commission.26 If he received it, the record fails to tell. Béranger, on the other hand, seems to have been quite content to follow his career as a ship captain. Having made seventeen voyages to and from France in twenty-four years, he evidently made no more ocean crossings after 1722 but served the Company of the Indies by shuttling supplies to Louisiana from the Caribbean islands. His contributions to natural history and ethnology as well as navigation are evident from his memoir and the Karankawan and Attakapan word lists that he compiled on the 1720 and 1721 voyages to the western Gulf of Mexico. His effort to record significant navigational data from his many voyages is remarkable. The sailing instructions he compiled for the Bahama Channel, the Straits of Florida, and the Tortuga Sounding, as well as his description of the Gulf coast west of the Mississippi, added a new dimension to data compiled by Spanish seamen and enhanced the safety of navigation. In his memorial he gave his opinion on the reasons Louisiana had made so little progress. While praising the competency of the colonial officials — especially Bienville — he faulted the lack of support given them and the poor quality of the people sent to make the colony productive.27 Béranger’s continued presence in the colony is revealed by his having been a witness to a marriage ceremony in November 1728—probably about the time he completed his memoir. Still following his seagoing career at the time, he is identified as captain of La Badine, the name of Iberville’s flagship on his first voyage to Louisiana. Béranger died in New Orleans and was buried there on June 18, 1730.28 Due largely to Béranger’s memorial, the French voyages to the western Gulf of Mexico expanded existing knowledge of the coast and its natives. As for La Harpe’s effort to occupy San Bernardo Bay, however, it was doomed to failure from the start, even had he succeeded in finding it. By the time the Subtile sailed to that purpose in August 1721, Captain Domingo Ramón and forty Spanish soldiers had been encamped there

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since the previous March, on the site of La Salle’s failed settlement. Soon to rise on the same spot was the new Presidio de la Bahía del Espíritu Santo, forestalling all future French claims.

Notes 1. As detailed in the preceding chapter, La Salle landed at Matagorda Bay in February 1685, believing it to be one of the Mississippi River distributaries. There he established a temporary settlement on Garcitas Creek near the head of Lavaca Bay while he sought to orient himself to his surroundings. The approximately three hundred soldiers and colonists died at such a rapid rate that no more than half remained after six months, and scarcely fifteen were still alive by early 1689. The name Bahía de San Bernardo was given the Matagorda Bay complex in 1687 by members of the Spanish Rivas-Iriarte voyage, which came by sea from Veracruz seeking La Salle’s settlement and found the wreck of La Salle’s ship La Belle. See Robert S. Weddle, The Wreck of the Belle, the Ruin of La Salle (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001). 2. Diego Dionisio de Peñalosa Briceño y Berdugo, discredited as governor of New Mexico, besieged the French Court with proposals for conquering northern Mexico and seizing the Spanish mines at the same time La Salle was seeking support for his sea quest of the Mississippi. Découvertes et établissement des Français dans l’ouest et dans le sud de l’Amérique septentrional (1614–1754), ed. Pierre Margry (Paris: D. Jouaust, 1876– 1886), 3:39–70. See also Weddle, Wreck of the Belle, 88–92 and 278 n. 6. 3. Bellisle, “Relation,” in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 6:320–347, trans. Henry Folmer under the title “De Bellisle on the Texas Coast,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 44, no. 2 (October 1940): 204–241 (hereafter cited as Folmer, “De Bellisle”). 4. Ibid. The Toyal Indians are known only from Bellisle. 5. Découvertes, ed. Margry, 6:319. 6. Jean-Baptiste Bénard de La Harpe, The Historical Journal of the Establishment of the French in Louisiana, trans. Joan Cain and Virginia Koenig, ed. Glen R. Conrad (Lafayette: University of Southern Louisiana Press, 1971), 158–159; Charles Le Gac, Immigration and War: Louisiana, 1718–1721, trans. and ed. Glenn R. Conrad (Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1970), 54. Authorship of the journal that bears La Harpe’s name is disputed. Many scholars maintain that the real author was Jean de Beaurain, who became geographer to the king in 1721. 7. Jean Béranger, “Mémoire sur la Louisiane: Relation de la Province de la Louisiane,” Archives Nationales (hereafter cited as an), Colonies, c23, c:472-100, I, (Center for American History [hereafter cited as cah], University of Texas at Austin), transcript, trans. William M. Carroll in Béranger’s Discovery of Aransas Pass, ed. Frank Wagner (Corpus Christi, Texas: Friends of the Corpus Christi Museum, 1983). 8. Ibid. Béranger says only that the first western voyage occurred in 1720. La Harpe (Historical Journal, 159), whose dates often are inaccurate or conflicting, supplies August 23 as the departure date. Le Gac (Immigration and War, 54), on the other hand, dates the departure August 26.

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9. Devin to the directors of the Company of the Indies, May 1, 1724, an, Colonies, C13, 8:199 (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.), usl microfilm. His map, titled Carte de l’Entrée de la Baye de St. Louis, nommée par les Espagnols St. Bernard, is included as an extra sheet in Béranger’s Discovery, ed. Wagner. It is reproduced in Robert S. Weddle, The French Thorn: Rival Explorers in the Spanish Sea, 1682–1762 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991), 220–221, fig. 12, and in Jack Jackson, Flags along the Coast, Charting the Gulf of Mexico, 1519–1759: A Reappraisal (Austin: Austin Book Club, 1993), 68. 10. Béranger, “Mémoire”; Devin’s map. 11. Béranger, “Mémoire.” 12. From the account of Garcilaso de la Vega in The De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539–1543, ed. Lawrence A. Clayton, Vernon James Knight Jr., and Edward C. Moore (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 2:527–528. Cf. Béranger’s Discovery, ed. Wagner, 22. 13. Béranger’s Discovery, ed. Wagner, 25–27, reproduces the word list. See also Weddle, French Thorn, 218–219. 14. La Harpe (Historical Journal, 160) names two of the men, Silvestre and Charleville, speculating that they must have been eaten by the Indians who he claims were said to be cannibals. 15. Minet’s maps are reproduced in La Salle, the Mississippi, and the Gulf: Three Primary Documents, ed. Robert S. Weddle (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), pp. 101 and 107, plates 7 and 8. 16. La Harpe, Historical Journal, 158, 159; Découvertes, ed. Margry, 6:347–348; Bellisle letter in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 6:349. 17. La Harpe, Historical Journal, 172. 18. Découvertes, ed. Margry, 6:347–348; La Harpe, Historical Journal, 173–174 (where pierriers is translated as “stone fortifications” rather than swivel-guns). 19. Devin to the directors. Devin’s coastal map evidently is the unsigned Carte de la Coste de La Louisiane depuis la Baye de Saint Bernard jusqu’à celle de Saint Joseph, which shows the coast from Saint Joseph Bay in Florida to Aransas Pass. Held in the Newberry Library, it is reproduced in Folmer, “De Bellisle,” following p. 226, and Jackson, Flags, plate 32. The map shows two Texas bays, the upper one indicated as the real Saint Bernard explored in 1722, the lower as the one taken for Saint Bernard in 1720. Clearly, the two bays are Galveston and Aransas; the area between the two is compressed, excluding Matagorda Bay. We have found nothing pertaining to the second voyage Devin claims to have made in 1721. 20. First quote, Béranger ”Mémoire”; subsequent quotes, La Harpe, Historical Journal, 178. 21. The second vocabulary appears in Béranger’s Discovery, ed. Wagner, 31–32. 22. Bienville to directors, October 4, 1721, in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 6:347–348. 23. La Harpe, Historical Journal, 182; La Harpe to ?, in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 6:352–353.

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24. See diary in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 6:357–382. 25. Bellisle to company, Biloxi, October 6, 1721, in Découvertes, ed. Margry, 248–250; Folmer, “De Bellisle,” 226. 26. Devin to directors. 27. Béranger, “Mémoire.” 28. Archdiocese of New Orleans Sacramental Records, vol. 1, 1718 –1750, ed. Earl C. Woods and Charles E. Nolan (New Orleans: Archdiocese of New Orleans, 1987), 17. an, funeral register F 1730, 109.

3

AMBIVALENT SUCCESSES AND SUCCESSFUL FAILURES St. Denis, Aguayo, and Juan Rodríguez PAT R I C I A R . L E M É E

3.1

Sculpted and cast in bronze in Fort Worth, Texas, by Larry Crowder, this bust of

St. Denis was erected in modern Natchitoches, Louisiana, as a lasting memorial to the historic bond between Quebec, Louisiana, and Texas. Northwestern State University of Louisiana, Watson Memorial Library, Cammie G. Henry Research Center.

Looming large in the colonial history of a region extending northeast from present-day Mexico through Texas and Louisiana to Florida is the figure of Louis Juchereau de St. Denis (Figure 3.1). St. Denis, as he is known historically, was born September 17, 1676, in Beauport, near Que35

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bec City on the Saint Lawrence River, the eleventh of twelve children from the union of Nicholas Juchereau de St. Denis and Marie Giffard.1 A French Canadian, St. Denis’ ancestors were among the earliest and most notable settlers of Nouvelle France. His maternal grandfather, the surgeon Robert Giffard, sieur de Moncel and de Beauport, and his paternal grandfather, Jean Juchereau, sieur de St. Maur, arrived from France with their young families in 1634. Jean Juchereau later was recommended to Louis xiv by Canada’s lieutenant governor, who requested a patent of nobility for the colonizer as a reward for his services to the crown. Juchereau died in 1672 on the land concession of his son, Nicholas, before receiving the patent. Nicholas himself later merited the crown’s attention: the fifty-five-year-old and his three hundred militiamen defended Beauport for three days against an English landing party during the siege of Quebec in 1690.2 For his heroic service, the Sun King awarded Nicholas a title of nobility. Following his death in 1692, Nicholas’ title descended to his children. In October 1699, Louis Juchereau de St. Denis appeared in the historic record when he sailed from France aboard the king’s ship, the Renommée, with his kinsman Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d’Iberville, who established the Louisiana colony on a previous voyage earlier that year. The Renommée arrived at Biloxi Bay on January 8, 1700. By mid-March, St. Denis and Bienville, one of d’Iberville’s younger brothers, were preparing to explore the region of the Senis Indians in eastern Texas.3 From the time of his journey with Bienville until 1713, few details are known about St. Denis’ activities. He is recorded during those years at Mobile and, farther west, at Fort de la Boulaye, better known as Fort Mississippi, where he commanded. St. Denis also commanded during that time a region near Bayou Saint-Jean in modern New Orleans, where, after receiving no salary for several years, he retired from military service. There were other changes of officers in the colony: Antoine de la Mothe, the self-styled sieur de Cadillac, agent for the wealthy Antoine Crozat, who obtained a monopoly for the Louisiana colony, arrived as the new governor in 1712, replacing Bienville, who had succeeded d’Iberville in that capacity. With instructions from Crozat to establish trade with the Spaniards in Mexico, Cadillac made at least two unsuccessful attempts to do so via a Gulf route from Louisiana to Veracruz. The fortuitous opportunity for an overland expedition to Mexico presented itself when Cadillac received a letter from a Spanish missionary, Fray Francisco Hidalgo. Hidalgo had served at the Spanish missions in eastern Texas from 1690 to 1693. He petitioned the Frenchmen to give succor to his beloved Hasinai (d’Iberville’s Senis) Indians. With passport in hand from Cadillac authorizing St. Denis’ travel into Spanish-held territory, the thirty-seven-

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37

year-old French Canadian departed Mobile in September 1713.4 Among his contingent were Pierre and Robert Talon, Canadian brothers who had survived the destruction of La Salle’s colony on the Texas Gulf Coast and in 1699 sailed with St. Denis and d’Iberville from France. When the Frenchmen reached the Hasinai villages in eastern Texas, Hidalgo was not there. Informed that the priest had returned to Mexico, St. Denis and his companions, with Hasinai guides, continued their journey southwestward in search of the priest. The party arrived south of the Rio Grande at the Spanish presidio San Juan Bautista in July 1714. St. Denis could not have foretold two personal events that would occur while he was on this trip: the death of his mother in Canada in June 1714 and his marriage in Coahuila to Manuela Sánchez Navarro y Gomes Mascorro, reportedly in 1716.5 Neither could St. Denis have known in 1714 that he would travel four times between Mobile and Mexico City during the next six years (see color illustration 4). The total of only the overland miles of these round trips in 1713 and in 1717, plus the approximate mileage of some but not all of other of St. Denis’ known overland travels, is a conservative and an almost unbelievable 14,000 miles. Placed in perspective, St. Denis traveled overland almost the equivalent of three round trips driven on modern highways between Savannah, Georgia, on the Atlantic Coast, and Los Angeles, California, on the Pacific Coast. Louis Juchereau de St. Denis is the focus of this essay about events and activities related to his 1721 meeting near the Neches River in Texas with the Spanish Marqués de Aguayo and with Juan Rodríguez, an apostate Indian chief who guided Aguayo’s expedition east from San Antonio. An involved set of circumstances, extending across international lines, precipitated the events that brought these three unusual individuals together. France had declared war against Spain on January 9, 1719. The news reached Bienville, governor of the Louisiana colony, when his brother arrived from France in late April. Bienville’s response was swift: in May he ordered an attack from Mobile on the Spanish presidio at nearby Pensacola.6 He also ordered soldiers from the Red River post of Saint-Jean Baptiste des Natchitoches to seize the Spanish mission San Miguel de los Adaes. Three months later, Spanish forces recaptured Pensacola, only to lose it again to the French a month after that. The Spaniards in eastern Texas, unprepared to defend themselves against further French intrusions, abandoned not only San Miguel but also their presidio and five other missions in the region. Soldiers, civilians, and missionaries retreated southwest to their fledging settlement at San Antonio. Thus France controlled a long stretch of the Texas Gulf Coast and a vast interior region that included

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much of the present state of Texas. The way was cleared for the French to pursue their long-standing objective of acquiring the silver mines in northern Mexico. Several plans were advanced for doing so. One of the plans required a joint operation of French naval and land forces.7 The latter, under St. Denis’ command, would include troops and their Indian auxiliaries from both New France, or Canada, and Louisiana. They would capture all positions occupied by the Spaniards east of the Rio Grande, drive off as much livestock as possible, and enter the silver mining country. The plan never was effected. Exactly why is uncertain. Pierre Heinrich offers the explanation that Spaniards captured the French ship bringing orders to Bienville.8 There were two French attempts by sea to locate and occupy Matagorda Bay, where La Salle had landed in 1684 to establish a French colony. Neither attempt succeeded. Jean Béranger, seeking the bay in 1720, sailed past it and entered modern Aransas Bay instead. Bénard de La Harpe was sent the following year to occupy the bay with soldiers transported on Béranger’s ship, but he undershot the mark and entered Galveston Bay. Another scheme against the Spaniards in Texas gained the approval of Bienville in Louisiana and of the Count of Toulouse, a son of Louis xiv and, at the time, the admiral of France.9 Like the previous plan involving St. Denis, this one called for him to lead a large force of various Indian groups who would invade San Antonio. From there, the Spaniards would be pushed back across the Rio Grande. It has been suggested that the plan included occupying La Salle’s bay also. Bienville advised authorities in France that if St. Denis were successful, he himself would deny to the Spaniards any knowledge of St. Denis’ actions and claim he had acted without authority. St. Denis, he added, had departed Mobile in late March (1721) en route to Texas to carry out the San Antonio raid. The Spanish Crown, meanwhile, was not idle; His Majesty Philip v wanted the French out of Spanish Texas and sent orders to the viceroy in Mexico for their removal. Chosen to lead the offensive was the second Marqués de San Miguel de Aguayo, a wealthy Spaniard who had come to Mexico in 1712.10 Aguayo, on learning of recent French aggressions, had written the viceroy, Marqués de Valero, to offer his sword and his fortune for the undertaking. Aguayo’s motivation is uncertain. The marqués and his wife had come from Spain when she inherited an estate in northern Mexico.11 That estate, totaling more than 11,626,850 acres, had descended undivided from her great-great-grandfather, Francisco de Urdiñola.12 Urdiñola had arrived in Mexico from Spain in 1572 as a common soldier and quickly prospered; he eventually became governor of Nueva Vizcaya. As early as 1583, Urdiñola began purchasing land in

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39

Saltillo and Parras. His holdings later included silver mines and haciendas at Bonanza, Mazapil, and Rio Grande in Zacatecas, but most of his properties were in that area of Nueva Vizcaya that became part of Coahuila in 1787. The headquarters of Urdiñola’s latifundio was the Hacienda de San Francisco de los Patos, approximately forty miles west of Saltillo. Aguayo was responsible not only for administering the latifundio his wife had inherited—he also was responsible for defending it. Regardless of the reason for Aguayo’s offer to fight the French, it was accepted. Further, Valero conferred on him the governorship of the province of Coahuila and the province of Texas, called New Philippines. Aguayo’s orders called for reestablishment of Spanish missions and presidios abandoned under the threat of French invasion.13 Preparations began immediately for the expedition, which eventually would include five hundred men, but problems were many and progress was slow. Almost eighteen months passed before the expedition crossed the Rio Grande. In all that time, Aguayo’s energy and drive were focused on an aggressive campaign against the French. That focus changed abruptly when Aguayo received word from the viceroy that a truce had been effected between France and Spain; he now could wage war against the French only if they encroached on Spanish territory. Aguayo’s disappointment is reflected in the comments of his diarist and the expedition’s chaplain, Juan Antonio de la Peña.14 Aguayo received additional news at the Rio Grande: St. Denis and other Frenchmen were gathered with many Indian groups, including those of Ranchería Grande, near Los Brazos de Dios, the modern Brazos River, above the road to the Tejas. The governor immediately sent a detachment to investigate. At the same time, he ordered Domingo Ramón with forty Spanish soldiers to occupy the former site of La Salle’s colony on the bay the Spaniards now called Espíritu Santo. Aguayo finally crossed the Rio Grande on March 24, 1721. When the expedition reached San Antonio, he found the apostate Juan Rodríguez, chief of one of the native bands of Ranchería Grande, ready to strike a deal: if the governor would establish a mission in San Antonio for Rodríguez and his Indians, Rodríguez would guide the governor to east Texas. Aguayo welcomed the offer. Reaching his destination required travel through the region of Ranchería Grande, formed by various Indian groups that had migrated from Mexico prior to 1716. Since then, Ranchería Grande had acquired new allies, including the so-called Norteños, or northern tribes of the upper Red River, as well as the Hasinai, the Kadohadacho, and some coastal groups. They also had become allied with the French, as evidenced by reports that they had been among the groups gathered with St. Denis. Aguayo seemed to recognize Ranchería Grande

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as the formidable enemy it had become, and he recognized Juan Rodríguez for what he was — a passport through and beyond that enemy to eastern Texas. Aguayo’s strategy accomplished the desired results. He traveled without incident along the route eastward, encountering various groups of Ranchería Grande as well as other groups, among them the Hasinai, whom early Spaniards called the Tejas, and the Kadohadacho, whose villages were far to the northeast on the Red River. Aguayo distributed gifts to the Indians and, concerned about not offending those groups he suspected had met recently with St. Denis near Los Brazos de Dios, threatened severe punishment for any Spanish troops who might damage the Indians’ cornfields. At the Neches River, the expedition was met by a Frenchman who had come to convey St. Denis’ desire to meet with Aguayo if St. Denis could be guaranteed safe conduct. That assured, St. Denis crossed the Neches to the Spanish camp on the west bank. Aguayo’s diarist, Peña, provides the only known first-hand account of the meeting: “The object of St. Denis’ visit [the Frenchman declared] was to announce that, if his Lordship [Aguayo] were willing to do likewise, he, as commandant of the forces on that entire frontier, would observe most amicably the truce which had been published in Spain between the two powers.”15 Aguayo responded that he likewise had received orders to observe the truce, provided the French immediately would evacuate the entire province of Texas and that St. Denis would withdraw all his soldiers to Natchitoches. He stipulated also that St. Denis was not to interfere with restoration of all the Spanish Crown had possessed, including Los Adaes near present Robeline, Louisiana. Peña reported that St. Denis agreed to Aguayo’s conditions and took his leave, promising he and his people would retire without delay to Natchitoches. Aguayo resumed travel eastward. Arriving several days later at the former site of Misión Concepción near present Nacogdoches, he was informed by Rodríguez that St. Denis had not made a hasty retreat to Natchitoches as promised. Instead, following the meeting, St. Denis had paused scarcely seven leagues from Concepción. There the Frenchman spent three days, Peña wrote, visiting the Kadohadachos and other native groups he had gathered the previous winter for a planned attack on La Bahía (site of La Salle’s former colony) and San Antonio — an attack, Rodríquez reported, that the Spaniards’ arrival had averted. Almost a month later, Aguayo reached the Los Adaes site and received there a letter from the commandant at Natchitoches —“Monsieur Rerenor,” as Peña recorded the name — congratulating him on his journey. The commandant’s real purpose, however, was to advise Aguayo he

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41

had no order to permit the Spaniards to settle at Los Adaes and that Aguayo should not proceed until St. Denis returned from his trip to Mobile to inform Bienville of the Spaniards’ arrival. From Peña’s rendering, one might assume that “Rerenor” was in command at the Natchitoches post only temporarily and in St. Denis’ absence. That, however, was not the case. Marcel Giraud identified Peña’s Rerenor as Renault d’Hauterive, who on arriving from France early in 1720 was commissioned promptly by Bienville as “captain in command at Natchitoches” and sent there to replace the recently deceased commandant Blondel.16 Renaud’s (Renault’s) name has been all but expunged from the record by historians’ assumptions that St. Denis succeeded Blondel in the Natchitoches command. Renaud did succeed Blondel, and the historic record reflects that Renaud filled the assignment for at least eighteen months. An entry dated October 16, 1721, in the journal attributed to La Harpe notes that Bienville had received from Renaud, still commandant at Natchitoches, word of Aguayo’s arrival at Los Adaes the previous August.17 The message, according to La Harpe, raised Bienville’s concern that Aguayo might overpower the French at Natchitoches; Bienville feared that in such a circumstance he himself would be blamed for not having given the command to St. Denis. Many people believed, La Harpe noted, that St. Denis had great influence over the Indian nations; thus, Bienville decided, against his will, to have St. Denis relieve Renaud. With knowledge that Renaud and not St. Denis commanded for a year and a half after Blondel’s death, a new question arises: where was St. Denis during that time? Two French documents bear on the matter. The first is dated July 1, 1720, in Paris, giving command of the “Upper Rivière aux Cannes” to St. Denis.18 The location of the command is puzzling to modern scholars because the historic record does not make clear what modern river was recognized in Paris in 1720 as Rivière aux Cannes, or Cane River. Louisiana scholars agree Cane River in Louisiana is a mid– eighteenth-century term that first appeared in records dated after St. Denis’ death.19 The name since has come to designate a segment of the Red River in lower Natchitoches Parish well below the site of the French fort. The 1720 reference seems to suggest some river other than the Red, or Rivière Rouge. What might it have been? A Rivière aux Cannes does occur in records of the La Salle expedition, which landed on the Texas coast in 1685. The expedition historian, Henri Joutel, applied the name to the combined Lavaca and Navidad rivers that flow into Lavaca Bay.20 For years to come, French mapmakers affixed the name to one stream or another along the Texas

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coast, usually in the vicinity of Matagorda Bay—La Salle’s Baye-SaintLouis. Guillaume Delisle’s 1718 map of the region identified Rivière aux Cannes as the lower segment of a river he designated upriver as the Río San Marcos or Río Colorado (color illustration 4). In view of the French interest in occupying La Salle’s bay, the Crown’s previously described plans to penetrate the Spanish mining country, and St. Denis’ known activities, could it be St. Denis was assigned a command in present Texas? The second document, dated September 27, 1721, in Paris, mentions St. Denis as post commander without a company at a salary of 1,800 livres.21 Is it possible Peña accurately reflected St. Denis’ introduction of himself to Aguayo? Was the French Canadian truly “commandant of forces on the entire frontier,” including, from the French perspective, all the known area of Texas? Were his “forces” possibly the Indian groups allied to him through trade—Indian groups he had convened to attack the Spaniards at San Antonio and possibly to occupy La Salle’s bay? Could one base of St. Denis’ operations in Texas have been near the former Spanish mission San José de los Nasonis, the likely place he spent three days with his Indian followers after meeting with Aguayo on the Neches River? Perhaps future research will answer such questions. Aguayo, back at Los Adaes, prepared for the return trip to Coahuila. He departed in November 1721 and reached Monclova the following May. In an account of his services sent to the king, Aguayo related that he had fortified and constructed presidios as instructed and had drawn maps of the region, reestablished the six missions in east Texas and established three new ones, and secured the Spanish Crown’s hold on the Province of Texas.22 The marqués requested as compensation the rank of lieutenant general. His services were rewarded with the lower rank of major general. Aguayo seems to have lived rather obscurely until his death in 1734 at his hacienda San Francisco de los Patos near General Cepeda, Coahuila. Juan Rodríguez lived out his days in San Antonio, where Misión San Xavier de Nájera had been founded for him and his Indian group. Whether the mission ever was built is uncertain. It is certain that Rodríquez was unable to control his Indians —they often fled northeast from San Antonio for refuge among other groups of Ranchería Grande. Ultimately, Nájera ceased to exist as a separate entity and was joined to Misión San Antonio de Valero. Rodríguez was married at the Valero mission in 1729.23 Their children, some of whom were adults at the time, were baptized and later married there. On December 13, 1740, Juan Rodríguez was buried at the Valero mission. St. Denis remained in command at Natchitoches until his death there in 1744. It is recorded that the post often was short of its full complement of soldiers because colonial officials believed the French Canadian com-

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Ambivalent Successes and Successful Failures

mandant could enlist the aid of his many Indian allies as needed. More than once, St. Denis relied on his personal finances, without reimbursement, to carry out his duties as commander. And more than once St. Denis was called upon to pursue the Crown’s objectives, and the colonial officials failed to support his recommendations and supply his needs. They betrayed him and falsely accused him of not following instructions. Finally, in 1742, a discouraged St. Denis requested permission to resign his command and retire to Mexico with his Spanish wife and their minor children.24 Authorities denied his petition, “encouraging” him to remain in the colony and promising to promote his sons advantageously. These promises, at least, were fulfilled. The precise nature of St. Denis’ unique relationship with Indian groups across so vast a region and how he came to enjoy such great influence over them is yet poorly understood. There is no evidence that these groups were ever loyal to the French per se, but certainly there is evidence that they were loyal to St. Denis personally and deferred to his presence through his descendants for at least three generations. A French Canadian by birth, a nobleman by inheritance, commandant at Fort de la Boulaye, at Bayou Saint Jean, at Rivière aux Cannes, and at Saint Jean Baptiste des Natchitoches, a knight of the Military Order of Saint Louis, a trader and trusted friend of the Indians, Louis Juchereau de St. Denis was a remarkable individual who significantly influenced the colonial history of the region that became Texas. Notes 1. Microfilm copy of baptismal record provided to the author by Henri JuchereauDuchesnay of Quebec. 2. Patricia R. Lemée, “Tios and Tantes: Familial and Political Relationships of Natchitoches and the Spanish Colonial Frontier,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 101 (January 1998): 342–343. 3. Variously appearing in the French historic record as Senis, Senys, Cenis, Assinnis, Asinais, and Hasinais, this Caddoan group was called Tejas by early Spaniards. Herbert Bolton, in his The Hasinais, Southern Caddoans as Seen by the Earliest Europeans (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), describes the Senis of d’Iberville’s journal as living in a compact and somewhat isolated area in the middle Neches River and Angelina River valleys of east Texas. 4. Lemée, “Tios and Tantes,” 343. 5. Patricia R. Lemée, “Manuela Sánchez Navarro,” Natchitoches Genealogist 20 (October 1995): 17–21. Manuela Sánchez Navarro y Gomes Mascorro was baptized April 16, 1697, in Monclova. She was one of at least two children born to Diego Sánchez Navarro y Camacho and Mariana Gomes Mascorro y Garza. Manuela’s widowed pater-

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nal grandmother, Feliciana Camacho y Botello, married Diego Ramón, commandant at the Spanish presidio San Juan Bautista on the Rio Grande; hence, Ramón was the stepgrandfather of Manuela. 6. Deliberations of the Council, April 20, 1719, Archives Nationales, Colonies, c13a, 5:331 (Colonial Records Collection, Center for Louisiana Studies [hereafter cited as cls], University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette), microfilm. 7. Mémoire de la Compagnie des Indes à Maulévrier du 26 November 1720, Archives du Ministière des Affaires Étrangères, Espagne, Correspondence générale, 296:293, transcript, Archivo General de México, Historia, vol. 391, Box 2q188 (Center for American History [hereafter cited as cah], University of Texas at Austin). 8. Pierre Heinrich, La Louisiane Sous La Compagnie Des Indes 1717–1731 (Paris: E. Guilmoto, 1908), 116. 9. Rapport au sujet du raid de Saint Denis contre l’éstablissement espagnol de St. Antoine, 1721, Paris, Archives Nationales, Colonies, c13c4, fols. 53–54 (Colonial Records Collection, cls), microfilm. 10. Eleanor Claire Buckley, “The Aguayo Expedition into Texas and Louisiana, 1719– 1722,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 15 (July 1911): 20. 11. Vito Alessio Robles, Coahuila y Texas en la Epoca Colonial (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, S.A., 1978), 416–417. José Ramón de Azlor y Virto de Vera, son of Artal de Azlor, was born in Spain, where he married Ignacia Xaviera de Echeverz y Valdes, daughter of Agustín de Echeverz y Subízar, first Marqués de Aguayo and governor of Nuevo León at the time La Salle landed on the Texas Gulf coast, and Francisca de Valdez y Alcega. Through this marriage, Jose Ramón de Azlor became the second Marqués de Aguayo. 12. Charles H. Harris iii, A Mexican Family Empire: The Latifundio of the Sánchez Navarro Family 1765–1867 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), 6. 13. Buckley, “The Aguayo Expedition,” 22. 14. Juan Antonio de la Peña, “Derrotero de la Expedicion en la Provincia de los Texas, Nuevo Reino de Philipinos, que del orden del Exmo. Señor Marqués de Valero Vi-Rey de esta Nueva España ha hecho D. Joseph Azlor, Caballero Mesnadero del Reino de Aragon, Governador y Capitan General de dicha Provincia de Texas, Nuevas Philipinos, y de esta de Coahuila, Nuevo Reino de Estramadura,” Mexico, 1722, transcript, Archivo San Francisco el Grande, Mexico City, vol. 710, Box 2Q229, 215–284 (cah); Juan Antonio de la Peña, “Peña’s Diary of the Aguayo Expedition,” trans. Peter Forrestal, Preliminary Studies of the Texas Catholic Historical Society 2 (January 1935): 6 (hereafter cited as Forrestal, “Peña’s Diary”). 15. Forrestal, “Peña’s Diary,” 42. 16. Marcel Giraud, Histoire de la Louisiana française (Paris: Presses Universitairs de France, 1953), 3:67. Captain Renault d’Hauterive was a son of the grand voyer (highway commissioner) of Tours, capital of the French province of Touraine. He arrived in Louisiana in 1720 as a company commander and almost immediately was assigned by Bienville to command the fort at Natchitoches. He married Charlotte Bossua, widow of François Duval, an official in the Company of the Indies in New Orleans, Louisiana. Soon after his participation with Bienville in the 1736 expedition against the Chicka-

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saws, d’Hauterive was made a chevalier of Saint Louis. He later became commander of the garrison of New Orleans, where he died in 1743. 17. Jean Baptiste Bénard de La Harpe, Historical Journal of the Settlement of the French in Louisiana, trans. Virginia Koenig and Joan Cain, ed. and annot. Glenn R. Conrad (Lafayette: University of Southern Louisiana Press, 1971), 184. 18. Commission to St. Denis as commandant on the upper Rivière aux Cannes, July 1, 1720, Paris, Archives Nationales, Colonies, B 42 bis: 377; Découvertes et établissement des Français dans l’ouest et dans le sud le l’Amérique septentrionale (1614 –1754), ed. Pierre Margry, (Paris: D. Jouaust, 1876 –1888) 6:224–225. 19. Personal communications with Drs. Hiram Gregory and Dayna Bowker Lee, University of Northwestern Louisiana, Natchitoches. 20. Robert S. Weddle, The Wreck of the Belle, the Ruin of La Salle (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 214–216. 21. La Harpe, Historical Journal, 184. 22. Aguayo, Relación de Servicios (1722?), Archivo General de Indies, Guadalajara, 117, reel 4, doc. 1, Robert S. Weddle, personal microfilm collection. 23. Marriage, baptism, and burial records of the Misión San Antonio de Valero, trans. John Odgen Leal (Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library at the Alamo, San Antonio, Texas). 24. Minister of Marine to Governor Vaudreuil and Minister of Marine to St. Denis, Archives Nationales, Paris, Archives des Colonies, Series b (Ordres du Roi), v78, Folio 448 (Colonial Records Collection, cls), microfilm; Patricia R. Lemée, “Tios and Tantes,” 354.

4

ATHANASE DE MÉZIÈRES AND THE FRENCH IN TEXAS, 1750 –1803 F. T O D D S M I T H

Although few French actually settled in Texas during the latter half of the eighteenth century, they exercised an important influence over the Spanish colony by maintaining the close relationship, through trade and friendship, that Louis Juchereau de St. Denis had established with the Indians of the region earlier in the century. In fact, following the cession of Louisiana to Spain in 1762, Spanish officials employed Frenchmen almost exclusively to establish peace with the tribes that had been inimical to the Spaniards in Texas. By the end of the century, due to the efforts of these French traders and diplomats, relations between the natives and the Europeans in Texas stabilized for the first time since the colony was established. Thus during the late 1700s, the French exercised greater influence in Texas than they would again. From St. Denis’ death in 1744 through the rest of the century, his descendants played important roles in government and in the trade that flowed from Natchitoches into Texas. Louis de St. Denis fils was a soldier and trader who commanded great respect from the Indian tribes of the region. One Spanish inhabitant of Texas pointed out in 1751 that the natives of his colony “would undergo a thousand torments for the sake of pleasing him; because this was the only official whom they respected and obeyed as a great chief, as they called him, the son of the former [great chief St. Denis], who was so revered by them.”1 Césaire de Blanc, an officer from Marseilles, succeeded St. Denis in 1745 as commandant of Natchitoches, a position he would maintain until his death in 1763. Five years after assuming command, the sixtytwo-year-old widower married St. Denis’ daughter, Marie des Douleurs, a woman four decades his junior. The couple had two sons, one of whom, Louis Charles de Blanc, in 1785 would become commandant of the post that his grandfather had founded seventy-one years before. In 1746, an46

Athanase de Mézières and the French in Texas, 1750–1803

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other St. Denis daughter, Marie Petronille, married the Frenchman who would have the greatest impact on Texas in the eighteenth century, Athanase de Mézières.2 Born in Paris in 1719, Athanase Christophe Fortunat Mauguet de Mézières was the son of Louis Christophe Claude de Mézières and Marie Joseph Ménard de Mauguet. Athanase’s father died when the youth was fifteen, and in 1738, following his mother’s marriage to a wealthy marquis, he was sent to Louisiana. Four years later, the twenty-three-year-old de Mézières accepted an assignment at Natchitoches with the rank of ensign. His marriage into the St. Denis family opened up doors for the talented Frenchman; he acquired land and slaves and eventually was promoted to the rank of captain, serving as lieutenant commander of Natchitoches. Unfortunately, his young wife died in 1748, soon after the birth of their daughter. In 1754, the ambitious and opportunistic de Mézières further advanced his position by marrying Pelagie Fazende, whose near relatives in New Orleans controlled a number of the colony’s governmental posts. Over the next fourteen years, de Mézières was productive in both the public and private spheres; he became the largest slave owner and tobacco producer in Natchitoches, and he and his second wife had eight children.3 Concerning Texas, de Mézières would be most influential through his official relationship with the Indian tribes of the region and his involvement in the Indian trade. Following St. Denis’ lead, French traders from Natchitoches entered the Indian villages of Texas (illegally, in the eyes of the Spanish colonial officials) and strengthened the natives’ allegiance to the French by providing them with a variety of European goods—including firearms, ammunition, kettles, knives, axes, and clothes—in return for products of the hunt, such as deerskins, buffalo robes, and bear fat. By the time St. Denis died, French traders had established strong ties with the Caddo confederacies on the Louisiana-Texas frontier. In addition to the town and military post at Natchitoches—named after the friendly Caddo tribe that lived just upstream on the Red River—the French established another trading post about fifty miles to the northwest, among the Yatasis on Bayou Pierre. The Nassonite Post, located on the right bank of the Red River in present Bowie County, Texas, was established by the French in 1719 among the Kadohadacho confederacy. During the 1730s, it was strengthened by the arrival of a few French families who settled there and constructed a flour mill. Alexis Grappe, a native of Besançon, commanded the Nassonite Post for nearly twenty years after first being stationed there in the 1740s. Through the trading posts among the Yatasis and Kadohadachos, French traders were able to circumvent the Spanish presidio at Los Adaes and trade with the Hasinais of the Caddo confeder-

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acy, who lived in eastern Texas along the upper reaches of the Neches and Angelina Rivers.4 Through their trade with the Caddos, the French traders were able to develop commercial ties with other Indians of the region, which ultimately caused conflict with the Spaniards of Texas. Various Wichita tribes—linguistic kin of the Caddos—moved southward from Kansas and Oklahoma in the decade following St. Denis’ death in order to gain better access to French trade goods. The Kichais eventually established a village on the Trinity River in eastern Texas, while the Tawakonis built a town on the Brazos at the site of present Waco. The Taovayas, however, established the most important Wichita settlement at a place that would be one of the landmark villages of the southern plains for the next half-century. The excellent site they chose was the farthest point upstream on the Red River that could be reached by boat; it lay just west of the thin sliver of forest known as the Western Cross Timbers. French traders flocked to the village to exchange goods not only with the Taovayas, but also with the Wichitas’ great ally, the Comanches. This tribe was by far the most numerous of all the Indians of Texas and, unlike the settled, agricultural Caddos and Wichitas, roamed the Great Plains on horseback to hunt buffalo. At the Taovaya village, the Comanches exchanged buffalo robes for the Wichitas’ farm produce and French trade goods. Other tribes, such as the Tonkawas, Bidais, and Attakapas of southeastern Texas, also received French traders from various towns in Louisiana.5 Although the Spaniards of Texas opposed this commerce, they were powerless to stop it and even depended upon the French traders’ good graces to convince the natives to remain peaceful. For instance, a new Spanish governor arrived at Los Adaes in 1752 and noted that all the Indians of the province were devoted to the French because of the trade goods they provided. He ordered an officer from the Spanish presidio, Manuel Antonio de Soto—who would marry another St. Denis daughter—to go to the Hasinai villages with a group of soldiers to investigate the French trade. A Hasinai chief, maybe dressed in a French military coat, intercepted de Soto and protected the French traders in his village by forcing the Spaniard to return to Los Adaes. The chief then convoked a meeting of enraged Hasinai warriors at his village. He also called St. Denis fils to the gathering and offered to kill all the Spaniards in Texas if the Frenchman so desired. St. Denis restrained the Indians and told them he would be very angry with them if they attacked Los Adaes, for these were Spanish lands. He was worried that war would disrupt the illegal commerce between Natchitoches and the Spanish post, and though he wanted to use the Hasinais to intimidate the Spaniards, he did not wish them to go so far as to throw his formal European ally out of the territory. St. Denis’ in-

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fluence proved supreme, and the Hasinais gave up the notion of a concerted attack upon the Spanish.6 French traders’ desire for items in addition to peltries had repercussions that affected the Spaniards and Indians who lived far to the west of the Louisiana-Texas frontier. The Frenchmen needed horses for their mount-poor colony as well as Indian slaves for the plantations of Louisiana and the islands of the West Indies. For the horses, the Comanches, Wichitas, Caddos, and Tonkawas raided the herds maintained at the Spanish missions and settlements around San Antonio and La Bahía. For the slaves, the same tribes, collectively known as the Norteños by the Spaniards, attacked the Lipan Apaches, who roamed the hill country west of San Antonio. The raiders mainly captured Apache women and children, whom the French traders would purchase at the Taovaya village and send downstream to Natchitoches and New Orleans. Occasionally, a French trader took a kidnapped Apache woman or girl for a wife. For instance, François Morvant, longtime trader in the Caddo villages, had a child with a thirteen-year-old Apache slave named Marie Anne, whom he eventually freed, married, and settled down with in east Texas. By the end of the eighteenth century, most of the mestizo population of the Louisiana-Texas frontier would be of Apache descent.7 The incessant Norteño raids upon the Lipans—made much more effective by the increased availability of French firearms—forced the beleaguered Apaches to ask the Spaniards to establish a mission in their country in the hope of gaining protection from their enemies. As a result, in 1757, the Spaniards constructed a mission-presidio complex for the Apaches on the San Saba River northwest of San Antonio near presentday Menard, Texas. The Norteños strongly opposed this development, feeling that the mission would provide the Apaches with a refuge from which to make retaliatory attacks upon them. Therefore, in March 1758, two thousand Norteño warriors, half of whom were carrying French guns, gathered near the mission on the San Saba. They planned to kill any Lipan Apaches they encountered and to frighten the rest of the tribe from ever returning there. The Norteños, led by a fully armed Comanche chief dressed in a French army officer’s uniform, surrounded the mission and made the priests let them inside the walls. When the Norteños found no Apaches there, they turned on the Spaniards and killed eight of them (including two priests, one of whom they decapitated) and set fire to the mission.8 The attack on the San Saba mission caused the Spanish to seek retribution against the Norteños. In August 1759, Colonel Diego Ortiz Parrilla led an expedition of 360 Spanish troops and 176 Indian allies (including 130 Lipan Apaches) out from San Antonio. Two months later, Ortiz

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Parrilla’s troops attacked the Norteños at the Taovaya village on the Red River. These well-armed natives outnumbered the Spanish-Indian force, however, and Ortiz Parrilla’s men could not penetrate the Taovayas’ palisaded village. The stunned Spanish colonel was forced to retreat to the San Saba River after suffering fifty-two casualties. Unable to believe that Indians could construct a stockaded fort, much less carry out such a wellorganized defense and counterattack, Ortiz Parrilla reported to his superiors that fourteen Frenchmen had led the Norteños into battle. Not only did he report seeing a French flag flying over the Taovaya village, he also was convinced that he had heard the sound of fife and drums coming from behind the stockade. The Spaniard used the agricultural Taovayas’ well-arranged corn and pumpkin fields as further evidence of French influence. No doubt the Norteños did have French weapons and were stalwart allies of their friends from Louisiana, but it is certain that they did not need any assistance from Europeans when it came to the art of war. Despite Ortiz Parrilla’s belief in French assistance in his defeat, Hasinai insolence and hostility in the aftermath of the Norteño victories forced the beleaguered Spaniards of eastern Texas to appeal to officials at Natchitoches for help. In response, St. Denis and de Mézières traveled to the Hasinai villages in 1760 and convinced the tribesmen to refrain from further violence against the Spanish priests and troops of the area.9 Although this was the first time that de Mézières served as an arbiter between the Spaniards and the Texas natives, it would certainly not be his last. In 1763, as a result of the defeat in the Seven Years’ War, France ceded Louisiana to Spain and abandoned North America. It was not until 1769, however, that Alejandro O’Reilly was able to put the Spaniards effectively in control of Louisiana. O’Reilly realized that peaceful relations had to be established with the tribes of Louisiana and Texas, for Spain was too weak and poor to afford war with the tribes, especially when the aggressive British now stood poised on the east bank of the Mississippi River. O’Reilly also understood that the Spanish method of treating with the natives through missionaries who attempted conversion would not work and that the only way to win the tribes’ allegiance was to allow French trading methods. O’Reilly, however, made significant modifications in trading policies. Instead of being free to trade any items to any French trader who arrived at their villages, under the new policy the Indians could deal only with licensed traders who were closely supervised by the government. The Indians were also forbidden to deal in Indian slaves and livestock, since the slave trade was open to abuse and the livestock trade promoted theft from fellow Spaniards in Texas and New Mexico.10 To put such a policy into effect, O’Reilly called upon the man who was said to have a knowledge of Texas and Louisiana and their native inhabi-

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tants “such as no one else possesses,” Athanase de Mézières. In late 1769, the Irishman named the Frenchman —both now in the employ of Spain— lieutenant governor of the all-important Natchitoches district. De Mézières was charged with implementing the new trade policy and with establishing Spanish authority over the tribes of Louisiana and Texas that had been French allies. This meant mediating a peace between the Norteños, who had destroyed the mission on the San Saba River, and their former Spanish enemies. De Mézières realized that he had to overturn Spanish Indian policy in Texas by dealing with the natives through trade rather than missionaries and by forming an alliance with the Norteños aimed at the Lipan Apaches rather than the other way around. Despite official opposition from superiors in Mexico City, de Mézières’ task was made easier by King Charles iii’s acceptance of the recommendations made by the Marqués de Rubí following his inspection tour of 1766–1767. The Spanish monarch issued the Regulations of 1772, which called for the abandonment of all missions and presidios in Texas except those at San Antonio and La Bahía. As a result, the Spanish missions in eastern Texas as well as the presidio and capital at Los Adaes were abolished, and the inhabitants were moved to San Antonio, the new capital of Texas. The Regulations of 1772 also authorized the use of trade and presents in dealing with most Indians and the use of force in dealing with enemy tribes such as the Apaches.11 Even before the issuance of the royal orders, de Mézières had taken steps to make peace with the Norteños. In April 1770, he gathered the chiefs of the Natchitoches, Yatasis, Petit Caddos, and Kadohadachos at Natchitoches and had them officially transfer their allegiance from France to Spain. In return, de Mézières designated the leaders of the Kadohadachos and Yatasis as medal chiefs, and the four tribes were granted an annual present and the right to have licensed traders visit their villages. With the establishment of good relations with the Caddos on the Red River, de Mézières began the long process of establishing peace with the Wichitas and the Comanches. In October 1770, the Frenchman, along with a few residents from Natchitoches, Spanish soldiers from Los Adaes, and a Spanish priest, met with the headmen of the three main Wichita tribes at the Kadohadacho village. Speaking through the Kadohadacho trader and interpreter Alexis Grappe, de Mézières told the Wichitas that he came as an agent of the benevolent Spanish governor of Louisiana, who was now his own commander since the cession of the colony. He stated that despite the attack upon the mission on the San Saba River, the Spaniards were willing to make peace with the Wichitas and provide them with presents and trade goods. The Wichita chiefs were still wary of their former enemies and hesitated before coming to a decision. The fol-

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lowing year, however, the Wichitas sent a message through a chief of the Hasinais to de Mézières indicating they were now willing to formally agree to peace. In response, de Mézières sent an embassy—which included his nephew, Louis de Blanc—to Texas to invite the Wichitas to come to Natchitoches. On two separate occasions in the fall of 1771, de Mézières, the Spanish commander at Los Adaes, and various Wichita chieftains wrapped themselves in the royal banner as a symbol of the peace established between Louisiana, Texas, and the Wichitas.12 With peace established, French traders from Natchitoches were free to enter Texas legally, and they did so in large numbers. Contracts made in Natchitoches during this decade list 103 people of French descent—25 from Louisiana or Canada, 30 from France, and 47 of unknown French origin—involved in the trade. Suppliers in New Orleans sent trade merchandise upriver to merchants in Natchitoches who then distributed the goods to the licensed traders. The traders, in turn, hired engagés to accompany them into the Indian villages in late autumn. After their winter hunts, the Indians returned to the villages in the spring to exchange peltries for trade goods that the Frenchmen would then take back to Natchitoches. Once the Red River levels rose high enough—usually by April— the merchants sent the furs downstream to New Orleans, and the cycle would begin again for the following year.13 Despite the new alliances and the legal trade, the situation in Texas remained unstable. The Comanches had yet to agree to peace, and royal officials placed little confidence in the treaties negotiated with former enemies. Therefore, de Mézières was commissioned to visit the Wichita villages to strengthen their commitment to Spain and approach the Comanches to seek an accord with them. De Mézières, accompanied by interpreters and a small troop of soldiers, left Natchitoches in March 1772. During a trip that lasted almost ninety days, the party visited the Kichai and Tawakoni villages before meeting a party of Taovayas and Comanches on the upper Brazos River. After conducting friendly negotiations with the headmen of the two tribes, the Frenchman led Wichita and Comanche representatives to San Antonio, where they celebrated the peace with the Texas governor. Although it seemed as if de Mézières had completed his task of bringing all of the Norteños under the banner of Spain, Comanche Chief Povea ominously admitted that he only had the authority to enforce peace within his own small band.14 In any event, de Mézières requested and received permission from the Spanish crown to visit Europe on business matters in 1773. While there, he acquired the rank of lieutenant colonel and astonished the Parisian elite by displaying his entirely tattooed body— decorated by the natives of

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Teodoro de Croix was born in Prévoté castle near Lille, France, in 1730. With de

Mézières he organized campaigns against Apaches. As commandant general of the Spanish Provincias Internas, he entered Texas on Christmas Eve 1777 and returned to Mexico a month later. Caballero de Croix, as he is also known, later became viceroy of Peru. Alfred Barnaby Thomas, Teodoro de Croix and the Northern Frontier of New Spain, 1776–1783 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1941).

Texas—showing flowers on his chest and arms and snakes that could be seen through his silk stockings.15 De Mézières returned to Natchitoches in March 1774 to find that his past successes with the Indians had come unraveled. Despite promising to send French traders to the Wichitas, the Indians were not satisfied with the meager amounts of gifts and weapons they received, particularly after they had come under attack from their Apache enemies to the south and their Osage foes to the north. In addition, Comanche raids on the Spaniards in Texas increased while the Frenchman was away. This convinced officials in Mexico that the Norteños were still hostile to Texas, and they opposed any attempts by de Mézières to remedy the situation. In addition to the declining state of affairs concerning the natives of Texas, de Méz-

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ières suffered a terrible personal loss when a severe epidemic struck the Natchitoches district, killing his wife and one child. The fifty-eight-yearold commandant was again a widower and this time was left a single parent with children of varying ages added to his responsibilities.16 In 1776, de Mézières’ efforts to establish peace between the Norteños and the Spaniards were rewarded with the creation of the Provincias Internas. This new administrative unit, which consisted of all the northern provinces of New Spain (including Texas), was detached from the jurisdiction of the viceroy and brought under the control of a commandant-general who reported directly to the king. In effect, the Provincias Internas wrested control of the Indian affairs of Texas from the Mexico City officials who were antagonistic to the policy of de Mézières and placed them into the able hands of the first commandant-general, Teodoro de Croix (see Figure 4.1). Commandant-General Croix, after studying the Indian situation in Texas, decided to investigate the possibility of a joint Spanish-Norteño campaign against the Lipan Apaches, a plan put forth by de Mézières in 1772 and immediately dismissed by officials in Mexico. To discuss the matter, Croix chaired two separate councils of war that recommended a general campaign against the Apaches. The second council, however, asked permission for de Mézières to travel to Texas to review their findings and recommend procedures for the attack upon the Apaches.17 De Mézières arrived in San Antonio in February 1778 and immediately took up the task that the council had given him. He agreed with their decision and was certain that a joint Spanish-Norteño campaign would result in the complete destruction of the Apaches and that it could be followed up by a similar attack upon the Osages. Before the campaign could be put into effect, however, it still needed the approval of a third war council at Chihuahua as well as the endorsement of the king. In the meantime, de Mézières received permission to visit the various tribes of Texas in order to reinforce the neglected alliance with them in preparation for the planned attack on the Lipans. The Frenchman traveled first to the Kichai and Tawakoni villages before heading northward to the Taovaya town on the Red River, where he distributed presents and renewed their mutual friendship. He also began negotiations with the Comanches by sending an emissary west to inform them that the Spaniards were willing to make peace if the tribe would return stolen horses and stop making raids in Texas.18 De Mézières informed Commandant-General Croix of his successful trip, and in June 1778, the final war council met in Chihuahua and gave its approval to the plans for the Spanish-Norteño attack upon the Apaches. It also recommended that de Mézières be transferred permanently to

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Texas to help the new governor, Domingo Cabello, manage Indian affairs. When Croix accepted this advice and ordered de Mézières to leave Natchitoches and relocate to San Antonio, the Frenchman balked. Seeking to stay his orders, he set out for New Orleans to discuss his new assignment with the governor of Louisiana. En route, however, de Mézières suffered an accident, forcing him to return to Natchitoches. In May 1779, after having grudgingly accepted his new command, de Mézières headed to Texas, only to experience a serious fall from his horse that caused the sixty-two-year-old to be bedridden for another two months. The Frenchman finally arrived Texas in August 1779 and, after visiting the Kichais, Tawakonis, and Tonkawas, entered San Antonio in late September. Much to his surprise, de Mézières learned from Cabello on October 12 that he had actually been appointed governor of Texas. On the following day, he wrote Croix and begged to be excused—arguing that he was unfit for high office, he was inexperienced in matters of law, he was hampered by precarious health, and he was simply too poor. Before he could receive a reply, de Mézières died in San Antonio on November 2, 1779.19 The Frenchman’s death deprived Texas of its most talented Indian diplomat at a time when the colony needed him most. In late 1779, Commandant-General Croix learned that Spain had just entered a war against Great Britain that had arisen out of the War for American Independence. Not only did this cause the Spanish king to veto the Spanish-Norteño campaign against the Apaches, it also threatened the alliance by disrupting the flow of trade goods upon which the Indians of Texas had come to depend. Not long before, Croix had ordered that Texas tribes be supplied by an official trader located in the newly founded town of Nacogdoches in east Texas. Realizing that French traders still maintained special ties to the Indians, Croix appointed Joseph María Armant, a native of Metz, as the official trader to the Texas Indians. Despite the fact that Armant had lived as a merchant in Natchitoches for more than two decades, he could not provide the Texas tribes with an adequate amount of goods, and he sold the few items he did acquire at much higher prices than the Louisiana traders. The Texas tribes, especially the Taovayas, complained bitterly to Spanish officials about the lack of trade goods and arms, which put them at the mercy of their Osage and Apache enemies.20 Fortunately for the Spaniards in Texas, there were plenty of Frenchmen from Louisiana who had had extensive dealings with the natives and shared de Mézières’ understanding of the tenuous situation vis-à-vis the Norteños and the Apaches. By employing these Frenchmen’s knowledge and capabilities, Spanish officials were able to fulfill de Mézières’ dream of an alliance with the Norteños aimed at the Lipans within a decade of the Frenchman’s death. In order to calm the enraged Taovayas from join-

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ing the British, with whom Spain was at war, de Mézières’ nephew, Louis de Blanc, traveled from Natchitoches to the Taovayas’ village on the Red River in late 1780. The following year, Governor Cabello sent another Louisiana trader, Nicolas de La Mathe, to the Taovaya village to deliver presents and goods. To pacify the Kichais, de Blanc formed a trading partnership with Paul Bouet Laffitte, a Frenchman from Gascony. Like many traders from Natchitoches, Laffitte had ties with the St. Denis dynasty. Laffitte had married Magdeleine Grappe, daughter of Kadohadacho trader Alexis Grappe, in 1770. After her death, Laffitte married Eulalie de Soto, a cousin of de Blanc and granddaughter of the founder of Natchitoches. He eventually settled at the Yatasi village near Natchitoches, where he conducted a thriving trade with Texas Indians for wild mustangs.21 When the war with Great Britain ended in 1783, Spanish officials once again began to pursue an alliance with the Norteños, understanding that the key to an effective peace was the friendship of the aloof Comanches. Therefore, in 1784, Texas Governor Cabello sent Jean-Baptiste Bousquet, a Natchitoches trader with experience with the Tawakonis and Tonkawas, to the Taovaya village to confirm their ties to the Spaniards and attempt negotiations with the Comanches. Bousquet found three Europeans—two Frenchmen and a Spaniard—living in the Taovaya village on the Red River and convinced them to accompany him and the chief back to San Antonio, where the alliance first made with de Mézières in 1771 was renewed. One of the Frenchmen, Pierre Vial, was a blacksmith from Lyon who was particularly appreciated by the Indians because of his ability to repair their broken weapons. His reciprocal affinity for the natives allowed him to follow in de Mézières’ footsteps and become the most important Frenchman in Texas for the remainder of the century.22 After pardoning Vial for the crime of living illegally among Indians, Governor Cabello ordered him to return to the Taovaya village to negotiate a treaty with the Comanches. Vial entered the Red River town in August 1785 and met with twelve principal Comanche chiefs a few weeks later. Following a week of negotiations, all the Comanche headmen agreed to peace. Three chiefs returned to San Antonio with Vial, and in October, the Spaniards and Comanches finally reached the accord that de Mézières had tried in vain for a decade to achieve. Each party agreed to refrain from fighting the other, and the Spaniards promised to distribute annual gifts and send traders to the Comanche villages. Most importantly, the Comanches were encouraged to continue their attacks upon the Apaches. With a few exceptions, the accord of 1785 lasted over the next thirty years and essentially marked the end of warfare with the Comanches for the remainder of Spanish rule in Texas. The diplomats who arranged the peace were Frenchmen born in two of the most modern

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cities of Europe, more than three thousand miles away from the relatively undeveloped Spanish colony of Texas.23 Now that the alliance with the Comanches and Norteños was complete, the Spaniards encouraged their new partners to attack the Lipan Apaches. Prior to the peace agreement with the Comanches, Governor Cabello had turned to another Frenchman, Andrés Courbière, for help in preventing the Apaches from making an alliance with the Tonkawas, Bidais, and Attakapas, who had access to firearms from Louisiana traders. Like Vial, Courbière was a native of Lyon who had gone to Louisiana as a teenager. He ended up in Natchitoches, where he entered the Indian trade and dealt mainly with the Tawakonis and Tonkawas. Courbière accompanied de Mézières to Texas, and, due to his proficiency in native languages, Cabello awarded him a special post as soldier-interpreter in the Bexar garrison. In late 1782, the Texas governor sent the Frenchman to spy on an assembly held between the Lipans and the eastern Texas tribes on the Guadalupe River. Courbière, dressed in Indian garb, successfully infiltrated the gathering and reported back to the governor. Officials in Mexico ordered that El Mocho, the Tonkawan chief — actually an Apache captive adopted by the tribe—be killed in order to thwart the possible alliance. Courbière tried to find a Tonkawa malcontent to assassinate the chief, but it was the Spanish captain in charge of the presidio at La Bahía who actually murdered El Mocho when he visited in July 1784.24 Governor Cabello had taken notice of Courbière’s efforts in the successful destruction of the Tonkawa-Apache alliance, as well as his assistance in welcoming parties of Comanches to San Antonio when they began to arrive following the celebration of the peace agreement in 1785. In fact, an important delegation of thirty Comanches had stayed in Courbière’s own house, in lieu of better accommodations, for eighteen days when they visited San Antonio in February 1786. This must have seriously cramped the Courbière ménage, which included his Spanish wife and several of the couple’s nine children. Following the visit, Courbière donated land next to his house, upon which Cabello had a structure built, about 144 feet long by 15 feet wide and partitioned into four 36-foot rooms, to lodge visitors from different nations. Throughout the rest of the century, a constant stream of Indians stayed near the Courbière residence when they came to meet with the Texas governor.25 Many of these visitors were Norteños, and after three decades, de Mézières’ dream of a destructive attack by the Spaniards and their Indian allies upon the Apaches finally came to pass. In early January 1790, a combined Spanish-Norteño force soundly defeated the Lipans at Soledad Creek west of San Antonio. This battle effectively broke the back of Apache resistance in Texas, and relations between the Spaniards and Li-

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pans, as well as with the rest of the Indians of Texas, were generally stabilized for the rest of the century.26 Thus, it was due mainly to the efforts of Frenchmen that the Spaniards in Texas, after nearly a century of dealings with the various tribes, were able to effect a peaceful, working relationship with the Indians by employing the same methods—trade and friendship—that the French had used in Louisiana. In fact, the importance of Frenchmen in Texas would never again be as great as it was during the latter half of the eighteenth century, for French influence in the Spanish colony began to wane soon after the victory over the Apaches. As early as 1791, Anglo traders and mustangers, led by Philip Nolan, began to enter Texas illegally from the United States. Following the purchase of Louisiana, American officials took possession of Natchitoches in early 1804, and soon thereafter, Anglo traders replaced Frenchmen in the Indian trade that continued to flow westward from Natchitoches. Anglo settlers entered Texas in such large numbers following Mexican independence in 1821 that they quickly came to dominate the region. Although Hispanics would maintain their important position in Texas, French traders and their Indian partners were swept aside as the Anglos established their hegemony. The days of Frenchmen being among the most important people in Texas had passed. Notes 1. David La Vere, “Between Kinship and Capitalism: French and Spanish Rivalry in the Colonial Louisiana-Texas Indian Trade,” Journal of Southern History 64 (May 1998): 206. 2. Patricia R. Lemée, “Tios and Tantes: Familial and Political Relationships of Natchitoches and the Spanish Frontier,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 102 (January 1998): 358. 3. Donald E. Chipman and Harriett Denise Joseph, Notable Men and Women of Spanish Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 152–154; Elizabeth Shown Mills, “(de) Mézières-Trichel-Grappe: A Study of a Tri-caste Lineage in the Old South,” Genealogist 6 (1985): 34–38. 4. David La Vere, Life among the Texas Indians: The WPA Narratives (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1998), 12–14; F. Todd Smith, The Caddo Indians: Tribes at the Convergence of Empires, 1542–1854 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995), 51–54. 5. F. Todd Smith, The Wichita Indians: Traders of Texas and the Southern Plains, 1540–1845 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000), 26 –28; La Vere, Life among the Texas Indians, 15–16. 6. Smith, Caddo Indians, 58. 7. La Vere, Life among the Texas Indians, 15–16; Dayna Bowker Lee, “Indian Slavery in

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Lower Louisiana during the Colonial Period, 1699–1803” (master’s thesis, Northwestern State University, 1989), 84–85. 8. Depositions of Juan Leal, Joseph Vásquez, and Father Fray Miguel de Molina, March 22, 1758, in The San Saba Papers: A Documentary Account of the Founding and Destruction of San Saba Mission, ed. Lesley Byrd Simpson (San Francisco: John HowellBooks, 1959), 73–77, 80–92. 9. Smith, Wichita Indians, 30–33; Smith, Caddo Indians, 60. 10. Smith, Caddo Indians, 66–67. 11. Ibid., 68; David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992): 215–220. 12. Smith, Caddo Indians, 68–69; Smith, Wichita Indians, 48–51. 13. Contracts are from Natchitoches Parish Conveyance Records (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Genealogy Library, Dallas), microfilm; Aubry Lane Lee, “Fusils, Paint, and Pelts: An Examination of Natchitoches-Based Indian Trade in the Spanish Period, 1766–1791” (master’s thesis, Northwestern State University, 1990), 50–56. 14. Chipman and Joseph, Notable Men and Women, 161–162; Smith, Wichita Indians, 54–56. 15. Chipman and Joseph, Notable Men and Women, 163. 16. Smith, Wichita Indians, 61–62; Chipman and Joseph, Notable Men and Women, 164. 17. Smith, Wichita Indians, 63–64; Chipman and Joseph, Notable Men and Women, 165–166. 18. Smith, Wichita Indians, 66–68. 19. Chipman and Joseph, Notable Men and Women, 170–175. 20. Smith, Wichita Indians, 72–73. 21. Smith, Wichita Indians, 73–76; David La Vere and Katia Campbell, eds. and trans., “An Expedition to the Kichai: The Journal of François Grappe, September 24, 1783,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 98 (July 1994): 59–78; La Vere, “Between Kinship and Capitalism,” 214–217; Dan Flores, Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 88–92. 22. Smith, Wichita Indians, 77–78. 23. Elizabeth A. H. John, ed. “Inside the Comanchería: The Diary of Pedro Vial and Francisco Xavier Chaves,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 98 (July 1994): 27–56; Chipman, Spanish Texas, 1519 –1821 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 198 –199. 24. Elizabeth A. H. John, Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540 –1795 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1975), 634–636, 652–653. 25. Ibid., 693–695. 26. Chipman, Spanish Texas, 200.

5

FRENCH PIRATES AND PRIVATEERS IN TEXAS R. DALE OLSON For Pascal Théodore Lasne1

The concept of piracy and its practice may be traced to ancient civilizations and found among all cultures. Within this expansive historical and cultural venue, French piracy in Texas played but a small part. A pirate is “a robber on the high seas; one that by open violence takes the property of another on the high seas,” and a privateer is “licensed by a government to seize or plunder the ships of an enemy.”2 Essentially, a privateer is a licensed pirate. Privateering was beneficial to the country issuing authorization in the form of a “letter of marque,” since the ships of its enemies were destroyed, and it was beneficial to the privateers for the obvious mercenary reasons. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico were overrun with privateers of the French and those of Spanish-American patriots. The former preyed upon the commerce of England, and “rendezvoused on the Island of Guadeloupe,”3 while the latter directed their operations against that of Spain. Some of this activity transferred to New Orleans and Barataria Bay and later to Texas. The initial arrival of French pirates and privateers on Texas soil was, ironically, instigated by a group composed mainly of Anglo-Americans in Creole Louisiana. Members of the New Orleans Association established a goal of capturing the two Floridas and selling them for $2 million, a sum Thomas Jefferson had empowered James Madison to pay Spain for the provinces.4 Members of the association believed that a large arsenal of twenty thousand guns existed at Pensacola that could be used later for an invasion of Texas. The association was a group of merchants, lawyers, and “general scoundrels” who supported a variety of enterprises, from smuggling to piracy.5 Membership was informal and included Edward Livingston, a former mayor of New York and noted jurist who later served as secretary of 60

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state under Andrew Jackson, and U.S. District Attorney John Randolph Grymes, as well as August de Castera Davezac, Abner L. Duncan, John K. West, the Laffite brothers, Vincent Nolte, and Barthelemy Lafon. To achieve their goals, the associates engaged Commodore Louis Michel Aury, promising him command of the sea, and Brevet-Lieutenant-Colonel Henry D. Peire, commander of soldiers. They decided to occupy Galveston Island on the Texas Gulf Coast as a temporary port. Remote Galveston Island was at that time virtually uninhabited. The only notable event reported there in the eighteenth century occurred when a Spanish navigator, Evia, surveyed the island in 1783. Evia had been sent to the island by Bernardo de Galvez, viceroy of Mexico, in whose honor Galveston Bay and later the city of Galveston were named. Evia reported that upon reaching the island, he found persons residing there who rendered valuable assistance by piloting him into and around the bay.6 He did not identify these individuals in his report. Some four decades after Evia’s mapping expedition, the era of French privateering in Texas began when a privateer, the Balona, approached Galveston Island on April 3, 1816. Louis Aury, the commander appointed by the New Orleans Associates, misjudged the depth of the pass into the harbor and grounded his ship on a shoal. Parisian Louis Michel Aury’s portrait, as described by Stanley Faye, showed a serious young face . . . under black hair parted in the middle and smoothly brushed to hang down over the ears, broad of forehead, narrow of chin, notable as to nose, made distinctive most of all by eyebrows arched high above black eyes, as if in the spirit of incomprehension that Aury never was to remedy.7 For two days the commodore and his crew waited until an east wind brought a tide that set them free. In poor condition, the Balona finally anchored in Galveston Bay. When the French commodore set foot on the sands of Galveston Island, the relatively brief occupation by French pirates and privateers in Texas began. Several days after Aury’s arrival, another of his ships, the Centinela, appeared in Galveston Bay, and Aury heedlessly ordered her brought into the harbor. The same shoal then claimed the second Aury vessel. Following these two failures, the young commodore ordered Captain Alexander to sound the pass and bring another ship, the Felix, to the island. The Felix joined the Centinela on the shoal. Later, a brig and another ship foundered, littering the entrance to Galveston Bay with stranded ships. The Balona and Centinela were damaged but finally reached the harbor. To exacerbate Aury’s condition following the grounding of his ships, his men mutinied on September 7 and 8, one month after landing in

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Galveston, and wounded the commodore in the mutiny. The mutineers, a group comprised largely of slaves, wrested control of Galveston Island from Aury. Two hundred men confiscated $60,000 worth of goods and, with three ships, sailed for their native Santo Domingo, leaving the wounded Aury behind. Aury’s desolation was short-lived, however. On September 10, two days after the mutiny, a delegation of the associates arrived at Galveston on two or three ships. Among them were Colonel Henry Peire, General Jean-Joseph Amable Humbert, Joseph Savary, and Jean Sauvinet.8 Also in the group was José Manuel de Hererra, a Mexican minister who was a business and political ally of the New Orleans Associates. The Associates had convened in New Orleans on August 5 and instructed Herrera to take possession of the island, establish a prize court, and serve as commissioner in cooperation with Aury. An agreement was signed on September 12 establishing Galveston as a puerto habilitado of the Republic of Mexico.9 Among the provisions was one permitting Aury, if he should deem it necessary, to change his residence to Matagorda or any other suitable place, an option he soon exercised. Aury received a commission as governor of the Province of Texas and of Galveston Island and as general in the Mexican Republican Army. He took the oath of fidelity to the Republic of Mexico and in his capacity as governor took formal possession of Galveston Island. The island commanded by Aury is some thirty miles long and several miles at its maximum width and was previously uninhabited except for a small group of Karankawa Indians. It had a well that provided “brackish” water and a fort-in-progress protected by about six cannons. It was essentially a desert devoid of maritime activity and having no permanent habitations except three or four cabins built of boards and the sails of vessels. On the same day that Herrera had established the Galveston government, many small vessels were leaving New Orleans with supplies, speculators, and passengers who said they were going to seek their fortune in the Kingdom of Mexico. In reality, their destination was Galveston. After the government was established, the vessels of Aury were immediately sent out as privateers to cruise against Spanish commerce. In contrast to the commodore’s apparent ineptness, as demonstrated when he landed at Galveston, his now somewhat expanded fleet was so active and energetic in the business that it completely cleared the Gulf of the shipping of Spain. Aury commanded twenty privateers sailing into the Gulf of Mexico and was in complete control of the Texas coast. By the end of 1816, approximately 360 men lived on Galveston Island under his command. Although conditions in Texas were generally deplorable, the situation in Galveston was prosperous,

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in consequence of the frequent capture of prizes by Aury’s privateers, which were brought in and disposed of here, among which were many Spanish slaves. Texas offered no market at the time for this “peculiar and valuable property,” so they were sold to parties, who later sold them to the planters of Louisiana.10 The many rich and valuable prizes brought into Galveston supported Aury’s government handsomely. The troops and officers were paid regularly at the end of every month. Provisions and munitions of all kinds were readily provided from New Orleans, and Aury was able to send supplies to General Bernardo Gutierres, who was recruiting a force at Natchitoches. Proof of Aury’s success is to be found in the numerous complaints laid before the government in Washington by the minister of Spain and by Beverly Chew, the customs collector at New Orleans. The latter, in a letter addressed to Mr. Crawford, secretary of the Treasury of the United States, dated August 1, 1817, described the object and character of the occupation of Galveston: I deem it my duty to state that the most shameful violations of the Slave Act, as well as our revenue laws, continued to be practiced with impunity, by a motley mixture of freebooters and smugglers, at Galveston, under the Mexican flag, being in reality little less than the re-establishment of the Barataria band, somewhat more out of reach of justice . . . The establishment was recently made there by a Commodore Aury, with a few small schooners, from Aux Cayes, manned, in a great measure, with refugees from Barataria, and mulattos.11 Complicating the political and social environment of Galveston, a force of 180 men commanded by the Spanish soldier of fortune Xavier Francisco Mina sailed into Aury’s stronghold on November 22, headed for Mexico. Nervous and apprehensive about the presence of someone else claiming the title of general, Aury refused to permit Mina’s disembarkation for eight days while the two men struggled to reach an agreement. Eventually relenting, Aury allowed Mina to establish a camp near his own. As a young hero in his native land, Mina had waged battle against the Napoleonic army but later became antagonistic toward his homeland. Mina’s ultimate destination was Mexico, where he planned to organize the various disparate insurgent groups fighting Spain for Mexican independence. His plan was to sail to Matagorda, southwest of Galveston, then proceed to Refugio, Bahia, and San Antonio before crossing into Mexico. He encouraged Aury to join him. To the seafaring Aury, the plan

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to travel overland was unattractive, and a dispute arose. Mina returned to New Orleans in March 1817 to clarify the desires of the associates. Having resolved their disputes, Mina and Aury abandoned Galveston on April 5, 1817 and sailed for Matagorda. Galveston became all but deserted when Mina’s expedition left along with Aury’s ships. As Laffite was to do three years later, Aury set the humble huts and cabins of Galveston ablaze. He transferred his headquarters to Matagorda. His subsequent career took many turns, but he had left Galveston Island forever. Eventually growing tired and frustrated in Texas, Aury abandoned his interest in assisting the Mexican cause and left the Texas Gulf coast. Upon leaving, he corresponded with Beverly Chew, the customs collector in New Orleans, to announce his departure and disassociate himself from any subsequent occurrences in Galveston.12 After spending August in the Florida Straits taking prizes, Aury occupied Amelia Island off the northeastern coast of Florida until the United States government forced him out. Returning to the Caribbean, he captured the islands of Old Providence and San Andreas. He declared Old Providence a dependency of the United Provinces of South America and continued to sail under letters of marque from Gran Colombia, Buenos Aires, and Chile. Aury died on August 20, 1821, on Old Providence Island in the Caribbean after being thrown from his horse. Xavier Mina failed in his attempt to unite the scattered insurgent factions in Mexico. On a foggy morning in November 1817, the would-be savior of Mexico was taken to a small clearing on a hillside above Los Remedios, Mexico, and executed by a firing squad of Spanish royalists.13 The sounds and sands of Galveston Island remained relatively quiet for a precious short period following the exodus of Aury and Mina. On April 15, 1817, a new government was formed on the deck of the Carmelita, a ship anchored in Galveston harbor. This vessel was owned by Barthelemy Lafon of New Orleans, and by May, the island became the base of operations for Lafon’s friend Jean Laffite, the most famous French privateer in history (Figure 5.1). Laffite, however infamous he was to become later, was not alone in establishing the commune he named Campeachy. Other Frenchmen shared in the creation and ultimate destruction of the island settlement. Aury, upon his departure from Galveston, had left a skeleton crew of some thirty to forty people in the charge of Louis de Rieux. However, de Rieux was not totally faithful to Aury, and when Lafon assisted in establishing the new government of Laffite, it was de Rieux who was named governor.14 In an obvious attempt to divert attention from himself, Jean Laffite was conspicuous by his absence from holding a post in his own government. Aury’s former settlement, now reinvented by Laffite, was ostensi-

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bly governed by a group of Frenchmen. They were: Louis de Rieux, governor; Ramon Espagnol, secretary of state; A. Pirrounnean Jr., major de place; Rousselin, collector; Jean Ducoing, admiralty judge; and Barthelemy Lafon, secretary ad interim. Marine Commandant Jean Jannet governed the island. Jean Laffite has been popularly called “the most romantic figure in American history.” He assisted General Jackson in saving the city of New Orleans. It has been claimed that he buried vast amounts of treasure, that he romanced dozens of women, and that he successfully fought dozens of duels. Laffite was elegant, fashionable, suave, highly intelligent, and gentlemanly, though he also was ferocious against enemies. He was the “Prince of Pirates,” the “Gentleman Rover,” the “Gentleman Smuggler,” the “Pirate of the Gulf,” the “Baratarian Chief,” the “Lord of Galveston Island,” the “Pirate of Genius,” and the “Hero of New Orleans.”15 Three events, all out of reach of the subjects themselves, propelled the French privateer brothers Jean and Pierre Laffite to the lofty niche that Jean, in particular, has long occupied in American history. A small booklet, The Memoirs of Lafitte, or the Baratarian Pirate, was first published in 1826 and republished repeatedly over a sixty-year period.16 A tale of fiction, the book was the first in a string of highly fictionalized accounts of Jean Laffite’s life and activities. A much larger and more comprehensive work, The Pirate: or, Lafitte of the Gulf of Mexico by Joseph H. Ingraham, appeared in 1839 and became the basis for scores of later books, articles, and movies concerning Laffite.17 The sum of this burgeoning body of ersatz material set the precedent for generations of legends that the general public widely accepted. The influence of these works upon scholars was often profound, though they exerted considerably less of an impact upon Laffite aficionados than did a third event, the publication in 1958 of The Journal of Jean Laffite by a vanity publisher called Vantage Press. The Journal of Jean Laffite, purportedly a journal written by the privateer but held by his alleged descendants for a period of 107 years after his death, ultimately became the most controversial element in a story bulging with controversy. For decades this work became the unquestioned basis for the publication of other fictional works and was the source of deep divisions among Laffite historians. It was the impetus for tangential research of near-staggering dimensions and resulted in an even greater elevation of the mythology of Jean Laffite. Whereas serious scholars routinely dismissed many accounts emanating from the two early books, some unconditionally accepted The Journal as authentic. According to it, Laffite did not die in the Yucatan within a few years of abandoning Galveston Island in early 1820 but lived until

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Numerous illustrations of the pirates and their devilish deeds have been imagined

by illustrators. This portrait of Jean Laffite appeared at first in Homer Thrall, A Pictorial history of Texas (St. Louis: N. D. Thompson & Co., 1883), and some scholars believe in its likeness.

1854 in Alton, Illinois, under an assumed name. He married, raised a family, traveled to Europe, where he became a benefactor of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, died an unspectacular death from pneumonia in Edwardsville, Illinois, and was buried in Alton. Although The Journal is often quite specific on information such as longitudes and latitudes of occurrences at sea and details concerning the cargo of many ships, it contains glaring historical inaccuracies. Most of the material within The Journal may be said to fall within one of two categories: material that has been available from other sources for decades and material that cannot be corroborated. The Journal was first published by a forger, a con man, and generally devious character who called himself John Andrecheyne Lafitte and

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claimed to have been the great-grandson of Jean Laffite. Although he maintained his misrepresentation concerning The Journal until his death from emphysema on February 20, 1970, in Columbia, South Carolina, recent research has confirmed the spuriousness of the work.18 John Andrecheyne Lafitte was not a Lafitte, a Laffite, or even an Andrecheyne. In reality, he was a relatively uneducated, coarse, retired engineer of the Missouri Pacific Railroad.19 He was born John Matejka in the 1880s in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of Bohemian immigrants. He eventually changed his surname from Matejka to Nafsinger to Lafitte, which he later spelled Laffite. Historians have long questioned the legitimacy of the document, and research during the past few years has established to all but a few that the work bears absolutely no relationship to Jean or Pierre Laffite. The Journal and a considerable amount of associated documents and memorabilia continue to serve as the cornerstone of a very large collection at the Sam Houston Regional Library and Research Center in Liberty, Texas, and has been used as a primary source by a large number of writers. Jean Laffite, unquestionably a Frenchman, although his precise place and date of birth is unknown, arrived in Galveston in May 1817, when Louis Aury was in Matagorda considering a permanent move. Laffite’s presence greatly facilitated Aury’s decision. Laffite’s leadership qualities are a subject about which most authorities agree. His abilities were manifest in his choice of associates, representing a spectrum from lowly diehards to some of the most brilliant minds in New Orleans. Edward Livingston, the former mayor of New York, John Grymes, the district attorney of New Orleans, Jean’s brother Pierre, and General Humbert were all men of considerable ability. All, however, paled in comparison to the man who commanded the ship Carmelita when it first entered Galveston Bay with materials to construct a new commune for Laffite. Barthelemy Lafon was a man of immense depth and impressive abilities. Although works on Texas history rarely refer to him, Barthelemy Lafon has been described as having “no peers in the chronicles of American history” and has been called “a considerably more important figure than Jean Laffite.”20 In the history of Louisiana, Lafon was a scientist, architect, metallurgist, engineer, cartographer, astronomer, archaeologist, and New Orleans public figure and politician. He designed homes in the French Quarter and gave names to streets that survive to this day. He was a confidant of Thomas Jefferson’s architect, Benjamin Latrobe, and at one time was very wealthy. Ironically, Lafon was also a pirate and an associate of the brothers Laffite. Only three events, very narrow in philosophical depth and temporal scope, suggest that this native of Villepinte, France, be placed in Texas

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history. First, he commanded the ship Carmelita that carried construction materials to the barren island of Galveston, presumably to be used to construct Laffite’s home-fort. Second, the high probability that Lafon was the architect of the first permanent structure on Galveston Island, traditionally referred to as “Maison Rouge,” cannot be dismissed, although a careful search of Lafon papers within the archives of the Historic New Orleans Collection failed to disclose that formal plans were executed. Third, Lafon was Laffite’s choice as interim secretary of the newly formed government at Campeachy. Lafon was a “quiet but potent force on the island.”21 The Carmelita, probably obtained by Lafon through piracy,22 sailed from New Orleans for Galveston Island, and on April 15, 1817, the Campeachy government was established on its decks. Lafon had been associated with Jean Laffite as early as 1812, but it was not until after the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815, that their relationship deepened. It is probable that Lafon spent the final three years of his life pursuing a “career of duplicity” at Galveston and in New Orleans.23 He left no papers, no diaries, no letters with which his eventful and productive life could be reconstructed. An epidemic of yellow fever erupted in New Orleans in August 1820, and on September 3, Lafon’s friend Latrobe succumbed to the fever. Twenty-five days later, on September 28, 1820, Barthelemy Lafon died in New Orleans at the age of fifty-one.24 He was buried in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 on the same day. His will of 1813 valued his estate at $175,516.50, but by the time of his death in 1820 it was considerably smaller. Due to disputes regarding his succession, it was, by 1826, “wholly insolvent and unable to pay the legacies and debts.”25 General Jean Joseph Amable Humbert was another French associate of the Laffite brothers whose life is worthy of volumes and who was active in the early days of Campeachy. Born in Rouvray, Lorraine, on November 25, 1775, his existence was “crowded with adventure.” 26 His military career began during the French Revolution under Napoleon, and he commanded an expedition against Ireland in 1798. He was victorious against the British at Castlebar. In a later battle at Ballinamuck, the British beat the general but accorded him such respect that he stood with the victors on a balcony in Dublin “in a blue coat with gold epaulets, gilt buttons, and a white cashmere waistcoat, acknowledging the admiration of the crowd.”27 Humbert apparently arrived in the United States in early summer 1813. He was a man of considerable ambition, and his activities in New Orleans are memorable, but his character already was under question. He was described by Luis de Onís, the unrecognized Spanish envoy to the

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United States, as somewhat “loco.” 28 Nevertheless, in 1816 Humbert led an expedition of a thousand men into Mexico to assist the revolution. They won minor battles, but Humbert abandoned his goal and in 1817 disbanded his troops. The Napoleonic general was active in various attempts to assist insurgents in Texas and on February 19, 1818, sailed with other French officers aboard the Intrepide to join General Lallemand and Laffite in Galveston. Humbert presumably was on Galveston Island with Laffite when a disastrous storm stuck in September 1818. It was reported that Humbert left Galveston on October 24 with some forty to forty-five stragglers from Champ d’Asile. The real cause of this abdication and of the dispersion of the band is unknown. An agent of the American government might have ordered them away. In reality, this event was not the dispersion of the commune on Galveston Island, nor was Humbert the “chief.” The group that accompanied Humbert on his last voyage to New Orleans was comprised primarily of women and invalids. Thus the heroic Napoleonic general, the “Military Governor” of Galveston, the hero of numerous battles, made an ignominious retreat to New Orleans among women and elderly people. According to Lyle Saxon, Humbert was, “until the very end of his career, one of the best customers at taverns of New Orleans.”29 Near the end he was “shabby, middle-aged, and ignored” and was “dismissed as indecorous and vagrant, . . . surrounded by the rabble and attending them in their crimes.” He was “too much taken by drink, a man without profession and without pride, a prisoner, a bad joke.”30 Humbert died in anonymity in New Orleans in February 1823. Not all of Laffite’s old associates from his previous bastion on Grande Terre Island, Louisiana, and from his days of glory in New Orleans followed him to Galveston. Two of the men prominently named in reference to the role of the Baratarians in the Battle of New Orleans chose different paths when Jean and Pierre came to Galveston. Dominique You, arguably the most revered and loved of the Laffite associates, and Renato Beluche, later an admiral in the navy of Simon Bolivar, apparently did not establish themselves on Galveston with Laffite. The name You or Youx inevitably appears in accounts related to the Laffites or the Battle of New Orleans. It is generally conceded that Dominique, whose Christian name was Alexandre, was an older brother of Jean and Pierre. Dominique You was a central figure in a plan to bring Napoleon to New Orleans, where he would live the remainder of his life among the city’s French inhabitants. The plan obviously never material-

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ized. Only days prior to the departure from New Orleans of the group that planned to return with Napoleon, news reached New Orleans of Napoleon’s death on May 5, 1821. You was recognized as a master cannoneer whose prominence in the Battle of New Orleans has been the subject of numerous reports. He lived his later years as a recognized hero and a well-known and respected leader of ward politics in New Orleans. His popularity did not, however, translate into affluence, as he died in poverty on November 15, 1830. His funeral was paid for by the town council, and he was buried with full military honors in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2. New Orleans businesses closed for the day, and thousands of admirers attended his funeral. His grave has long been a tourist attraction. The Venezuelan hero Renato Beluche was an associate of the Laffites in Louisiana for many years. Born of French immigrants in New Orleans in 1780, Beluche began his seafaring career as a pilot’s mate, and by the age of twenty-five he was master of a merchant schooner. In 1813, after serving with Dominique You in assisting General Jackson during the British invasion of New Orleans, Beluche joined the Venezuelan patriots in their rebellion against Spain, and he ultimately became a national hero. Although the whereabouts and activities of Beluche between July 1818 and May 1821 are unclear, it is probable that they were spent in the Caribbean, not in the Gulf with his old friends the Laffites.31 Beluche’s relationship to Galveston, if indeed any existed, is probably more accurately characterized as that of visitor rather than resident. Upon Laffite’s arrival at Galveston Island on March 23, 1817, fourteen of the approximately thirty to forty inhabitants were officials in the new government, which, incidentally, had absolutely no legal basis. Jean Laffite embarked upon the goal of establishing a community similar to that which he had overseen on Grande Terre Island in Barataria Bay in Louisiana over a decade before. It was reported that his Galveston fort was a two-story block house in which was mounted a brass thirty-six-pounder, Long Tom, and outside there was an earthwork on which was mounted a battery of forty-twopounders. There was an arsenal and a dockyard with carpenters to repair damaged vessels. Campeachy, rough and temporary, “resembled a mining camp” (Figure 5.2).32 Texas historian Henderson Yoakum claimed that the settlement consisted mainly of frame buildings and that Laffite’s was the best, being two stories high.33 Most of the buildings were of one story and were constructed by sinking the posts into the ground without sills and often without floors. The famous home-fort of Jean Laffite has traditionally been referred to

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Laffite’s Headquarters, pen drawing, an imaginary and yet precise rendering of

Campeachy by Emile Bunjes. Picturesque Galveston: Twenty-Five Pen Drawings (Galveston: The Foundation, 1966). The Galveston Historical Foundation.

as “Maison Rouge,” an appellation that may have been invented by writer William Bollaert years after Laffite left Galveston.34 The probable site of this famous structure, whose construction was overseen by Barthelemey Lafon, is located at 1417 Avenue A on Galveston Island. The site now holds the aboveground foundation of a “castle” built in 1885 by a sea captain, William Hendricks. The ten-foot-high concrete foundation once held a very large three-story home that deteriorated over many years and was demolished in approximately 1955. The appearance of the original Maison Rouge is unknown. Dr. Joseph Osterman Dyer, a Galveston physician and writer who arrived in Galveston in the late 1880s, came to know several former Laffite associates, among them an individual known only as Lacassinier and another one known as Nick the Greek. From these men, Dyer gained first-hand reports of the days of Laffite on Galveston Island. An accomplished freehand artist, Dyer drew a likeness of Maison Rouge from the memory of one of his acquaintances that along with numerous other items of early Galveston was later donated to the Rosenberg Library in Galveston.

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Much of the Dyer collection, including the sketch of Maison Rouge, eventually disappeared from the library collection. Captain Hendricks, who arrived in Galveston in 1856, could have been acquainted with former Laffite associates. There is evidence that the foundation on each side of the front stairs of the Hendricks castle in Galveston bears a bas-relief of crossed anchors, the seal of Campeachy. Under Laffite, the commune of Campeachy prospered and in so doing perpetuated the enmity of Laffite’s old nemesis in New Orleans, Customs Collector Beverly Chew. Chew reported, “The prizes made by the privateers under the Mexican flag are to a very large amount of merchandise such as jewelry, laces, silks, linens, britannias, muslins, seersuckers, calicotes . . . iron, nails, tallow, leather, glass ware, crockery, cordage, beef, etc.”35 The Galveston commune grew and in September 1818 was augmented, albeit briefly, by the arrival of hundreds of Frenchmen who had recently abandoned their wilderness fort on the Trinity River, Champ d’Asile. Although eyewitnesses to the arrival suggest that Laffite graciously extended hospitality and assistance to the impoverished group, later analysis indicated that the privateer was actually informing the Spanish of the group’s activities.36 It was under threat of the Spanish that the Frenchmen had left their fort on the Trinity. A hurricane of immense proportions added to the misery of the settlers from Champ d’Asile shortly after their arrival on the island, and the storm became a pivotal event in the short history of French pirates and privateers in Texas. For two days, September 13 to 15, 1818, all the inhabitants of the island endured high winds that destroyed all but four structures, and a four-foot flood covered the entire island. The Frenchmen from the Trinity River encampment lost almost everything, and Laffite fared little better. Provisions became low and potable water nearly nonexistent, ships were lost, and devastation was pervasive. Campeachy was never to regain its pre-storm condition. Although it is considered that Laffite acted heroically in attempting to salvage his Campeachy, the storm inflicted an economic and emotional toll on him from which he never recovered. Laffite suffered great economic reversal, and even Maison Rouge was largely destroyed. With little food and water, it became necessary to ration supplies. One measure Laffite enforced was to send all slaves who could not work to be sold in New Orleans, thus separating many families. General Charles Lallemand, commander at Champ d’Asile, had gone to New Orleans, leaving Baron Antoine Rigau in charge. Rigau did not, however, appear to possess the leadership skills of Lallemand, and his group became fragmented. The survivors of Champ d’Asile left Galves-

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ton, straggling in groups toward New Orleans, presumably with General Humbert in their midst. Long before the storm, the Galveston establishment had been a source of irritation to the American authorities. The Laffite settlement had been a well-known source of smuggled goods and slaves. Even though numerous laws were broken, Laffite and his men usually maintained respect for American vessels. During the month before the storm, George Graham, acting upon orders from President James Monroe, had corresponded with Laffite. Graham asked Laffite by what authority he assumed possession of Galveston.37 Laffite demonstrated the same confidence of earlier years, when he had responded to a $500 reward posted for his capture by Governor Claiborne by offering a reward of $1,000 for “Claiborne’s head.” So now Laffite replied to Graham demanding under what authority Graham was acting.38 Graham finally held conferences with Laffite and Lallemand in Galveston in August 1818. Although he assured the pirate that the United States had not forgotten his services in the Battle of New Orleans, Graham made clear that a smugglers’ establishment at Galveston would not be tolerated and that the United States was about to take possession of Galveston.39 Laffite was well aware that his tenure on the island was to be of short duration, and he agreed to leave Galveston as soon as he could assemble his forces.40 Interestingly, neither man spoke the truth. Graham exaggerated in saying that the United States was going to occupy Galveston. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was indeed interested in such an occupation, but no plans of action had been drawn. Adams later recalled, “This was all in Graham’s own head and in my opinion not much to the credit of its wisdom.”41 As for Laffite, he did not leave. Two months after Graham’s departure from Galveston, Laffite received another demand to leave, this time from a Spanish force led by Don José Sandoval. Laffite was given three days to vacate, a threat that bore a strong odor of hollowness.42 Laffite, supported by General Rigau, explained to Sandoval that everyone on the devastated island was disgusted and discontented. Laffite had moved from Maison Rouge to a shipwreck in the bay. It was clear to Sandoval that the ragged inhabitants of Galveston had few munitions, no powder, and precious few supplies. And however dark the situation, Lafitte was not ready to leave his island. At one point, David De Forest, consul general for the United Provinces of South America, informally became involved in the negotiations. He suggested that the United States postpone its demand for Laffite’s departure for one year so as to provide the privateer an opportunity to select a new base of operations. But none of the negotiations, plots, subplots, or counterplots resulted in the removal of Laffite from Galveston. Even

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though his operations were tattered and he faced the probability that privateering would soon be reduced to an anachronistic practice, Laffite remained in control at Galveston. By April 6, 1820, filibuster James Long arrived at Bolivar, across Galveston Bay from Laffite’s encampment. Sensing an opportunity to salvage Galveston for Jean, Pierre Laffite approached the Spanish captain-general, John Manuel de Cagigal, with the warning that Long was planning to capture Galveston for the United States. Pierre requested a garrison of eighty to one hundred men to forestall such an occurrence and to preserve the island for Spain. The Spanish viceroy, Apodaca, dismissed the plan. Ironically, the Laffites had originally become established in Galveston with the full approval and backing of the Spanish consul in New Orleans. Now they felt abandoned by their benefactor, and Jean undoubtedly felt the pressure of many inexorable forces converging upon him simultaneously. Jean Laffite left Galveston forever on May 12, 1820. Until summer 2001, the place and nature of his demise had not been determined. Several hypotheses have been proffered, and various dates between 1823 and 1828 have been given for his death. He reportedly died in the Yucatan and was buried at Dzilam de Bravo; as evidence supporting this hypothesis, historians point to explorer John Lloyd Stephens’ visit to Dzilam in 1841, to a report by local residents of a possible Laffite gravesite in the settlement, and to the belief of families in the area who claim descent from the famous privateer.43 The grave to which Stephens has referred is not that of Jean, but of Pierre. In November 1821, a Mexican government agent, Miguel Molas, attacked a new base of operations established by the Laffites on Isla Mujeres near Cancun, Mexico. It has been reported that Jean lived there in a hut, the only human habitation on the island. Pierre was traveling with Canadian privateer George Schumpf and a woman from Mobile, Lucy Allen, when he was badly wounded, but all escaped the attack by boat. Three leagues from the lookout at Dzilam, Pierre died. He was buried either at the Campo Santo in Dzilam, or, as several authorities suggest, in the interior of the church at nearby Dzindzantun. Regardless of the place of burial, it is undisputed that the body was that of Pierre, not Jean. The woman, Lucy Allen, probably a mulatto mistress of Pierre, gave birth to a daughter, Felipa Cediles, after Pierre’s death. Felipa married Simon Estrada, and the couple had a son, Jose Torres Estrada, whose offspring are considered to be descendants of Pierre. In 2001, extensive research by historian Jean Epperson, assisted by other members of the Laffite Society, began to clarify the details surrounding Jean’s death. After Pierre’s death, Jean continued smuggling slaves around the Cuban coast. In January 1822, a brigantine of the Eng-

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lish navy destroyed Jean’s ship. Jean survived the attack and swam to the shore but was later jailed in Puerto Principe (Camaguey). He was transferred to the Hospital of San Juan de Dios and escaped on February 13, 1822.44 Three months later, on May 1, Laffite skirmished with two American ships, the Alligator and the Grampus.45 Evidence mounts that Jean died — as many of us may have intuitively expected—at sea. Several newspaper accounts of the spring of 1823 reported Jean’s death at sea. The Washington Gazette on April 23 advised that “the celebrated La Fitte, was killed in action.” The Niles Weekly Register of April 26 said that “a piratical vessel, under the command of the famous Lafitte . . . hoisted the bloody flag and refused quarter, and fought until nearly every man was killed or wounded, Lafitte being among the former.”46 The Rhode Island Republican of June 4, 1823, reported an encounter between the schooner Columbus Ross and Laffite “off Cuba on November 26, 1822.” The Baltimore Patriot of April 23, 1823, reported a skirmish between a British sloop of war and a “piratical schooner” that left twenty-five men swimming in the water and “to whom the boats gave no quarters.” The occupation of Texas soil by French privateers and pirates essentially ended with the departure of Laffite and his followers. Indeed, the basic concept of privateering ceased to be a reality shortly after Laffite abandoned Galveston Island. The Latin American states were establishing their independence from Spain, and the taking of ships on the open seas could no longer be considered as anything but blatant piracy. Gone from Texas were all the French privateers and pirates. Gone were Louis Aury, Barthelemy Lafon, General Humbert, Pierre Laffite, members of the Galveston government and the New Orleans Associates, and most of Jean Laffite’s old followers. Gone were the fabled commune on Barataria Bay, the glory days in New Orleans, and the dreams for a utopia, as Ernest Fischer wrote, in Galveston.47 Jean’s residence was no longer the luxurious Maison Rouge, but a hut on lonely Isla Mujeres. Laffite left sufficient material for generations of myths piled upon myths, repeated until they inevitably became accepted as fact. He very probably did not leave the treasures for which he has so long been credited. In economic decline, leaving funds buried on an island such as Galveston, devoid of permanent landmarks, presumably would not have been an attractive option for a man of Laffite’s intelligence and practicality. By the time he sailed from Galveston, he was bankrupt, lacked a base of operations, and faced the reality that the pursuit of his chosen profession would no longer be tolerated. It is an inescapable fact that he squandered the opportunity to remain in New Orleans while still a hero and to live the remainder of his days in the same manner as his former associate,

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Dominique, who was tolerated if not unconditionally respected. Rather, he chose to pursue the path of privateer-pirate to the end, alienating the American establishment, restricting his options, and making choices that led to an inevitably violent conclusion. The era of French pirates and privateers in Texas ceased on May 12, 1820, as Laffite’s small group sailed through the same pass that Louis Aury had found so treacherous less than four years earlier. Galveston Island waited another eighteen years after the pirates’ departure for its formation as a city, a development engineered by yet another man of French ancestry, Michel Ménard. No physical remnants of Laffite’s Campeachy remain on Galveston Island. Two archaeological excavations of the traditional site of Maison Rouge, undertaken in 1984 and 1996, confirmed an occupancy consistent with Laffite’s tenure of Galveston. The Laffite Society, formed in Galveston in 1995, boasts among worldwide membership most of the leading researchers on matters related to nineteenth-century Gulf Coast privateering and the brothers Laffite. Notes 1. This essay is dedicated to the memory of the writer’s maternal great-grandfather, Pascal Théodore Lasne, neither pirate nor privateer, but Parisian musician and watchmaker, who was born in 1847 and emigrated to Texas in 1887. 2. Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary (Chicago: Consolidated Book Publishers, 1952). 3. Charles W. Hayes, Galveston, History of the Island and the City (Austin: Jenkins Garrett Press, 1974), 16. 4. Stanley Faye, “Commodore Aury,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 24:3 (July 1941), 63. 5. Harris G. Warren, The Sword Was Their Passport (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1943), 119. 6. Hayes, Galveston, 15. 7. Faye, “Commodore Aury,” 61. 8. Warren, Sword, 143. 9. New York Advertiser, January 20, 1818. 10. Hayes, Galveston, 21. 11. Ibid., 19. 12. Louis Michel Aury, December 12, 1817, cited in American State Papers (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1817), 4:136–137. 13. William F. Lewis, “Francisco Xavier Mina, Guerilla Warrior for Romantic Liberalism, 1789–1817” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Santa Barbara, 1967), 182. 14. Richard Espagnol, testimony, October 7, 1817, New Orleans, cited in American State Papers (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1817), 4:137–138.

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15. Jack C. Ramsey Jr., Jean Laffite Prince of Pirates (Austin: Eakin Press, 1996); Stanley C. Arthur, Jean Laffite Gentleman Rover (New Orleans: Harmanson, 1952); Mitchell V. Charnley, Jean Laffite Gentleman Smuggler (New York: Viking Press, 1934); Ruppert S. Holland, The Pirate of the Gulf (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1929); Harry B. Crozier, “Lafitte, Lord of Galveston,” photocopy, (Rosenberg Library, Galveston, n.d.); Edward P. Mitchell, “A Romance of American History, the Story of Laffite, the Pirate of Genius, and the Baratarians,” photocopy, (Rosenberg Library, Galveston, n.d.); Carl Carmer, The Pirate Hero of New Orleans (New York: Harvey House Publishers, 1975). 16. Anonymous, Lafitte, or The Baratarian Chief: A Tale, Founded on Facts (New York: Auburn N.Y. Free Press, 1826). 17. Joseph H. Ingraham, The Pirate of the Gulph of Mexico (London: J. Cunningham, 1839). 18. Jean L. Epperson, “Who was John Andrecheyne Laffite?” The Laffite Society Chronicles, 7:2 (October 2001). 19. Charles Hamilton, Forgers and Famous Fakes (New York: Crown Publishers, 1980), 123. 20. Roger G. Kennedy, “Bartholemey Lafon,” Architectural Digest 50, no. 6 (October 1993): 102. 21. Roger G. Kennedy, Orders from France (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 399. 22. U.S. District Court Case Papers, No. 1066, filed July 3, 1817, Synopses of Cases. 23. Stanley Faye, “The Great Stroke of Pierre Laffite,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 23 (July 1940): 53. 24. Harriet Bos, “Barthelemy Lafon” (master’s thesis, Tulane University, New Orleans, 1977). 25. U.S. District Court Case Papers No. 1062, 1826, Synopses of Cases. 26. Lyle Saxon, Lafitte the Pirate (New York: The Century Company, 1930), 75; Warren, Sword, 78. 27. Kennedy, Orders from France, 389. 28. Warren, Sword, 78. 29. Saxon, Lafitte the Pirate, 65. 30. Kennedy, Orders from France, 389. 31. Jane de Grummond, Renato Beluche, Smuggler, Privateer, and Patriot, 1780 – 1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983). 32. Colonel J. S. Thrasher, “Early History of Galveston,” Galveston City Directory, 1859–1860, n.d. 33. Henderson K. Yoakum, History of Texas from Its First Settlements in 1685 to Its Annexation to the United States in 1846 (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1855). 34. Jean L. Epperson, “Maison Rouge and the Pride, Myth or Fact?” Laffite Society Chronicles 3, no. 1 (January 1997). 35. Chew to Crawford, 1817, National Intelligencer, Washington D.C., December 23, 1819.

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36. Frederic Gaillardet, Sketches of Early Texas and Louisiana (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966), 125; Warren, Sword, 214. 37. Graham to Laffite, August 26, 1818, Consular Letters, Galveston, 1817–1841, 1 (National Archives, Washington, D.C. [hereafter cited as Consular Letters]), cited in Warren, Sword, 218. 38. Laffite to Graham, August 26, 1818, Consular Letters. 39. Graham to Adams, September 9, 1818, Consular Letters. 40. Laffite to Graham, August 28, 1818, Consular Letters. 41. Charles F. Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848 (12 vols., Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1874–1877), 175– 176. 42. Castenada to Rigau, October 19, 1818, Consular Letters, cited in Warren, Sword, 225. 43. John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (New York: Dover Publications, 1969). 44. Jean L. Epperson, “The Final Years of Jean Laffite,” Laffite Society Chronicles 7, no. 2 (October 2001). 45. Robert Vogel, “Some Background Concerning Laffite’s Departure From Galveston,” Laffite Society Chronicles 5, no. 2 (August 1999). 46. Epperson, “Final Years.” 47. Ernest G. Fischer, Marxists and Utopias in Texas (Burnet, Texas: Eakin Press, 1980).

6

CHAMP D’ASILE, TEXAS BETJE BLACK KLIER

Three years after the Battle of Waterloo, former Baron General Charles Lallemand founded a colony in Texas for members of Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeated army (Figure 6.1). In 1818, they settled on land that both the United States and Spain claimed along the ill-defined western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase. Lallemand called the enterprise Champ d’Asile, field of asylum, and announced in the press that the colony would reunite brothers-in-arms for peaceful agricultural pursuits, yet defend itself if necessary. Within nine months of the arrival of the colonists, not a single imperial veteran would remain in Texas.1 Today, Champ d’Asile is a little-known episode of Texas and French history that took place in a remote, unsettled territory during a period of political uncertainty. Archaeologists cannot pinpoint the exact site where the events unfolded. However, it is known that the men encamped in southeastern Texas on the lower Trinity River near Moss Bluff and Atascosito, some twelve to thirty “leagues” north of the Gulf of Mexico.2 Although some aspects of the Champ d’Asile episode will always defy illumination, much light can be brought to this complex story through close examination of French, Spanish, British, American, and Brazilian documents, including visual representations.3 In 1818, when these French settlers arrived, corsairs, pirates, and filibusters controlled the coast of Texas, and cannibalistic Indians threatened the interior. United States history tends to ignore this region from the time of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 until the birth of the Republic of Texas in 1836. But momentous events occurred during these thirtythree years, including the commencement of the Mexican Revolution in 1808, the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, the settlement of the boundary between Louisiana and Texas in 1819, Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821, and the fall of the Alamo and the Texas Revolution. 79

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The ephemeral Texas colony also has vanished from French history. Although replete with information on the French Revolution and the First Empire, French history tends to ignore the moment when the events in Texas occurred, early in the Second Restoration of the Bourbon monarch Louis xviii, who reigned continuously from 1815 until his death in 1824. Prior to his ascent, the French Revolution had dethroned and beheaded the reigning Bourbons a decade before Napoleon Bonaparte established the First Empire (1804–1814). In 1806, Napoleon continued to sweep away Bourbon rulers by chasing the Spanish Bourbons from their throne as well. He installed his brother Joseph as king of Spain and the Indies (1808–1813). This move helped unleash the forces of the Latin American liberation movement. However, by the time Champ d’Asile was founded, the Napoleonic Empire had fallen, Paris had been occupied by foreign troops, and France was ruled by Louis xviii, an unforgiving, unattractive, and un-

6.1

Baron General Charles Lallemand commanded at Waterloo. After the French de-

feat, he led a number of Napoleonic veterans to Champ d’Asile on the Trinity River in 1818. Intended as a fund-raiser for the Texas colony, this 1819 portrait was engraved by Legrand after Francois-Henri Mulard. The University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio.

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popular king. Although the contest between the Bourbons and the Bonapartes had been suppressed in Europe by the Battle of Waterloo, the colonial version of that rivalry was to be reignited in Texas on the banks of the Trinity River at Champ d’Asile. Texas still belonged to Spain in 1818, and the king of France and the king of Spain were members of the same Bourbon family. They feared and despised Bonaparte, and their two countries cooperated diplomatically to suppress his followers throughout the Americas.4 Champ d’Asile is nearly forgotten today, but from 1817 to 1819, kings, presidents, and ordinary people discussed Lallemand and Champ d’Asile. The founders promoted it as a haven for Bonapartist exiles, legally referred to as the “proscribed.” Actually, the legally exiled comprised a very small percentage of the 150–200 refugees (whose exaggerated numbers reach 6,000), and the colony’s leaders may have had other, more sinister motives in mind.5 Within a year of Lallemand’s announcement, in the café-guinguettes of Paris, men were drinking “liqueur of Champ d’Asile” while they sang of “noble savages” providing refuge for the “noble debris” of the imperial army. In parlors, gentlewomen accompanied themselves on harps and plaintively advised the heroes “dispersed by the storm” to be happy at Champ d’Asile and forget their beloved France. The central events of the Champ d’Asile story are the anticipation in 1817 of the colony in Texas and its founding in 1818. The story derives additional dramatic interest from the tales told in words and images in France about Champ d’Asile in 1819 and 1820, after the colony had failed. This essay contrasts the realities in Texas with the rich nineteenth-century French myth. After his 1815 defeat, Napoleon and a handful of his loyal officers, including Charles Lallemand, surrendered to the British Captain Frederick Maitland, expecting to be granted political asylum.6 But the British betrayed Bonaparte and Lallemand. Without permitting Napoleon to set foot on British soil, which would have obligated them to grant him asylum according to their laws, the British transferred “the general” (as they thenceforth called him to justify their actions as a military arrest instead of a diplomatic breach) to a ship bound for a remote British possession in the south Atlantic, the island of Saint Helena. And they refused to permit Lallemand to accompany his commander, as they were well aware of his role as an instigator of rebellion and as a fearless commander. Yet the colorful leaders of the Whigs, Britain’s minority liberal party under Lord Holland, vigorously opposed the military deportation of Napoleon and Lallemand. To mollify this opposition, the officials deported Lallemand to another British island, Malta, instead of returning him to France, where he certainly would have been executed as a traitor by the restored royalist regime.

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All of the European monarchs had joined together as the Seventh Coalition to defeat Napoleon at Waterloo. By the conventions of the surrender, French military men were granted immunity by the Allies. However, when Louis xviii was restored to the French throne, he disregarded the immunity provisions of the truce agreement by reclassifying their crimes as political instead of military. Louis launched an aggressive program of vengeance that was vigorously supported by extremists among the French royalists. Article 1 of the ordinance of July 24, 1815 declared that “the generals and officers who betrayed the King before March 23, or who made an armed attack on France and the government, and those who used violence to take over the power, will be arrested and court-martialed within their own divisions.” The first fifty-seven proscripts provided many members of the future cast of characters in the Texas drama.7 Royal vengeance targeted old and new enemies of the crown. Old enemies of the Bourbon regime were mostly politicians who had voted in 1792 to behead Louis xvi and Marie Antoinette. All of these “regicides” were exiled from France; some came to the United States, but none to Texas.8 New enemies included almost all members of the now-exiled extended Bonaparte family, along with a hodge-podge of conspirators who had directly participated in Napoleon’s successful effort to dethrone Louis xviii. It was the men who collaborated in the northern conspiracy in March 1815 who would found Champ d’Asile. On April 11, 1814, Napoleon voluntarily abdicated his throne and went into exile on the Island of Elba with an entourage of some four hundred former officers and men. Louis xviii then ascended the throne as king of France, although Napoleon still had supporters scattered throughout the world. Among them were the British Whigs, who had negotiated the failed Peace Treaty of Amiens in 1802.9 While Napoleon brooded on Elba, his British Whig friends secretly communicated to him the plans his allied enemies had made to transfer him from Elba to the Island of Saint Helena, located at least a month’s sail from European ports. Alarmed at the prospect and renewed by his respite from the battlefield, Napoleon prepared a hasty exit, bolted from Elba, and landed at Cannes in the south of France on March 1, 1815, Day One of the so-called One Hundred Days of his ephemeral return to power. Napoleon marched peacefully, though dramatically, to Paris, gathering troops and royalist deserters as he progressed. Simultaneously, Charles Lallemand and his brother, Henri Dominique Lallemand, joined by their friend Count Charles Lefebvre-Desnouëttes, instigated an uprising in the north on March 12, but their efforts were premature and the rebellion was quickly suppressed by troops still loyal to the king. The Lallemands were captured, but Lefebvre-Desnouëttes escaped and hid at the home of

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Antoine Rigau.10 In the evening before Napoleon and his men arrived in the capital on March 20, Louis xviii and his entourage abandoned the Tuileries Palace and fled to Ghent, Belgium, for the protection of the allies. He departed French soil on March 22. Once in Paris, Napoleon reclaimed the reins of the government and freed the Lallemand brothers, promoting them for their loyalty and valor. Frenchmen watched power shift from the Bourbons back to the Bonapartes. Ignoring the political risks, they returned to Napoleon’s service in great numbers. Subsequently, Louis xviii granted amnesty to those who supported Napoleon only after March 22—a practical (not merciful) expedient because the king could not administer the country if he had to forego the talents of all who had served Napoleon during the Hundred Days. Instead, the monarchy chose to focus on punishing traitors, defined as anyone who supported Bonaparte while Louis xviii occupied French soil. Actions taken against such traitors quickly became known as the White Terror. White symbolized the monarchists, as opposed to violet, the color of Bonaparte’s partisans. Commanders like Ney and Labédoyère were arrested, hastily tried, condemned, and shot by firing squads. Others, like Lefebvre-Desnouëttes, were condemned to die but managed to escape, but not Postmaster Antoine Lavalette (1769 –1830), who decided to risk remaining in Paris with his family. He was arrested, tried, and condemned. His marriage to Émilie Beauharnais, Napoleon’s niece by marriage, placed Lavalette in double jeopardy as a relative of Bonaparte and a conspirator to effect his return. As postmaster, Lavalette had been the chief inspector of postal documents whose duties included granting passports to foreign dignitaries as well as selectively opening and reading personal and diplomatic correspondence throughout Napoleon’s reign. Fortunately for Lavalette, the royalists were unaware that during this time, he had befriended Whig leader Lord Holland. In the autumn of 1815, Lavalette languished in the Conciergerie prison awaiting death, which he narrowly escaped through the ruse of his wife and young daughter. During their final visit on the eve of his execution, Madame Lavalette exchanged clothes with her husband and took his place in the prison cell.11 General Sir Robert Wilson and two fellow English Whigs, resolved not to idly witness another travesty of justice but rather to help rescue Lavalette. They secreted him out of the country into Belgium. The British gentlemen, however, were caught, tried, and imprisoned in France for three months. After Wilson’s release in July 1816, he returned to London, where British officials punished him for interfering in French matters by discharging him from the royal service and stripping him of his commission

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and numerous military honors. But Wilson, a real-life “Scarlet Pimpernel,” was already a folk hero in Paris and England. Opposition politics came to replace his unjustly terminated military career, so despite his official punishment, he was easily elected to Parliament. Wilson’s role in the Champ d’Asile story became important because he and his friends kept Napoleon and the Bonapartist refugees in the news. He promoted their cases in London and Paris and provided a secret rendezvous site in Brussels where they might conspire to rescue Napoleon. The vestiges of this plan gave birth to Champ d’Asile. Wilson had numerous contacts in Paris, including Benjamin Constant, sometimes an exile in London, where he frequented the home of Whig leader Lord Holland. As a writer, Constant had unsuccessfully campaigned in the press to prevent Labédoyère’s execution. The indecisive and cerebral Constant would seem to have little in common with the bold and precipitous Lallemand, but they had belonged to the same Masonic Lodge in Paris, and the Baroness Lallemand now moved in the same liberal social circles as Constant. To assist Baron Lallemand, Constant would aim his best weapon—the pen—at the royalists. Rallied by the popular response to Wilson’s campaign, Constant and other opposition journalists on both sides of the Channel sought to arouse public sympathies in favor of the proscribed and their Texas colony. In Britain, better treatment, or even release, of Napoleon was the goal; in France, the opposition press wished to influence the French king to rescind the bans and grant amnesty to exiled Frenchmen everywhere. The press spotlighted Lallemand and Rigau, who would found Champ d’Asile, and Lefebvre-Desnouëttes, who would choose to settle in Alabama instead. All had been tried in absentia and found guilty, and a firing squad awaited them in France. In Belgium, the Jeannet family, friends of the condemned men, met in the home of Wilson’s sister and planned to join the exiles in America. The renowned Captain Lord Cochrane, a discharged Whig whom the British admiralty labeled “renegade,” joined the plotters in Belgium. Together, they conspired to rescue another exile, Napoleon.12 The group in Belgium became a key contingent behind a generalized plan to rescue Napoleon using the rebellions in South America as a cover. This plan spread to include the escaped exiles and the adventurers and dismissed soldiers who joined them. Support for the idea came from an international group of strange bedfellows, including Whigs, Quakers, Abolitionists, Masons, and the International Napoleonic Confederation. As rumors spread, attention began to focus on Philadelphia, where most of the exiled officers had gathered. A French community had grown there over the previous two decades comprised of exiles from the French Revo-

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lution and refugees from the slave uprisings in Saint-Domingue (Haiti). As this group grew in numbers, news arrived that the plan to rescue Napoleon had hit two obstacles. First, a written version of one of the rescue plans was “discovered,” which was diplomatic language for a betrayal in exchange for a reward.13 The participants were forced to publicly deny the entire scheme and exercise greater discretion. They continued to plot until the second complicating factor proved fatal to the plan. A certain Roul, unpopular and emotionally unsteady, leaked the details of the plot to the Bourbon ambassadors of France and Spain in Philadelphia in exchange for a royal pardon so that he might return to France.14 This compromising news forced Joseph Bonaparte (known as the comte de Survilliers) to abandon the conspiracy. Lefebvre-Desnouëttes and other prominent exiles also lost hope and transferred their energies to an agricultural colony. In 1816, the United States government granted the French community in exile 100,000 acres of land in the Territory of Alabama with the proviso that each grantee cultivate vines and olives. Lefebvre-Desnouëttes led the agricultural group, variously called the French Immigrant Society and the Society for the Cultivation of the Vine and Olive, to Alabama, where they named their town Demopolis.15 Unfortunately, after numerous cabins had been built and much of the land had been cleared, United States government surveyors informed the French colonists that most of their settlement rested outside the land that had been granted to them. Lefebvre-Desnouëttes was forced to return to Washington to arrange for the colony to move four miles east.16 Lallemand and his followers continued to contemplate a rescue attempt.17 Realizing that elements of the scheme had been irretrievably launched, they liquidated their allotments in the Alabama land grant in order to finance an alternative rescue operation. This scheme constituted an illegal act counter to the spirit in which the land was granted. Instead of going to Alabama with Lefebvre-Desnouëttes, Lallemand informed the Spanish ambassador in Washington, Luis de Onís, and the American Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, of his intention to settle peacefully in Texas, use weapons only in self-defense, and even pay taxes at a future date. After publishing a grandiose announcement in the U.S. press, the men headed for Texas. The first shipload of colonists arrived in Galveston in January 1818 under the command of Rigau, who was destined to become second in command. The site for the future colony was strategically located out of the reach of Mexican officials in San Antonio or Saltillo. Champ d’Asile was also out of reach of United States officials because it lay west of the Neutral Strip, a zone the United States had pledged in 1806 not to traverse. Lalle-

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mand had never explored Texas, but he received competent advice from his best friend, Arsène Lacarrière-Latour, who had surveyed and mapped southeast Texas, and from the Laffite brothers, whom he knew from Saint-Domingue or had met in Philadelphia with their mutual friend Latour.18 Despite the hands-off policy that prevailed in 1818, many power-mongers had been or were still interested in Texas. Who would capture this prize? Thomas Jefferson and his expansionist party? James Wilkinson, the commander-in-chief of the United States Army who had signed the Neutral Ground Agreement of 1806 in time to rush off and falsely accuse his partner Aaron Burr of treason? Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, who had once been the king of Spain and the Indies? Amable Humbert, hero of the failed Irish Rebellion and sometime Texas resident? Ferdinand vii, the restored Bourbon king of Spain? The British, who invaded New Orleans in 1814? Napoleon Bonaparte? Charles Lallemand? Perhaps Texas would be left in the hands of the corsairs settled on Galveston Island. Their slave-smuggling activities were an anathema to most people but a boon to a few. Their slave trade helped steady the economic and political balance in the United States. Illegal slaves introduced into Louisiana for resale to the planter states replenished the labor supply, thus sustaining the existing balance in the Senate between slave and free states for a short while.19 At that time no one knew that the answer to the question of who would capture Texas would be Sam Houston, who led the successful effort to wrest Texas from the Mexicans, but not until 1836. Ironically, in 1814, Sam Houston served with Andrew Jackson in Alabama as United States troops fought a genocidal battle against the Creek Indians. In 1816, the United States government would grant to Lefebvre-Desnouëttes and the Society for the Cultivation of the Vine and Olive some of the land taken from the Creeks. From January to March 1818, followers of Lallemand gathered in Galveston, where they joined the corsairs and pirates under Pierre and Jean Laffite. After the baron arrived in March, Laffite’s men escorted them up the Trinity River to establish their colony on the Orcoquisac Bluffs, long since abandoned by the Orcoquisac Indians and the Spanish soldiers who had acknowledged the strategic location by building at least two presidios in the area. From the outset the project was what a Texan would call “snake-bit.” Within sight of Galveston Island in January, four men were swept overboard and drowned. As the troops ascended the Trinity River in mid-March, one of their barges sank, and two more colonists drowned. Important supplies were lost. Hungry, they consumed a poisonous weed that they believed to be lettuce, and as dozens lay retching near death, an Alabama Coushatta Indian provided an antidote that saved their lives.

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Immediately upon returning to Paris after the failure of the colony at Champ

d’Asile, L. Hartmann and J. B. Millard published their account of the tragedy, Le Texas, ou Notice historique sur le Champ d’Asile (Paris, 1819). They included this site plan, which represents the dwellings of General Lallemand (“No. 1”), Fort Charles (“No. 2”), Fort Henri (“No. 3”), a stockade (“No. 4”), Rigau’s dwelling (“No. 5”), a storehouse (“No. 6”), and the soldiers’ dwellings (“No. 7”). McKie Collection, Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin, ct0455.

Military policies were in effect from the outset. Men were divided into three cohorts or companies. Apparently the halcyon days of the colony occurred when they first arrived and were building forts and residences. L. Hartmann of Strasbourg, who wrote one of the two extant eyewitness accounts, said their four well-built forts were constructed as if “by magic” (Figure 6.2). In the beginning, the men were engaged in familiar activities that they did well. Lumber was plentiful, and game, fish, and wildflowers abounded. But as the season changed, so did the emotional climate. A more candid eyewitness reported “thefts, brawls, duels, and assassinations,” desertions, and beatings.20 Summer on the Trinity brought sultry heat, mosquitoes, and dissention. The friendly Indians who helped them settle and shared their “pulque” began to steal their supplies and pillage their meager crops. Karankawa Indians slaughtered and ate two men who had gone on a hunting expedition. The colonists split into factions along cultural lines—French, Italians, Germans, Spanish, Polish, Belgian, and Swiss. Lallemand and Rigau, the two leaders, fought. The frustrated men wondered why they were in Texas in July in their wool clothes. Without women, without food, without hope, they made no progress toward any of the goals attributed to them. They had not taken over Mexican silver

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mines, liberated South America, or rescued Napoleon. They certainly had made no progress toward establishing an independent agricultural colony or a haven for uniting the downtrodden. In the midst of all this strife, Lallemand learned in July that Mexican troops from San Antonio de Béxar were moving against the colony to force the French intruders out of the disputed territory. After a brief show of bravado, Lallemand wisely decided to disband the colony. Some two hundred colonists hastily abandoned Champ d’Asile and returned to the familiar sands of Galveston and the protection of Jean Laffite. On August 24, a glimmer of hope arrived in the person of Major George Graham, an emissary of the United States government. Surprisingly, although he had come to gather information about the French threat and rid Galveston of all unauthorized colonists, apparently he also meant to enlist the aid of Lallemand and Laffite in a different mission—to wrest Texas from Spain. Interestingly, the official self-forgiving story from John Quincy Adams’ diary differed, suggesting that Graham’s mission was solely to verify Joseph Bonaparte’s non-involvement and order the French colonists and corsairs to leave Texas forever.21 However, this cover story is strongly contradicted by the actions of the participants as well as by several French and Spanish documents that corroborate Graham’s secret mission. French and Spanish records concur that Laffite and Lallemand accepted Graham’s proposal, and Lallemand’s actions strongly suggest that he had cast his lot with Graham. The two immediately left for New Orleans on the pretext of obtaining supplies. In New Orleans, Lallemand became a United States citizen. Before either of Graham’s plans could be implemented and before the dreaded “Spanish army” arrived from San Antonio, disaster struck. From September 13 to September 15, a hurricane battered Galveston Island, destroying most of the shelters, contaminating the water in the wells, setting adrift the boats containing the remaining supplies, and wrecking Laffite’s fleet. Finally, in mid-October, Captain Juan de Castañeda, the Mexican military commander, arrived in Galveston and left his troops camped nearby so that no one would discover that they were a rag-tag group of Creoles with insufficient mounts and uniforms. Seeing the equally pathetic band of French colonists, the commander boldly suggested that Rigau and Laffite withdraw with their partisans. They ignored Castañeda’s suggestions, and he merely withdrew and reported to his superior that the French were no longer a threat. En route back to San Antonio, the Mexican soldiers destroyed Champ d’Asile’s fortifications, commander’s lodge, and twenty-four cabins to render it useless for the Bonapartists to return to reclaim their outpost. Castañeda reported feeling glad that he had not been forced to fight such a well-constructed de-

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fense.22 However, his men were near naked and starving, so weak from hunger that it took them two days to destroy the empty colony. Some of the colonists had escaped from Champ d’Asile even before the majority retreated to Galveston. After the hurricane, the remainder began to disperse from Galveston. Six officers who deserted to the Mexican troops in Galveston were sent to Havana at the expense of the Spanish government.23 Others joined the corsairs and pirates. Some set out on foot northward toward Nacogdoches and Natchitoches; others followed the eastern trail toward Opelousas. Lafitte lent his only remaining schooner to former French General Humbert to ferry as many colonists as possible back to New Orleans. By November 1818, most of the survivors had arrived in Louisiana, where the French community helped provide food and clothing. From there, a small number of them traveled to Alabama to join the discouraged settlers who had been forced to leave Demopolis for the new village of Aigleville. Lallemand and Graham may have struck an agreement to help establish some of the Champ d’Asile colonists in Alabama. Approximately half the survivors of the Champ d’Asile fiasco nonetheless remained in the New Orleans area, where they awaited aid from a French fund-raising campaign. Despite much speculation, the finances of the enterprise from 1817 to 1819 have never been satisfactorily explained. Many of the colonists sold the land grants they had been given in Alabama. Various merchant associations that supported rebellion in the Spanish colonies also contributed to their expenses. Joseph Bonaparte paid the refugees’ lodging bills in Philadelphia so they might leave honorably, and funds came from the dowry of Harriet Girard, who married Henri Lallemand. Quaker and British abolitionists may have provided support in hopes that Lallemand would foment another slave rebellion in the Caribbean or provide a haven in Texas for runaway slaves from Louisiana. Whatever these meager contributions may have been, the French colony was primarily supported by two brothers, Pierre and Jean Laffite. The Laffite brothers, like Lallemand, were playing an ambiguous game, keeping several options open, and watching for opportunities. Laffite depleted his resources to assist the French colonists in anticipation of reimbursement from the Spanish government under a plan to trap a large number of the French anti-Bourbons for the royalists. This great coup would have earned a royal pardon for the Laffites, enabling them to return to Spain, which they claimed to be their homeland. But the weather and the political climate sabotaged their plan to have the Spanish government pay a bounty for the men of Champ d’Asile.24 Whether the Laffites actually would have betrayed Lallemand remains an open question. Perhaps Jean Laffite’s real plan included enticing the

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Spanish government to sponsor the bivouac that he would then exploit for other purposes. Laffite may have thought that Lallemand would become desperate and switch his loyalty to the royalists, as recommended by their mutual friend, Lacarrière-Latour. Maybe the Laffite brothers and the diplomats entertained hopes that Champ d’Asile would succeed. Both the French and Spanish ambassadors considered the possibility that Champ d’Asile might succeed and be remanded to Louis xviii to indemnify the Bourbon family for the loss of Louisiana at the instigation of Napoleon Bonaparte. These experienced ambassadors would certainly recognize the clemency potential for the Laffite and Lallemand brothers, as well as for the colonists, in an amends scenario. When the hopes of the Texas colonists vanished, their dreams were realized in French art and fiction, where the myth of Champ d’Asile replaced the grim realities of failure. The myth was shaped by the worldview of those who opposed the monarchy. Stories and pictorial representations of the mythical Champ d’Asile combine descriptive elements of the myths of the Promised Land, the Garden of Eden, and Paradise Lost. The prevailing Franco-English liberal party line provides the myth’s theme: “Blame the Bourbons.” Blame the king for exiling France’s glorious patriots. Blame the royalists that the heroes need a haven in Texas. Blame the viceroy’s troops when Champ d’Asile fails. Who were the propagandists who exploited the story of Champ d’Asile, and who was their intended audience? When the occupying forces left in 1817, France polarized into two broad groups—royalists who supported the monarchical form of government under a Bourbon king, and a coalition that opposed them. The opposition coalition included liberals, Bonapartists, and Orleanists, all simply referred to here as “Bonapartists.” The voice of the Bonapartists was Benjamin Constant, who with his liberal friends founded a newspaper called La Minerve française. In August 1818, The Minerva published Charles Lallemand’s rhetorical proclamation of his intention to found a colony in America called Champ d’Asile, which had been announced in the United States almost a year earlier. Ironically, at the time the proclamation was published in France, the colonists had left Champ d’Asile permanently. Nevertheless, The Minerva sponsored a fund-raising campaign to help exiles already in the United States reach the Texas colony and to send unemployed veterans from France to join them. Contributors’ names appeared in the paper alongside poems and lyrics about Champ d’Asile. Sheet music was printed and sold for the benefit of the colonists (Figure 6.3). Visual depictions of veterans reunited in paradise proliferated. Engravings in shop windows illustrated how officers worked alongside their men to clear land, building shelters and fortifications, plow the fields, and plant crops.

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Like the traders who sailed to the New World in the 1700s, the Bonapartists were depicted as living in harmony with Native Americans. Mapmakers supported the legitimacy of the site chosen by Lallemand for his Champ d’Asile by creating maps that geographically locate the colony beside the ephemeral Gulf coast colony of seventeenth-century French explorer René Robert Cavalier de La Salle. This maneuver illustrated the claim that Lallemand’s colony occupied land formerly colonized by France (not Spain), while reinforcing President Jefferson’s and Secretary Adams’ claim that the United States bought Texas as part of the Louisiana Purchase. In January 1819, months after Champ d’Asile had been burned and months after Lallemand had become a United States citizen, reports of the colony’s collapse began to arrive in Paris. The opposition press immediately accused the Bourbons of marching against the poor veterans. When the Bourbon troops, rumored to be as many as six thousand freshly armed and well-supplied soldiers, were reported to be pressing down on the colonists, the outgunned colonists had the wisdom to withdraw to Galveston. Of course, the Bourbon presses were glad to claim victory over veterans of Napoleon’s Grande Armée, and they did.

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Pioneer French lithog-

rapher Godefroy Engelmann published this vignette by Horace Vernet to illustrate the first musical score commemorating the unfortunate Texas colony. The lyrics caused a sensation when they appeared in the French Minerva in late 1818, and proceeds from the sale of the sheet music went to the colonists. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

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Louis Garnerey signed his views of Champ d’Asile with his name spelled back-

wards, “Yerenrag.” He later changed the ending of his name to “ay” to distinguish himself from his father and brother Garnerey. In this Vue d’Aigleville, Colonie du Texas ou Champ d’Asile, he depicts Fort Henri in the background. Industrious colonists work in harmony with each other and with nature. Prints and Photographs Collection, Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.

The opposition press described Graham’s visit as that of an American emissary who had come to Lallemand with a generous offer. Plausibility and consistency, rather than accuracy, remained the guiding principles of the opposition. Reordering the elements of the false story reproduced the outrageous version that is found in the most widely disseminated source today, the reprint of the nineteenth-century Larousse encyclopedia.25 According to the opposition, since Spain was evicting Lallemand from Texas, the United States would give the French a new town called Aigleville, whose street names honored their great victories (Figure 6.4 and color illustration 5). Lafitte the pirate would escort them to the new location. They reported that the transplanted Champ d’Asilians planted grapevines and olive trees. They cheerfully began to build a new town whose streets bore the names of Napoleonic great victories—Wagram,

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Friedland, and Austerlitz—but wished only to return to their homeland. The opposition press used fragments of truth to lie. When the first Champ d’Asile colonists, L. Hartmann and J. B. Millard, returned to France in April 1819, they published detailed eyewitness accounts of their experiences.26 In deference to opposition leaders who were presenting them as both heroes and victims, their account conformed to the fiction that the men of Champ d’Asile had lived together in harmony. They donated the proceeds of their writings to the fund for their friends from Champ d’Asile who wanted only to return to France. As news of the colony’s failure spread, The Minerva nonetheless continued to solicit funds even more fervently than before because contributions could now be used to repatriate the colonists. Each faction within the opposition coalition had its agenda. Orleanists wanted to increase the power of the duke of Orleans and replace the Bourbon king with a king from the Orleans family. Bonapartists wanted to cover up the failure of the Texas colony and keep the support for Bonaparte alive in hopes of empowering his son. Liberals wanted to create a nation where individual liberties of free men would be guaranteed; nearly all of them imagined some kind of republic. All of the coalition wanted to pressure the Bourbon king to rescind the banishments and allow the soldiers who had fought for France to return to their homeland to live out their lives. Champ d’Asile became a metaphor that each faction could manipulate to further its cause. Because most of the French population in 1819 was illiterate, people in France were accustomed to learning about important events through art. The myth of Champ d’Asile inspired artists and coincided with the popularization of the new medium of lithography, which enabled the mass production of detailed prints. The relative ease of generating lithographs in Paris opened up the French-Texas story to a wide range of consumers including the financially strapped, unemployed veterans who were impassioned by their former glory and humiliated by their reduced status and who could identify with the exiles at Champ d’Asile. The myth of Champ d’Asile grew out of an amalgam of what the media implied, the artists interpreted, and the viewer inferred. It was developed and propagated in small installments in newspapers, novels, poems, and songs as well as in paintings, engravings, and lithographs. Images wandered from one medium to another: a Champ d’Asile image from a song sheet could migrate to the label of a liqueur bottle or from a lithograph advertising a book to a wallpaper scene. Regardless of the medium, viewers recognized the accurate depictions of their heroes’ faces and uniforms. Therefore, they had no reason to doubt the accuracy of other details in the scenes showing proud and happy offi-

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cers and men working together in equality and harmony in front of tall mountains and or resting under palm trees along the Trinity River. Casual observers in Paris believed the captions that declared that the French were resourceful and could be happy anywhere they gathered. Literate viewers, who had been intellectually nourished on Rousseau, Bernadin de St. Pierre, and Chateaubriand, believed also that nature would restore individuals downtrodden by society’s failures. Robust officers in their clean uniforms embracing one another under the palms certainly looked restored, healthy, and happy. Visual artists selectively manipulated the truth in depicting the myth of Champ d’Asile. Much of the art blends the details of the agricultural colony in Alabama with the details of the military colony in Texas. This deliberate obfuscation of the differences in the two colonies was achieved by producing matching pairs of lithographs labeled Texas and Alabama. In one set, each location features a sign or banner saying “Aigleville” underscored with narratives stating that the colonists had moved from Champ d’Asile to Aigleville. The eight women and children in Texas always are featured in the foreground, so that it would be impossible to notice the disparity in the ratio of males to females between the two colonies. Artists referenced literary, religious, or revolutionary symbols and traditions, often combining all three, in their renditions of Champ d’Asile in order to arouse familiar sympathies. For instance, Christians could recognize an image of Jesus Christ’s descent from the cross in the outline of an exile expiring in his cabin at Champ d’Asile. References to the revolutionary images of the painter Jacques-Louis David abound, and elements from Anne-Louis Girodet’s painting The Burial of Atala appear to tug at the heartstrings of readers who favored Chateaubriand’s popular novel. Mapmakers had laid the groundwork for the political content of Larousse’s encyclopedia entry. The triumph of myth over history was sealed in the third quarter of the nineteenth century by Pierre Larousse with the following entry under “Champ d’Asile”: At the time of the second return of Louis xviii, many French [who were] pursued relentlessly, took refuge in the United States where 100,000 acres of land were granted to them on the Gulf of Mexico between El Norte [the Rio Grande] and the Trinity River for the purpose of founding a colony. This place of refuge, this establishment of the banished, received the name of Champ d’Asile. While the Lallemand brothers organized the little republic . . . Spain having claimed the land on which the colonists were established, the United States gave them in exchange a place in the country of Alabama.

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Pierre Larousse, who was one year old at the time of the Champ d’Asile controversy, compiled his seventeen-volume dictionary-encyclopedia between 1860 and 1876. Dependent upon the support of Napoleon iii, Larousse made no mention of the tragic demise of Champ d’Asile.27 The maps and art depicting Texas are intimately bound to their time and cannot be understood fully without situating them in the context of the early Second Bourbon Restoration. Layers of meaning were derived by blending the Texas story with images from known literary and artistic works that must be reexamined together. The vision of Champ d’Asile rises not on the banks of the Trinity River but from the imaginations of French politicians and artists who created an image of Texas in art, music, and literature. Regardless of the imaginative distortions, the French myth of Champ d’Asile established Texas as the ultimate destination for brave hearts in search of liberty. Notes 1. The most reliable source of non-archival information on Champ d’Asile is René Rémond, Les États-Unis devant l’opinion française, 1815–1832, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Colin, 1962). 2. Local historian Jean Epperson, extending the research of the late John V. Clay, places the colony at or near present-day Moss Bluff. The actual site may be underwater today due to changes in the course of the Trinity River. Cf. Jean Epperson, “Where Was Champ d’Asile?” Texas Illustrated Magazine of History and Folklore, The Liberty Gazette 20, no. 8 (January 1998): 3–8. 3. Cf. Ron Tyler, ed. The New Handbook of Texas, 5 vols. (Austin: The Texas State Historical Association, 1996), s.v. “Baudin,” “Champ d’Asile,” “Constant,” “Garnerey,” and “Lallemand.” 4. Correspondance Politique, Sous-série États-Unis, vols. 73–75, Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Paris (hereafter cited as AÉ). Heartfelt gratitude is here extended to Mr. Daniel Rebours for his generous assistance with these reports. Diplomats of France’s allies assisted in gathering information on Champ d’Asile. Cf. Guadalupe J. Codinach, “Confédération Napoléonnie. El desempeño de los conspiradores militares y las sociedades secretas en la Independencia de México,” Historia Mexicana 38, no. 1 (July–September 1988): 43–68. 5. For a list of the known colonists see Kent Gardien, “Take Pity on Our Glory: Men of Champ d’Asile,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 87, no. 3 (January 1984): 241–268. 6. The surname of the elder Lallemand brother (1774–1839), who surrendered with Napoleon, was Frédéric-Antoine, although he always went by “Charles.” Military references and contemporary memoirs often call Charles “Lallemand, l’aîné” (the older) to distinguish him from his younger brother, Henri-Dominique Lallemand (1777–1824), “Lallemand le jeune,” who escaped first to England and then, learning of his brother’s captivity, proceeded to America. Both were barons of the empire and generals of divi-

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sion at Waterloo, but Charles was a chasseur and Henri an artilleryman. Henri participated in the planning of Champ d’Asile, where a fort was named in his honor, but he never went to Texas. Military records of the Lallemand brothers, Antoine Rigau, sometimes spelled Rigaud (1758–1820), and General Count Charles Lefebvre-Desnouëttes (1773–1822) come from their personnel files in the archives of the Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre (hereafter cited as shat), Chateau de Vincennes. 7. Comte Antoine de La Valette, Mémoires et Souvenirs du comte de Lavalette (Paris: Mercure de France, 1994), 520 n. 106. 8. The best-known regicide, Joseph Lakanal (1762–1845), probably contributed to the Texas plan in the earliest stages, before the details of the secret Napoleonic Confederation became public and compromised the early scheme. Ambassador Hyde de Neuville attributed to Lakanal memos signed “La Kanal” regarding the secret international Napoleonic Confederation. See Jesse Reeves, The Napoleonic Exiles in America: A Study in American Diplomatic History 1815–1819, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 1905), vol. 23. 9. Charles James Fox (1749–1806), Whig leader and Britain’s first foreign secretary, was accompanied to Paris by his nephew Henry Richard Vassall Fox (1773–1840), Baron Holland. Young Fox inherited his father’s title and the mansion when he was one year old and the Whig leadership upon his uncle’s death in 1806. The future Lady Holland accompanied them to Paris and was enduringly smitten with Napoleon who, from Saint Helena, overestimated the couple’s potential political influence in Great Britain. Lady Holland’s gifts to the exile earned her bequests of Napoleon’s personal snuff box (now in the British Museum) and a lock of his hair. In England, supporters of Bonaparte were called “Napoleonists.” For information on Lord Holland and the Whigs see E. Tangye Lean, The Napoleonists (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). 10. Also a baron and general, Antoine Rigau later helped Charles Lallemand found and command Champ d’Asile. Rigau’s son and daughter accompanied him to Texas and back to New Orleans, where he succumbed soon thereafter. See Raoul Brice, “La Captivité,” in Les Espoirs de Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène (Paris: Payot, 1938), 15–128. 11. Angered by the public humiliation of losing their prize catch by being outwitted by a woman and her twelve-year-old daughter, the royalists kept Émilie incarcerated for six weeks. Her infant son had died just before the rescue, and her condition deteriorated in prison. Released for health reasons, she returned home and in destroying incriminating correspondence to protect her husband discovered his marital infidelity. The shock sent her to a mental hospital, where Lavalette found her six years later when he was pardoned. She returned home to his care until he died in 1830 and survived him by twenty-five years. Their daughter, Josephine, who had accompanied her mother to the Conciergerie, had been forced by her father’s exile and her mother’s imprisonment into a loveless marriage, but she later found love as the mistress of painter Eugène Delacroix. 12. AÉ, vol. 74, report from Pétry, consul general at Philadelphia, July 24, 1817. 13. See Reeves, Napoleonic Exiles, 45– 80, for his penetrating interpretation of the Lakanal letters sent to Joseph Bonaparte that “came into [de Neuville’s] possession . . . intercepted in all probability by one of the minister’s agents.” Reports in volumes 74–75 of AÉ confirm and extend Reeves’ suspicions: de Neuville planted spies who in-

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tercepted correspondence and infiltrated the Bonapartists’ activities in hopes of receiving pardons. 14. Much confusion existed then and persists today among several exiles with similar names—Roul, Roule, Raul, and Réal—because diplomat Pétry varied the spelling of Roul’s name and mistakenly designated him as a “general,” which was his rank in Bolivar’s army. Cf. Fernand Beaucour, “Qui était roul, premier officier d’ordonnance de l’Empereur à l’Ile d’Elbe (1775–1840)?” (unpublished paper in the archives of the Musée Marmottan, Paris). 15. Demopolis replaced the name Proscripolis; Aigleville replaced the site of Demopolis. See Kent Gardien, “The Splendid Fools: Philadelphia Origins of Alabama’s Vine and Olive Colony,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 96 (October 1980), 491–507. 16. See Thomas W. Martin, French Military Adventurers in Alabama, 1818–1828 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1937). 17. On June 4, 1817, General Paul-Albert-Raymond Latapie had sailed from New York for Brazil, where he arrived August 14. Joseph Bonaparte sent Latapie and his men to test the political climate and the feasibility of launching a rescue party from Brazil’s most easterly Atlantic port, Pernambuco, today called Recife, on the bulge of South America nearest Saint Helena (shat, personnel file, Latapie). 18. Jean Garrigoux, Un Aventurier Visionnaire, Arsène Lacarrière-Latour (Aurillac: Société La Haute-Auvergne, 1997). 19. When Missouri applied for statehood in 1818, there were eleven free states and eleven slave states. Southern planters exploited Laffite’s slave-smuggling enterprise to provide manpower for their plantations. 20. The primary eyewitness account by L. Hartmann and J. B. Millard, Le Texas, ou Notice historique sur le Champ d’Asile (Paris: Beguin, 1819), is contrasted here with a less politicized version discovered and translated by Jack Autrey Dabbs, “Additional notes on the Champ d’Asile,” Western Historical Quarterly 54 (1950–1951): 347–358. 21. John Quincy Adams, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, comprising portions of his diary from 1795 to 1848, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1874–1877), 4:175–176. 22. Antonio Martinez, The Letters of Antonio Martinez, Last Spanish Governor of Texas, 1817–1822, Trans. and ed. Virginia H. Taylor (Austin: Texas State Library, 1957). 23. Kent Gardien, “Take Pity,” 258. 24. Stanley K. Faye, Privateers of the Gulf: 1803–1820, ed. Don C. Marler (Hemphill, Texas: Dogwood Press, 2001). 25. Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXième siècle (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire, 1866–1879). 26. Hartmann and Millard, Le Texas. For English translation see Donald Joseph, The Story of Champs d’Asile (Dallas: The Book Club of Texas, 1937). 27. Larousse, Grand dictionnaire.

7

HEROES, VILLAINS, MERCHANTS, AND PRIESTS The Alamo’s Frenchmen

BETJE BLACK KLIER Whether hero, villain, actor playing priest, or bishop playing politician, the experiences of several Frenchmen have enriched the legacy of the San Antonio shrine. They added drama to the story of the Alamo through anecdote, architecture, and film, enriching our past and challenging our future. In 1836, Louis “Moses” Rose supposedly escaped from the Alamo just before the final onslaught of the Mexican army, resulting in one of the most enduring stories in Texas lore. A half-century passed before a compatriot, businessman Honoré Grenêt, transformed the compound into its most theatrical incarnation—a mock castle built alongside the chapel. Long after the castle disappeared and after the last of three French bishops relinquished Catholic control of the Alamo, a French movie director came to San Antonio to reenact the heroic story in a silent film. In 1911, Gaston Méliès unleashed an unending stream of movies about the Alamo with his production of The Immortal Alamo. Yet despite the attention of devoted researchers, French association with the Alamo compound continues to mystify historians today. Surprisingly, Texas’ most celebrated hero-martyr did not even know that he was of French descent! David “Davy” Crockett wrote in his autobiography, “My father’s name was John Crockett, and he was of Irish descent. He was either born in Ireland or on a passage from that country to America across the Atlantic.”1 Creek Indians had murdered Crockett’s grandparents, the natural keepers of family lore, so it fell to genealogists to follow the trail of the hero’s ancestors from Tennessee back to the Huguenot colony of New Rochelle, New York, across the Atlantic to Ireland, thence crossing the Channel to France. Crockett’s reputedly handsome forefather Antoine de Sassure Peronnette de Crocketagne served as second in command of the household guard of King Louis xiv.2 In 1669, de Crocketagne married Louise de Saix, a cousin of the Marquis de

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Lafayette. (This alliance dispels the myths of the Texas hero’s humble origins.) The French couple converted to Protestantism and found themselves outside the law in 1685 when Louis xiv revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had granted tolerance to French Protestants. The revocation gave them only twenty days to leave the country. It would take seven generations, 150 years, and total Anglicization before de Crocketagne’s descendant Crockett reached San Antonio and achieved immortality as a hero of the Alamo. Evidently, Crockett died without learning about his aristocratic French ancestry. France has been credited instead with the coward of the Alamo saga — Louis Rose, called Moses presumably because at fifty-one, he was older than the other soldiers. Also called the “Traitor of the Alamo”3 and the “Yellow Rose of Texas,”4 Rose is often (unjustly, I believe) perceived as a villain. Nonetheless, most students of Texas history credit him for the noblest anecdote of the siege, the Alamo story of a line drawn in the sand. On February 24, 1836, Alamo commander Colonel William B. Travis wrote a letter requesting outside help and concluding his letter with “Victory or death.” Upon learning that no help would come, the young commander allegedly drew his sword and etched a line in the sand. Travis asked his soldiers to choose to fight for liberty and die with him inside the Alamo compound while killing as many of the enemy as possible, thus buying time for Sam Houston and his men. Escape still remained possible, as Rose would demonstrate. In 1873, thirty-seven years after the Alamo fell, the story of Travis’ speech and a description of his gesture first appeared in print.5 William Zuber published a letter recounting the story, which he claimed to have learned from his parents, Abraham and Mary Ann Zuber. Their knowledge came directly from the only surviving soldier, the Frenchman Rose, who escaped on March 3 and took refuge on their Grimes County farm. Rose’s extended stay in the Zuber household lent plausibility to quotes that William Zuber and his widowed mother subsequently attributed to him. Had Rose died with Travis and the others, as initially reported, the story could not logically exist, either from Rose’s mouth or from Zuber’s omniscient pen, which transforms the old veteran’s moment of truth into a quasi-religious event: A consciousness of the real situation overpowered him. [Rose] sank upon the ground, covered his face, and yielded to his own reflections. For a time, he was unconscious of what was transpiring around him. A bright idea came to his relief; he spoke the Mexican dialect very fluently, and could he once get safely out of the fort he might easily pass for a Mexican and effect an escape.6

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Whereupon Rose jumped over the wall or slipped through it into the night. Later, when asked why he had not stayed “in the Alamo with the others,” Rose replied, “By God, I wasn’t ready to die!”7 Zuber was a raconteur. Testimonies regarding the final days of the siege, taken from the surviving noncombatants before the Zuber-Rose story reached print, failed to corroborate Zuber’s 1873 third-hand version of events. These survivors, however, as Natalie Ornish points out, were “women, children, and slaves, who remained behind closed doors,” where they would have been unaware of Travis’ speech and actions.8 Ornish also offers the testimony of a man who was an eleven-year-old boy during the siege. His belated corroboration of the Zuber-Rose story refutes those who were elsewhere in the compound “behind closed doors.” Enrique Esparza said, at age eighty-two in 1897, ‘Rose left after this armistice had expired. Rose went out after Travis drew the line with his sword. He was the only man who did not cross the line. Up to then he had fought as bravely as any man there. He had stood by the cannon. Rose went out during the night. They opened a window for him and let him go. The others who left before went out of the doors and in the daytime.’9 The legendary story told or not told by Rose became history for many, although not for all, and continues to challenge historians today. On one end of the spectrum are historians such as Ornish who find too much that is believable within the documentation to dismiss Rose, so they elect to sort their findings into a plausible story. On the other extreme are people like Tom Lindley who doubt not only the line-in-the-sand story but also that Rose was ever inside the Alamo. Lindley advances the provocative hypothesis that Louis Rose arrived with a group of reinforcements that was stopped outside the Alamo and was unable to enter.10 But as Texas’ premier folklorist, J. Frank Dobie, concluded, Travis’ line in the sand is “a line that not all the piety nor wit of research will ever boot out.”11 The Alamo story became a parable of virtue and self-sacrifice that replaced outmoded Greek and Roman characters or heroes of the American Revolution. Travis’ dead line provides a metaphor for a genuine human condition, a moment of truth when decisions are taken and a choice is made. Frank Thompson describes the line as “the moment when the men of the Alamo consciously decide to sacrifice their lives so that Texas might live.” 12 In 1939, archivist Robert Bruce Blake brought to light documents in the archives of the Nacogdoches County courthouse that show that some of Rose’s Nacogdoches neighbors profited from his choice to live. Others

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did not respect his decision, nor did they keep their opinions to themselves. No fewer than six times, Rose testified in front of the Board of Land Commissioners regarding claims filed by heirs of soldiers killed at the Alamo. However, one document refers to him as “Luesa,” the (misspelled) feminine name Louise in Spanish, presumably mocking his unwillingness to elect certain death. Rose spent many years in Nacogdoches, Texas, where he worked as a butcher, then moved to Natchitoches, Louisiana, and finally near Logansport, Louisiana, where he died in 1851 at the home of his friend Aaron Ferguson. Derision followed Rose throughout his life and only increased after his death. Unfortunately, his name provided natural ammunition. A “Rose” who worked for a “Thorn” (Frost Thorn, a Nacogdoches entrepreneur) is humorous; that Rose suffered from thorns imbedded in his legs during his Alamo escape is sad; but a Rose unjustly tormented as “yellow” is tragic. The folk song “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” already popular in the South in the years following the Alamo siege, became popular throughout the United States and Europe after its initial publication in 1858. A simple tune with a regular beat, the song was adopted during the Civil War as a marching song by Texan troops who, in 1864 after a disastrous Tennessee campaign, even added a stanza about John Bell Hood’s retreat. Although the “Yellow Rose” originally referred to a blended-race woman, its origins were remote to Texans who were still humming the tune when Zuber’s story was published.13 Moses Rose had died in 1851, and France had been the ally of the defeated Confederacy. It would be easier to whistle a tune than defend the Frenchman. Rose is an enigmatic figure but neither a traitor nor a deserter. He actually may have been the most experienced combat veteran at the Alamo. A Lieutenant Louis Rose participated in the triumphs and the disasters of the First Empire: the campaigns in Naples (1806 –1810) and in Portugal and Spain (1811–1813). In March 1814, he received the coveted cross of the Legion of Honor for bravery.14 He was a brave man among battletested brave men. After fighting at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Louis Rose managed to escape to America, where he somehow linked up with Jim Bowie. Together, they fought for many years with the filibusters seeking economic and political independence. They likely participated in the Battle of Nacogdoches and the siege of San Antonio. Louis Rose sacrificed much for Texas: he sold his property and pledged his belongings in order to buy a horse and the military equipment necessary to go to war against Santa Anna with his friend Bowie. He fought beside his friend for ten of the thirteen days of the Alamo siege, but his well-honed soldier’s instinct told him to escape while there was still

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time. Napoleon had demonstrated the importance of selecting the right time and an advantageous position for combat, and Rose would have recognized the danger of the compound. The line he drew for himself favored life and retreat over self-sacrifice. He would have died for Napoleon, maybe even for Bowie, but not for Travis. His life belonged to another country or another fate. “For a time, he was unconscious of what was transpiring around him,” had written Zuber. Nay. This soldier had witnessed thousands of soldiers dying around him in Europe, yet he had survived. Moses Rose understood fully what was transpiring. Bravely, he took charge of his life, preferring to pit his wits against the enemy with the night as his only ally. Ironically, within five years after Louis Rose escaped from the Alamo compound for which the price was so high, the mission-turned-battleground passed into French hands without a shot being fired, only a legislative volley from the Bexar County representative in the legislature. On January 18, 1841, the Congress of the Republic of Texas granted the Alamo “with out-buildings and lots” to the “present [resident] chief pastor” of the Catholic Church,15 Jean-Marie Odin, vice-prefect of the apostolic prefecture of Texas. Thus the Alamo would remain, in full or in part, a property of the Catholic Church for the next forty-two years, though ownership would never be uncontested for long as it passed through the hands of French Bishops Odin, Dubuis, and Neraz. When Texas annexation unleashed another war with Mexico in 1848, Bishop Odin leased the Alamo to the United States for quartermaster purposes. At that time, the city of San Antonio also claimed the Alamo on the basis of a grant made by the king of Spain in 1733, and the city filed suit against the French bishop’s claim. A mistrial led to state and federal appeals; both courts rendered verdicts in favor of the Catholic Church, and the United States Army continued to use the Alamo as a quartermasters’ depot. When Texas seceded from the Union and joined the Confederate States of America, the Confederate Army took over the Alamo, which was returned to the U.S. Army in 1865. After the Civil War, the new bishop, Claude Dubuis, attempted unsuccessfully to regain control of the Alamo church from the federal government. Because Spanish was still used at San Fernando Cathedral, the centuries-old Catholic church on Main Plaza, Dubuis wanted to provide a sanctuary for San Antonio’s German Catholics. In 1877, Honoré Grenêt, a prosperous San Antonio merchant born in Monthois (Ardennes, France) and father of painter Louis Grenêt, bought the old mission convent and its courtyard for $20,000 from his compatriot Bishop Dubuis. Grenêt also secured a ninety-nine-year lease on the Alamo chapel and an adjacent tract from Samuel Maverick, who had

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bought it from the Catholic Church. Grenêt repaired the Alamo chapel to use as a warehouse. He added Spanish porticos and turrets adorned with fake cannons to the convent, thus giving the building the appearance of a fortress, which Grenêt intended to leave to the city as an attraction (Figure 7.1). He conducted a mercantile business on his fanciful property until his sudden death in 1882. In 1886, the estate of Honoré Grenêt sold the Alamo convent property for $28,000 to the firm of Hugo-Schmeltzer (Charles Hugo, Gustav Schmeltzer, and William Heuermann). The emporium’s glamour faded until finally Jean-Claude Neraz, the third and last French bishop to control ownership of the Alamo, sold the church to the state of Texas in 1883 for $20,000. From the earliest days of motion pictures, the drama of the Battle of the Alamo struck the imaginations of movie producers. A visiting Frenchman produced the first Alamo movie, The Immortal Alamo, in San Antonio in 1911. The producer Gaston Méliès was the brother of George Méliès, a well-known French magician and cinema pioneer. After discovering that Americans ignored European copyrights, George sent Gaston to New York to handle the distribution of films produced by his company, Star Films, including his most famous work, A Trip to the Moon. Seeking warmer climes and extended daylight for exterior filming, Gaston moved the company from New York to Texas. Eschewing quality

7.1

This engraving, printed on an envelope from the estate of Honoré Grenêt, shows

Grenêt’s emporium built as a fortified castle, now vanished. Today’s visitor sees instead the long barracks restored beside the Alamo. Gentilz-Frétellière Family Papers, 3/33, Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library.

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7.2

Gaston Méliès

produced the first Alamo movie in San Antonio in 1911. Without cutting his hair in traditional Franciscan fashion, he donned a robe to play a cameo role as a priest. Collection of Frank Thompson.

for commercial success, Gaston Méliès produced seventy-one films in one year. Many were set in the San Antonio missions. Unable to take advantage of the Alamo itself, as it already was under the control of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, Méliès used a painted decor for exterior shots in conjunction with shots of the interior of the San Jose Mission. In addition to the immortal story of the Alamo, the mortal tenminute movie, of which only a few stills remain, was said to contain “a romance, a love story, an authentic page from history and an exposition of fine photography” along with the story of the Battle of San Jacinto.16 During the shooting of The Immortal Alamo, French actress Sarah Bernhardt came to San Antonio to perform Tosca and La Dame aux Camélias at the Grand Opera House. Gaston Méliès bought tickets for his actors and employees to attend the performance of the sixty-seven-year-old star.

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Gaston Méliès played a cameo role as a priest in his movie, thus avoiding association with the infamous Frenchman Rose (Figure 7.2). According to the New York Dramatic Mirror of June 3, 1911, Rose was cast as “the treacherous individual of the play.” Most Alamo movies, with the exception of some that were made for television, simply omit the controversial Louis Rose. Movie critic Frank Thompson explains that Rose is “too disturbing a character.”17 In 1952, when a film about a man who had not crossed Travis’ line was announced, it brought protests. Surprisingly, the film was not about Louis Rose, and the brave old soldier who had chosen life and provided Texas a dramatic and heroic story remained comfortably forgotten. Notes 1. David Crockett, The Autobiography of David Crockett, with introduction by Hamlin Garland (Boston: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 19. 2. Marie Norris Wise, Norris-Jones-Crockett-Payne-Blanchard: The Heritage of Marie Norris Wise (Sulphur, La.: Wise Publications, 1994), 34–35. 3. Raymond Powell, “The Traitor of the Alamo,” North Louisiana Historical Association Journal 4, no. 4 (1973): 1982, 119 –121. 4. Steven G. Kellman, “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” Journal of American Culture 5, no. 2 (1982): 45–48. 5. William P. Zuber, “An Escape from the Alamo,” letter to the editors, Prairie Plains, Grimes County, May 7, 1871, in James M. Day, The Texas Almanac, 1857–1873: A Compendium of Texas History (Waco, Texas: Texian Press, 1967), 691– 697. 6. Zuber, “Escape,” 694. 7. J. Frank Dobie, “Rose and His Story of the Alamo,” in In the Shadow of History, ed. J. Frank Dobie, Moody C. Boatright, and Harry H. Ransom (Austin: Texas Folklore Society, 1939), 9–41. 8. Natalie Ornish, Pioneer Jewish Texans (Dallas: Texas Heritage Press, 1989), 34–36. 9. Ornish, Pioneer Jewish Texans, 34. 10. Thomas Ricks Lindley, unpublished Alamo manuscript that he has generously shared with several Alamo authors. I appreciate his helpful thoroughness. 11. Dobie, “Rose and His Story,” 14. 12. Frank Thompson, The Alamo: A Cultural History (Dallas: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2001), 62. See also by Thompson, The Star Film Ranch: Texas’ First Picture Show (Plano: Republic of Texas Press, 1996). 13. Francis Edward Abernethy, Singin’ Texas (Dallas: E. Hearst Press, 1983). 14. Dossier No. L.242 10 32, Archives of the Museum of the Legion of Honor, Paris. Evidence is suggestive though inconclusive that this is the same Louis Rose who came to

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Texas. French officers had to be literate, and “Moses” signed with a mark, leaving some doubt concerning the match. 15. The other San Antonio mission churches had been declared, on January 13, 1841, “property of the present chief pastor of the Roman Catholic Church, in the Republic of Texas, and his successors in office.” It took a second bill for the Alamo to become property of the Catholic Church after Cornelius Van Ness, who represented Bexar County in the legislature and who had amended the first bill, agreed to it. Cf. The Laws of Texas, 1822–1904, comp. H. P. N. Gammel (Austin: Gammel-Statesman Publishing Co., 1904), 2:492. 16. Frank Thompson, Alamo Movies (East Berlin, Penn.: Old Mill Books, 1991), 17–23. 17. Ibid., 18.

8

DIPLOMACY, COMMERCE, AND C OLONIZATION Saligny and the Republic of Texas

FRANÇOIS LAGARDE For Jean-Pierre Montreuil When Texas obtained its independence from Mexico in 1836, American expansionism was oriented toward the west, and in fewer than ten years the new Republic of Texas would be annexed by the United States. Following the Louisiana Purchase and Andrew Jackson’s conquest of Florida, the United States’ “manifest destiny” was to expand south of the fortyninth parallel until Texas, Oregon, and, after the war against Mexico, California and New Mexico became parts of the new country. Such expansionism did not please France and England, which were embarking on colonial enterprises of their own. The Monroe Doctrine led the European powers to believe that Americans would eventually take over Mexico, where England had important investments. Protectionist tariffs would then extend through much of North America, to the detriment of European exports. The Republic of Texas, impoverished and wanting to increase its population quickly, had written the right to own slaves into its constitution to encourage immigration from the Southern states. Annexation of Texas by the United States, favored by a large majority and officially requested in Washington by the republic’s emissaries, was rejected because of the opposition to slavery. The Northern states were abolitionist and held a fragile majority in the U.S. Congress. Annexation would have reduced their advantage. England was also strongly opposed to slavery and did not recognize the independence of Texas until the Texas Congress ratified a secret treaty on the suppression of the slave trade in 1842. France, which had lost its American colonial empire except for Martinique and Guadeloupe, where plantations were the norm, would abolish slavery only in 1848. Louis-Philippe’s government did not object to slavery. The main order of the day was to beat England in the race for foreign markets, and Texas held great commercial interest. In addition, its being an independ107

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ent nation offered the political advantage of acting as a protective buffer against U.S. expansionism into the Spanish-speaking Americas. Similarly, Texas was searching for markets for its cotton and sugar. Prior to concluding commercial agreements with France or England, Texas had to be recognized as an independent state by a foreign nation. The first overture toward France took place in February 1837 when Texas envoys in Washington wrote to French Minister Pageot. They informed him that Texas, an exclusively agricultural producer with no national industries to defend, would not impose protectionist tariffs on the importation of manufactured goods, a situation France should find enticing.1 A few months later, James P. Henderson, the Texas minister to England and France, met in London with foreign minister Lord Palmerston to discuss recognition of Texas as a country, but to no avail. He did manage to secure a commercial agreement with England in April 1838, however, then went to France, where he met with Count Molé, the French foreign minister. France had just sent a naval squadron to Vera Cruz to blockade Mexican ports in retaliation for unpaid debts. By the end of 1838, Rear Admiral Charles Baudin would bombard the fortress of San Juan de Ullóa and invade Vera Cruz.2 Henderson hoped that these circumstances would facilitate France’s recognition of Texas, but the only knowledge the French Foreign Ministry had of Texas was that there had been talks of annexation by the United States. This conflicted with Henderson’s request for recognition of Texas as an independent country, so Molé refused to grant anything. When Henderson mentioned the commercial agreement signed with England, Molé’s interest was piqued. Hersant, the French consul in Philadelphia, informed Molé that the Bank of the United States had granted a loan to Texas pending recognition by a European power.3 Such a loan would allow Texas to buy European goods, and the first country to recognize Texas was likely to receive important commercial advantages. Texas offered France an opportunity that had to be seized quickly, before anyone else did so. Molé decided to send a French observer to Texas to assess the situation and the actual prospects. Edouard de Pontois, the French plenipotentiary in Washington, selected Alphonse Dubois de Saligny from among the embassy’s secretaries. Born in Caen, Normandy, Saligny was single and twenty-nine years old (Figure 8.1). He traveled for three months by land and by river from New York to Houston, arriving in February 1839. His mission was to observe, gather information, and send a report to his ministry. Saligny was not the first Frenchman to travel through the new republic with an eye to its potential. In 1837, Count Charles de Farnesé had met with President Houston regarding the establishment of a Catholic archdiocese in Texas and had offered to build churches and schools in ex-

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109

Godefroy Engelman produced this lithograph of Alphonse Dubois de Saligny when

the young and ambitious Frenchman was chargé d’affaires in Austin. Prints and Photographs Collection, Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin, ct0456.

change for two square miles of land for each church. Nothing came of his proposal.4 In 1838, a young medical doctor from Tours, Frédéric Leclerc, had spent a few months in Texas. He published two articles in La Revue des deux mondes in which he spoke highly of the heroic Revolutionary War, the richness of the land, and its “huge production capacities,” exaggerating the figures of its agricultural production and of its population and brushing aside the problems of slavery, Indian threats, and yellow fever. “The Anglo-American race dominates,” he wrote, and Mexico would never be able to conquer back her former province. Leclerc’s enthusiasm even led him to instruct the cartographer A. Brué to draw a couple of railroad lines on the map published in 1840, although the first railroad tracks were not laid in Texas until the 1850s (color illustration 5).5 Other French explorers and reporters who saw Texas as a fantastic country abounding in commercial and economic opportunities would later express similar views.

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In May 1839, while Saligny also was in Texas, Baudin spent twelve days around Houston and Galveston on his return trip to France. His goal was to assess the independence of Texas and the possibility of “opening commercial relations.” Texas had let it be known that it could also provide men to wage war against Mexico in exchange for a French subsidy, but that prospect never materialized. Baudin’s aide-de-camp, Louis Maissin, took copious notes, and in the volume that was published in France relating the 1838 naval expedition, he wrote a highly favorable chapter on Texas with Ashbel Smith’s help. Mexico would never win Texas back, as the “Anglo-Saxon race” was obviously superior to the “degenerate” Spanish race. Slavery was unavoidable, as the profit was high, and if France were to establish “very advantageous commercial relationships” with Texas, it would have to allow slavery.6 Saligny traveled for a while with Frédéric Gaillardet, who had called himself co-author with Alexandre Dumas of the popular play La Tour de Nesle and who became editor of a French newspaper in New York, Le Courrier des États-Unis. Gaillardet published five Lettres sur le Texas in the Journal des débats in October 1839.7 Like other reporters, he praised the superiority of the Anglo-American race, Providence obviously being on the side of “the civilizing pioneer,” and he painted Texas with “the most pleasant colors that one could ever see.” Recognition by France would establish a much desired intermediate power “between the fearsome ambition of the United States and the even more frightening weakness of the Spanish-Americans.” Again, Gaillardet found it imperative that France beat England in the race to recognize Texas because the commercial advantages gained would be extensive. He added that the greatest advantage Texas offered was as “a place for emigration, for the establishment of a colonial center” and that French emigration would ensure France’s control of it.8 During his exploratory sojourn in Texas, which lasted fewer than three months, Saligny met with President Lamar and other officials. He traveled around Houston and Galveston, reported erroneously that he had gone to San Antonio, and sent official dispatches on the Texas-Mexico relationship and on General Hamilton being sent to Europe to negotiate a loan. When Abbé Anduze, an envoy of Louis-Philippe and a friend of Théodore Pavie, arrived from New Orleans to make a financial offer from a private banker to the government of Texas and to examine the possibility of buying oak trees for the French navy, Saligny quickly saw in him a rival, as he also was interested in the trees. Saligny denigrated him in a letter to his ministry. The final report on Texas that Saligny sent to Soult, who had replaced Molé, was highly favorable. Mexico would never reconquer Texas, and

8.2 King Louis Philippe signed the Treaty of Amity, Navigation, and Commerce on October 2, 1839, in Fontainebleau, France. The treaty amounted to the official recognition of the Republic of Texas by the Kingdom of France. Texas State Library and Archives, Austin.

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the Mexican race was doomed to “disappear before the onrush of modern civilization pioneered by the Texians”; annexation by the United States would never take place, and the Indian threat was negligible. Saligny provided inflated figures of agricultural production, population, and revenues and concluded in favor of the French recognition of Texas independence in order to take advantage of “the opportunity open to us to establish our influence over a portion of this continent, and to open important outlets for our industry and navigation.” 9 Back in Paris, Saligny joined the negotiations between Henderson and Pontois, insisting that tariff reductions, already granted for French wines, brandies, and silks, be extended to include manufactured articles. Saligny likely had connections with French manufacturers. Henderson refused, being unwilling to “buy” recognition at the expense of equity. But General Hamilton pressed for the recognition so necessary for obtaining a loan and even wrote that a “douceur,” or bribe, of $50,000 would procure recognition promptly.10 A Treaty of Amity, Navigation, and Commerce was finally signed on October 25, 1839, and France became the first European power to recognize Texas (Figure 8.2). Saligny became chargé d’affaires for Texas with the mission to promote commerce and French cultural habits and to protect French residents in Texas. Saligny returned to Texas from France in January 1840. In Austin, the treaty was ratified by Congress in his presence. In addition, Lamar abolished all import duties on French wines, although during the preceding eighteen months, no ships had arrived from France, while six English ships had come to Galveston. Saligny, always an affairiste,11 was encouraged by Hamilton to believe that Texas would take possession of the Santa Fe mines and turn them over to French engineers and colonists. The French government and Saligny himself would have reaped enormous profits from such a venture, but the French ministry was not interested. Saligny spent some time in New Orleans, then in July returned to Austin, where he paid his wagoner with counterfeit money. He quarreled with his innkeeper, Richard Bullock, over an inflated bill, and one of his slaves, a woman named Rosa whom he had bought in New Orleans, died. When Lamar did not sufficiently emphasize Texas’ gratitude toward France during the discussion of a treaty with England, the chargé took offense. Saligny was finally mollified when Congress gave him a standing ovation. While in Austin, he purchased a piece of land on a hill east of the Capitol on which he would build the French Legation (Figure 8.3). Abbé John Timon and Abbé Jean-Marie Odin, prefect and vice-prefect of Texas, had been traveling across Texas to assess the situation among its few Catholic inhabitants. Saligny believed that the spread of Catholicism in Texas would further French immigration, and with his aid, Odin

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and Timon lobbied Congress for passage of a bill aimed at returning the churches and missions of Texas to the Catholic Church. Sam Houston supported the bill and it passed easily, even though it took a second bill to add the Alamo to this important endowment. Saligny is greatly criticized by scholars who study his actions and correspondence. Indeed, his lies and his arrogance deserve criticism. The Treaty of Amity, for which he was responsible, had few consequences: Texas’ independence turned out to be ephemeral, and French exports to the republic were negligible. But the Church Bill brought to Texas numerous French missionaries who built churches, schools, and hospitals. As Vice President David Burnet said in paying tribute to Saligny, “These two bills are two beautiful feathers which you deserve to wear on your hat.”12 In January 1841, House Representative James Mayfield introduced a bill whereby a corporation funded by the French businessmen Jean Basterrèche and Pierre de Lassaulx and their associates, among them Saligny, would introduce a minimum of eight thousand immigrants into Texas within eight years. These immigrants would settle on the frontier from the Red River to the Rio Grande and build twenty military posts with a road joining them. The French company would exploit the mines and share the proceeds equally with Texas. In return, the company would receive three million acres of land and tax exemptions on imports. This project was unrealistic, and it is remarkable that either party considered it achievable. The Franco-Texian bill, as it was known, became a campaign issue during the presidential election of 1841, when opposition to foreign interference had become fierce. Houston supported it, but Mayfield, the bill’s originator, changed his mind and opposed it. Although the bill passed the House of Representatives, it died in the Senate.13 Saligny blamed Mayfield for the bill’s failure. The infamous Pig War that followed is a postscript to the Franco-Texian affair. Saligny, believing he had lost an opportunity to pass an important contract between France and Texas while becoming rich, was intensely resentful. On February 19, 1841, Eugène Pluyette, one of Saligny’s servants, was attacked with sticks and stones in the street for the third time by Richard Bullock, at whose inn Saligny had stayed upon his arrival in Austin in July 1840. The French chargé d’affaires wrote an official letter of complaint to James Mayfield, secretary of state in the Lamar cabinet, complaining that this fray represented “a brutal attack upon the inviolable principles of the Laws of Nations,” since Pluyette was employed by the house of an accredited diplomat.14 Lamar ordered an inquiry, and Bullock was instructed to appear in court. The judge, however, could not summon Pluyette, since “by the law of nations, Foreign Ministers, their retinue and suite are not amenable to the civil or criminal jurisdiction of the Government to

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which they are accredited.”15 Saligny was willing to allow his servant to speak with Mayfield or the judge, but he refused to let Pluyette testify in court, since the Law of Nations forbade it. Mayfield stood by the Constitution of Texas and municipal laws that granted Bullock his right to a fair trial and to a confrontation with his accuser, but the judge sided with Saligny, choosing to rule on the basis of the Law of Nations. Two witnesses testified that Bullock had been the aggressor, and the innkeeper was “put upon recognizance, with sureties to respond to the prosecution at the next term of the District Court of Travis County, for the misdemeanor, charged as an offence against international law.”16 When John Chalmers, secretary of the treasury, stood bail for Bullock, Saligny interpreted this support by a member of the Cabinet as another insult to France. But he had won the first battle in his war against Mayfield. The conflict between Pluyette and Bullock was in fact a war between Saligny and Mayfield, whom the chargé held responsible for the failure of the Franco-Texian bill. Upon his return to Austin in 1840, Saligny had re-

8.3

The French Legation in Austin formerly was the home of Alphonse Dubois de

Saligny. Its designer is unknown; its construction was completed in 1841. The plan is a version of the dog-trot common in early Austin houses. The proportions and detailing of the exterior recall the Creole cottages of Louisiana and east Texas. Photograph by Richard Cleary.

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fused to pay Bullock’s bill “for board, horse-keeping, burial expenses of one of his negroes, servant’s hire, attendance in sickness, [etc.]” on the basis that the bill was too high.17 The chargé had appealed to Abner Lipscomb, then secretary of state, who had sided with him. Two arbitrators had reduced the bill, and Saligny had paid $200 toward it but still owed a balance of about $100. And Bullock attacked Pluyette because Pluyette, on Saligny’s orders, had killed some of Bullock’s pigs. Bullock had “suffered detriment in the loss of hogs, which had been most maliciously and wantonly killed, with pitch-forks and pistols, used by his debtor and a Frenchman in his employ.”18 Saligny avowed that the roving animals had demolished his fence, entered his house, and eaten his papers and sheets, thus justifying his orders to his servants to kill the pigs. Although Bullock could not sue Saligny due to diplomatic immunity that exempted him from the laws of the republic, he continued to harass him. When Saligny entered a formal complaint, Vice-President David Burnet refused to prosecute Bullock, explaining that people in Texas were ignorant of the Law of Nations. Saligny agreed to withdraw his complaint against Bullock in exchange for the innkeeper’s silence and the stipulation that Congress would pass a law granting the government authority to enforce the aforementioned Law of Nations in Texas. Such a law was indeed passed by Congress. On March 24, “a new insult, of the most atrocious character”19 was inflicted upon Saligny when Bullock grabbed the Frenchman by the neck and shook him, refusing to let him enter the room of George Flood, the United States chargé who was staying at Bullock’s inn. To make matters worse, Secretary Chalmers approved of Bullock’s aggression and added that, had he been in Bullock’s place, he would have shot him. Saligny wrote to Mayfield, “In view of such facts, Sir, I should be tempted to believe myself in the midst of a savage tribe, rather than in the bosom of a civilized and friendly nation.”20 He threatened to leave if the Texas government did not act promptly against Bullock. Amused, Mayfield answered that in his opinion, Bullock was not attacking the foreign minister but the private individual who was still his debtor and who had ordered the execution of his pigs. In addition, Mayfield reminded Saligny of his using counterfeit money to pay the wagoner who had transported his belongings from New Orleans to Austin and that the government had hushed up the affair by paying the wagoner for him. In addition, he reminded Saligny of “the extraordinary bill presented by [him] to Congress . . . together with other extraordinary privileges” that the Franco-Texian bill contained.21 Saligny replied that he would not even respond to such accusations and that he was discontinuing all interchange with the Texas government. Mayfield protested that Texas had

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only good feelings toward “chivalrous France” but added that Saligny’s own move to break off relations with Texas meant that Saligny had renounced his diplomatic immunity and that his passports were at their disposal. He then added the coup de grace: Texas was asking for the chargé’s recall because he had interfered in Texan internal affairs by claiming that he would write to the French chargé in Mexico to obstruct the negotiations that James Webb, the Texas minister in Mexico, was conducting with Mexican authorities. If Saligny had won the first battle regarding the Law of Nations, Mayfield was certainly winning the war. According to Saligny, President Lamar disliked Mayfield and Chalmers and attempted to resolve the issue. He did not prevail, however, and on March 29, 1842, Saligny left Austin for Houston on his way to New Orleans. Three months after Saligny’s departure, Richard Bullock died abruptly from brain fever, an illness that likewise would strike the French chargé but from which he would recover. The commander of the Sabine, a French sloop anchored at that time in Galveston, wrote to the French Ministry of the Navy that the British and not the French were doing business in Texas, and the Texans knew who was helping them: “It is England, who at this moment is acting as mediator to obtain the recognition of the independence of Texas by the Mexican government. Simultaneously, the influence of the Chargé d’affaires diminishes, and insults replace courteous treatment of him.” 22 Saligny cunningly managed to convince French Foreign Minister François Guizot that he had been mistreated in Texas, and the minister supported him unconditionally. Texas requested Saligny’s recall, but France had been insulted, her chargé’s immunity had been violated, and an apology was demanded. Sam Houston finally extended the requested apology, and in April 1842, after almost a year’s absence, Saligny returned to Texas. He stayed only a few months, after which he sailed to France for a leave of absence. The Count Jules de Cramayel replaced Saligny during the following year. His truthful report on Texas was at great variance with those of Saligny and other reporters. The country was bankrupt, anarchy was rampant, the Mexican army had invaded Texas twice, and agricultural production was stagnant. For political reasons and to please the United States, Houston had revoked Lamar’s proclamation abolishing tariffs on French wines (whose imports remained low). Commercial negotiations were being officially pursued in France between Saligny and Ashbel Smith, who complained that Saligny was never to be found. In Washington-on-the-Brazos, Cramayel and Houston negotiated also, but to no avail. A few commercial ships arrived from France, and a direct shipping

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line between France and Texas was discussed but quickly fell through. England excluded France from all mediation efforts with Mexico as French influence became almost nonexistent. Meanwhile the idea of annexation was gaining ground everywhere. Saligny returned to Louisiana in January 1843 and contented himself with sending dispatches extracted from newspapers and other correspondence. England was the favored country in Texas, a situation that greatly irritated the United States. In March 1844, more than thirty foreign ships arrived in Galveston, including four from England, nine from Bremen, and none from France.23 The chargé explained that to prevent the United States’ annexation of Texas, England and France must pressure Mexico into recognizing Texas’ independence. But French diplomacy was slow and timid, and the diplomatic act that the two European powers attempted to draw up was never concluded. In addition, French and British representatives in Washington opposed European intervention. After the United States Congress had authorized negotiations with Texas, Charles Elliot, the British chargé, and Saligny, in a last effort to forestall annexation, rushed to Washington-on-the-Brazos to arrive there before Andrew J. Donelson, the U.S. envoy. President Anson Jones and his secretary of state, Ashbel Smith, listened to them but pointed out that “the will of the people,” toward which Saligny felt much contempt, would prevail unless Mexico recognized Texas’ independence. The chargés decided that Elliot would secretly go to Mexico, and Jones agreed to postpone any negotiation regarding annexation for ninety days. An official memorandum was signed between Jones, Elliot, and Saligny just hours before Donelson arrived at the Texas capital. But Elliot’s secret mission was discovered, and England resigned itself to the fact that the United States would annex Texas. In June 1845, the Texas Congress voted unanimously in favor of annexation over the peace treaty brought back by Elliot from Mexico. In October, Texas voters approved annexation, the Texas Constitution was approved by the U.S. Congress, and President Polk signed the act on December 29, 1845. Consequently, Elliot and Saligny were recalled. What had started out quite well with the Treaty of Amity and Commerce ended abruptly without bringing the expected benefits. Recognition did not generate much commerce, and French influence increased neither in Texas nor in Mexico. In truth, Saligny cannot be held totally responsible, as the European nations were powerless in the face of American expansionism. In Texas, the young Frenchman of pseudo-aristocratic culture must have felt isolated and at a great distance from his ministère. Saligny may not have accomplished more than a Treaty of Amity and pas-

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sage of the Church Bill, but he did not perish. He may not have succeeded as an empresario, but he did succeed in establishing the French consular presence that was 163 years old in 2000. An empresario was a capitalist entrepreneur who traded land for immigrants. As in the case of the Franco-Texian bill, the empresario signed a contract with the Republic of Texas, which gave large tracts of land in return for the empresario to bring, within a limited period, a fixed number of European immigrants to settle on the land and cultivate it. He was allowed to import goods and products to be sold in Texas or Mexico with almost no import duties. When successful, he was entitled to receive half of the land granted by the republic. The main difficulty was recruiting and “importing” enough immigrants. France was starting to colonize Algeria and volunteers were few, in spite of the flowery descriptions of Texas. An immigrant had to pay his own passage (a voyage lasting from six to nine weeks) and was supposed to bring enough capital to survive the first year. The very poor could not afford to immigrate. The only French empresario to succeed was Henri Castro, who came to Texas as the representative of Basterrèche and Lassaulx to reintroduce the Franco-Texian bill. Instead he succeeded in arranging a contract with the Republic of Texas to settle a colony along the Medina River. When Saligny learned that he and his associates had been left out of the new deal, he attacked Castro’s record and accused him of several crimes, including setting a New York bank afire. Sam Houston named Castro consul of Texas in Paris, but Saligny successfully pressured Houston and Guizot, the French foreign minister, for his rival to be dismissed. Saligny and Cramayel continuously criticized the arrival of Castro’s colonists, but Castro may not have been the swindler or racketeer they claimed. Castro invested himself and his capital without restraint, and he succeeded in founding a unique colony of Alsatian, French, German, Swiss, and other nations’ immigrants. In 1836, the Colorado and Red River Company and the Rio Grande and Texas Land Company published a brochure in Paris presenting Texas as a new paradise where the immigrant was assured of making his fortune easily. In 1839, Charles Guillot and “Monsieur L. Harper” from Poissy wrote to Lamar about sending French farmers to Texas.24 It is not known whether anything was arranged. In 1842, a contract was signed between the owner of the town of Harrisburg and Snider de Pellegrini, an Italian capitalist who owned a Society of Colonization headquartered in Paris. In return for land concessions and banking privileges, he was to bring French immigrants, develop vineyards, and establish a bank and a store in Harrisburg. But the few immigrants who came died of malaria, and the enterprise went bankrupt.25

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In the spring of 1842, the French Ministry of Commerce sent Alexandre Bourgeois d’Orvanne, former mayor of Clichy-la-Garenne, to Texas to report on its commercial prospects. He was accompanied by Armand Ducos, a former sub-prefect recommended by the French minister of finance. As Texas was impoverished and suffering attacks from Mexico, D’Orvanne sent a report to his minister stating that the republic could not “for the immediate future hold an important role in the exchange of European goods.”26 He was in favor, however, of encouraging emigration, if only to create a commercial demand for French products. Ducos and Dorvanne obtained two concessions of two million acres each in exchange for bringing seventeen hundred families or single adult men to Texas. D’Orvanne was also to help Ashbel Smith secure a loan of $1 million in Europe, but he failed in this attempt and did not succeed in sending a single immigrant to Texas. He sold one of the contracts to a German colonization company, even though it had expired. In a brochure published in Paris in February 1843, D’Orvanne introduced his Compagnie Générale de Colonisation. His stated goals were to help the French working class and to develop French commerce. Once again, Texas was depicted as a perfect country. Its moderate climate and unsurpassed fertility would make work pleasurable. The bait to attract immigrants was property. Each family would receive six hundred forty acres and each single man half that (a huge expanse to French farmers, even if the compagnie was to get half). The plan was to divide the land like a checkerboard and distribute every other lot to the colonists, while the company would own the lots between. The value of the company’s lots would increase with time due to the colonists’ work on their lots. An initial investment of a half-million francs would profit twelve millions francs (about $2.5 million dollars) in twelve years, claimed the brochure. In addition, the company would own and run the local store and have a monopoly on the sale of food, clothing, and farm equipment to the colonists. All these articles would enter Texas duty-free. The company was to export the colonists’ agricultural production and lend money at 50 percent interest. “Deprived of all resources during the first year, these immigrants’ only recourse will be the company,” stated the brochure.27 Such a system sounded better than slavery, explained D’Orvanne, because the company did not own the land or the laborers and therefore had no responsibility toward them. This extraordinary way of helping the working class was often heard in France under Louis-Philippe’s regime. Guizot, whose motto was “Enrichissez-vous par le travail ou par l’épargne!” (Get rich by working or saving!), thought D’Orvanne and Ducos to be “worthy” and “estimable men.”28 Perhaps Saligny was among the company’s shareholders, although he had not been included in Castro’s

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“racketeering” enterprise. But Prince Solms-Braunfels, director of the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas, to which D’Orvanne had sold his colonization contract, wrote of the French failed empresario that “his own interests are more important to him than the Society’s, and much more so than that of the immigrants.” 29 As Cramayel had written, immigrating to Texas was extremely difficult at that time.30 One needed capital, he explained, in order to survive the first year and to buy slaves to work the land, and the only work available was farming. No assistance or protection could be received from the Republic of Texas, and “a half-savage existence” was to be expected at best. Nor could any help be expected from the French chargé, as François Guilbeau, a merchant and the French consul in San Antonio, testified in his letters to Guizot. Guilbeau had seen his store looted by Texan volunteers who had also killed a French citizen. Mexican bandits attacked his convoys and had killed one of his wagoners. There were French orphans, whose parents had been among Castro’s colonists, to provide for. Saligny, “who is never in Texas and who never answers the pleas of his countrymen,” complained Guilbeau, represented France “in the most wretched manner possible.”31 Upon the death of Lemaire, the French consul of the town of Liberty, Cramayel chose not to replace him, declaring: “Liberty is only a hamlet in the interior of a region that has no direct commerce with foreign countries. In the surrounding area there are only about thirty French residents, widely scattered, and living in a situation close to destitution.” 32 For entrepreneurs, there was money to be made through export of wines and brandies, silks, manufactured articles, and people. Emigration was useful only as long as it helped commerce. Castro’s colonists constituted the majority of the first-generation French immigrants to Texas during the republic. Others came individually, many directly from France, a few after spending some time in the United States and especially in Louisiana, where the French presence was significant. Many were farmers, but there were also merchants and craftsmen in the cities. Altogether, their number was minimal. D’Orvanne tells of a few merchants and farmers around Nacogdoches and San Augustine, Texas, and he notes that the French living in Galveston did not hold any important positions. Saligny reported about two hundred French people in Galveston in 1842, including directors of several creditable commercial houses. One of his French domestics remained in Austin and opened a confectionery store. Guilbeau speaks of more than one hundred French citizens in San Antonio, when Castro was sending colonists on their way to Castroville. The U.S. Census of 1850 counted 78 French-born persons in San Antonio, 110 in Galveston, 45 in Houston, and 4 in Austin.33

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Apart from Castro’s colonists, the few names that have survived anonymity are those of immigrants who became rich or politically active or who advertised their businesses in newspapers. Victor Baulard from Besançon arrived in Galveston with his father in 1843. Baulard became an apprentice with a painter and merchant and soon become his associate. The brothers Sébastien and Adolphe Drouet immigrated in 1842 at a very young age, fought gloriously with the Confederacy, and later ran shipping lines along the Texas coast. Eugène Pillot from Haute-Saonne arrived in Texas in 1837 and made his fortune in the lumber business, in farming, and in real estate. He also owned the Tremont Opera House in Galveston. Michel de Chaumes, a Parisian, directed construction of the first state Capitol building in Austin. Among the second-generation French, the Bremond brothers made a fortune in Texas. Paul Bremond arrived in Houston in 1842 and later became a railroad entrepreneur. John Bremond went to Austin and made his fortune in retail and banking. A correspondent for the Houston Telegraph and Texas Register wrote from Victoria in 1943: The few French families that settled near this town have suffered many privations. They were poor, and were in some instances dependent on the charity of the settlers. They expected to find a paradise in Texas, where they would obtain the comforts and even the luxuries of life with little labor, and of course they were disappointed. Several of them became insane, probably from discouragement and the suffering they were enduring. One of them, an old lady, while insane paddled across the Guadeloupe on a log, and as soon as she got upon the opposite bank, she commenced dancing and singing in high glee, supposing she was out of Texas. She had previously been exceedingly melancholy.34 Admittedly, French recognition of the Republic of Texas was a chivalrous and gallant gesture to be remembered. It was also a diplomatic maneuver intended to support an emerging independent nation and, at the same time, slow American expansionism toward Latin America. French and British diplomacy, however, were unable to stop annexation of Texas by the United States. France also expected to increase its commercial exchanges with Texas and Mexico, but this did not happen for almost a century. Saligny got the Church Bill passed and began a relationship of amity and diplomacy between France and Texas that has continued until today. The Consulat de France in Houston opened in 1952, preceded by a series of subconsulates in Galveston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, and El Paso. Most importantly, with Henri Castro’s impulse, French, or at least eastern French, immigration started in Texas during its years as a republic. The first and most lasting commerce between the two nations was an ex-

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change of land for people, for hardy colonists who were recruited and imported. The French would never immigrate to Texas in large numbers, but they would never cease to come. Notes 1. Hunt and Wharton to Pageot, Washington, February 8, 1837, cited in Marye Katherine Chase, Négociations de la république du Texas en Europe 1837–1845 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1932), 183. Pageot answered that he was not in a position to respond. 2. Cf. Betje Klier, “Peste, Tempestad, and Pâtisserie. The Pastry War: France’s Contribution to the Maintenance of Texas’ Independence,” Gulf Coast Historical Review (spring 1997): 59–73. 3. Hersant to Molé, Philadelphia, November 29, 1838, in Nancy N. Barker, The French Legation in Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1971), 1:49 –52. 4. Cf. James Moore, Through Fire and Flood: The Catholic Church in Frontier Texas, 1836–1900 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1992), 10 –13. 5. Frédéric Leclerc, “Le Texas et sa Révolution,” La Revue des deux mondes 21 (March 1, 1840): 605–639, and 22 (March 15, 1840): 220–253. 6. M. E. Maissin, “Note xiii: Texas,” in P. Blanchard and A. Dauzats, San Juan de Ulùa ou Relation de l’expédition française au Mexique (Paris: Chez Gide, 1839), 522–572. 7. Frédéric Gaillardet, “Lettres sur le Texas,” Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, October 1–26, 1839, Paris. 8. See also Henri Fournel, Coup d’œil historique et statistique sur le Texas (Paris: Delloye, 1841), 17, which repeats the same argument in favor of Texas, that Mexico’s abolition of slavery had been “an act of inopportune philanthropy.” Fournel never went to Texas but met Henderson in Paris. 9. Saligny to Soult, June 24, 1839, New York, in Barker, French Legation, 1:95–103. 10. Hamilton and Burnley to Lamar, June 22, 1839, Philadelphia, in George P. Garrison, Diplomatic Correspondence of the Republic of Texas (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1908–1911), 3:1268. 11. Nancy N. Barker, “From Texas to Mexico: An Affairiste at Work,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 76, no. 1 (1976): 1–37. 12. Saligny to Guizot, January 19, 1841, Austin, in Barker, French Legation, 1:192. 13. Nancy Barker, “Devious Diplomat: Dubois de Saligny and the Republic of Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 72, no. 3, (1969): 324–34; Nancy Barker, “In Quest of the Golden Fleece: Dubois de Saligny and French Intervention in the New World,” Western Historical Quarterly 3, no. 3 (1972): 253–268. 14. Saligny to Mayfield, February 19, 1841, Journals of the Sixth Congress of the Republic of Texas 1841–1842 (Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones, 1940 –1945), 3:189. 15. Mayfield to Saligny, February 22, 1841, Journals of the Sixth Congress, 3:194.

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16. Hutchinson to Mayfield, Document C, in Mayfield to Saligny, February 25, 1841, Journals of the Sixth Congress, 3:203. 17. Ibid. 18. Bullock’s memorial to Burnet, February 20, 1841, in Barker, French Legation. 19. Saligny to Mayfield, March 25, 1841, Journals of the Sixth Congress, 209. 20. Ibid. 21. Mayfield to Saligny, March 29, 1841, Journals of the Sixth Congress, 218. 22. Cosmao to Ministry of the Navy and Colonies, May 16, 1841, at sea, in Barker, French Legation, 1:241. 23. Saligny to Guizot, March 8, 1844, New Orleans, in Barker, French Legation, 2:506. 24. The papers of Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, edited from the original papers in the Texas State Library (Austin: A. C. Baldwin, 1921–1927), 2:588 and 3:110. 25. Adele B. Looscan, “Harris County, 1822–1845,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 19 (1915): 49–50. 26. Bourgeois d’Orvanne to the Minister of Commerce, July 4, 1842 aboard the Britannia, in Barker, French Legation, 1:344. 27. Bourgeois d’Orvanne, Compagnie Générale de Colonisation. Institution Nationale, February 8, 1843, Paris, 20. 28. Guizot to the minister of the interior, February 16, 1843, Paris, in Barker, French Legation, 1:412. 29. Prince Solms-Braunfels, Second report to the Directors of the Adlesverein, August 20, 1844, in Chester William and Ethel Hander Geue, A New Land Beckoned: German Immigration to Texas, 1844–1847 (Waco: Texian Press, 1966), 30. 30. Cramayel to Guizot, July 17, 1843, Galveston, in Barker, French Legation, 2:453. 31. Guilbeau to Guizot, November 16, 1843 and November 29, 1844, San Antonio, in Barker, French Legation, 2:590 –594. 32. Cramayel to Guizot, December 28, 1843, New Orleans, in Barker, French Legation, 1:491. 33. Ralph A. Wooster, “Foreigners in the Principal Towns of Ante-Bellum Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 66, no. 2 (1962): 208–220. 34. Houston Telegraph and Texas Register, November 1, 1843.

9

GROUNDS FOR EMIGRATION Alsace at the Time of Henri Castro

JANINE ERNY

That people may leave their homeland to escape natural disasters, wars, and political or religious persecution is hardly surprising. It is less understandable when they make that important decision in a time of peace, when living conditions seem to be rather stable. This is what happened, however, in many Alsatian villages during the 1840s, when Henri Castro began to recruit emigrants for Texas. Political, economic, cultural, and religious conditions pushed many Alsatians to leave their homeland for America. In the departments, prefects and subprefects had to report to the Paris administration, which took appropriate measures in such fields as fixing the amount of food available for each individual, the construction and management of roads and buildings, education, public accountability, child labor, and health and sanitary questions. There were taxes on transportation, land, doors and windows, and items such as playing cards, domestic salt, and sugar, as well as meat butchered for consumption. Bread had to be weighed, and its price was closely checked. The state had a monopoly on tobacco. Movement of people was supervised within the country as well as at borders. In the first part of the century, travelers were listed by name when they crossed the department borders. Inhabitants could be requested to leave their homes for various reasons. Inquiries were made about the morality and the history of people. In order to live in a town where one was not born, permission was required. For those young men who drew a bad number, just as in a lottery, military service was compulsory, unless they were wealthy enough to buy substitutes. Brothels were allowed, but alcohol was prohibited. Suicide and crimes such as theft, disturbance of the peace, trespass, insults to superiors, and noisy gatherings were reported to the police. Permission was necessary to organize dances, concerts, banquets, and 124

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meetings. To prevent fights and bouts of drinking, village celebrations of any kind were strictly regulated. To please the village vicar, who preached against dancing, many a mayor simply forbade the annual village fair. Initiative was not encouraged, since prefects and mayors received detailed guidelines regulating any official celebration such as the visit of a dignitary or the annual royal festivities. These measures were meant to consolidate the allegiance of the people to the monarchy. Religious services and processions likewise were subject to regulation by the police. Catholics, who were predominant in Alsace, accepted these measures with reluctance, and many conflicts occurred. The arrival of the industrial revolution brought economic growth mainly to the bourgeois class, while laborers, salesmen, craftsmen, and peasants saw their incomes stagnate or decrease, and many endured extreme poverty. Between 1784 and 1876, the population of the Upper Rhine doubled, from 270,000 to 470,000 inhabitants. Such an increase was not alien to the endemic state of tension and poverty in which peasants lived. Malnutrition struck laborers, peasants, and tradesmen, while artisans fared better. Peasants near Colmar, where emigration to the United States was high, ate almost exclusively potatoes, boiled cereal, and skimmed milk. In the Upper Rhine in 1829, statistics showed one indigent person per thirty-nine inhabitants, whereas the French average ratio was one in twenty. Division of land through inheritance was inevitable. Alsace accounted for the largest number of landowners in France, but also for those who owned the smallest plots. It was estimated that 73 percent of landowners in the Upper Rhine had fields that were smaller than twelve acres. Cash was scarce. Peasants were often obliged to borrow from solicitors or usurers. Country doctors were paid by the government. Their function was to vaccinate and to take care of the sick, the poor, children, and prostitutes without charge. A few doctors and pharmacists were appointed in every department. They distributed medicine and foodstuffs and wrote annual reports. In 1830, there were still cases of smallpox. The major causes of disease were poor hygiene, humidity, filth, and lack of food. Streets were crammed with dirt and trash, and farmyards were glutted with dunghills and manure. Homesteads often were badly maintained and poorly ventilated, and clothing was neglected. Alcoholism was rampant. By the end of Louis-Philippe’s reign (1830 –1848), a majority of the peasantry could neither read nor write and spoke only a dialect. From 1830 on, following the example of Froebel in Germany, kindergartens were created. Girls were taught by the Sisters of Divine Providence. Quite often, however, teachers lacked competence and seriousness, and

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9.1

This passport was issued in Strasbourg to Joseph Batt, born in Mertzwiller (Lower

Rhine). Batt and his family immigrated from Alsace to America in 1836. Approximately 1,800 Alsatians immigrated to Texas between 1842 and 1869. Joseph Strebler, Alsaciens au Texas, (Strasbourg: Culture Alsacienne, 1975). Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin, ct0458.

parents gave priority to working in the fields. In villages where there were only Catholics, religious instruction was given in German by the vicar. He could also provide general education, a situation that often led to ill feelings between him and the public school teacher. Although French was taught in Alsace, dialect prevailed within the families. Reports showed

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that reading and spelling levels were not satisfactory, although discipline and behavior were good, and that cleanliness was much wanting. The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed extreme poverty, while the Alsatian countryside gave the impression of being fertile and flourishing. Over the years, an overall atmosphere of weariness, disarray, and pessimism had undermined the sense of well-being of the population, and, when Henri Castro and his recruiters brought a promise of a better life, even though the price was to leave one’s country, it was immediately welcomed. Between 1842 and 1869, according to the number of passports issued, 1,800 Alsatians emigrated to Texas (Figure 9.1). Sixty percent of them left as part of Castro’s colonization program between 1843 and 1846.1 Note 1. Nicole Fouché, Émigration Alsacienne aux États-Unis 1815–1870 (Paris: Publication de la Sorbonne, 1992), 204 and 224.

10

HENRI CASTRO AND CASTROVILLE Alsatian History and Heritage

WAY N E M . A H R

In 1990, the United States Census recorded Castroville’s population at 2,159 inhabitants, though today it is closer to 3,000 and includes recently arrived Anglos and Mexican-Americans, as well as descendants of the original colonists. Castroville was named for the French entrepreneur Henri (or Henry) Castro, who in 1844, with a colonization contract from the Republic of Texas, established the Castro colony on the pecan- and cypressshaded banks of the Medina River about twenty-five miles west of San Antonio. Between 1843 and 1869, about 1,800 migrants went from Alsace to Texas; 60 percent of these went between 1843 and 1846, during the Castro recruiting years. Castro brought a total of 1,120 emigrants from Alsace to Texas.1 Immigrants also came from the rest of France, Lorraine, Franche-Comté, Swabia, German Switzerland, Baden, and the Münsterland. A melange of ethnic and linguistic backgrounds existed, but Castroville and nearby pioneer settlements have preserved and nurtured their Alsatian dialect, their predominant Catholicism, and many of their traditions. As immigrants have done nearly everywhere else in the United States, most Castroville residents have adopted American culture, but they have often done so without sacrificing their unique character and history. Ironically, although built by colonists who had been cut off from their European roots, Castroville has continuously celebrated its Alsatian, or French, or German, heritage. Castroville was not built only by Alsatians. Charles de Montel was German, George H. Noonan was an Irishman from Newark, and George Louis Haass was Bavarian. But an Alsatian cultural import has persisted in and around Castroville since its inception. The number of immigrants sharing similar roots was small but sufficient for a culture to persist. Residents maintain and sustain Castroville’s Alsatian origin and heritage through genealogical and ethnohistorical research, 128

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preservation work in architecture, language—a spoken Alsatian dialect still heard on occasion around Medina County—and cultural exchanges between “Little Alsace” and “Big Alsace.” Henri Castro was born in 1786 in Saint-Esprit (near Bayonne, when it was in the department of Landes), to a Jewish family that had immigrated to France from Portugal before his birth (Figures 10.1 and 10.2). The founder of Castroville saw in himself a true descendent of his ancestor Juan de Castro, viceroy of the Indies and founder of towns in Portugal.2 He held official positions until he served in the Napoleonic army in Spain and was an officer in the National Guard of Paris in 1818. He was named vice consul for Naples at the port of Providence, Rhode Island, and emigrated to the United States in 1827. He worked in the banking business and represented François Guizot in Louisiana. He obtained U.S. citizenship but in 1838 returned to France and became “associate particular” with Louis Philippe’s banker, Jacques Laffite. Castro worked with Hamilton in trying to secure a loan for Texas, but France did not guarantee the loan.

10.1 & 2

Henri Castro was fifty-seven years old when he started to recruit Alsatians and

other colonists for Texas, and he died at the age of seventy-nine. The photograph of the younger Castro probably was taken before he became an empresario. The photograph of the older Castro presumably was taken during the Civil War. (Photo 10.1 from Bobby D. Weaver, Castro’s Colony: Empresario Development in Texas, 1842–1865, College Station: Texas A&M University, 1985. Photo 10.2 from Julia Waugh, Castroville and Henri Castro, San Antonio: Standard, 1934.) Photographers unknown.

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In 1842, Castro returned to America as an envoy of Jacques Laffite in regard to the Texas loan and as an emissary of Messrs. Jean Basterrèche and Pierre Lassaulx, who had been associates in the Franco-Texian bill for which French Chargé Dubois de Saligny had lobbied in 1841 in Austin, only to see the colonization bill die in the Senate.3 In New Orleans, Saligny, hoping for his bill to be revived during the Sixth Texas Congress, met with Castro and gave him a letter of recommendation to Secretary of State Anson Jones, along with permission to stay in the French Legation in Austin. Castro arrived there at the end of January 1842. In Austin, new legislation that would dramatically impact land distribution and colonization in Texas was about to be passed by the Texas Congress. Following a demand by the Englishman W. S. Peters for an empresario concession, a bill was passed in 1841 by the nearly bankrupt republic to encourage land grants and obtain the income they would generate.4 A new law passed in 1842 empowered the president of the republic to make empresario contracts. Belgium’s envoy Victor Pirson, along with William Kennedy (sent by the British minister of foreign affairs), the Germans Fisher and Miller, the Frenchmen Bourgeois, Ducos, and Henri Castro, all received separate land grants. On February 15, 1842, Castro, in a temporary partnership with Jean Jassaud (another associate of Jacques Laffite), received two tracts of land. One tract of approximately 600,000 acres was on the Rio Grande near Camargo, where no colonization would ever occur under Castro’s leadership. The other tract lay west-southwest of San Antonio and encompassed all or part of what are now Medina, Atascosa, Frio, LaSalle, and McMullen Counties, a total of 1.25 million acres.5 He received the grants on the condition that he would settle the land with six hundred families within three years, with the first two hundred colonists to be settled before August 15, 1843. The grant, modeled upon the Peters Colony law of 1841, stipulated that each married man would be allotted 640 acres, and each bachelor would be allotted 360 acres. To gain proper title to the land, colonists were required to construct a permanent dwelling on their plots and put at least fifteen acres under cultivation within a year. Castro would receive ten sections of land for every one hundred colonists he introduced, and he could contract with each man for half of his acreage in return for full passage to Texas. At the time he obtained his concession, Castro was named consul of Texas to France by Sam Houston, but this nomination was blocked by the French ministry and a disappointed Saligny, whose Franco-Texian bill was not revived and who had been kept out of Castro’s empresario venture.6 Ashbel Smith, Texas’ Chargé in Paris, nevertheless supported the empresario fully, attesting to his best efforts to recruit proper immi-

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grants. Castro set up offices for the Société de Colonisation EuropéeAméricaine at 6 rue de la Beaume, and although he impressed people with his manners, sumptuous headquarters, and promises of fortune, he recruited few immigrants, probably because the French government was not supportive of immigration, and Castro faced competition from his rivals Bourgeois and Lacos. Castro’s first successes included recruits from Paris and the departments of Marne, Meuse, Doubs, and Haute-Saône. On November 2, 1842, the Ebro left Le Havre bound for Galveston with 144 colonists aboard. The Lyons left three months later on January 18, 1843, with 91 colonists, and on February 27, the Louis-Philippe sailed from Dunkirk with 49 passengers. Among these emigrants, only 96 were potential landholders.7 A young and unemployed Parisian, Auguste Frétellière, was among the first colonists, and he left a memoir of his short-lived emigration. Persuaded by Castro that he would become a millionaire in Texas, he prepared his departure carefully, acquiring all the necessary gear. He left in October 1843 from Antwerp on his seventyfour-day voyage to Galveston. Slowly, he proceeded from Galveston to Lavaca by shallow-draft boat and then to Victoria, where he met some French colonists who had settled there after finding employment. In San Antonio, Frétellière survived by exchanging his Paris-bought firearms for food. He finally went to Castroville, fenced in his lot, and planted corn and vegetables. But “fatigued and disgruntled with this life of an anchorite,” he returned to France, his mother having paid for his trip.8 As the first colonists began to arrive in Texas, they found overland travel difficult, money short, lodgings inadequate, and disease common. Mexican bandits and Indians also battled the newcomers on the frontier, and the colonists became dispirited. By the time Castro learned of their discontent, some had abandoned the venture and settled in communities between the coast and San Antonio. Others took employment and gave up on the Société de Colonisation; some died trying to reach the grant lands. Those who reached San Antonio had to find temporary shelter, and some even camped in the ruins of the Alamo. Castro appointed agents to aid his colonization efforts while he was in France, but Messrs. Laude, Phene, Martin, and Mercier proved to be ineffective. In Paris, Castro had the good fortune to meet Ferdinand Louis Huth, who assured him that his father, Ludwig Huth of Neufreystaedt, Baden, would participate in the Texas venture. In addition to colonization, commerce would be developed between the two nations. Goods would be exported to Texas, and cotton, hides and other Texas products would be imported. The Huths also agreed to help recruit and transport colonists from Strasbourg to ports of departure in France and Belgium. Louis Huth went to Texas in October 1843 with French, Alsatian, German, and Swiss colonists. Castro had portrayed

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Texas as a fertile paradise in his advertisements, but the harsh conditions Huth encountered showed how false Castro’s hyperbole was. In 1843, Castro moved his recruitment operations to the Rhenish provinces and had his greatest success in the Haut-Rhin (Upper Rhine) of Alsace. By the fall of 1843, more than two-thirds of Castro’s immigrants were Alsatians.9 Castro returned to Texas in July 1844 and for the first time scouted his grant land around the Medina River, under the protection of Captain Hays of the Texas Rangers and with assistance from John James, deputy surveyor for Bexar County. To fend off competition by Bourgeois and his associate, Prince Carl Solms-Braunfels, commissionergeneral of the Adelsverein, the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants,10 Castro bought from John McMullen sixteen leagues of land between present-day Quihi and San Antonio. This brought his concession, including the future site of Castroville, closer to San Antonio. Most of the colonists remained in San Antonio, hesitant to venture to the new site because they feared Indian attacks. To assuage their fears, Castro added the inducement of a free town lot and forty acres of land situated on the McMullen tract. He finally set out from San Antonio in a driving rain on September 1, 1844, with twenty-two carts and twentyseven colonists, including Theodore Gentilz and Charles de Montel, a German guide. They crossed the Medina River and started building a temporary communal structure to house provisions and the settlers’ possessions. Castroville was founded in September 1844 by a small group including twenty-two Alsatians, seventeen of whom were from the Upper Rhine and four from the Lower Rhine.11 More settlers began to arrive as word was passed that the colony had been successfully established. John James laid out the town plan, and colonists drew for town lots. Bishop Jean-Marie Odin, vicar apostolic of the Catholic Church in Texas, came to visit the new colony at Castro’s invitation. On September 12, 1844, he celebrated mass under a giant pecan tree on the banks of the Medina River and blessed the cornerstone for a church dedicated to Saint Louis of France, a popular saint in Alsace, where Saint Louis day was celebrated every year.12 That tree stood until recently and was listed by the Texas Forest Service as a “famous Texas tree.”13 Bishop Odin, François Guilbeau, a French merchant from San Antonio, and twenty-seven colonists delivered certificates attesting to the foundation of the town. Castro arranged for the poor settlers to be fed and provided them with oxen, carts, and plows. By November 1844, there were sixty-three homes in Castroville. In January 1845, Castro went to Washington-on-the-Brazos and obtained from the Texas Congress a twoyear extension of his empresario contract and the right to bring in up to a

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thousand families. He also advertised in Texas newspapers and contracted with several recruiting agents in the United States. Priests could recruit emigrants in France and accompany them to Texas, bringing with them the Church and Catholicism, then a large part of the culture. Father Grégoire Pfanner was a recruiting agent for Castro in Alsace; in 1845, he went to Texas with a group of three hundred colonists, mostly farmers from the Upper Rhine. But Pfanner became disillusioned, mainly due to his inability to obtain collaboration from Louis Huth, and he soon disappeared with his two associates, Fathers Lienhard and Roesch. When the town was platted, Castro set aside three blocks in the center for a church, a boys school, and a girls school. Today these blocks are the sites of the present Saint Louis Church, the parish elementary school, and the original convent of the Sisters of Divine Providence. The original church was not completed until Bishop Odin returned on November 9, 1846 to dedicate it. By that time the small structure was already too small for its congregation. This original building still stands on the grounds of the old convent, where it is listed both as a national and a state historical structure. In May 1845, Castro left Louis Huth and Jules Bourgeois in charge of the colony and returned to France to carry out more recruiting and to raise additional money. He arranged for Guillaume D’Hanis, a Belgian banker from Antwerp, to become his associate. A new Société de Colonisation au Texas was created, with Castro holding only a minority interest. As a consequence, he had to relinquish control over society business affairs and over much of his invested capital. In Europe, Castro’s agents proceeded into Germany and recruited discontented citizens of the Germanic Ducal states, this at a time of revolutionary turmoil. They recruited in Saxony, the Duchy of Brunswick, Westfalia, the Saarland, Bavaria, Baden, and East Friesland. Many migrating families brought their customs, crafts, and tools to build and cultivate a new land. Settlements in Medina County that began with Castroville in 1844 soon expanded to include Quihi, established in March 1846 by Louis Huth and ten pioneer families. Quihi is an adaptation of the word quichie, the pioneers’ name for the white-necked Mexican eagle.14 Vandenburg was founded in September 1846 and abandoned when Verde Creek went dry. “Old” D’Hanis was founded in the spring of 1847 and was named in honor of Castro’s Belgian associate. Some of the immigrants survived the ocean voyage only to meet a quick death from disease. Despite the proximity of protective forts such as Fort Clark, Fort Inge, and Fort Lincoln, other settlers, especially in outlying D’Hanis and Quihi, were killed in altercations with hostile Co-

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The Rev. Emmanuel Domenech was

stationed from 1848 to 1851 in Castroville and Eagle Pass. In 1883, the review Les Missions catholiques published excerpts from his Journal d’un missionnaire au Texas et au Mexique depicting his adventures in Castroville. From Domenech’s drawing, Canedi etched five engravings, among them this view of the Medina’s banks (10.3) and views of San Antonio’s Mission San José (10.4) and Mission Concepción (10.5). Les Missions catholiques 758 (December 14, 1883). Catholic Archives of Texas.

manches, Lipan Apaches, or Delawares, whose lands were being invaded. But Castroville was not attacked, and Indians traded with Castro’s colonists, exchanging wild turkeys and venison for sugar and other commodities. It was even reported that Indians came to hear the music at Sunday mass in the little church.

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Castro, now sixty years of age, returned to Texas in May 1846. He arranged with Huth for the accommodation of new colonists who were to be sent by D’Hanis, but serious financial problems became the source of disagreements between the two associates, and Castro disassociated himself from Huth and his Antwerp partners. Few settlers had been able to claim their land, and land payments normally due to the empresario became voluntary. In 1853, Castro owned sixty sections of land (38,400 acres), and after a series of lawsuits, he lost most of the sections except for portions deeded to his wife. After the 1845 financial restructuring, he was forced to mortgage land that did not belong to him. The empresario and his family lived in Castroville during the Civil War. In 1864, while on his way to France, Henri Castro died in Monterrey, Mexico, without having made his fortune in Texas. Nicole Fouché estimates that Castro brought a total of 372 families or individuals (families and bachelors counted equally) from Alsace to Castroville between 1843 and 1849. But immigrants often move around before they settle, and by 1850, only one-fourth of the original settlers still lived in Castro’s colony. Most of the original settlers were Catholic, and about one-fifth of them were German Lutherans. The Protestants formed the Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1852, one of the oldest Lutheran congregations in Texas. The church was finished in 1854, and it remained in constant use until 1939, when it was replaced. The first Catholic church building was also replaced under the direction of Father Claude Dubuis, who had arrived in Castroville in January 1847 to replace Pfanner. He was joined by Mathieu Chazelles, who died within three months, and by Father Emmanuel Domenech, with whom he built the church that was inaugurated on Easter Sunday of 1850. Domenech sketched the Medina and San Antonio’s missions and later published five engravings in one of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith’s journal, Les Missions catholiques (Figures 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5). Dubuis erected the first crucifix on Mont Gentilz, today known as Cross Hill. He established the cemetery at the foot of Cross Hill and instituted the first Feast of Saint Louis in 1847 as well as the first religious processions to the crest of Mont Gentilz, a tradition that continued until World War II. Dubuis’ church served the parish until 1870, when the third and current Saint Louis Church was built under the direction of Father Pierre Richard, who also funded the Saint Louis Roman Catholic Benevolent Society (10.6). Constructed in Country Gothic style of native limestone, the church held its first mass on Saint Louis’ day, August 25, 1870. It is located in the center of town facing Houston Square, and the steeple can be seen as one approaches the town from any direction, reminiscent of many European villages. The Saint Louis Church was restored in

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The Rev. Pierre Richard, parish priest of Castroville from 1868 to 1880, founded

the St. Louis Society. An all-male assembly is gathered here under a banner, wearing their insignia and surrounding their pastor. Collection of Dr. M. W. Sharp, Castroville. The University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio.

1972–1973 and continues to serve the parish as it has done for more than 130 years. Through the church’s rituals and feasts, the missionaries certainly helped instill a sense of Franco-Catholic culture among the first generation of colonists. More than half of all the Alsatian immigrants were from hardy peasant stock, pragmatic people with a strong work ethic. They adapted to their harsh new environment, tilled the land, built farms and homes, and created a town at times reminiscent of the villages they had left in Europe. Religion, language, some schooling, some farming customs, and some traditions represent the main cultural imports from Alsace to Castroville. The French farmers became accustomed to eating corn (an animal feed to them). School tradition and classes were more Catholic than Alsatian, although beginning in the 1870s, community schools allowed ethnic groups to have their languages spoken in Castroville’s classes.15 Medina County was incorporated in 1848. In 1853 and again in 1855, Alsatians defeated a move to change Castroville’s name to Medina City. On the eve of the Civil War, 207 votes, or 60 percent of the votes, were cast against secession. Nicole Fouché states that many Castrovillians moved to Mexico during the Civil War.16 This has been said also of German set-

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tlers, while “French” immigrants often sided with the Confederates, enlisting or hauling cotton to Matamoros to sell for the Confederacy. Westward expansion brought growth and commerce, which included freight wagons and supporting businesses that thrived for several decades. The town prospered until 1881, when the Sunset Road was projected to pass through Medina County and onward to points west. Mont Gentilz, or Cross Hill, is part of a steep geological escarpment west of Castroville. Building the Sunset Road tracks would have required extensive cutting to reduce the grade. Castro’s good choice for a colony turned out to be a bad one for a railroad. As a combined result of geological and financial disincentives, the Sunset Road was relocated about five miles south of Castroville. Wagon freighting could not compete and disappeared altogether, and with it went the prosperity that Castroville had enjoyed.17 The founding of the closely knit communities of LaCoste (established in 1881), Pearson-Noonan, Dunlay, Hondo, and “New” or present-day D’Hanis followed, with the Alsatian language and traditions handed down by a few families to new generations. Present-day Lytle, Devine, and Yancey in southern Medina County were gaining in population from original Alsatian families, along with the migration of newcomers from the U.S. eastern seaboard. The smaller Medina County communities of Verdina, French Settlement, Saus Community, Haby Settlement, Bader Settlement, Burger Settlement, Biry, Elstone, Peachtree, Sturm Hill, and Cliff were, and are today, populated by descendants of these Alsatian pioneers whom ethnohistorian Janine Erny has studied conscientiously. Castroville’s declining fortunes did not end with the railroad’s bypassing of the town. A bitterly contested election held in 1892 moved the Medina County seat from Castroville to Hondo. This resulted in a population decline in Castroville that was exacerbated when the Sisters of Divine Providence moved their convent to San Antonio in 1895. These events isolated Castroville geographically and culturally, and by 1897, its citizens petitioned the state to revoke the town’s 1850 act of incorporation.18 Castroville became a sleepy village not unlike some of those the colonists had left in Alsace, but this was a situation that probably helped conserve its heritage. Some settlers’ descendants continued to farm as before, and the town remained a small, peaceful but stagnant venue until a major highway (U.S. 90) connected it with the world in 1938. Commerce increased, and when wartime industry in San Antonio brought an influx of new people and new money to Medina County, Castroville had a renaissance. The city voted for reincorporation, and in December 1947, the first city council in fifty years took office. A contest was held for a best slogan, and L. J. Haby’s proposal of “Little Alsace of Texas” was adopted.19 Castroville was identified as a “French” community by the Institute of

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Texan Cultures, which wanted to portray a multi-ethnic Texas at the time of the 1968 San Antonio Hemisfair.20 Although a majority of the original settlers of the colony were Alsatians from France, they called themselves “Germans,” and visitors still mistake the old Alsatian dialect for German, as did the English-speaking census taker in 1850. In 1936, the population was 787, of whom 65 percent were “German,” 15 percent were Mexican American, and 20 percent were French or American.21 “Castroville is a French town with a German flavor growing out of Texas soil,” wrote Waugh in 1934.22 In 1990, according to the U.S. Census, there were no French speakers but 547 German (i.e., Alsatian) speakers in Medina County. The dialect spoken in Castroville is Germanic rather than French, and it can still be heard today in a few homes. It has incorporated American words, mainly for emphasis or reference, and has changed since it was first heard in Texas more than a century and a half ago. Erny even calls today’s dialect anglo-alsacien.23 And upon hearing Castrovillians speak their dialect, Alsatian visitors commonly wonder about the speakers’ date of arrival in America. An English-Alsatian dictionary was published in 1976 by Ralph and Annette Tschirhart as one of the first efforts to draw attention to and retain the dialect.24 Alsatian still is spoken by a few people, most of whom are over fifty years old, but it is a dying language in Medina County. Its decline is arguably related to the economic renaissance that brought Castroville into the commercial mainstream by the necessity to speak English in school and by the desire to sound “American” rather than German, especially during World War ii. In the Ahr family, for instance, the dialect was spoken during four generations, starting with Laurent Thomas Ahr, who was born in 1828 in Oberentzen, Alsace, and immigrated in 1848. Laurent married Anne-Marie Bischoff in Castroville in 1854, and they had ten surviving children, including Francis William Ahr, father of Adolph Henry Ahr, father of Adolph William Ahr, father of the author, the first one in his family not to speak Alsatian. In the tradition established by Dubuis in 1847, the Feast of Saint Louis, known as Saint Louis Day in Castroville, has been celebrated continuously for about 125 years on the Sunday closest to August 25. This popular feast celebrates Castroville’s Alsatian heritage with a Catholic mass and a fair, but it derives from a public feast begun by the French monarchy as a celebration of Louis Capet ix, a crusader and defender of centralized monarchy. 25 “Saint Nicholas Day,” on December 5, when children set out shoes or stockings in which fruit, nuts, or sweets would be left, was observed until the 1990s. Saint Nicholas, patron saint of Lorraine, has been worshipped in Alsace-Lorraine since 620, and immigrants imported that custom to Texas.26

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Many farmers and a rare few commercial butchers still make fresh and “dry” sausages following traditional recipes, and parisa, or filet americain préparé, a dish similar to steak tartare.27 Castroville, Quihi, and LaCoste take pride in their own local recipes of parisa. Wine and soap were commonly made at home until about the 1950s. Winemaking had been a tradition since the days of the original settlement, and Catholic emigrants were greatly opposed to Protestant-inspired Prohibition.28 Disincorporation, and a tendency among the descendants of the pioneers to be independent, self-sufficient, and, arguably, resistant to change, explain in part why Alsatian culture lasted. A conservation effort that started during the 1930s and accelerated during the 1950s focused on restoration of Castroville’s pioneer homes, which are found in the National Register of Historical Places.29 The Mont Gentilz cemetery, where headstones carved in French, German, Spanish, and Alsatian mark nearly all the graves, is also a registered historical place. As a sense of ethnic pride grew throughout the United States during the 1970s, Castroville was not an exception. The Castro Colonies Heritage Society was founded in 1975, when 25 Medina County residents traveled to Alsace to retrace their ancestry. The following year, 220 Texans from the Castroville area visited Alsace. Regular exchanges have since taken place, and strong bonds have grown between “Little Alsace” and “Big Alsace.” Today’s inhabitants, especially members of the Castro Colonies Heritage Society, are striving to preserve the history and traditions of the Castro Colony. Since the 1970s, Castroville has been the twin city of Eguisheim, and D’Hanis the twin city of Niederentzen-Oberentzen, both located in Alsace. Classes in the Alsatian dialect are taught regularly, and an Alsatian dance group performs at special events, coiffed and dressed in the traditional fashion. A school in Rouffach (Upper Rhine) sponsored a “Garden of Roots” in the Castroville Regional Park, and students came from France for three successive years to plant and cultivate the garden. That same group obtained a three-hundred-year-old house in Alsace, dismantled it, shipped it to Castroville, and reassembled it on the banks of the Medina River across from the site of Bishop Odin’s first mass in 1844. Henri Castro is the only French empresario to have succeeded in founding a colony in Texas. He brought hardy and determined men and families who succeeded in colonizing a land that was at first hostile and wild. They transformed that land into farms and towns that grew quickly during the past century and a half, and they and their descendants became Texans. But among its inhabitants, in Castroville’s homes and on Saint Louis Day, in language and religion, Alsace’s language, culture, and religion continue to thrive.30

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Notes 1. Nicole Fouché, Émigration Alsacienne aux États-Unis. 1815–1870 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1992), 204. 2. Cf. Julia Nott Waugh, Castro-ville and Henry Castro Empresario (San Antonio: Standard Printing Company, 1934), 67. 3. Cf. Bernice Denton, “Count Alphonso de Saligny and the Franco-Texienne Bill,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 45, no. 2 (March 1941): 136–146. 4. Cf. Bobby D. Weaver, Castro’s Colony: Empresario Development in Texas, 1842– 1865 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985), 10. 5. Weaver, Castro’s Colony, 110. 6. Waugh, Weaver, and Fouché agree in explaining Castro’s failure to receive his exequatur in Paris as a result of Saligny’s misinformation on Castro. Saligny and Cramayel were also very critical of the perilous situation in which Castro’s first colonists were left upon their arrival in Texas. 7. Weaver, Castro’s Colony, 28. 8. Auguste Frétellière, “Adventures of a Castrovillian,” in Waugh, Castro-ville, 96. 9. Fouché, Émigration, 118. 10. See Rudolph Biesele, The History of German Settlements in Texas (Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones, 1930), 66 –67. 11. Fouché, Émigration, 192. See also “Procès-verbal de la prise de possession de la concession faite par le gouvernement texien à Monsieur Castro, dans le comté de Bexar,” in Henri Castro, Le Texas en 1845 (Anvers, 1845), 9–10. 12. Fouché, Émigration, 194. 13. Texas Forest Service, Famous Trees of Texas, ed. John A. Haislet (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1970), 137. 14. Ruth C. Lawler, The Story of Castroville, Its People, Founder, and Traditions (San Antonio: Lacoste Ledger, 1974), 8. 15. See Janine Erny, Et parmi les pionniers du Far West, il y avait des Alsaciens (Aubenas: Le Verger, 1999), 114. 16. Fouché, Émigration, 210. 17. Castro Colonies Heritage Association, The History of Medina County, Texas (Dallas: National Share Graphic, 1994), 65. 18. Ibid., 66. 19. Ibid., 163. 20. The French Texans (San Antonio: University of Texas, Institute of Texan Cultures, 1973) 21. Curtis Bishop, Castro’s Colony,” in The New Handbook of Texas, ed. Ron Tyler, 1:1023. 22. Waugh, Castro-ville, 1.

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23. Erny, Et parmi, 208. See also Fouché, Émigration, 216. 24. Ralph and Annette Tschirhart, English-Alsatian Dictionary (Little Alsace of Texas, Castroville, 1976). 25. Fouché, Émigration, 125. 26. Ibid., 216. 27. The dish was named parisa after a nineteenth-century Parisian chef who headed the kitchen of the Tarde Hotel in Castroville. 28. Erny, Et parmi, 205. 29. Several restored pioneer homes and buildings in Castroville’s Historic District, along with others in outlying settlements, are listed in the National Register of Historic Places. These include the Landmark Inn, the Devine Opera House, the D’Hanis District, and the Saathoff House in Quihi. 30. Mrs. Connie Tschirhart Rihn Balmos of the Castro Colonies Heritage Society, Mr. Charles Halty, Mr. Guy Allen Holzhaus, and “The Last Alsatian-Speaking Cowboy in Texas,” Mr. Justin Jungman, were helpful in the preparation of this article and need be thanked. With the author, they are all descendants of the first colonists.

11

FRENCH CATHOLIC MISSIONS IN TEXAS, 1840–1880 Propagation and Enterprise

FRANÇOIS LAGARDE

French Catholic missions in North America originated when Champlain and Father Aubry arrived in Acadia in 1604. Later Jesuits, Recolets, Sulpicians from Nouvelle France, Carmelites, Capuchins, and secular clergy from the Atlantic coast and Louisiana became the Levites and the proselytes of Catholicism during the nineteenth century, when the French clergy controlled the American Catholic Church.1 In 1817, Louis du Bourg, bishop of Louisiana and one of the founders of the Société de la Propagation de la Foi (Society for the Propagation of the Faith), recruited missionaries in France. Among them were Antoine Blanc and Michel Portier, future bishops of New Orleans and Mobile. In 1822, an emissary of du Bourg recruited a subdeacon in Lyon, Jean-Marie Odin, who would become the first bishop of Texas.2 Born in Ambierle (Loire), Odin was educated in religious schools in Verrières, L’Argentière, and Alix and attended the Saint Irénée Sulpician seminary in Lyon, where future missionaries became priests (Figure 11.1). In America, Odin spent ten years in the seminary of the Lazarists, or Vincentians, at Saint Mary’s of the Barrens, Missouri. In 1840, he was sent to Texas by Father Superior John Timon, who had been through eastern Texas briefly and found Catholics in need of clergy. The second French colonial empire was burgeoning. Although Texas Indians were not on good terms with the settlers, Timon felt the Indians could be converted. There also were Catholics of Spanish descent, since Spain originally colonized the province. Spanish Franciscan friars coming from Mexico had founded missions in eastern and central Texas in the eighteenth century, and a small, widely scattered population of Mexicans, Indians, and recent immigrants was still Catholic. But the missions were abandoned and in ruins, the Alamo had been a battleground, and by 1840, there were only four priests in Texas. Odin found two Spanish priests in 142

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11.1

143

The Rev. Jean-Marie Odin became the first Catholic bishop of Galveston in 1847

and the second archbishop of New Orleans in 1861. This photograph was taken circa 1866. Photographer: Bendann Brothers, New York. Catholic Archives of Texas, Episcopal Collection.

San Antonio, one of whom was married. He fired them both for immoral conduct. He also found two Irish priests from Kentucky living with a group of American immigrants. In addition, some Protestants had “converted” after Mexico ruled that American colonists settling in Texas needed be baptized. In 1841, the Texas Congress passed the Church Bill, meant to return the churches and missions of Texas to the Catholic Church, and Fathers Timon and Odin, with the help of the French chargé in Austin, Dubois de Saligny, were given the care of the Catholic missions. Consequently, from 1841 until the end of the nineteenth century, approximately two hundred French missionaries and nuns, regular and secular, emigrated to Texas from all across France but mainly from the Diocese of Lyon (Departments of

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Rhône and Loire) and from Alsace and Lorraine.3 The French clergy and its five French bishops, Jean-Marie Odin, Claude-Marie Dubuis, Jean-Claude Neraz, Jean-Antoine Forest, and Pierre Dufal, accomplished a Catholic restoration in Texas.4 The French mission was financed by donations and by the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, founded in Lyon by Pauline Jaricot and her entourage. Texas, one-fourth larger in area than France, continually lacked missionaries and funding. Odin and his successor, Dubuis, born in Coutouvre (Loire), recruited incessantly within French seminaries and congregations, traveling across the ocean several times. Seventy missionaries came from the Diocese of Lyon; many bilingual recruits from Alsace were sent to Texas to live within German or Alsatian settlements.5 Seminarians and lay clergy, Lazarists or Vincentians, Oblates via Canada, Benedictines, Franciscans, Jesuits via Mexico, Marists, Brothers of the Christian Doctrine, members of the Congregation of the Holy Cross, members of the Congregation of the Resurrection, Ursulines via New Orleans, sisters of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament, sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word of Lyon, sisters of Divine Providence of Saint-Jean-de Bassel, sisters of Saint Mary of Namur via Belgium, all were recruited by

11.2

The Rev. Claude Marie Dubuis, second Catholic bishop of Texas, sits here sur-

rounded by a group of French missionaries circa 1872. Photographer unknown. Catholic Archives of Texas, Clergy Groups, Photograph Collection.

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Odin and Dubuis to fund and direct churches, schools, orphanages, infirmaries, and hospitals in Texas (Figure 11.2).6 The French missionary in Texas was a structured subject, even when toiling across Texas’ burning deserts or through its freezing rains. James Moore found rigidity and triumphalism in the French missionary, another way of saying that the missionary was educated, supported, and structured for a mission. He was usually a young Frenchman educated in seminaries that were described as “authentic arsenals for God’s soldiers where all the arms for God’s battles were forged.”7 There he had read philosophy and theology. An authoritative and charitable hierarchy had decided his career from ordination to exeat, and its commands were received with obedience. The man on a mission was given precise assignments from his bishop, receiving his faculties, or written accreditation, to administer sacraments and consecrate. Trained and indoctrinated, his mission was to collect souls, as botanists Berlandier and Reverchon had collected plants, as reporter Leclerc and French envoy Saligny collected information, and as empresarios collected colonists. He was sustained by doctrine, ideology, or faith. The Catholic missionaries were not the only faith-led French immigrants of the time. Champ d’Asile’s soldats-laboureurs, Icarians and Fourierists, and even colonists believing in the Promised Land were motivated by hopes and indoctrination. The missionary’s faith, or identity, came from seventeenth-century Saint Vincent de Paul, Jean-Jacques Olier of Saint Sulpice, and Jeanne Chézard de Matel, founder of the Sisters of the Incarnate Word. The missionaries believed that the more souls that were collected, the more their salvation was ensured, and that anyone born, married, or dying without the Holy Sacraments would not be granted eternal life. The structured subjects received some support from their administration, even though Galveston and San Antonio, where the two Episcopal sees were, or New Orleans, Lyon, and Rome were far away and had limited means of action. They were informed by pastoral letters and by reading newspapers such as the Propagation’s Annales or Le Propagateur. A dogma migrated from Rome to the Texas frontier and defined the missionaries’ actions and beliefs, if not their feelings. A compulsory rhetoric stopped them from deviating or becoming lax, and the last word was always for Providence. Once, Odin was rescued from drowning and attributed his salvation to the Virgin Mary.8 Bishops were very rigid and preferred to follow canonical regulations to the letter.9 Conservative Odin forbade fandango dances and drinking and did not believe that Fourierists had a chance of success in Reunion, their attempt at a utopian colony in Texas (see chapter 15).10 Dubuis fought against Fredericksburg’s Protes-

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11.3

Rev. Jean Gonnard

was born in Montbrison in 1827 and ordained in Galveston. In 1867, at age forty, he died of yellow fever in Corpus Christi after rendering numerous sacrifices. Photographer unknown. The University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio.

tant musicians. For bishops and priests, family and good morals were the foundations of society.11 And the missionaries did not hesitate in fighting off rivals since, according to the Propagation, there are only two categories of people: Catholics, and heretics or the unfaithful. Domenech refused to bury a non-Catholic, and Odin refused to ring the church bells for a Protestant in San Antonio. Dubuis expelled a Lutheran teacher from Castroville’s school, and he was very strict regarding “mixed” (CatholicProtestant) marriages. Father Faure, in his necrology of Mathieu Sarry written for Les Missions catholiques, said Sarry “had succeeded in closing a Spanish newspaper directed by a Jew who was attacking religion relentlessly.”12 To save souls was the missionary’s passion, and if he was unsuccessful, he despaired: “Am I a missionary?” laments Jean Gonnard, born in Montbrison, in a letter to his bishop Odin (Figure 11.3). He had garnered only one marriage, 150 baptisms, and twenty-five funerals in six years, only two dozen followers received communion regularly, and he had never had a première communion or any “imposing ceremony.” He was ashamed of himself and had fallen sick. “I wish to preach on house tops. I

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did not come to pine away alone in the woods,” cried Gonnard.13 Odin sent him during the Civil War to Corpus Christi, where he recovered his faith and found success: he built a school with his own funds and devoted himself to treating the sick during a yellow fever epidemic that took his martyr’s life. Each missionary ran a small enterprise and followed methods that can be traced to a French model, if one compares Sarah Curtis’ research on Catholic churches and schools in the Lyon diocese with those in Texas.14 The soul collector was, first of all, a distributor of sacraments, since a valid Catholic — one who can be counted in the Propagation’s tables — was baptized, confirmed, confessed, married, anointed, and took communion, at least on Easter. The missionary and his bishop, who had faculty to administer confirmation, traveled extensively from farms to settlements to towns. They kept books, and Dubuis sent yearly reports to Lyon on the number of baptisms, marriages, and conversions his diocese claimed.15 This apostolic and sacramental mission was essential, but a large part was also economic for the mission. A commerce of intentions de messe, or paid masses, of indulgences and public collections, of auctioning the front-row pews in Castroville’s Saint Louis Church, and of selling the dead’s clothing after the Civil War helped the poor immigrant missionaries to survive. In France, the sou des missions (“pennies for the missions”), regularly given by tens of thousands of parishioners organized in little armies of ten and one hundred, allowed the Propagation to support the Texas missions for more than twenty years. The missionary was an entrepreneur; he built, often with his own hands, churches and schools and institutions that supported the propagation of the faith. This builder encountered and overcame all sorts of technical, financial, and legal difficulties, from lack of personnel and total absence of cash to natural catastrophes, customs complications, and trials in court. First, he built or restored a church or chapel for his sacramental life and the comfort of colonists, who in the building and its ceremonies found elements of the culture they had left. In Castroville, the Jewish empresario and the Catholic bishop collaborated in building Saint Louis. The beautiful church, with bells, an organ, chandeliers, and stained glass, attracted colonists when art and distraction were rare commodities. A church housed “those touching ceremonies which always bring upon the faithful and even upon Protestants a salutary impression,” Odin writes.16 The Catholic Church imported crates of liturgical ornaments and sacred vessels. Once a group of missionaries disembarked in New Orleans with so much baggage that they were mistaken for a troupe of traveling actors. The beautiful Galveston cathedral attracted passersby, explained Odin to the directors of the Propagation, because

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found in one of the main towns of Texas, and unique in a country still in its wild state, it is a great object of curiosity for all its inhabitants. Numerous travelers who pass by want to visit it. We carefully profit of this circumstance to let them have a good idea of our belief. How many prejudices were vanquished during such visits. Most of the country’s farmers must go to Galveston during the winter to sell their cotton. The desire to see and learn about the Catholic cult leads them to the cathedral, usually on Sundays. The sight of our ceremonies and the instructions they listen to often produce a favorable reaction that sooner or later, bears fruits. The erection of this church brought many expenses, but the real good which it produces largely compensates for all financial sacrifices.17 Admittedly, Odin spoke the language that the Propagation wanted to hear, and it would be unjust to negate the missionaries’ charity and abnegation. But as in France at the time, the construction of schools, infirmaries, convents, seminaries, and other health or educational institutions had three goals: to increase the number of faithful, to provide services to the population in a spirit of progress, and to provide the Church and its personnel revenue large enough to survive materially and possibly to expand. Father Neraz, when he was curate in Nacogdoches and before he became bishop of San Antonio, remarked: “If we can successfully build a school, if only to provide for food, we will do it rather than let the poor souls we are charged of go without spiritual comfort.”18 A school for boys or for girls, and later for Negroes, was a means of increasing the number of Catholics, who competed with Protestants. Dubuis wrote, “Requests for schools never cease to arrive; and with twenty more subjects [i.e., twenty missionaries], we would be in full control here.”19 Dubuis believed that closing a school resulted in the closure of the church next to it. Nineteenth-century French Catholic schools have been criticized for being reserved to a rich elite, especially at a time when pioneers lacked many essentials. Converting and educating the elite, in the hope that the masses would imitate them, was necessarily associated with the fact that paying schools were a luxury at first.20 But many poor pupils were educated for free, as many sick were charitably treated, so long as their souls could be saved. Priests and nursing nuns also provided spiritual and medical care to the dying. They visited the sick and the moribund to cure them, because conversion often takes place around what Odin called “the bed of Death,” as Anstaett shows in his letter regarding Captain Pierre Ménard’s death.21 Death can also bring bequests by the saved souls to their shepherd’s church.

11.4

The Rev. Claude Dubuis became a hero in a Catholic comic strip that portrayed

his adventures and good deeds in Texas. Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact, 15, no. 6 (Dayton, Ohio: George A. Pflaum, November 19, 1959). Catholic Archives of Texas.

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In the reality or history of people and things, the missionaries encountered enemies from outside and enemies from within. They had to leave family and country at a young age, and some recruits were swiftly shipped abroad before they or their family could change their minds.22 Young men who felt the call to become missionaries, or martyrs, were often passionate; many were bored and dreaming of the colonial world. Domenech explains that he became a missionary upon a friend’s suggestion, without giving it much thought and not even knowing where Texas was.23 The recruits traveled across the Atlantic at a time when the voyage was long and perilous; therefore, one wrote one’s will before embarking. In Texas, they encountered severe physical and climatic adversities and worked among populations and immigrants who were often poor and crude. They traveled extensively by foot and horse (and in later years, by car or train) in spite of desert heat, floods, rattlesnakes, wolves, panthers, or maringouins (a colloquial French word for mosquitoes that Dubuis uses in his correspondence).24 Hurricanes and fires destroyed convents, schools, and churches. They were attacked by Indians, bandits, and Know-Nothings, battled against hunger, solitude, and fatal diseases such as yellow fever, typhus, or cholera (Figure 11.4). Some encountered tragic deaths by drowning or by getting lost in the wilderness; others went mad, committed suicide, or succumbed to such “temptations” as despair and drunkenness.25 “Things are bad, and I have fallen in a pit of boredom and sadness,” wrote Father Louis Chambodut to Odin. Berthet complained of having not one single parishioner and of falling in a pit of solitude.26 They carried more crosses than they received consolations, as it was said then. The missionaries got caught up in the Civil War and the Mexican wars, from San Antonio to Brownsville and along the Rio Grande. In 1861, three Texas regiments went to the army of Virginia and became famous as Hood’s Texas Brigade. One company mustered in Galveston and adjacent counties was made up entirely of French settlers, descendants of the dispersed army of Napoleon. They were all Catholics, and Father Chambodut was a great favorite with them. After the Civil War, General John B. Magruder showed his affection by giving the venerable Chambodut the gift of his sword.27 Always short of money and personnel, the French Catholic clergy in Texas could not keep up with the rapid growth of immigration, the erratic beginning of public schools, and their Protestant rivals —Methodists and Baptists who were also building schools and churches. Some remained foreigners, without fully immigrating since the Church could displace them and send them back to France or to a colony. Often they did not speak Texas languages well—English, German, or Spanish — a handicap

French Catholic Missions

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when one must teach, confess, preach, or find one’s way. Father Thions wrote to his parents from Corsicana: I assure you that I have worked well for the past two years, and especially that I have perfected my English, which I use now in all occasions. It’s an important point, the most important of all. The missionary’s success in these lands depends on it for a great part. When people are eager to listen to you preaching God’s word, if you can persuade and convince them by the strength of your speech, the good Lord soon will touch their hearts and truth will grow in them like a seed. Because English, and in particular American English, is spoken with the tip of the tongue between the teeth, I’ve had fake teeth put in my mouth and they are so well adjusted than no one can see the difference. This will make you laugh, but it is true. I could not do without them now when I speak in public. If I’m not tired, I can make myself heard at a distance of 100 meters.28 The bishops saw Indians as superstitious savages in need of civilization and evangelization but did not minister among them. Instead, they concentrated their already insufficient resources on Americans, Mexicans, and foreign immigrants.29 French clergy usually sided with the Confederates, and Odin —who had bought a family of slaves from Father Timon in Galveston—found Lincoln “malicious.”30 The Propagation saw an evangelical model in Saint Peter Claver, the Spanish Jesuit who, slave of the slaves, had evangelized African and Indian victims of the trade in Cartagena. This exemplary missionary had spoken words of love and forgiveness to people who breathed with vengeance and despair, and he had reconciled them with their fate, announcing that their slavery would earn them deliverance in the heavens. Today, missionaries across America accomplish the same task of softening the master’s harshness and improve the slaves’ morality, while they carefully avoid confronting the wall of separation which time had erected between the two classes. In her own sake, the Catholic Church has had to conform with customs and laws of those who dominate, and . . . she steers clear of the pitfalls where imprudence and lack of zeal could lead her.31 In 1888, the Church of Saint Peter Claver was consecrated by Neraz in San Antonio. The bishop and his successor, Jean-Antoine Forest, supported the education of black people.32 In spite of its Restoration conformism and its numerous fights against adversity, the French mission was very social and built institutions

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which began poor and fragile but became solid foundations. A priest was a social worker as well as a spiritual provider, but missionaries were in demand primarily for their schools and hospitals. A community of immigrants regrouped by religion but also by language and national origins, gathering around its curate for news, mutual aid, and “a beautiful ceremony.” Since then, schools and infirmaries have grown into high schools, universities, and hospital chains. If the missionaries succeeded materially, or colonially, did they succeed spiritually? Did they collect and save many souls? Odin complained to Father Anstaett about Catholics in Victoria who neglected to do their Christian duties. They had cried adamantly for a priest, but upon his arrival, they had not taken advantage of his ministry.33 Imported French Catholicism, however, did become a social and psychological support system in Texas, and this modern American enterprise continues in its mission to save souls. In the 1870s, French clout began to diminish when Dominic Manucy in Brownsville and bishop Nicolas Gallagher in Galveston appointed English-speaking Anglo and Irish priests. The recruiting of nursing sisters from France stopped, and in 1893, upon Gallagher’s request, minutes and records of Saint Mary’s congregation in Galveston ceased to be recorded in French. In 1903, twelve sisters of the Presentation arrived from Bordeaux at Saint Edward’s College in Austin, having been exiled because of French laws forbidding most religious congregations. They did not speak English and did cooking and cleaning for the rest of their lives. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when one-fifth of Texas’ three million inhabitants were Catholic, Galveston’s diocese had 320 sisters, twentyeight parish schools, seven academies, and five hospitals. When Louise Chollet, founder of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word in Texas, died in 1906, her congregation had 452 members and more than fifty religious institutions in five states, including thirty-four schools and academies, twelve hospitals, two orphanages, and two retirement homes. The oldest French legacy in Texas regarding medicine and health care was founded by three young sisters of Charity who came from Lyons’ Hospital de l’Antiquaille: Marie-Blandine Nathelin, Marie-Joseph Roussin, and Marie-Agnès Escudée. In 1866, they opened an infirmary in Galveston that became Saint Mary’s Hospital. In 1869, three other sisters of Charity went to San Antonio, where they opened the Santa Rosa infirmary, which later became a hospital. Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, a branch of the Galveston’s Sisters of Charity order, was also established in San Antonio, and the two groups have grown across Texas and the United States for a century and a half. In the twentieth century, they became sch, or Sisters of Charity of

153

French Catholic Missions

Houston, and iwhs, or Incarnate Word Health Systems of San Antonio. The two companies merged, or rather remerged, in 1999 and formed Christus Health, a large health care corporation that owns more than 40 hospitals and facilities in five American states and Mexico with assets of more than $3 billion. The all-giving, all-loving French sisters of 1866 had given birth to a health care conglomerate. The Daughters (not Sisters) of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul was founded in France in the seventeenth century and has had a branch in the United States since 1851 that was started by Elizabeth Seton. This religious order also became a large health industry, Ascension Health, after a merger between the Daughters of Charity and the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Nazareth, Michigan. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Daughters of Charity managed two Hotels Dieu, in Beaumont and El Paso. Saint Paul’s Hospital in Dallas and Seton and Saint Vincent de Paul Hospitals across Texas are the legacy of Monsieur Vincent’s Lazarists and of Sœur Louise de Marillac’s Filles de la Charité. Traces of their origins sometimes can be found: bits of French ancestry noted on the companies’ websites, for example, or a portrait of Saint Catherine Labouré on a wall next to a statue of Saint Vincent in a second-hand store or shelter staffed by the Daughters.34 French seeds and roots have become Texas trees and branches. In Texas in the year 2000, there were five million Catholics (one-fourth of the population), fourteen dioceses and one archdiocese (San Antonio), 1,012 churches, and 271 schools (all levels).35 Perhaps the most important French legacy in Texas is Catholicism restored, if not founded, by French nuns, priests, and bishops during the nineteenth century. The Catholic mission in Texas was an enterprise of socialization, as Emile Durkeim would soon portray religion, as well as a mission of evangelization, as defended at the time by pro-colonialist Ferdinand Brunetière. The Catholic mission was a colonial enterprise that succeeded, and Texas has benefited greatly from its French Catholic import. Notes 1. Sister Mary Doris Mulvey, French Catholic Missionaries in the Present United States (1604–1791) (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1936). 2. Patrick Foley, “Jean-Marie Odin, C.M., Missionary Bishop Extraordinaire of Texas,” Journal of Texas Catholic History and Culture 1, no. 1 (March 1990): 42–60. 3. James Vanderholt, Biographies of French Diocesan Priests in Nineteenth-Century Texas (San Antonio, 1978), photocopy, lists 115 priests of French origin, including 33 returning to France, 11 going to Louisiana and 3 to Mexico, 20 disappearing without leaving traces, and 49 dying in Texas, including 40 within five years after their arrival. Em-

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LAGARDE

manuel Domenech, Journal d’un Missionnaire au Texas et au Mexique (Paris: Gaume, 1857), xi, estimated that the Texas Catholic mission “is eminently French; nine tenths of the missionaries are French.” Yannick Essertel, “Lyon and the Distant Missions: The Texas Story,” Catholic Southwest 7 (January 1996): 115–130, estimates that Odin ordained 47 seminarians in Texas between 1846 and 1861, including 22 from Lyon. 4. Jean-Marie Odin was vice-prefect apostolic (1840), vicar apostolic (1841), bishop of Galveston (1847, first bishop of Texas), archbishop of New Orleans (1861). ClaudeMarie Dubuis was second bishop of Galveston (1862). Jean-Claude Neraz, born in Anse, was second bishop of San Antonio (1895). Jean-Antoine Forest, born in Saint-Martin-laSauveté, was third bishop of San Antonio (1895). In 1978, Pierre Dufal, born in SaintGervais d’Auvergne, was bishop coadjutor for one year. 5. Bernard Doyon, The Cavalry of Christ on the Rio Grande (Milwaukee: Bruce Press, 1956), 132. 6. See James T. Moore, Through Fire and Flood, the Catholic Church in Frontier Texas, 1836 –1900 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1992); Carlos Castañeda, The Church in Texas since Independence 1836–1950, vol. 7 of Our Catholic Heritage in Texas (Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones Company, 1958). 7. See Jean Perrichon, Vie de Monseigneur Dubuis, L’Apôtre du Texas (Lyon: Vitte, Ruiban & Paquet; and Roanne: Rébé, 1900), 19. 8. Odin to Anstaett, April 23, 1856, Correspondence, Jean-Marie Odin, 1833–1884, Catholic Archives of Texas (hereafter cited as cat), Austin, Archives of the University of Notre Dame (hereafter cited as aund). 9. See Essertel, “Lyon and the Distant Missions,” 129. Father Parisot, The Reminiscences of a Texas Missionary (San Antonio: Johnson Bros., 1899), 106, explained that for baptisms to be valid, correct Latin phrasing had to be used. 10. Odin to Propagation, May 30, 1855, Propagation of Faith Records, Correspondence (cat, aund). 11. See Lettre Pastorale, March 25, 1866: “Tremble and fear, for if you choose evil, cancer will spread from families to society to destroy it. You must not dare commit a crime against God, against your own family, and against society!” Episcopal Collection (cat). 12. Les Missions catholiques, September 4, 1874 (Lyon, France: Bureau des Missions Catholiques), 441. 13. Jean Gonard to Odin, May 14, 1861, Clergy Collection, Correspondence, Gonnard (cat). Gonnard’s letter is in English. 14. Sarah Curtis, “Supply and Demand: Religious Schooling in Nineteenth-Century France,” History of Education Quarterly 39, no. 1 (spring 1999): 52–72. 15. See Sister Mary Xavier, Father Jaillet, Saddlebag Priest of the Nueces (Corpus Christi: Incarnate Word Academy, 1948). 16. Odin to Propagation, May 14, 1845, Propagation of Faith Records, Correspondence (cat, aund). In Castroville, to “electrify” the assistants, Domenech and Dubuis fire one Bengal light, but smoke makes them cough. Domenech, Journal, 207. 17. Odin to Propagation, March 25, 1852, Propagation of Faith Records, Correspondence (cat, aund). Author’s translation.

French Catholic Missions

155

18. Claude-Marie Dubuis to Odin, November 9, 1861, Correspondence 1833–1884, Dubuis (cat, aund). 19. Ibid., March 2, 1867. 20. See Barnabas Diekemper, “The French Education of Texas, 1847–1860, An Interpretation,” Red River Valley Historical Review 6, no. 1 (March 1981): 71–79. 21. Odin to Propagation, May 15, 1845, Propagation of Faith Records, Correspondence (cat, aund); Anstaett to Odin, September 24 1861, Correspondence, 1833–1884, JeanMarie Odin (cat, aund). 22. Saint Irénée’s Superior to Odin, May 5, 1854, Propagation of Faith Records, Correspondence (cat, aund). 23. Emmanuel Domenech, Les Secrets de ma valise; voyages et souvenirs (Lyon: Librairie Générale Catholique et Classique, 1895), 71. 24. In 1872, Dubuis still traveled “a bit by train, a lot by carriage, and very often by horse,” wrote Louis Challand to Propagation, September 12, 1872, Propagation of Faith Records, Correspondence (cat, aund). 25. On Father François Derue’s suicide in Dallas in 1888 see a moving letter by Father Jacques Martinière to the Curate of Saint Julien-la-Vètre, 1833–1884, Correspondence, Jacques Martinière, (cat, aund). On Father Bourbon, who erred in the desert till he fell and died, see letter of Faure to Odin, May 15, 1865, 1833–1884, Correspondence, Odin (cat, aund). Keralum, the constructor of Brownsville’s cathedral, got lost in the desert and died. On Father Swagers’ and Father Miller’s drunkenness see letter of Wenniger to Odin, May 16, 1866, and letter of Neraz, January 2, 1882, 1833–1884, Correspondence, Odin, Neraz (cat, aund). 26. Louis Chambodut to Odin, March 6, 1862, Correspondence 1833–1884, Chambodut (cat, aund); Pierre Berthet to Odin, August 6, 1861, Correspondence 1833–1884, Chambodut (cat, aund). 27. Mary Ann Acosta, “Chambodut, Louis-Claude Marie,” in The New Handbook of Texas, ed. Ron Tyler, (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1997), 2:35. 28. Claude Thions to his parents, March 28, 1881, Correspondence, 1833–1884 (cat, aund). 29. Some missionaries worked among Indians: Parisot baptized a dozen Karankawas; Lynch and Fitzgerald visited among the Bidaï when they were almost exterminated. Domenech wrote: “Submission of Indians is possible only through Catholicism,” but he added that missionaries were afraid of being scalped. Domenech, Journal, 144. 30. Odin to Anstaedt, September 10, 1861, Correspondence 1833–1884, Odin (cat, aund); Act, January 9, 1847, passed between Timon and Odin. 31. Jean Charruau, L’esclave des nègres: Saint Pierre Claver (Paris: Pierre Tequi, 1914), 31. 32. Not every member of the Catholic Church shared such conformism toward slavery, and the Church has always sided with the poor. In the 1950s, “The Champion of Zapata,” Father Edward Bastien, an Oblate from Montreal, opposed federal administrators in Texas by defending all the way to Washington a community of Mexican people displaced by the construction of the Falcón Dam on the Rio Grande. See Maria F. Rollin,

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“The Champion of Zapata: Father Edward Bastien and the Fight for Just Compensation” (communication presented at the annual meeting of the Texas State Historical Association, Austin, March 3, 2000). 33. Odin to Anstaedt, Galveston, May 10, 1854. Correspondence 1833–1884, Odin (cat, aund). 34. Saint Catherine Labouré was a novice of the Daughters of Charity in Paris during the 1830s when she said that the Virgin was appearing to her. 35. The Official Catholic Directory for the Year of the Lord 2001 (New Providence, N.J.: P. J. Kennedy and Sons, 2001), 2155–2157.

12

BIRTH, STOCK, AND WORK French Immigration in Texas FRANÇOIS LAGARDE

Nationality does not equal culture, and being French differs from the ways implied by the U.S. Census Bureau’s categorization. But immigration patterns and flows are known in part from census figures, whose categories regarding nationality are used, inter alia, in this study. In Texas, there are French-born immigrants, admitted legally into the United States with residency and working rights. There is a larger group called French stock, consisting of the French-born and second- and sometimes third-generation native or U.S.-born.1 There is also a francophone category of “French and French Creole” speakers, usually larger than the two other groups due to Cajun immigration. In 1990, Texas officially had 16,986,510 inhabitants, of whom 1,524,436 (8.97 percent) were foreign-born. Of these, 5,544 were born in France, or 0.36 percent of Texas’ foreign-born population and 0.032 percent of the total Texas population. The French-born in Texas ranked twenty-second for all countries and were the third largest group from a European country, after Germany (34,058) and the United Kingdom (28,111) and before Poland (5,271) and Italy (4,297). A century earlier, in 1890, there were 2,730 French-born in Texas, or 1.78 percent of the state’s foreign-born population and 0.12 percent of the total Texas population. In 1860, a U.S. marshal assistant established a census for Austin and listed 8,824 horses, 1,095 asses and mules, 61,109 cows and bulls, 15,338 sheep, 8,125 pigs, 3,140 “Negroes,” 332 Germans, 40 English, 37 Irish, 31 Swedes, 21 Swiss, and 14 French.2 In 1990, there was 1 French-born person per 3,064 Texans, 163 Mexicans, 10 Vietnamese, 9 Salvadorans, 6 Germans, 6 Indians (India), 5 United Kingdom natives, 5 Philippines, 4.5 Koreans, 4 Canadians, 3 Chinese, 3 Taiwanese, 2 Cubans, 2 Colombians, 2 Guatemalans, 2 Iranians, 2 Japanese, 1.6 Nigerians, 1.5 Laotians, 1.2 Nicaraguans, 1 Panamanian, 1

157

158

LAGARDE

Norwegian, and 1 Thai. In 1990, there were more Laotians and more Nigerians in Texas than there were French. These samples speak for themselves: French immigration in Texas has always been very small. Admittedly, French-born is less representative than French stock, which is roughly three to four times larger. Still, the figures are so small that the French in Texas cannot even be called a minority. The 2000 Census figures regarding the foreign-born in Texas (to be published in summer 2002) should show an increase in their numbers, but even if the figures are put at 9,000 French-born and 25,000 French stock, they represent only one French-born per 2,300 Texan inhabitants, and one French-stock per 830 Texans, mere drops in the Texas ocean. A history and geography of French immigration in Texas can be partially reconstituted, although more is known about the nineteenth than the twentieth century, as is also the case for the French in California.3 In addition to census records (handwritten or printed) and Immigration and Naturalization Service (ins) reports, sources of information include memoirs, city and county histories, Who’s Who publications, newspaper articles, and a handful of related studies. Some archived reports and correspondence from Texas-based French consuls are available primarily for the nineteenth century. For the twentieth century, the correspondence of Jean-Marie Romagny in El Paso and of Galveston Vice-Consuls Genoyer and de Smedt during World War I are still to be researched in detail. The vice-consuls of Galveston— St-Cyr, Théron (of the infamous Civil War conspiracy), Fauconnet, Borelly, Glaudut, Lobit, and Adoue—mention and sometimes portray French immigrants in Texas. Altogether, four to five hundred surnames of “French” immigrants in Texas could be listed today, with a few remembered for their fortune or their achievements and most only as names on tombstones or in registers. A majority of French immigrants in Texas remain forever faceless. Two historical subgroups, Alsatians and Cajuns, are called French by categorization. Alsatians were French by nationality. Cajuns were French because of their language and their origin. Alsatians are more German by language if not by culture and, after 1871, by annexation. Rémond writes of Alsatian emigration as a tributary of the German emigration current,4 and Jordan sees Castroville as a colony of “2,000 German-speaking settlers, including many Alsatians.” He adds, “Castroville and Fredericksburg have splendid Gothic structures,” typically mixing French and German.5 Census takers seem to have always registered Alsatians as Germans. Fouché indicates that isolated Alsatians who wanted to join a settlers’ group in Texas during the nineteenth century congregated with Germans and not French.6 When a French TV crew came to Castroville in

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Birth, Stock, and Work

TA B L E 12 . 1

French-born and French Stock in Texas by Census Year CENSUS

FRENCH-BORN

F R E N C H STO C K

1850

647

1860

1,883

1870

2,232

1880

2,653

1890

2,730

6,500

1900

2,025

6,304

1910

1,811

5,805

1920

2,544

8,112

1930

1,803

10,185

1940

1,233

6,833

1950

1,656

7,611

1960

2,444

8,951

1970

2,860

8,992

1980

4,941

n.a.

1990

5,544

n.a.

the 1990s to film a documentary, the inhabitants refused to be portrayed as French and demanded they be called “Alsatians.” Cajuns speak French-derived languages that the French-born can understand, but culturally, if not “ethnically,” they are Americans from Louisiana who have immigrated to Texas since the eighteenth century. Cajuns and French-born immigrants have a distant past in common and belong to a francophone community, within which Quebecois and other French Canadians should be included as well, if only to form a francophone group. The 1990 Census estimates that 64,585 “French or French Creole” speakers lived in Texas, a number approximately eleven times that of the French-born population. As Dean Louder and Michel Leblanc have written: Texas francophones are predominantly transplanted Louisianans. In fact, like its Bayou-state counterpart, the French population of

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Texas is extremely heterogeneous. Black francophones, according to the 1970 Census, constituted 22 percent of the total native-born French-mother-tongue population of Texas, whereas they constituted 16 percent of Louisiana. The rest are Cajuns.7 Texas had 10,670 francophones in 1920 and six times more, 64,585, in 1990. But these numbers are hypothetical. The 2000 Census Supplemental Survey indicated a decrease in French speakers after the category “Cajun” had been deleted and replaced with “French Canadian” in census questionnaires. Between nineteenth-century Alsatians and twentieth-century Cajuns lay the French-born who did not come from Alsace or Louisiana or French stock. Census tables show a small but constant flow of immigration, from 647 French-born in 1850 to 5,544 in 1990, with perhaps 8,000 or 9,000 in 2000 (table 1). Progression (in numbers, not in percentage) was constant until the last decade of the nineteenth century and fell during the twentieth century, as did most immigration across the United States, due to wars and U.S. legislation imposing quotas, ceilings, and preferences. Immigration increased again after World War ii and peaked in 2000. French males immigrated to Texas in much greater proportion than French women during the nineteenth century, when there were two to three times more French fathers and husbands than French wives and mothers. But this trend began to reverse after World War ii and continued until the women outnumbered the men (1,683 French-born females for 748 males in 1960). “War brides,” other marriages, and family-sponsored immigration must explain such changes. For the year 1997, ins reported 2,568 legal immigrants from France to the United States, including 1,188 spouses of U.S. citizens, 176 children and parents, and 146 family-sponsored people for 727 employment-based persons.8 Geographically, the French first came to Texas along the Mississippi and Red Rivers from Nouvelle France and Louisiana. Then Galveston became the port of entry and the largest “French city” in Texas until the 1890s. Most immigrants heading to Castroville or San Antonio arrived at Lavaca. A few French emigrated from Mexico after Maximilian’s venture or fleeing the revolutions. French brides of American soldiers were among the last to arrive by boat after World War ii when immigration became airborne and the trip that once had taken three months now took less than a day. In 1895, French Consul Henri Mérou wrote in his memoirs that two hundred French families of respectable but modest means lived in Galveston. The French language was disappearing, even among French families.

Birth, Stock, and Work

161

A young man responded to the consul about speaking French: “What for? What good does it bring to speak this language when everything in society and business is done in English? If it were German, maybe it would be useful to practice it, but French?” 9 After Galveston, San Antonio was the next largest “French city” in Texas during the nineteenth century. Located in German immigration country, Austin has never been very “French.” There are also fewer French companies in the capital city than in the Dallas –Fort Worth area or in Houston. There have been more French in El Paso, Brownsville, and Corpus Christi than in Laredo, Lubbock, or Amarillo. In 1990, 25 percent of the 5,544 French-born lived in Houston, followed by Dallas –Fort Worth (11 percent), San Antonio (7 percent), Austin, and El Paso. The same year, Galveston County had become the ninth largest county for French-speakers and the French-born. Medina County, where Castroville was founded, had 0 French-speakers, 547 German speakers (i.e., Alsatian, for the most part), and 2 French-born (see Table 12.2). French-born immigrants in 1990 concentrated in the large cities and Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (smsas): Houston, Dallas –Fort Worth, San Antonio, Austin, and El Paso, in that order. French and French-Creole speakers were found in Harris County (Houston) and its adjacent counties (from Brazoria to Jefferson and Liberty Counties), followed by Dallas –Fort Worth. The San Antonio and Austin smsas were almost equal in numbers of francophones (see Table 12.3). Historically, the first French natives to enter Spanish Texas could have been the “two Frenchmen” whom T. R. Fehrenbach mentioned as members of Vásquez de Coronado’s entrada of 1540, although these soldiers either marched on or died.10 La Salle’s 280 colonists would have immigrated if they had not disappeared so quickly. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, temporary French immigration from Natchitoches and the Red or Sabine Rivers took place in Spanish Texas. A handful of various “French” people, from French Canadian explorers and traders to Galveston pirates and Champ d’Asile exiles, spent some time in Texas but did not immigrate. French immigration started at the time of the Republic of Texas. An immigrant was then a foreign-born person who, after emigrating, stayed abroad; he or she moved at first but eventually settled down, raised a family, and died in the new country. Auguste Frétellière, who came to Castroville but returned to France after a year (his mother paid for his return trip), for example, was not an immigrant. The French initially came in small groups.11 The first large group to immigrate successfully—those who did not return home, die soon, or move on —were Castro’s colonists, including many of the 1,800 Alsatians who moved to Texas between 1843 and 1869.12 The two hundred or so

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LAGARDE

TA B L E 12 . 2

French-born in Texas per county, city, or Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) G A LV E STO N

HARRIS, H O U STO N

DA L L AS

TA R R A NT, F O RT WO RT H

BEXAR, SA N A NTO N I O

EL PAS O

T R AV I S , AU ST I N

1870 county

303

151

79

3

346

4

51

421

156

161

42

293

4

64

393

181

247

96

415

46

56

357

152

173

66

252

23

30

county

185

177

187

55

256

91

46

city

183

135

144

43

230

85

26

148

174

155

58

477

105

26

1880 county 1890 county 1900 county 1910

1920 city 1930 county

116

253

170

70

417

80

41

stock

485

1,337

728

309

1,495

256

110

58

221

116

46

253

47

21

n.a.

288

137

41

230

63

50

1,529

910

463

1,417

499

261

624

448

167

484

240

115

1940 county 1950 “City & Adjacent” 1960 SMSA

n.a.

Stock Speakers* 1970 SMSA

n.a.

Stock Speakers

453

171

90

264

121

52

1,470

696

347

1,100

396

230

29,476

5,831

2,784

4,789

1,458

1,064

1980 county

n.a.

Speakers

1,348

685

250

567

259

247

13,662

5,390

2,200

2,119

676

512

1990 city ancestry

n.a.

1,379

463

135

403

213

306

48,441

26,730

14,472

21,893

7,978

16,708

* French or French-Creole speakers

163

Birth, Stock, and Work

TA B L E 12 . 3

Number of French-born immigrants and of French and French-Creole speakers, per county C O U NT Y

Bell

FOREIGN-BORN

SPEAKERS

81

672

574

2,784

Bowie

38

180

Brownsville

33

170

Collin

41

949

Coryell

41

285

Dallas

738

7,035

Denton

61

863

El Paso

219

870

Fort Bend

86

832

Galveston

55

1,680

Jefferson (Beaumont)

49

7,117

1,722

17,948

Lubbock

79

514

Montgomery

80

636

Nueces (Corpus Christi)

51

694

Palo Pinto

42

139

Potter (Amarillo)

13

179

Smith

37

413

443

3,904

Taylor

19

427

Tom Green (San Angelo)

30

175

401

2,655

23

338

Bexar (San Antonio)

Harris (Houston)

Tarrant (Fort Worth)

Travis (Austin) Williamson

priests and nuns who came from the 1840s to 1880s constitute another group. More than half spent their life in Texas, although presumably none engendered any first-generation French natives. The third group, the Utopist Icarians of 1848, quickly immigrated to Illinois. Another Utopist

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group, the Fourierists of 1855, failed as a group but continued to immigrate to Texas as individuals; only one of the original settlers stayed on the Fourierist farm. These groups were all indoctrinated by capitalist, socialist, or Catholic ideology. They had faith in their immigration. Other categories would come later: French spouses after the world wars and the engineers and managers of the 1980s and 1990s. Immigration, for the most part, was an individual enterprise. Most immigrants came alone or with their families, following a variety of sea and land paths. The attraction was always economic, even when there were family or “ethnic” ties or migratory chains. Migrants came to Texas to work the land, to trade, to practice their professions, to make a fortune or just a good living. Texas was the Promised Land; it was “America,” where work and success could be found. And Texas needed laborers. In 1871, Lorenzo Castro, son of Henri Castro, wrote that Alsatians who had lost everything after the Prussian War should be encouraged to immigrate to Texas.13 Railroad companies recruited in France during the 1870s and 1880s, and the superintendent of the Texas Bureau of Immigration from 1871 to 1874 wanted to print brochures in French advertising Texas as the railroad companies did. A newly appointed Bureau of Immigration commissioner for Europe recruited a hundred people from Alsace and Lorraine in the port of Bremen in one day during December 1871.14 Xavier de Bray, the Civil War Confederate hero who was Galveston’s immigration bureau agent in 1874, mentioned a Mr. Mathis, a native of Lorraine, who was expecting to bring a large number of immigrants from there.15 While most immigrants, according to the superintendent’s reports, were “amply provided for,” some had to borrow from an unknown future Texan employer to pay for the voyage. An 1881 brochure published by the Société Foncière et Agricole des États-Unis (an entity of the Franco-Texan Land Company), titled Le Texas, les ressources et les avantages qu’il offre aux agriculteurs, promotes an arrangement by which the Société grants to the immigrants a 150-acre farm, complete with equipment and animals. Sharecroppers pay by using annual shares of harvest and production. In 1876, the infamous Franco-Texan Land Company owned 600,000 acres west of Fort Worth and north of San Angelo, the remains of a land grant by the Texas legislature to the Memphis, El Paso, and Pacific Railroad. After the Civil War, John Fremont had used that grant as mortgage for raising securities on the Paris Bourse, or stock exchange, and after a series of fiascoes and scandals, the French bond holders received 13 acres for each $100 bond. Large and small bond holders of the Franco-Texan Land Company came to Texas and settled in and around Weatherford, where the company was headquartered. Henry du Bellet, André Chaptive,

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and George Levy were the French directors until the company disbanded in 1899. Paul de Bresson raised horses in Weatherford, where a small community of French farmers and animal raisers was established. In 1881, Léon Chotteau thought to export live cattle to France and to “import” immigrants for the Société Foncière et Agricole. As with the empresarios, people were still traded for land. Virginia Taylor found that hundreds of immigrants came on Chotteau’s Compagnie Générale Transatlantique ships.16 Immigrants led very different lives from one another, depending upon their personal fortunes. George Levy, elected mayor of Weatherford in 1892, crossed the Atlantic forty times and finished his life in a French country castle, as did Dubois de Saligny. Meanwhile, the Chauvaux family came from Bourgogne in 1882 in the Franco-Texan’s tow. They were farmers and moved from Weatherford to the Panhandle looking for the Promised Land, which for them meant a land that had water and no grasshoppers. They never returned to Bourgogne, and the parents never fully became anglophone. But the children did and married both payses and U.S. natives.17 Nineteenth-century French immigrants became farmers, ranchers, merchants, entrepreneurs, and bankers. Some became rich, many joined the middle class, and some remained poor. Others moved on or returned to France. Claude Pillot, born in Haute-Saonne, was already farming in Harris County during the 1830s. His son Eugene, a Harris County treasurer, started as a carpenter and ended up owning the Tremont Opera House. George Brulay, born in Paris in 1839, opened a mercantile business in Brownsville in 1876. He also farmed cotton and sugarcane with modern irrigation from the Rio Grande. Sylvain Letot, who had been a soldier in the Crimean War and had served under General Grant in the U.S. Civil War, farmed near Dallas, where a small town named Letot grew up near the railroad. Letot owned a store, a gristmill, and a cotton gin, and he was the postmaster. One historian described him as having “a sunny, optimistic nature,” while another person called him a stubborn miser.18 His son, Clément, born in Bourgogne, married an Alsatian and had ten children. Mayer Halff, born in Lauterbourg in 1836, and his brother Salomon started with a store, then bought land, loaned money, and traded cattle. After the Civil War, they owned more than one million acres of West Texas land and were partners in the Laramie Cattle Company. They drove cattle along the Chisholm Trail and founded a bank in San Antonio. Charles Armand Schreiner, born in 1838 in Riguewihr, became a Texas Ranger and a rancher in Kerr County. He bought a store in Kerrville, joined the Third Texas Infantry during the Civil War, became county

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Raymond Martin became a wealthy businessman and a powerful political boss

in Webb County during the second half of the nineteenth century. He came from the Department of Haute Garonne in southwestern France, where immigration traditionally has been important. A Twentieth Century History of Southwest Texas (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1907). Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.

treasurer, started a wool and mohair company and a bank, and founded a college. Raymond Martin’s fortunes resemble Schreiner’s and Halff’s. Born in 1828 in Haute Garonne, Martin immigrated during the 1850s to New Orleans, San Antonio, and then Laredo, where he opened a store and ventured into ranching, banking, and politics (figure 12.1). He headed the Botas party against the Guaraches and was behind the 1886 Laredo Election Riot that left thirty people dead. He operated a ferry across the Rio Grande, then a bridge, and owned waterworks. He became a hispanophone, not an anglophone, and fought against Prohibition, believing that drinking was a constitutional and religious right. He became the mayor of Laredo, and his son Albert and grandson Joseph “Pepe” followed him in that post.19 Mercantile enterprise attracted immigrants in search of Fortuna, or opportunities. In San Antonio, François Guilbeau owned a store, culti-

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vated land, and worked in the freight business between San Antonio, Port Lavaca, and the Rio Grande. Edward Tschirhart, born in Castroville, and Joseph Mény were also in the freighting business and hauled cotton during the Civil War. Louis Oge, born in Alsace-Lorraine in 1832, arrived in Castroville as a child. He became a Texas Ranger, an Indian fighter, a mail carrier between San Antonio and El Paso, and “one of the wealthiest citizens” of San Antonio.20 Abraham Levi, born in Hatte, Alsace, began with a store in Victoria and ended with an ice works and the Victoria Bank and Trust. Jean-Baptiste Adoue, born in Aurignac, started out with a store in Waco and ended with the National Bank of Commerce in Dallas in 1892. His brother Bertrand Adoue started in Brownsville and along the Houston and Central Texas Railroad and ended with a bank, a brewing company, and a hotel in Galveston. He supported the Catholic Church there, when Saint Patrick’s Church and Saint Mary’s School were still French, and he founded a seamen’s house. There was a Société Française de Bienfaisance et d’Assistance Mutu-elle [French Society of Charity and Mutual Assistance] in Galveston and a French mutual aid society in San Antonio but none in Dallas. Both Adoues were associated with the Lobit brothers, who were French. Emanuel Meyer Kahn, born in Alsace in 1849, opened a store in Dallas in 1872 and founded a synagogue and the American National Bank. The brothers Léon and Sylvain Blum owned the mercantile firm Blum & Co. in Galveston, with offices in New York and Boston and on Boulevard Haussman in Paris. The brothers Bremond were second-generation French, sons of an émigré physician in New York. Paul built railroads in Houston, and John made his fortune in commerce and banking in Austin. Aimé Jay, who traveled in Texas in 1880 as a French insurance salesman and whose memoir was published, portrays Jean-Baptiste Lacoste as a rich and corrupt player in San Antonio politics.21 He sold equipment to the military during the Mexican War and owned the San Antonio waterworks. He was in Mexico as a supporter of Maximilian. He returned to San Antonio and was elected county treasurer, thanks to free whiskey, parades, and the French, Irish, and Spanish vote. Jay mentions also “a Frenchman, a Parisian, Mr. Carlin, who has somewhere along the Rio Grande a sheep ranch that is worth 180,000 piasters, and he started penniless.”22 Jay met with a Saint Cyrian, who had been a soldier in Africa and had been exiled to Texas by his family council. There were, however, more middle-class, lower-middle-class, and poor French immigrants in Texas than there were French with fortunes. Adolphe Gouhénant survived the Icarians and became the private tutor of Major Ripley A. Arnold’s children in Fort Worth and a photographer in Dallas. Gernand became a dance master after the failure of the Fouri-

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erists’ Reunion colony. Maxime Guillot from Angers established a carriage factory in Dallas after the Civil War and brought his wife and four apprentices from France. The brothers Adolphe and Sébastien Drouet ferried freight by sea along the Texas coast. R. P. Henri, an engraver, worked in a Dallas gun factory during the Civil War. The brothers Rousseau traded under a tent at the corner of Preston and Milam in Houston. One of the brothers was robbed and killed; the other had a parrot who swore in French and a daughter who died from poison, a loss which made him go to California in his old age.23 Some educated colonists acted as colonizers, intent on bringing progress and civilization to Texas. At a time when Paris was becoming the world capital of medicine, French doctors immigrating to Texas believed that they could bring scientific advancement to the undeveloped country. Théodore Léger typifies such lay missionaries of France’s mission civilisatrice. He had been a professor of midwifery in Paris, a member of the Medical College of Mexico, and a vice president of the Medical Society of New Orleans before going to Texas in 1836. He attended Stephen F. Austin at the time of his death and became a supporter of Mirabeau Lamar, for whom he printed in Brazoria a short-lived newspaper, The People. In 1838, he published an extraordinary brochure titled Essay on the Particular Influence of Prejudices in Medicine over the Treatment of the Disease most common in Texas, Intermittent fever; preceded by a few General Observations on Medical Theories. In a style that is both burlesque and professorial, Léger attacked a theory of medical errors and impostors from Gallien to Stahl. The pompous doctor claimed to belong to a long line of French physicians, from Pinel to Broussais, and was a partisan of the eclectic school, in likely reference to Victor Cousin. For Léger, medicine was too often “the art of seeing patients die” in Texas, and he wished he could be Molière: “Divine Providence! Why have we not a Molière in Texas!”24 Eclecticism would show “how many ages behind the march of science is the majority of those who, in the Texian Republic, adorn themselves with the title of Doctor.”25 Léger prescribed quinine mixed with “good French wine” in the treatment of intermittent fever, or malaria. The French doctor clearly disdained the standard prescription of calomel (chloride of mercury): “Calomel and Blue-pills form their heavy artillery; then advance in second rank, Jalap and Rhubarb; Epsom salts and Castor oil bring up the rear, and to borrow the words of Molière’s Malade imaginaire, Si la maladia non vult guerire, Repurgaro, resaignare, recalomelisare [If the illness does not want to be cured, Purgate again, bleed again, and calomelize again!]”26 Léger’s Essay is the soapbox of a progressive, a member of “the great party of the future, and of

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progress,” as Victor Considerant would call his Fourierists in a speech to the Congress at Austin in 1855.27 A botanist turned doctor, Jean-Louis Berlandier’s life shows how immigration is shaped by economic imperatives. He was French by a few kilometers, born near Fort de l’Ecluse, close to the Swiss border, probably around 1800. In Geneva, he attended the Academy, where he studied and worked with naturalist Pyrame de Candolle, author of the encyclopedic Podromus. Candolle sent his young assistant to Mexico to collect natural history specimens to be shipped, sold, and studied in Europe. Berlandier arrived in Mexico in 1826 and accompanied Mier y Terán’s Boundary Commission across the Spanish provinces. From fall 1827 to spring 1828, he explored in Texas around Gonzales, San Felipe, and San Antonio. He contracted malaria and returned to Matamoros to recover. There he married and had several children. He became a doctor and continued to collect plants, particularly around Goliad, although his relationship with Candolle had ceased to be productive. He drowned in the San Fernando River in 1851; he was not yet fifty. Berlandier admired Humboldt, read Greek and Latin, and wrote a journal of his voyages in Mexico and Texas, a 1,500-page handwritten manuscript. Although the journal has never been published in French, it has been translated and published in English.28 The naturalist collected specimens and recorded observations of the flora and the fauna; a true scientist, he studied geology, the sky, the climate, the geography, the economy (he was a passionate Physiocrat), the Indian, the Creole, and other peoples of the Spanish provinces. He also observed the territory as a prospector, envisioning agricultural or mining enterprises (cotton and coal) that would benefit Texas. But none of these interests occupied Berlandier’s life. He became a doctor of the poor in Matamoros, not another Humboldt.29 The 1870 U.S. Census contains a quaint table of Selected Occupations, with Age and Sex, and Nativity. It lists a total of 2,060 French-born individuals ten years of age and older, of whom 1,078 have occupations. •

Three hundred eighty-three or 35 percent worked in agriculture, including 272 “farmers and planters” and 72 laborers.

•

Two hundred eighty-six or 25 percent were employed in “professional and personal services,” including 36 clergymen (a state record that year among foreign-born by nationality) 52 domestic servants, 76 laborers, 23 teachers, 16 U.S. soldiers, 10 barbers, 7 “officials and employés [sic] (civil) of Government,” 6 physicians, and 1 lawyer (out of 1,027 for Texas).

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•

Two hundred and four or 19 percent are in “trade and transportation,” including 127 traders and dealers, 25 clerks, 30 car men, and 16 sailors.

•

Two hundred twenty-three or 20 percent are in “manufacture and mining,” including 49 carpenters, 17 bakers, 16 blacksmiths, 18 boot and shoe makers, 18 butchers, 20 masons, 15 tailors, 10 fishermen, and 5 painters.

This table shows that a majority of French immigrants belonged to the working class of artisans, laborers, servants, employees, clerks, and so forth. Not every immigrant “arrived” in Texas, and Paul Sauvalle tells of his failed ranching venture and miserable time drifting along the Louisiana and Texas Railroad in the company of two “wrecks” from the 1871 Paris commune, hopping freight trains and hunting for jobs.30 The twentieth century is marked by a decrease in immigration, followed by an increase.31 In 1900, there was only one French-born person in Paris, Texas, but eight French coal miners in Thurber.32 In 1920, AlsaceLorraine was counted as French again, but the two world wars and U.S. immigration policies kept immigration low until the 1950s, when immigration once again grew along with the economy. Cajuns came in great numbers after Spindletop in the Golden Triangle (Beaumont, Orange, Port Arthur). Frenchtown, in Houston’s Fifth Ward, where patois was the language of life and music, housed a community of Cajuns attracted by railroad work during the 1930s. After World War ii, French Louisianians also moved to Brownsville and along the Gulf for shrimping. France recalled her nationals for both wars, and one can follow the saga of Adrien Chabrier and other World War i soldiers in the diplomatic correspondence of Romagny in El Paso. U.S. soldiers of the European wars and later those stationed in Europe in conjunction with nato married French women, and some of those couples came to live in Texas, where the U.S. Air Force maintains large bases.33 The young women from the provinces often had a difficult time adapting to life in America, and those who married black soldiers had to live on base because of segregation. Dual citizenship became available in the 1970s. During the last three decades of the twentieth century, French economic investment in Texas increased greatly, and numerous acquisitions of Texan facilities by French multinationals triggered a migration of managers and engineers. Most of these employees stayed in Texas only temporarily, but some stayed and immigrated. Few French in Texas of the twentieth century are known. Marius Chataignon, born in Célieu in 1886 and ordained in Galveston in 1911, became a famous U.S. Army chaplain known as “Father Chat” (Figure 12.2). Benjamin Foulois, “father” of U.S. military aviation, has been pre-

12.2

The Rev. Marius Chataignon, or “Father Chat,” was a U.S. Army chaplain during

World War i and in Italy and north Africa during World War ii. He was awarded the Legion of Merit by General Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Bronze Star. This photograph was taken in 1943. Photographer unknown. Catholic Archives of Texas, Clergy Collection.

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sented as a French Texan, but he was second-generation French (in a migrational sense). His memoirs do not contain any particular “Frenchness.” The Schlumbergers are well known and represent the exception in terms of culture. They brought a great deal of culture, including French culture to Houston, while most immigrants brought their labor and their professional skills. Gaston Mélies, George’s brother, worked in San Antonio in 1910 but soon migrated to California. Marion Koogler, founder of the McNay Museum in San Antonio, brought Etienne Ret, a French poet and cubist painter, to her Art Institute in the 1940s, but he withered there. A few Texas universities have had departments of French disseminating high culture and francophony with some success. Among French scholars are historian and Jesuit Gérard Decormé, who lived in a monastery near El Paso,34 master architect Paul-Philippe Cret of the Austin University of Texas campus, and George Engerrand, a botanist, archaeologist, and anthropologist of repute. But no twentieth-century entrepreneurs surfaced, with the exception of the Schlumberger brothers. In March 1954, Jacques Villere, manager at the Mercantile National Bank in Dallas, established a Liste partielle des Français à Dallas that contains sixty-one names, of which forty-three are women’s names.35 Only three of the women were not married (or at least were not listed as Mme but Mlle), and on the basis on their surnames and information regarding their husbands, about thirty of the women must have been married to Americans. Half of the persons on the list were “naturalized,” as opposed to “French,” since dual nationality did not exist in 1954. Twenty-seven professions were indicated, including five professors, one dance instructor, four cooks or restaurant workers, three secretaries, two businessmen, two tailors, two technicians, two engineers, two employees, one shoemaker, one accountant, and two sculptors, Raoul Josset and José Martin. As in 1870, the French living in Dallas during the 1950s belonged largely to the middle and working classes, according to this list. Genealogists discover immigrants who have been forgotten except by a few descendants. Joseph Dubray was born in the Orne Department in 1884 and came to America in 1903, following his brother Charles (Figure 12.3). Dubray taught French, music, and the classics in Louisiana, then in 1909 moved to San Antonio, where he became a school superintendent. He established the Saint Anthony Business College in Fredericksburg in 1910 and married an Alsatian from D’Hanis after the death of his first wife, an Irish nurse. In 1923, after the high school opened in Fredericksburg, Dubray moved to Austin and became head of Saint Edward’s University’s business department and music director. He died of cancer at age forty-four, leaving six children.36 What is the legacy of this successful, nearly forgotten immigrant? In 2000, his children and grandchildren cited

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“respect for education, the Catholic faith, a strong sense of family, and love of music” as some of the values inherited from Joseph Dubray. Bishops Dubuis and Neraz would have been pleased. Today, French people migrate before they immigrate. They come to Texas for jobs, for marriages, or for other turns of events. They stay temporarily and migrate to France again. Often, immigration takes twenty to thirty years. Children, property, and situations of all sorts attach a person to a place. In 1999, the author interviewed sixty French residents of Austin, along with four from San Antonio and one from Houston, about their migration.37 Why and how had they come to Texas, what had been their experience as immigrants in Texas, and how did they see their future? A variety of reasons and journeys brought these French-born people to Austin, but family ties and jobs (including studies and training) were the main reasons, which corresponds to ins’ visa distribution. Occasionally, a crisis in France—from personal conflict to unemployment—had

12.3

Joseph Dubray was a musician, a professor, and a school administrator. He and

his family moved around Texas, driven by economics and their Catholic faith. Collection of Gregg Goodnight.

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A Café de Paris was opened next to the pavilion that France hosted for the 1968

Hemisfair international exhibition in San Antonio. All the chefs came from France, and most of them remained in Texas or elsewhere in the United States after the restaurant closed. The University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio.

triggered an expatriation. But often chance as well as precise preparation played a role in some migrants’ fate. Half had lived in another foreign country before residing in Texas; several had lived in Africa. Most of them kept strong ties with France, going there often, although a few had not been back for decades. Practically all French people in Austin were white; most of them were middle-class, a few of them upper-middle-class, notwithstanding some illegal nannies and garçons (Figure 12.4). Assimilation is easier for adults who work and children who go to school, as can be seen in the difficulties experienced by spouses, who at first cannot work and are isolated. Small children abruptly transplanted can experience difficulties in adapting. Immigration goes through stages: arrival, insertion, acculturation, assimilation, naturalization. But for first-generation French immigrants, becoming a citizen is more of an administrative process than a sign of true naturalization: peau française et masque U.S. (French skin and American mask), to paraphrase Frantz Fanon.38

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In immigrant families, the first generation remains “French” through family, language, cultural origin, or the “heart.” But French culture does not cross over. French is not spoken or lived in Texas; it becomes a private affair, an origin or a past. This first generation is not the generation of early immigration that was “sacrificed” in the nineteenth century, but it remains hyphenated, semicultural, or even postcultural. Some immigrants do not feel that they belong to any culture in particular; they are globalized, no longer from anywhere. Their children, native or not, are more American than French and often do not speak their mother tongue well.39 Immigration is a generational process, and it can be rapid. Within the third or fourth generations, French becomes an ancestry. In 1990, 571,175 Texans indicated French as one of their ancestries. Immigration is almost a Darwinian process. The newcomer has to evolve and adapt in a different terrain. Success — economic and social integration — is dependent upon cultural transformation. The French immigrant usually assimilates quickly; he keeps an accent but is Americanized. His Frenchness becomes private, secondary, trivial. No salad bowl for immigrants of very small groups. They continue to be thrown, however gently, into a melting pot. Notes 1. “First generation” has two meanings or usages: a genealogical one that refers to the first native generation, the first stock born on U.S. soil, and a “migrational” meaning that refers to the first generation to immigrate in a family. The author uses first generation in its “migrational” sense. 2. The 1860 Austin Census was taken by Samuel Wood; see Frank Brown, Annals of Travis County and of the City of Austin: from the earliest times to the close of 1875, vol. 18, chapter 20, 26–27. Unless specified otherwise, figures are from U.S. censuses. 3. See Annick Foucrier, Le Rêve Californien, Migrants français sur la côte Pacifique (XVIIe–XXe siècles) (Paris: Belin, 1999). 4. René Rémond, Les Etats-Unis devant l’opinion française, 1815–1852 (Paris: Colin, 1962). 5. Terry Jordan, Immigration to Texas (Boston: American Press, 1980), 27. 6. Nicole Fouché, Émigration alsacienne aux États-Unis 1815–1870 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1992). 7. Dean R. Louder and Michel Leblanc, “The Cajuns of East Texas,” in French America: Mobility, Identity, and Minority Experience across the Continent, ed. Dean R. Louder and Eric Waddell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 309. 8. U.S. Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service (ins), 1997 Statistical Yearbook (October 1999), 231.

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9. Henri Mérou, Coins de France en Amérique (Paris: Basset, 1912), 18. 10. T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star. A History of Texas and the Texans (New York: Collier Books, 1980), 23–24. 11. Terry G. Jordan, “Population Origins in Texas, 1850,” Geographical Review 59, no. 1 (spring 1969): 85–103, picks a total of 1,071 French surnames from the 1850 Census, including “American-born with Spanish or French surnames.” His map titled “Culture Areas” has four F’s, for “Sizable French Minorities,” one for Bexar and Medina Counties (i.e., Castroville), and one each for Harris, Liberty, and Jefferson Counties. Jordan believed that migrants clustered linguistically and culturally, as indicated by the grouping of “56 percent of the French-surname population in four counties,” 99. 12. Fouché, Émigration alsacienne, 238. 13. Lorenzo Castro, Immigration from Alsace and Lorraine, A Brief Sketch of the History of Castro’s Colony in Western Texas (New York: G. H. Wheat & Co., 1871). 14. Report of the Superintendent of the Bureau of Immigration of the State of Texas, Austin, 1873, 5. 15. Ibid., 1874, 11. 16. See Virginia Taylor, The Franco-Texan Land Company (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969). 17. Robert Robertson, “Texas: La terre promise,” West Texas Historical Association Yearbook 73 (1997): 11–30. 18. Francis W. Johnson, A History of Texas and Texans (Chicago and New York: American Historical Society, 1914) 3:2551; Sam Acheson, Dallas Yesterday (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1997), 82. 19. See Jerry D. Thompson, Warm Weather and Bad Whiskey: The 1886 Laredo Election Riot (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1991). 20. Johnson, History of Texas, 2169. 21. Aimé Jay, A Travers les États-Unis d’Amerique (Niort: L. Clouzot, 1884). 22. Ibid., 106. 23. Dr. S. O. (Samuel Oliver) Young, True Stories of Old Houston and Houstonians (Galveston: Oscar Spinger Publisher, 1913), 95. 24. Ibid., 11. 25. Ibid., 12. 26. Léger has replaced Molière’s “reclysterisare” (to administer clysters, or enemas) with his own “recalomelisare” (to administer calomel). 27. Victor Considerant, European Colonization in Texas: An Address to the American People (New York: Baker, Godwin & Co., 1877), 10. In 1837, Frédéric Leclerc, also a doctor and a colonizer, encountered an old Indian chief who had cured a Texan officer of malaria, and Leclerc attempted to learn the Indian’s secret, but to no avail. He wondered whether the Indian knew about quinine or about vaccination, after he was shown children bearing what appeared to be vaccination marks. In the eyes of the colonizer Leclerc, the “savage” must have learned that technique from some Europeans, when in

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reality scarification was a common practice among the Indians. The colonizer could not believe that a “savage” would know as much as he did. See Frédéric Leclerc, “Le Texas et sa Révolution,” La Revue des deux mondes 22 (March 1, 1840): 605–639, and 22 (March 15, 1840), 220–253; Franck Dalmasso, “Frédéric Leclerc (1810–1891), Médecin en chef de l’Hôpital general de Tours,” Ph.D. diss., Faculté de Médecine de Tours, Université François Rabelais, 1997. 28. Jean-Louis Berlandier, Journey to Mexico during the Years 1826 to 1834, trans. Sheila M. Ohlendorf, Josette M. Bigelow, and Mary M. Standifer, introduction by C. H. Muller, and botanical notes by C. H. Muller and Katherine K. Muller (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1980), 2 vols. See also Samuel W. Geiser, Naturalists of the Frontier (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1948), 38 –72. 29. See Laurence Denis, “French Doctors and Naturalists in Nineteenth-Century Texas” (communication presented at the French in Texas Symposium, Austin, March 2001). 30. Paul Sauvalle, Louisiane-Mexique-Canada Aventures cosmopolites (Montreal: Desaulniers et Leblanc, 1891). 31. A. W. Carlson, “One Century of Foreign Immigration to the United States: 1889– 1979,” International Migration 22–23 (September 1985): 309–333. 32. Marilyn D. Rhinehart, “Underground Patriots: Thurber Coal Miners and the Struggle for Individual Freedom, 1888–1903,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 92–94 (April 1989): 516. 33. Nina Mjagkij, “Forgotten Women: War Brides of World War i,” Amerikastudien/ American Studies 32, no. 2 (June 1987): 191–197. 34. Gérard Decormé, La obra de los jesuitas mexicanos durante la epoca colonial, 1572–1767 (Mexico: Antigua Librería Robredo de J. Porrúa), 1941. 35. Jacques Villere’s list is located in Raoul Josset’s Papers, Alexander Architectural Archive, University of Texas, Austin. 36. Gregg Goodnight, “Joseph Marshall Dubray, Texas Educator, 1884–1928” (communication presented at the French in Texas Symposium, Austin, March 2001). 37. Transcripts and tapes are archived at the Center of American History, the University of Texas at Austin (restricted access). 38. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Sevil, 1952). 39. See Jacqueline Lindenfeld, The French in the United States, An Ethnographic Study (Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey, 2000).

13

FRENCH ARTISTS IN TEXAS MARTHA UTTERBACK

When the Alamo was established as the Mission San Antonio de Valero in 1718, Father Antonio de San Buenaventura y Olivares brought with him two Frenchmen, one thought to have been a master sculptor known as Francisco el Francés.1 A century and more later, as the Alamo lay under siege, two French Creoles, the Despalier brothers, were among its defenders. A French artist on the scene not long after, Théodore Gentilz, made note of that.2 In the intervening years and since, other French artists have come to Texas — some, like Francisco, here but briefly (it appears he was soon expelled by the Spanish governor); others, like Gentilz, came to stay. French artist-scientists came to collect and record—John Louis Berlandier in South Texas in 1828 and 1829 as botanist with a Mexican boundary survey, and John James Audubon, the great ornithologist, and his son, John Woodhouse Audubon, in Buffalo Bayou and Galveston Bay in 1837. Some came to report—Théodore Marie Pavie on a private journey in east Texas in 1830, Augustus Guy de Vaudricourt with the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey in 1849, and Paul Frenzeny and Jules Tavernier, on assignment with Harper’s Weekly in 1873. In 1846, Joseph Auguste de Chatillon and Louis Dominique Grandjean-Develle traveled to the Brownsville area to sketch General Zachary Taylor and battle scenes of the Mexican War. All left lasting visual accounts of what they saw, some of them magnificent records indeed. French artists who stayed longer also came for an assortment of reasons. The painter Eugénie Aubanel Lavender arrived in 1851, enchanted with a place that scarcely hinted at the arduous life awaiting her. Father Peter Tarrillion, ordained a priest in Galveston, served from 1867 until 1899 as pastor of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Fredericksburg, where three of his religious paintings were hung. John Didelot was a French stonemason working in Austin from 1876 until his death in 1883. He 178

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carved a font and decorations for St. David’s Church and a large stone eagle for the top of Lundberg’s Bakery on Congress Avenue. François de Gissac came to Texas perhaps to escape the personal obsessions that haunted him. He taught art and painted in Waco in the 1890s. His best-known work hangs in the Texas State Capitol, a portrait of Judge Robert M. Williamson, or “Three-legged Willie.” Germaine Bourquin was wounded while serving in a French Red Cross hospital in World War i. After the war, she came to San Antonio, where she established the French School of Beaux-Arts and developed paintings from her war sketches. In the 1930s, Pierre van Parys Bourdelle and Raoul Jean Jossett came to Dallas to execute sculptures for the Texas Centennial Exposition. Their work remains in monuments across the state. There were artists born in Texas of French parents, a second generation with more or less binding connections to their French heritage. Andrée Louise Frétellière, daughter of Auguste Frétellière, one of the original settlers of Castroville, was also a niece and student of Théodore Gentilz, whose work she often echoed in style and subject. Louis Edward Grenêt, son of Honoré Grenêt, found in Paris his home as an artist after proving his skills in San Antonio. Somewhat later, Adèle Brunet, daughter of Joseph Brunet and Françoise Adèle Bruere, painted murals in Austin and Dallas before becoming a successful designer in New York. Ambrose Louis Garneray and Louis Mathieu Didier Guillaume seem to have visited Texas only in the imagination, but they created images that have become part of our history nonetheless: Garneray’s 1830 engravings of Champ d’Asile detail clearly the colony as he conceived it to be, and Guillaume’s painting of the battle of San Jacinto is a scene of splendid and memorable action, regardless of its measure of authenticity. Of all the French artists, one painter in particular has remained popular over the years for his distinctive view of a time and a place in Texas. His story seems worth telling in more detail. When Théodore Gentilz was sixteen and seventeen years old and studying at the École Royale Gratuite de Dessin in Paris, he was winning awards for his drawings of figures, fleurs, ornements, and animaux.3 The promise of those early years seems fulfilled in the work he produced in Texas from the 1840s until probably past the turn of the century—fulfilled in particular in his contribution to the historic visual record of San Antonio and south Texas in the nineteenth century. He was born in Paris on May 2, 1819, to Louise Forget and Pierre Jean Gentilz, a carriage maker, in the family trade his father had practiced before him. They named their son Louis Théodore Jean Gentilz.4 Eleven years later and also in Paris, Marie Louise Anastasie Fargeix was born. She would become a pianist and a music teacher and an artist

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of delicacy and charm. In another nineteen years, she would marry Théodore Gentilz.5 In 1832, a sister to Théodore was born, Henriette Adelaide,6 and twenty years later, she would marry a friend of his named Auguste Frétellière.7 They would provide Gentilz with a family in Texas—two nieces, Marie Jeanne Mathilde and Andrée Louise; two nephews, August Emmanuel Honoré and Henry Théodore; and one great-nephew, Olan Henry Frétellière.8 It was in 1835 and 1836, and probably in preceding years, that Théodore Gentilz was a student at what was to become l’École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, a school which still exists. Old entrances on the rue de l’École de Médecine still stand, with plaques in place listing the subjects taught when Gentilz was a student. His studies were undoubtedly important to him years later as he established himself as an art teacher in San Antonio, Texas. There, in his notes, manuscripts, and notices for his private classes, he identified himself as a laureate of the National School of Mathematics and Drawing of Paris, France.9 Gentilz’ teachers included Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who had come to la petite école de dessin in 1834, at the age of twenty, to teach a course in composition d’ornement,10 and Gault de St. Germain and André Dutertre, both of whom taught drawing of flowers and ornaments. Gentilz wrote in several passages about the contrasting styles of his two drawing teachers and how he came to adopt the method of one —Dutertre — with successful results.11 Perhaps in the late 1830s, Gentilz joined the atelier of Raymond Auguste Quinsac Monvoisin.12 He wrote a pungent commentary, Un peu de tout, about his fellow students and instructors and about art and artists generally. In it are irreverent verses, a few compliments, and many more mocking insults, from which Gentilz did not exclude himself—an “ugly clown,” he calls himself in one verse. But he also writes, with believable frankness, that one other student—Jassogne —”and I were the best draughtsmen of the Monvoisin studio.”13 Théodore Gentilz registered for military service in 1839 and, at age twenty, listed his profession as painter. His appearance is recorded on the form: he was 1 meter 690 millimeters tall, or 5 feet 6 1/2 inches, with chestnut-colored hair and brows, blue eyes, an average nose and mouth, an oval face and round chin, and with skin an average light color.14 The next record that we have of Gentilz is in November 1843, when at the age of twenty-four he boarded the Henrich, a ship bound for Galveston, Texas. As one of Henri Castro’s colonists, he was journeying toward new land on the far side of San Antonio, Texas. He was no. 100 on the ship’s passenger list and recorded as a peintre et dessinateur.15

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By late April or early May 1844, Gentilz had arrived in San Antonio and there met another young man enlisted for the colony.16 His name was Auguste Frétellière, and their lives would be linked from this time forward. It is possible that the initial sketch for the most popular of Gentilz’ paintings, the Fandango, was drawn during this brief period when Gentilz and Frétellière were in San Antonio awaiting departure to Castro’s colony (color illustration 6). Frétellière wrote about attending the dance during that interlude,17 and Gentilz recorded on what is probably a later version of the drawing that the scene he was depicting was in 1844. The painting of the Fandango familiar to us was most surely completed some years later when, according to one of his nieces, Gentilz found better paints. According to her, the Fandango we know was a finished copy of an original study done in 1848: “the paints used for the first studies were inferior; for the copies, good quality, from New Orleans.”18 In September 1844, Gentilz and Frétellière were part of the first small group to reach the site of Castro’s colony, and their names are recorded among the founders of Castroville. The surveyor John James laid off the lots, and Gentilz’ town lot was located in range 8, block 5, lots 1 and 2— the northeast side of the block west of the Place Houston and north of the Place Ogé.19 In 1845, Henri Castro appointed Gentilz dessinateur géographe for the colony at an annual salary of five hundred francs and included him in the colony’s four-man council.20 In 1846, Gentilz became Castro’s assistant and helped in establishing other settlements in the grant.21 In November 1847, Théodore Gentilz set out with several colorful companions on a journey to survey land at Laguna San Miguel in south Texas. He recorded the trip in a lively narrative; all we have now is someone’s copy of it.22 But we do have his spirited, tiny, quick sketches. These are some of the earliest examples of his work in Texas that we can pinpoint by date. They have the spontaneity and punch of sketches drawn on site, in ink, by a sure hand and with the clear view of an alert and amused observer. You can sense the delight Gentilz took in recording the events of that trip, and while the drawings and his account offer another glimpse of his humor, perhaps they also suggest the curiosity and zest that must have spurred him to leave the Paris ateliers for the adventure of a lifetime in Texas. In that same year, 1847, Théodore Gentilz’ father died.23 Pierre Jean Gentilz had been born in 1779 at Villemusard, France.24 A copy of his trade card25 tells us that the Gentilz brothers, located in Paris off the Fauborg St. Honoré on rue Miromesnil, furnished carriages to the couriers of the Queen of England and to the couriers of the English cabinet. Two years later Théodore Gentilz returned to Paris, where he and Marie Fargeix were married.26 He collected his younger sister, Henriette,

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13.1

Theodore Gentilz, Self-portrait, June 15, 1864, watercolor on

paper. San Antonio Museum Association, 45-87p(14).

and brought them both with him back to Texas. The following year, he is recorded as a merchant, not a painter, with his assets amounting to $100.27 In 1854, Gentilz purchased a home in which he was to spend the rest of his life —a plastered caliche-block house on Flores Street. He paid $250 to Mr. H. D. Stumberg for the property, the second lot from the corner of Salinas Street, on the east side of North Flores.28 At the back of the property ran the San Pedro ditch. Ten years after the purchase, he painted a view of the street, with its low houses, a bend in the dirt road, trees, and picket fences.

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183

Marie Gentilz, carte-de-visite by Doerr & Jesse. Gentilz-Frétellière

Family Papers, 50/2/13, Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library.

In this same year, 1864, Gentilz painted a self-portrait in watercolor (Figure 13.1) and a group of compositions for a small album. In it he included the Flores Street view and a series of landscapes, some of them copied from prints of European scenes. For most, Gentilz carefully identified, in parentheses after his titles, which were painted from other works and which were original compositions. Those whose sources we know show a lovely transformation from the original. The following year, 1865, Gentilz compiled another album, this composed of drawings paired with watercolors developed from them, to illustrate the rules of perspective as applied to landscapes and other composi-

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tions. The album was probably created as an instructional aid, because at about this time, Théodore Gentilz began teaching at St. Mary’s Institute, which had been established in San Antonio in 1852. He was to remain there for nearly thirty years.29 It appears that it was while he was teaching at St. Mary’s that he wrote and illustrated two ambitious manuals on perspective, one full manuscript in English and one in French. Exhaustive in content, they contain illustrations and diagrams and numbered paragraphs of instruction. The English manual alone contains almost two hundred pages and is made up of two parts, one on linear perspective and the other on aerial perspective. Together the two sections contain more than a thousand numbered paragraphs and well over six hundred illustrations. It is “to the memory of Violet-le-Duc, the eminent architect and artist, my teacher on perspective and history of ornaments” that Gentilz dedicated his work.30 In 1876, the Société Française de Secours Mutuels de San Antonio (Texas) had been founded, and for years Gentilz served as its secretary.31 It appears that he also joined to some extent in the social life of the Frenchspeaking community,32 and occasionally he painted a French subject, such as the gentle Joueurs de boules in 1882. In 1885, Gentilz copyrighted his relatively large-scale historical painting of the fall of the Alamo, which he developed from numerous sketches and measurements, inquiries and observations. Destroyed during a fire in the early 1900s,33 the painting exists now in black and white photographs, engraved reproductions, and in the preliminary drawings made for it. There are sketches of soldiers and equipment, floor plans, site plans, and building elevations —as well as notes on the numbers of men, their uniforms, the location of landmarks and their distances, the flag that flew, and the exact angle of how the light would have slanted on that early March morning. In 1887, Gentilz wrote about how to develop a picture from a photograph34 and in that decade painted genre scenes that appear to be based on photographs of the day, made primarily of picturesque local Mexican customs, some reproduced as prints in popular publications. The paint Gentilz used on some of these canvases looks more like a tempera than an oil, with very clean, dry, flat colors. Some of his most attractive paintings are these, with their precise details and clear light. As in his earlier interpretations of black and white prints of European scenes, his versions of black and white photographs of local scenes show color choices that are fresh and sometimes surprising. In 1880, Gentilz had drawn up a list of flowers of the San Antonio area. Nine years later, so it appears, he put together an album of flower paintings.35 As a student at the Royal Free School of Drawing in Paris, Théo-

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dore Gentilz had won awards for his drawings of flowers. Perhaps a halfcentury later on another continent, he created flower drawings and paintings of a clarity and sensitivity that place them among the most beautiful of all his work (color illustration 7). There is something endearing about the familiar wildflowers of our fields and roadsides preserved so carefully and, it would seem, affectionately, by this immigrant artist from Paris who first saw them more than 150 years ago. In the 1890s, some of Gentilz’ paintings of scenes from earlier in the century were dated or copyrighted. These are the paintings for which Théodore Gentilz is best known today. Individually and as a group they may also be judged his most important work, because in them, in vivid images and concise details, he gives his unique view of Mexican life in early San Antonio: the custom of the fandango and the romantic ritual of men on horseback presenting the invitation, an exhilarating horse race through the main plaza of town, men relaxing in a cantina, a wedding procession, and a funeral procession. Some were painted in two sizes— the Convite para el baile (color illustration 7), the Corrida de la sandía (color illustration 8), and Entierro de un ángel (color illustration 9), and possibly others for which only the drawings have been found. In October 1898, Marie Fargeix Gentilz died.36 In March 1900, Théodore Gentilz compiled a list of compositions and portraits by himself and Marie, arranged by support and size, with values or prices given—a total of $3,223 for his ninety-seven paintings.37 The list appears to be primarily an inventory, but also may have been intended as a price list, perhaps for his heirs. About two months after making the list, Gentilz signed his will, leaving his estate to his nieces.38 He was eighty-one. In another two years his friend Auguste Frétellière was gone, and on January 4, 1906, Théodore Gentilz died.39 In 1918, Mathilda and Louise Frétellière sold the house on North Flores Street that had been in the family for so long to Mr. Castañola, who owned a large grocery store behind them. They moved to a house on Palmetto Street,40 on the east side of town, near the city cemeteries. Considering the slight remnants of the life of Marie Gentilz—some books and sheet music, a few pencil drawings and a small body of watercolors—we are left with a rather distinct view of her as a talented pendant to her husband’s greater skills and drive. She was one of Théodore Gentilz’ private students,41 and much of her known work is, predictably, similar to his. There are no existing letters or other writings that we know to be hers that could suggest her background or views. Pages of compositions written by her young sister-in-law survived from the Paris years,42 but nothing that we know of Marie’s. The most extensive inscriptions found thus far are her manuscript scores and the statement in an oc-

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casional book that Ce livre appartient a Marie Fargeix.43 Still, there are hints of how she must have enriched her husband’s life even as she learned so much from him, and there are modest pleasures left for us all. Marie Louise Anastasie Fargeix was born in Paris on May 6, 1830, to François Fargeix, a tailor, and his wife, Mélanie Marie Petit (Figure 3.2).44 She was living on the rue de Sèvres and had just passed her nineteenth birthday when she married Théodore Gentilz in the mairie of the Tenth Arrondissement of Paris in 1849.45 He gave her a silver wedding coin engraved along the edge T Gentilz a M Fargeix le 12 Juin 1849 and brought her with him back to Texas. Gentilz had been away from France for more than five years by then, serving much of that time as a valuable member of Henri Castro’s Texas colony. Although we have as yet no record of his move, he had probably left Castroville for San Antonio and established some kind of home there for his incoming family. In addition to Marie he brought with him to Texas his sister, Henriette, thirteen years younger than he. The three of them were sharing a home in Bexar County in 1850.46 Two years later, Henriette married Auguste Frétellière,47 a friend of Théodore’s since their shared adventures in San Antonio in the summer of 1844,48 and in another year, Marie was representing Auguste’s mother at the baptism of Auguste and Henriette’s first child.49 Soon after, Théodore and Marie moved into their home on North Flores Street, by some accounts one of the prettiest streets in town, lined with overhanging shade trees and with the clear acequia flowing alongside. An acquaintance later recalled the “profusion of flowers” in the Gentilz yard.50 It appears that Marie’s parents soon joined them there. In a carte-devisite portrait,51 her mother, Mélanie Fargeix, is holding a little dog that is surely Pauline, the pet Théodore recorded so attentively in several memorable drawings. When Marie’s father died in 1869, the funeral procession departed from the Gentilz home.52 In 1859, Marie Gentilz sang a song of farewell to the beloved priest Claude Marie Dubuis on his departure from San Antonio to return to France. Father Dubuis had come to Castroville in 1847 and later was named pastor of the church of San Fernando in San Antonio. The farewell song was composed by the San Fernando’s organist, Joseph Burger, an Alsatian who earlier had led the church music in Castroville. The lyrics, in French, are an affectionate tribute, ending with the repeated phrase, avec espoir nous te serrons la main— “with hope we shake your hand.” Both music and lyrics are inscribed in the most precise hand on letter paper imprinted with a garland of vignettes of San Antonio. The little piece of music is a work of art itself, so beautifully presented one hopes that an-

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other copy as charming was handed to the priest to cherish and keep (Figure 13.3).53 A student of Théodore Gentilz’ at St. Mary’s College in later years recalled Marie Gentilz as a “delightful little French lady, lively and vivacious. She taught music and could play wonderfully even then.”54 At least three hundred pieces of sheet music have been found in the collections of the Gentilz and Frétellière families,55 including manuscript scores and printed scores with Marie’s name or initials. Some fifty pieces have Théodore’s signature or initials, and others are signed by his nieces, Mathilde and Louise Frétellière. Marie may well have taught her nieces how to play the piano, and she must have filled the house on Flores Street with music and song. It may have been in the late 1880s or early 1890s that Théodore painted in watercolor ten bouquets of Texas wildflowers—each a beautifully balanced combination of individual flowers he had composed and painted earlier. He signed each painting TG à M Gentilz, and, like the wedding coin of some forty years earlier, they must have been a special gift to his wife. Of the nearly fifty known works of art signed by Marie Gentilz, about half are of flowers—several pencil drawings and about twenty watercolors (color illustration 12). The drawings are mere slips of art, hardly more than sketches in pale pencil. Her flower watercolors are a different matter—carefully painted, the best of them precise of line and bright with true color, in simple, balanced compositions that show the details of the blossoms. There are other pleasant watercolors by Marie. An appealing little mottled owl in sepia and a tidy white horse and brown cow are fresh, modest, and straightforward. Butterflies and moths are faithful in color, and most identified by name. Quaint churches and rustic dwellings, landscapes and mountain views, all most surely copies of other art, are still picturesque scenes. Théodore Gentilz’ inventory of paintings of 1900 lists thirty-two of Marie’s paintings by name. Of the oil paintings, fourteen are on canvas and eighteen on board or cardboard. The names of most of the canvases are found also on Théodore’s list, but there is less similarity in the titles of the cartons, which include more European scenes by Marie.56 For the most part, the paintings of Marie Gentilz that we know today do not appear on this list at all. Although years younger than her husband, Marie died first, and Théodore designed a fitting monument for her grave. It was to be of stone, five feet high, surmounted by a cross, and with the dates of her birth and death separated by a lyre.

13.3

Joseph Burger, “Au départ de Monsieur Dubuis,” on letter paper by Pentenrieder

& Blersch. Gentilz-Frétellière Family Papers, 36/9, Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library.

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Pour faire en pierre en trois morceaux celui de Marie premièrement 57 The actual gravestone in City Cemetery No. 1 in San Antonio is a single marker serving the graves of both Marie and Théodore, somewhat similar to the upright stone at the graves of Auguste and Henriette Frétellière, located nearby. Marie died in the house on Flores Street on October 21, 1898, when she was sixty-eight years old, of heart failure. Her funeral was held on a Sunday afternoon in San Fernando Cathedral and “was largely attended.” 58 In the mind’s eye there were flowers, and the most beautiful music echoing down the stones. Notes 1. Mardith Schuetz, “Professional Artisans in the Hispanic Southwest: The Churches of San Antonio, Texas,” The Americas 40, no. 1 (July 1983): 19, 35; noted in John and Deborah Powers, Texas Painters, Sculptors & Graphic Artists: A Biographical Dictionary of Artists in Texas before 1942 (Austin: Woodmont Books, 2000), 176–177. The Powers’ invaluable dictionary is a source for much of the information in this section. 2. Gentilz-Frétellière Family Papers, 7/15 (Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library, San Antonio), cited hereafter as Gentilz Papers and drtl. Generally accepted sources record only one of the Despalier brothers in the Alamo at the time of the 1836 siege, but Gentilz noted two. 3. Yearly lists of concours, Archives de l’École Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs (Archives Nationales, Paris). 4. Acte de naissance (rétabli), Prefecture du département de la Seine (Archives de Paris); Gentilz Papers, Inventory records, 8. 5. Acte de naissance (rétabli), Prefecture du département de la Seine (Archives de Paris); Jack Butterfield to Marg Riette Montgomery, Alamo Library, March 5, 1958, Gentilz Papers, Inventory records, 10; Acte de mariage (rétabli), Prefecture du département de la Seine (Archives de Paris). 6. Gentilz Papers, 5/47. 7. Marriage certificate and license, February 7, 1852, recorded in Book B of Marriage Licenses, 319 (Bexar County Archives, San Antonio). 8. San Fernando Church Baptisms, 1853, 1857, 1861, and 1864 (San Antonio Public Library, cited hereafter as sapl), microfilm; Gentilz Papers, 17/18. 9. San Antonio City Directory, 1881–1882, 33, microfilm (drtl); Gentilz Papers, 8, 9, 11/2, 11/9, 11/32, and 17/5. 10. Louis Hautecoeur, Histoire de l’architecture classique en France, Tome 6 (Paris: A. et J. Picard et Cie., 1955), 298; file on Viollet le Duc and Archives de l’École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (Archives Nationales, Paris).

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11. Gentilz Papers, 11/9, 11/10. 12. Ibid., 11/13. 13. Ibid., 11/11, as translated. Jassogne has been identified as Louis Jassogne by David Karel, Université Laval, Quebec, letter to author, August 24, 1990. 14. Recrutement, Classe de 1839 (Archives de Paris). 15. Passenger list par le Navire Henrich, Colonization Papers (Texas State Archives, Austin). 16. Auguste Frétellière, “Adventures of a Castrovillian,” 91–92, in Julia Nott Waugh, Castro-ville and Henry Castro, Empresario (San Antonio: Standard Printing Company, 1934). 17. Frétellière, “Adventures,” 93. 18. Catalogue of a Loan Exhibition of Old San Antonio Paintings Held in the Witte Memorial Museum, December Second and Third, Nineteen Hundred Thirty-three (San Antonio: Naylor Printing Company for the Yanaguana Society, 1933), 15. 19. James Menke, “Original owners of town lots in Castroville,” compiled list from vol. 1 of Deed Records of Medina County (Archives of Medina County, Hondo, Texas), in James Menke, The Settlements, book 4 of Medina County Scrapbook. 20. Henri Castro to Louis Huth, August 15, 1845, hm48842, Castro Papers (Huntington Library, San Marino, California). 21. Bobby Weaver, Castro’s Colony: Empresario Development in Texas 1842–1865 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985), 64, 86. 22. Gentilz Papers, 7/3. 23. Acte de décès (rétabli), Prefecture du département de la Seine (Archives de Paris). 24. Gentilz Papers, 6/10. 25. Ibid., Inventory records, 8. 26. Acte de mariage (Archives de Paris). 27. Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Bexar County, Texas, Federal Population Schedules, transcribed by Mrs. V. K. Carpenter (Huntsville, Ark.: Century Enterprises, 1969), 135. 28. Deed Record 408, Book M-2, 359 –360, Bexar County Deed Records (Bexar County Archives, San Antonio). 29. Fathers P. F. Parisot and C. J. Smith, comp., History of the Catholic Church in the Diocese of San Antonio, Texas, (San Antonio: Carrico & Bowen, 1897), 137. 30. Gentilz Papers, 9. 31. Ibid., 20/33, 20/34, 7/1. 32. Ibid., 20/4. 33. “Story of Alamo Told in Picture,” San Antonio Express, March 6, 1936, p. 3; source cited in Sam DeShong Ratcliffe, Painting Texas History to 1900 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), p. 106 fn. 26.

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34. Gentilz Papers, 11/15. 35. Ibid., 13/4, M/36, 13/1. 36. Ibid., 5/46. 37. Ibid., 12/1. 38. Théodore Gentilz, Will, May 8, 1900, Bexar County probate record 4229, filed January 12, 1906 (Bexar County Archives). 39. Gentilz Papers, 5/46, 16/21. 40. Kathy Cruse, San Antonio Conservation Society, memo to author, August 28, 1986; Gentilz Papers, 3/44. 41. Gentilz Papers, 11/34. 42. Ibid., 15/2. 43. Ibid., in box 36 and books S/9, S/9.5. 44. Acte de naissance (rétabli), Prefecture du département de la Seine (Archives de Paris). 45. Acte de mariage (rétabli), Prefecture du département de la Seine (Archives de Paris). 46. Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Bexar County, Texas, 135. 47. Marriage certificate (Bexar County Archives). 48. Frétellière, “Adventures” 92–93. 49. San Fernando Church Baptisms, record 2333, 1853, microfilm (sapl). 50. Bexar County deed records (Bexar County Archives); A. L. Lockwood, “Thirty-five Years Ago,” San Antonio Daily Express, August 6, 1900, p. 4, reprinted by sapl in The Explorer, Texana/Genealogy 4, no. 2 (1977): 42; F. W. Brown, “History of the Site of the Bank,” typescript, 1960, rg2 (Frost Bank Archives, Frost National Bank, San Antonio); Butterfield to Montgomery, Gentilz Papers, Inventory records, 10. 51. Gentilz Papers, 50/2/1. 52. Ibid., 16/17. 53. Ibid., 36/9; Sister Joan of Arc, C.D.P., Catholic Music and Musicians in Texas (San Antonio: Our Lady of the Lake College, 1936), 45–46; Patrick Foley, “Claude Marie Dubuis,” in The New Handbook of Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1996), 2:712–713; Parisot and Smith, comp., History, 104, although dates differ in the last reference. The letter paper was printed by Pentenrieder & Blersch from drawings made by Erhard Pentenrieder. 54. Butterfield to Montgomery, Gentilz Papers, Inventory records, 10. 55. Gentilz Papers, boxes 36–48. 56. Ibid., 12/1. 57. To make in stone / in three sections / that of Marie first, as translated, Théodore Gentilz, Will (Bexar County Archives). 58. Gentilz Papers, 16/21.

14

EUGÉNIE LAVENDER, NÉE AUBANEL A Romantic on the Frontier MARTHA UTTERBACK

Born on Christmas Day of 1817 in Bordeaux, a great-niece of one of Napoleon’s generals and a cousin of historian François Pierre Guizot, so began the remarkable life of Jeanne Etiennette Eugénie Aubanel. Her father, Etienne Aubanel, and her mother, the former Mademoiselle Petit, soon moved to Paris, where Eugénie and then a sister and a brother were carefully raised in refined and stimulating surroundings. The Aubanels were staunch supporters of Napoleon and especially resentful of his treatment by England. The story is that the first complete sentence little Eugénie learned was Abattez les anglais— down with the English.1 Eugénie would soon lose her mother, but Madame Aubanel, who had become mortally ill after the birth of her third child, made certain that her children would be well cared for. She asked that her husband promise to marry her sister, who was devoted to the children. Following her wishes, a year after his wife’s death, Etienne married Julienne Antoinette Fortin.2 It was Eugénie’s stepmother who arranged for her to attend art classes: she studied at the École des Beaux Arts with Paul Delaroche, and with Ary and Henri Scheffer, and she was permitted to copy paintings in the Louvre. In 1838, she won an award for one of her paintings and was presented a medal by no less than Louis Philippe. She painted literary, historical, and religious subjects, genre scenes, portraits, and landscapes, some of them copies of master paintings.3 Her sister married a French count, but Eugénie declined such an arranged union and chose instead an Englishman, after all. He was Charles Lavender, an Oxford graduate teaching at the University of Paris, he had served in the Queen’s navy, and he was to prove to be a daring adventurer. They were married February 14, 1846.4

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After several years, Eugénie and Charles became disillusioned with the political situation in France and more and more attracted to the idea of going to Texas, captivated by published pictures they saw. In 1851, over the protests of their family, they left Paris for the lure of the countryside of Texas, which they hoped to paint. By this time they had two little children, both girls, and with them set out from the port of Le Havre for New Orleans.5 After their arrival, Charles gathered two wagons, horses and mules, and provisions. He hired two men for the trip, and with his wife and two children began the journey to Houston, Texas. From Houston they traveled toward Dallas, stopping at scenic places along the way and enjoying the fall weather of central Texas. They made stops in Cameron, Waco, and probably in Dallas and Fort Worth, then returned to Waco, where Charles prepared to make their home.6 These Texas journeys were not altogether idyllic. The Lavenders lost one wagon and all its provisions in a flooded stream and very nearly lost the children as well. They tried to evade hostile Indians but were not always successful, and Charles was taken captive and held for several days. The little family fought prairie fires, battling back the flames for their lives; they were threatened by wild animals and they killed poisonous snakes. Traveling from Waco to Dallas, Eugénie went into labor with her third child, and while her husband started back to fetch a doctor, Eugénie, still with her two little girls to manage and otherwise alone in the countryside, gave birth to their son.7 The stories of the Lavenders’ experiences have taken on such variations and embellishments that an accurate account seems beyond reach today, yet there is little doubt that their trials were far more extreme than even these romantic adventurers could have imagined. Eventually Eugénie, fearful about the deprivations that their children, especially their little son, had to endure, hoped to return to New Orleans to make her home, but at the time a yellow fever scare delayed their plans. They moved instead to Corpus Christi, which had been Charles’ preference. For several months they lived there in a canvas house painted with tar. Not until 1854 was Eugénie able to get back to New Orleans, but there they remained through the Civil War years. It was in New Orleans that Mr. Lavender directed the Audubon College, and it was there that their son, Charles Jr., died.8 After the war and when their oldest daughter, Emilie, married and moved to Brownsville, they returned to Texas to be near her. When Charles Lavender died, in the 1870s, Eugénie moved back to Corpus Christi. There she had built a small cottage in which she placed the fam-

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Eugénie Aubanel in Paris, circa 1845. Courtesy, Mr. And Mrs. Evans R. Wood-

house; photograph, Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Los Angeles.

ily antiques, which had come to her from Paris after the death of her stepmother. She taught art and resumed her painting. She painted daily, sometimes on canvas, sometimes on china, or shells, or wood, or cloth.9 Among the works she completed in her years in Corpus Christi were a still life, dated in 1892 and now in the Witte Museum in San Antonio, and portraits and figures which hung in the Convent of the Incarnate Word in Corpus: an 1879 likeness of Father St. John, an early pastor of Saint Patrick’s Church; a painting of Saint Joseph and the Child Jesus, completed in 1884; and a portrait of Saint Patrick, completed in 1896 and one of the last of Eugénie Lavender’s paintings.10 There are records or descriptions of other paintings completed in Texas: portraits of her daughter Emily Macmanus with her own daughters and of Gaston Macmanus, her grandson; a young woman with a cockatoo

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and a young girl with an armful of flowers; a yard filled with brilliant red hibiscus; and, most curious, two small works painted with the juices of weeds likely mixed with native clays, one a landscape, the other a portrait of a man.11 In 1897, an illustrator for a St. Louis newspaper adapted a portrait of Eugénie Aubanel of sixty years earlier into a fashionably scratchy sketch of an elegant and graceful young woman with abundant dark curls. It differs markedly from a photograph of Eugénie made the year before her marriage, in which her open face and large features suggest the strength and purpose and vigor she must have summoned throughout her life (Figure 14.1).12 Other illustrations in the newspaper article deal with her travels in Texas as the stories are told—Mr. and Mrs. Lavender, both in buckskin trousers, beating back flames from a prairie fire as their children cower nearby, and Mr. Lavender, released by grateful Indians after he had relieved the suffering of an Indian child.13 Eugénie Lavender died on September 2, 1898,14 leaving paintings that seem to have escaped entirely the drama of her life and that may have been the most conventional part of it. Notes 1. “Paintings in Lavender Collection,” typescript copy, La Retama Public Library, Corpus Christi, Texas (cited hereafter as “Paintings” and lrpl); “Grandma Lavender is the Pride of Corpus Christi,” written for the St. Louis Republic, February 28, 1897, typescript copy (Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin), p. 1 (cited hereafter as “Grandma Lavender” and cah); and Sister Borremeo, “Biography of Mrs. Charles Lavender,” typescript copies (cah and lrpl), 1–2 (cited hereafter as “Biography”). Sister Borremeo was a granddaughter of Eugénie Lavender. Cecilia Steinfeldt, curator emeritus of the Witte Museum, generously shared her files on Eugénie Lavender, providing the principal sources used. 2. “Biography” (cah; lrpl), 1–2; “Paintings” (lrpl) gives the dates for Julienne Antoinette Fortin’s life as 1790 –1886, indicating that she was the stepmother rather than the natural mother of Eugénie, whose mother was named only as “Mademoiselle Petit” in the biography by Sister Borremeo. 3. “Biography” (cah; lrpl), 3–6; “Grandma Lavender” (cah), 1; Pauline Pinckney, Painting in Texas: The Nineteenth Century (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), 97. 4. “Biography” (cah; lrpl), 6–7. 5. Ibid., 7– 8. 6. Ibid., 8–9; “Grandma Lavender” (cah), 3. 7. “Biography” (cah; lrpl), 9 –10; “Grandma Lavender” (cah), 3–5. 8. “Biography” (cah; lrpl), 9–11; “Grandma Lavender” (cah), 4–5.

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9. “Biography” (cah; lrpl), 12–14; “Grandma Lavender” (cah), 6. 10. “Biography” (cah; lrpl), 15–16; “Paintings” (lrpl). 11. “Biography” (cah; lrpl), 15–16; “Paintings” (lrpl); Cecilia Steinfeldt, Art for History’s Sake: The Texas Collection of the Witte Museum (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, for the Witte Museum of the San Antonio Museum Association, 1993), 153. 12. “Grandma Lavender” (cah); photograph reproduced in Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890 –1945, Patricia Trenton, ed. (Berkeley: Autry Museum of Western Heritage and University of California Press, 1995), 184. 13. “Grandma Lavender” (cah). 14. “Biography” (cah; lrpl), 16.

15

BUILDING UTOPIA IN THE PROMISED L AND Icarians and Fourierists in Texas

J O N AT H A N B E E C H E R

The early history of the French in Texas is crowded with visionaries who combined rose-colored pictures of the geography, climate, and natural resources of Texas with grandiose fantasies concerning the role that they themselves might play in turning these attributes and resources to good use. Some of these visionaries were extraordinarily gullible; others found themselves, as Robert S. Weddle has written of La Salle, “entangled in webs spun of their own deceit.” Most were probably more self-deceived than deceiving. Texas, for many of them, was a palimpsest in which they found the realization of their own dreams and longings. Such was surely the case of the two French utopian socialists who organized attempts to build communities in Texas in the mid–nineteenth century: the Icarian communist Etienne Cabet and the Fourierist socialist Victor Considerant. Both of these thinkers had been involved in radical political activities in France, and both came to the United States in the period immediately following the failed European revolutions of 1848. Both hoped to change the course of history through the establishment of model communities, and both were drawn to Texas by the prospect of cheap and (so they believed) readily accessible land not far from Dallas. Both failed to realize their dreams, and Cabet never actually set foot in Texas. But whereas Considerant’s failure marked the end of his career as a social activist, Cabet’s short-lived Texas fiasco was only the prologue to several more successful experiments in communal living. Of the two, however, it was Considerant and not Cabet who left the deeper mark on Texas history. The most memorable moment in Etienne Cabet’s attempt to build utopia in Texas came at the beginning. On February 3, 1848, sixty-nine of Cabet’s followers set sail from Le Havre to New Orleans, where they expected to transfer to a river boat that would take them up the Mississippi 197

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and Red Rivers to the site Cabet had selected. Few who witnessed their departure forgot it. They were dressed identically in black velvet tunics and gray felt caps. Hundreds of friends and relatives had gathered on the dock where the American sailing vessel Rome was tied up. The sixtynine members of the first Advance Guard formed ranks. Cabet himself stepped forward and had them recite a catechism: “Are you loyal adherents without reservation to the social contract?” he asked. “Yes!” they replied. “Are you sincerely devoted to the cause of Communism?” “Yes!” came the answer. “Are you willing to endure hardship for the benefit of humanity?” “Of course!” Then the sixty-nine marched two-by-two to board the ship. Gathering on the stern deck as the ship pulled out, they sang their own words to the old revolutionary “Chant du Départ.” Let us go found our Icarie / Soldiers of Fraternity. Let us go found in Icarie / The happiness of Humanity. One of the sixty-nine described the departure as no occasion for tears but as “the beginning of a new life,” as a farewell “full of hope for the future.” Another Icarian called it “one of the greatest acts in the history of the human race.”1 Etienne Cabet was a radical democrat and influential republican journalist who was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1831, then exiled to England, where he met the venerable utopian Robert Owen. In 1840, not long after his return to France, he published the first edition of his Voyage en Icarie, a novel describing a thoroughly egalitarian utopia where all citizens would live as brothers and sisters, dispensing with private property, and where reason and conscience would rule without king or priest but with the help of a benevolent dictator, the Good Icar (Figure 15.1). This work made Cabet famous. It appealed especially to artisans and skilled craftsmen because it offered clear and unambiguous images of community and economic morality as opposed to the egotism and greed of emerging capitalism. It also appealed to skilled workers because of Cabet’s ability to articulate the anger that many felt toward the whole process of industrialization that was cutting their wages and depriving them of work, and toward the capitalists, merchants, and middlemen who were turning the increasingly industrialized society into a “new feudalism.”2 Cabet was a skilled and prolific journalist who drove home his basic ideas in a newspaper called Le Populaire. During the 1840s, he won a large following among the artisans of Paris and such provincial cities as Lyon, Toulouse, Nantes, and Périgueux. With the publication of Le Vrai Christianisme in 1846, Cabet began to be seen— and to see himself—as

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Etienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie, first published in 1838, captured the imagina-

tions of thousands of French workers. The front cover lists the values shared by the Icarians: Fraternity / All for One / One for All / Solidarity / Equality-Liberty / Eligibility / Unity / Peace / Education / Intelligence-Reason / Morality / Order / Union / Love / Justice / Mutual Assistance / Organization of Labor / Machines for Everybody’s Advantage / Augmentation of Production / Equitable Distribution of Products / Abolition of Misery / Increasing Improvements / Marriage and Family / Continual Progress / Abundance / Arts / Primary Duty: To Live / Primary Duty: To Work / To Each According to His Needs / From Each According to His Strengths / Common Happiness. Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin, ct0457.

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more of a messiah than a journalist. In that work he repeated over and over again that Jesus Christ was the first communist, that communism and Christianity were both built on pacifism and brotherly love, and that God’s kingdom would be established on earth in the form of an Icarian community. Within a year after the appearance of Le Vrai Christianisme, Cabet was ready to play the role of a new Moses, summoning his followers to join him in a quest for the Promised Land not in France but five thousand miles from Paris, at the edge of civilization, in Texas.3 Cabet’s summons Allons en Icarie! first appeared in Le Populaire on May 9, 1847. The following week he added that Icarie would be located in America. Only six months later, however, on November 14, did Cabet announce his decision to build his utopia in Texas. In reaching his decision he sought the advice of Robert Owen, who referred him to a Texas land agent, William Smalling Peters. In September, Cabet met with Peters in London, and the two quickly came to an agreement: the Icarians would receive free land near Denton, Texas, between the Red River and the forks of the Trinity—provided they established homesteads on the site by July 1, 1848. After that date the land would cost them a dollar an acre. But the agreement also specified that the land was to be allocated in checkerboard fashion so that the state of Texas retained possession of half the

15.2

Etienne Cabet in

November 1848 on the eve of his departure for the United States. From Jules Prud-hommeaux, Icarie et son fondateur Etienne Cabet (Paris: Edouard Cornély & Cie, 1907).

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tracts and the Peters Company retained the rights to parcels of 320 acres alongside the parcels developed by the Icarians. What this meant was that in order to lay claim to an unbroken tract of land and thus to create a true community, the Icarians would at some point have to make huge payments to both the Peters Land Company and the state of Texas.4 Why did Cabet accept such unfavorable terms? Perhaps because he felt that at the age of sixty he had no time to lose (Figure 15.2). He had boundless self-confidence, and he may also have believed that there was no limit to the money he could raise from his devoted followers. At any rate, in announcing his choice of Texas he said nothing about the terms of his agreement with the Peters Company. He simply stated that he was sending a young Icarian fluent in English, Charles Sully, to Texas to oversee preparations while he remained in France to supervise the selection of the two groups comprising the first and second Advance Guard. He also announced contests to design uniforms and to write an Icarian anthem. And he issued a separate prospectus describing the site he had chosen as “salubrious, fertile, composed of woods and prairies, well watered, with a climate resembling that of Italy.” 5 The talk about an Italian climate was only one of many exaggerations and misleading statements in Cabet’s brochure. In fact, very little about the voyage of the Advance Guard went according to plan. The first surprise came on March 27, 1848, when the Icarians reached New Orleans. As their ship prepared to dock, the cannons of the port fired a great salvo. This was not, as some thought, a welcoming salute to the Icarians. It was part of a celebration by Louisiana democrats on receiving the news of the overthrow of Louis Philippe and the creation of the Second French Republic. If the revolution had broken out just three weeks earlier, some of the Icarians would never have left France. As it was, five of them—five of the “most cultivated”—decided to return to France immediately.6 For Cabet, the timing of the revolution of 1848 could not have been worse. He later wrote that this “unforeseen revolution . . . upset all my plans and destroyed almost all my means and resources.” After February 1848, many of his followers got caught up in the revolution and abandoned their plans of emigration. For a few months Cabet himself became immersed in revolutionary politics, first as a leader of the democratic and socialist left and then—as the revolution moved to the right—as a scapegoat of the emerging “party of order.” Not until June 1848, after he had been the object of death threats and had twice failed to win election to the National Assembly, did Cabet turn his attention back to the emigration to Texas.7 In the meantime, however, Cabet’s Advance Guard was in trouble. The trouble started in Shreveport, where the group arrived by steamboat

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from New Orleans on April 4. There they learned that the site Cabet had chosen was still two hundred miles away and, far from being accessible by riverboat, required an arduous overland journey. They had first to get to Sulphur Prairie, where the Icarian agent Charles Sully had purchased land and buildings to be used as a way station. The hundred-mile trip from Shreveport to Sulphur Prairie proved to be exhausting. The Bonham Road that Cabet had talked up turned out to be a footpath that soon disappeared. Traveling cross-country, the group’s wagons broke down, and supplies had to be loaded onto backpacks. When they finally arrived at Sulphur Prairie on April 21, there was more bad news. Only then did the Advance Guard learn from the agent Sully just how badly Cabet had been hoodwinked by the Peters Land Company. Not only was there no way a contiguous community could be built on the checkerboard of parcels conceded to Cabet: to claim even these parcels, they would have to work the land and build a log cabin on each half-section before July 1. Sully’s advice to them was to go no farther—to remain at Sulphur Prairie until the arrival of the second Advance Guard and the other settlers already en route. Then they should come to a collective agreement as to the next step.8 Adolphe Gouhenant, the leader of the first Advance Guard, rejected this good advice and decided to go on Icarie with the twenty-six men willing and able to continue. This final leg of the journey was the hardest of all. Gouhenant’s group encountered scorching heat, fierce mosquitoes, and a trail that was impossible to follow. But they hardly mentioned their difficulties in the letters they sent back to Cabet in Paris. Remaining resolutely upbeat, they wrote only of the “great beauty” and the “prodigious natural wealth” of the country. And when they finally reached their destination in mid-May, they described the site in idyllic terms: We have selected an admirable site for our community between Denton and Oliver creeks, near their junction. We will have at our disposal fine forests, excellent springs, and extremely fertile soil. Oliver Creek will enable us to establish a flour-mill and a sawmill. We are on the edge of the open prairie and we can expand indefinitely to the south and the west without running into private property. In a private letter to Cabet, Gouhenant was even more enthusiastic. “Oh, if you could see Icarie!” he wrote. “It’s an Eden! Even if you are offered the presidency of the Republic, you should come to Icarie. Here among us you will be happier, richer, and greater.”9 Why did Gouhenant and many of his associates refuse to acknowledge the real hopelessness of their situation in their letters to Cabet? The answer, I think, is that to do so would have been to call into question their

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faith in him and in their cause. To persevere was to demonstrate the strength of their faith. As Alexis-Armel Marchand wrote his brother: We have arrived at the territory where we are going to found our new homeland. For just ten days we have been working unbelievably hard to build huts. We have almost finished ten of them, and we must build 150 by July 1. Our task is hard and painful, and we have had all kinds of obstacles to overcome, but thanks to the courage inspired in us by so noble a cause, we have not allowed ourselves to become discouraged, and we hope to triumph over all our adversities.10 By July 1, and as a result of efforts that really were heroic, Gouhenant’s group had built thirty-two small log cabins and a fifteen-by-twenty-foot log refectory. They had also done a little planting, and they calculated that they had met the conditions necessary to lay claim to more than ten thousand acres of land. But they were exhausted, and they had no escape from the relentless summer sun. Then the fever hit. During the months of July and August, almost every member of the Icarian Advance Guard fell sick. Four of them died. A fifth was killed by lightning. Four others, including the group’s only doctor, simply left.11 To remain in Icarie under these circumstances would have been suicidal. Thus, toward the middle of August, the whole contingent made ready to leave. But then on August 29 they were joined by a group of eleven Icarians led by Pierre Favard. This was all that remained of the nineteenmember second Advance Guard that had set out from Le Havre on June 3. Favard could not understand why the first Advance Guard had come so far and stayed so long. After taking stock of the situation, he wrote Cabet that the Peters concession was worthless, given its distance from a navigable river and the state of “these abominable roads.” He denounced Gouhenant as a traitor, and he added that he had advised the whole group to return to New Orleans.12 The remnants of the two Advance Guard groups did turn back, expelling Gouhenant, losing four more of their members on the overland trip back to Shreveport, and finally arriving at New Orleans in October, hungry, penniless, and shaking with fever. At New Orleans they were soon joined by several boatloads of would-be settlers whom Cabet had allowed to depart even after receiving Favard’s first letters. More than four hundred Icarians were now packed into two rented brick buildings in New Orleans, and they began to argue bitterly. Some were furious at Cabet, whom they accused of having abandoned them; others blamed Gouhenant for failing to stop at Sulphur Prairie. Most of them still clung to the hope that Cabet might join them and that, under his leadership,

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they might find a better site on which to found the ideal city of their dreams.13 Cabet’s attitude through all of this had in fact been deeply equivocal. During the first four months after the February Revolution, he had paid scant attention to his Icarian Advance Guard. Furthermore, he never acknowledged his own failure to negotiate an acceptable agreement with the Peters Land Company; and when he finally received Favard’s disaster reports, his first response was to blame Gouhenant and “the Jesuits” for everything that had gone wrong. At the same time, Cabet was slow to reveal the real state of affairs in Texas. Indeed, he allowed two boatloads of emigrants to leave before offering a full account in Le Populaire.14 Finally Cabet realized that he had no choice but to go to New Orleans himself. Arriving on January 19, 1849, he learned that more than 200 “dissidents” (as he called them) were calling for the dissolution of the movement and threatening legal action to get back the money they had entrusted to him. Two days later, at a general meeting of all Icarians, Cabet was formally accused of having deceived and abandoned the two groups comprising the Advance Guard. He replied by calling his critics rebels and anarchists. After two days of heated discussion, 280 Icarians voted to remain with Cabet. The rest—about 200 —voted to return to France, and they were allotted 15,000 francs from the now-depleted Icarian treasury. This was not enough to get them back to France, let alone redeem their contributions to the movement.15 For another month Cabet and his faithful followers remained at New Orleans, hoping to find a suitable site for relocation. Then on February 5, a group that had been sent to explore possibilities upriver in the Mississippi Valley reported that the Mormons were trying to sell what remained of the thriving community they had created at Nauvoo, Illinois, before their expulsion by angry mobs in 1846. On February 28, 1849, the 280 Icarians who remained loyal to Cabet voted to move to Nauvoo. The following day they boarded a steamship and, again singing the Icarian “Chant du Départ,” they headed upriver to try to build their utopia in a more favorable setting on the banks of the Mississippi River. The disastrous Texas chapter of their voyage to Icarie was over. Very few of the Icarians remained in Texas after the failure of their effort to build a community on the site originally selected by Cabet. One who did remain, however, was Adolphe Gouhenant, the much-maligned leader of the first Advance Guard. After his expulsion by the Icarians in September 1848, Gouhenant, who had been a painter in France, spent several years eking out a living as a deer skinner. But by 1853, he had made a new life for himself by buying land and establishing an “arts saloon” on the main square in Dallas. That summer, Gouhenant had a chance en-

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counter with the French socialist Victor Considerant, who had come to Dallas on his own search for a site for a possible communitarian experiment. The two hit it off, and the next day Gouhenant sat Considerant down under a cottonwood tree on the bank of the Trinity River and told him the story of his life as a follower of Cabet. Gouhenant’s account of the failure of the first Icarian community in Texas was fascinating for Considerant not only because it made a remarkable story but also because he believed it demonstrated that a successful communitarian experiment would require much more careful planning. Considerant also reflected on the ups and downs of Gouhenant’s career. In 1848, he had been “sacrificed, slandered and crushed” by Cabet. But now, in 1853, Gouhenant had become “the proprietor of a dozen lots of land in the town of Dallas” and had established a successful business. Only in America, Considerant believed, was such a rapid change of fortunes possible.16 In 1853, Victor Considerant was forty-five years old (Figure 15.3). Two decades earlier he had helped create a social movement devoted to the spread and implementation of the ideas of the French utopian thinker Charles Fourier. For fifteen years he had championed the view that the answer to the problems of industrial society was the creation of Fourierist communities in which work and social relations would be organized according to the dictates of the passions. Then in 1848, with the establishment of a democratic republic in France, Considerant was elected to the French National Assembly and embarked on a political career as a leader of the French democratic socialists. In 1849, however, he was forced into exile, and he began for the first time to consider the prospects for establishing a Fourierist community outside of France. In November 1852, at the invitation of the American Fourierist Albert Brisbane, he sailed for America to explore the possibilities for a communitarian experiment in the New World.17 In his writings Considerant for some time already had been contrasting the decadence and corruption of Europe with images of youth, energy, and vitality that he identified with American democracy. So it is hardly surprising that he was entranced by America. Soon after his arrival, he wrote a friend excitedly about “the enormous resources” offered by America to anyone interested in radical social experimentation. He then embarked with Brisbane on an extraordinary trip by train, steamboat, and horseback that took him from New York to Texas. In traversing Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) he was overwhelmed by the beauty and fertility of the landscape. Oklahoma was a wild Eden “just waiting to be farmed and developed.” He found Texas even more “magnificent” and more “welcoming.” A few weeks later, in visiting the small military out-

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15.3

During his years in

Texas, Victor Considerant became an American citizen. After his return to Paris in 1869, he continued to sign his name “Victor Considerant, citoyen américain” and to wear a serape and a broad-brimmed Texan hat. Carte-de-visite, photographer unknown.

post of Fort Worth, Considerant easily convinced himself that he had located the ideal site for a communal experiment.18 On his return to Europe in 1853, Considerant rapidly wrote a “report” on his trip for friends and followers. This work, which was published in May 1854 under the title Au Texas, had several dimensions. On one level it was the record of a journey to the Promised Land in which Considerant cast himself in the role of Moses. But the book also offered the detailed description of a plan for the establishment of a colony in Texas, and it concluded with an appeal for funds and for immigrants. From this perspective Au Texas can be seen as a piece of promotional literature in the emerging tradition of American boosterism, for it gave an extravagantly rosy picture of the opportunities awaiting settlers and investors in Texas. It painted Texas as “the pearl of the 32 states in the Union,” a land of rich soil, pleasant winters, and abundant harvests. Drawing on his own observation, his conversations, his readings, and, it would seem, his fantasies, Considerant asserted that in no other part of America was rainfall more reliable than in Texas and that Holland was not more favorable than Texas to the use of the windmill as a source of power. Even poverty assumed a more benign character in Texas than elsewhere. “Poverty in Texas is not a resigned and static poverty,” he wrote. Rather it was “a point of departure. Comfort and wealth come right on its heels.”19

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The response to Au Texas exceeded Considerant’s wildest expectations. The Fourierists’ Paris office was deluged with letters of support, offers of participation, and pledges of money totaling hundreds of thousands of francs. These offers came not only from France but also from Belgium and Switzerland, from the young and the old, and not only from artisans and skilled workers but also from civil servants and professional people, from clerks with a love of gardening, from widows, and from retired music teachers. But very few of those who offered to participate had any experience of farming—and this was to prove a problem.20 As it turned out, there was also a fundamental disagreement between Considerant and the majority of his followers concerning the kind of community to be established in Texas. What they wanted was a Fourierist association—a community in which work would be organized on Fourierist principles with profits distributed to labor, capital, and talent according to Fourier’s specifications and with a guaranteed minimum of food, clothing, and shelter to be provided to all. What he wanted was a “champ d’asile,” a place of refuge in Texas where the representatives of various social theories could try out their ideas independently. Considerant’s idea was to create a “colonization agency” that would initiate and supervise the initial phases of settlement. It would be run as a joint-stock company capitalized at five million francs. Its representatives would purchase land in north Texas, then recruit and hire an advance guard of about 150 American “pioneers” to clear fields, plant crops, and build temporary lodging. Meanwhile, the colonization agency in Europe would be negotiating with groups of prospective settlers. These settlers would purchase the improved land from the agency, and it would arrange their transportation to Texas. Once they arrived, they would be free to organize their collective life as they pleased. Although some would follow Fourierist principles, other methods of communal organization also would be represented.21 Why was Considerant so reluctant to call for an immediate effort to build an experimental Fourierist community in Texas? Apparently because he was not sure it would work under frontier conditions in a strange country. He said as much in his text when he criticized the “illusions” of those who wished to proceed immediately to the “realization,” and he noted the “disastrous” outcome of the Icarian venture in Texas. Unfortunately, he had described so eloquently— and so extravagantly— the opportunities awaiting settlers in Texas that his warnings about the difficulties of the task and the need to avoid sectarian dogmatism were not heard.22 One other contentious issue concerned the timing of departures and the composition of groups of would-be settlers. Considerant had long

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been warning about the dangers of impatience. Thus his original proposal had called for the American advance guard to spend a year preparing the site prior to the arrival of settlers. In accordance with this plan, his associate François Cantagrel had sailed for America in October 1854 with the intention of proceeding to north Texas to select a site and recruit laborers. But much of this was called into question by a later agreement which specified that a group of European Fourierists would take over the functions of the advance guard. The whole situation was further complicated by the fact that some Europeans were determined to leave as soon as possible for Texas, regardless of the leaders’ instructions.23 In the end, close to 150 French, Swiss, and Belgian immigrants departed for Texas during the winter of 1855. The question of who authorized these departures is hard to resolve, but one thing is clear: Considerant’s original plan to postpone the arrival of settlers was a dead letter. Nonetheless, he too was caught up in the general enthusiasm, and in the first days of January 1855, as he addressed his comrades for the last time prior to his own departure, he seemed to have no doubts or reservations. “God will protect us,” he wrote. “Friends, I am leaving, and I shall wait for you on the immaculate soil in which we are going to sow liberty, science and love.”24 When Considerant reached New York City on February 4, 1855, his hopes were high. But he soon made a series of discoveries that left him sick and demoralized. The first was that the Texas State Legislature had closed off to settlement the land around Fort Worth that he had chosen as an ideal site for a community. Another disappointment was the failure of the project to attract significant American support. Fewer than two dozen Americans actually joined the community in Texas, and the attempt to raise money from American Fourierists was a dismal failure. In the end, even Albert Brisbane, who had encouraged Considerant at the outset and who had published an abridged translation of Au Texas, only contributed $7,000 of the $20,000 he had initially pledged.25 A further disappointment was the hostility of the Texas press. The Fourierists’ arrival happened to coincide with the height of the “KnowNothing” movement in Texas. The hatred of Catholics and the suspicion of foreign radicals that were characteristic of urban nativism in America found an echo in the rural South and West, where they were reinforced by the fear that foreigners — and especially radical foreigners —were likely to be abolitionists. Not surprisingly, Considerant’s plans aroused bitter opposition from the Know-Nothings and their sympathizers. Just two weeks after Considerant’s arrival, the Texas State Gazette of Austin published a widely reprinted editorial deploring his plan to establish “a colony of socialists in Texas.” Similar comment appeared elsewhere in papers ranging from the Texas State Times to the Washington Sentinel.26

15.4

Plan of lands belonging to the European-American Colonization Society in Texas,

including “Plan of Building Lots and Gardens in Reunion.” All of the separate shaded areas were owned by the colonization society. The “building lots and gardens” were located in what is now west Dallas. There is a plaque commemorating Reunion on Hampton Road, but the chalky bluffs on which the main buildings were to rise have been dug out by the Lone Star Cement Company. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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Not all Texas newspapers were hostile to the Fourierists. The Dallas Herald, the Northern Standard, and the Galveston News were all relatively sympathetic. Still, the combined effect of all these setbacks was to devastate Considerant. Convinced that the weight of the world had fallen on him, he became physically sick and fell into a state of deep depression. Remaining in the east for several months, he wrote a new brochure entitled European Colonization in Texas that he hoped would disarm his Know-Nothing critics and attract American investors. He also traveled to Washington to seek help from Texas congressmen in obtaining a land concession or in circumventing the newly imposed restrictions on settlement. Nothing came of these initiatives. Unable to obtain the land he wanted in north Texas, Considerant began in March to look elsewhere. At that very moment, however, his collaborator François Cantagrel was buying unrestricted land near Dallas, though at a higher price than Considerant had hoped to pay.27 So it was that a site was finally selected just west of Dallas (Figure 15.4). Setting up headquarters in a cabin by the Trinity River, Cantagrel and the Yankee Fourierist John Allen bought several pair of oxen and then began to hire local laborers to bring trees out of a cedar forest on the property and start the work of building. By mid-April they had assembled a labor force of about twenty, and they were working with an energy and speed that later arrivals found impressive. The site chosen was near the top of a bluff overlooking the Trinity River. It was dotted with outcroppings of white limestone, and although the quality of the soil was poor, small trees and vines and buffalo grass grew abundantly, creating an illusion of fertility. The first buildings were simple log cabins. But Cantagrel also got work started on a large central building of rough-sawn cedar logs and hand-hewn limestone rocks to house dormitories and a community kitchen and dining room. Plans were drawn up for a director’s house and for separate bunkhouses; large tracts on the hillside were laid out for vineyards and orchards; and the valley land was divided into separate fields. The name given to the settlement was Reunion.28 News that Cantagrel had purchased land in Texas reached Paris on April 20, 1855. By that time, and despite the fact that they had no fixed destination, more than one hundred would-be colonists were en route to Texas. Two groups totaling almost fifty people had sailed just prior to Considerant. Then on February 28, a boatload of forty-three colonists left Le Havre under the leadership of Dr. Auguste Savardan. And on April 12, a group of twenty-seven Swiss led by Charles Burkly of Zurich sailed out of Bremen. While the Paris directors were well aware of the dangers of premature emigration, they authorized these departures without hesitation, and in May they could write optimistically of future sailings in the fall.29

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Considerant finally arrived at Reunion on May 30, 1855. He found that morale was good and that the laborers working under Cantagrel’s direction had made a start in constructing housing. They were not prepared, however, to provide anything but the most primitive accommodations for the seventy additional colonists who were on the way. Three large bunkhouses had been built out of stone and log, each with private rooms in the rear for couples and single women and a dormitory for men at the front. These bunkhouses had long, sloping, shingled roofs, and a porch in front of each building served as a dining area. Considerant, who was not happy with them, called them “mastodons.”30 Both Considerant and Cantagrel agreed that since at the outset the colonists were going to have to live off food and supplies purchased at Houston or Dallas, it would be wise to eat frugally. Thus the first weeks, the colonists dined with monotonous regularity on coffee and bread and occasional corn meal pancakes in the morning, a lunch of weak bouillon and boiled beef (which Dr. Savardan later described as often rancid), and in the evening on leftovers from lunch. They rarely ate vegetables, and the only amenities were an occasional cup of tea and a small glass of whiskey ceremoniously poured out in the evening. By midsummer, however, the menu became more varied, as hunters began to bring in game from the woods and fields below the town site. At the same time, the purchase of cows and pigs and goats permitted the colonists to enjoy what one of them described as “a host of little treats, like butter, cheese, etc., which were lacking at the beginning.”31 During the early summer the colonists devoted themselves to construction, to planting vegetables, and to establishing small herds. But it soon became apparent that in the absence of cities, markets, and even roads, there was no point in trying to establish the sorts of workshops and industries with which most of them were familiar. There was no market for even the most basic of manufactured goods. The town of Dallas was still little more than a dot on the map: its population in 1855 had not yet reached four hundred, and it was only incorporated the following year. Under the circumstances, tanning and distilling were the only industries that could amount to anything. It was clear that once roads were built and a railroad line established across the north of Texas, economic growth would be rapid. In the meantime, the only profitable farmwork seemed to be stock raising and vegetable farming. The latter was difficult, however, because, as the Polish colonist Kalikst Wolski put it, “the sun, so beneficent in other countries, burns mercilessly in Texas.” The working day was long. Since it was impossible to work outdoors when the summer sun was high, the colonists had to get up before dawn and work till 7 p.m., with a three- or four-hour siesta at midday. But until the arrival of Savardan’s group, morale re-

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mained high and most of the colonists accepted the routine uncomplainingly. True, there was grumbling about waste and mismanagement. But the general atmosphere was positive. On July 2, the Belgian Vincent Cousin could boast that Reunion was about to replace Dallas as “the capital of North Texas,” and on holidays like July 4 and July 14, the whole community gathered happily in an outdoor amphitheater created by Considerant’s wife, Julie, in a grove of trees furnished with hammocks and decorated with bouquets and garlands of flowers.32 By mid-July 1855, with the arrival of the groups led by Savardan and Burkly, the population at Reunion reached 130. At this point, serious problems began to emerge. The main problem was simply that the newcomers were exhausted and in many cases bitterly disappointed from the moment of their arrival. After an ocean voyage of at least six weeks and an arduous three- or four-week trip in covered wagons through dry creek beds and burned forests and waterless prairies, they arrived at Reunion to find primitive accommodations, bad food, oppressive heat, springs running dry, and rattlesnakes. The summer of 1855 was one of the hottest in memory: rivers and springs dried up prematurely, crops failed, and prices rose. Since the planting at Reunion had gotten underway late, and since the colonists had planted many crops not native to Texas, Reunion was especially hard hit by the drought. By early July some wheat had been harvested, and there was still hope for late plantings of corn and sweet potatoes. But the rest was lost, and in the fall these late plantings, too, were largely destroyed by hordes of grasshoppers and caterpillars.33 In August everything went wrong. First, Reunion’s principal spring went dry, and water had to be hauled in from a distance. Then the merchant in Dallas who had been the colonists’ chief supplier ran out of salt and sugar. There was now so little water on the prairies that the ox-drawn wagons that normally brought supplies from Houston to Dallas could no longer make the trip. Not surprisingly, with food and water running short and with the new arrivals exhausted, a number of the colonists fell sick. In early August, two people died, and Kalikst Wolski noted in his journal that a tailor named Maget was “busy stirring up our colonists against Dr. Savardan.”34 In the face of all these difficulties, many of the colonists lost courage. In July there were conflicts between different groups of immigrants. Dr. Savardan’s group began almost immediately after their arrival to complain about the food, the housing, and the chaotic organization of work. By Savardan’s own account, his group quickly fell into disgrace, serving as the target for a “constant fire of sarcasm” from the Belgians. On the other hand, the smaller group of Swiss under Charles Burkly were respected by

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the rest of the community, but they were so dissatisfied with Considerant’s leadership that within six months most of them had left.35 Throughout all of this, the main problem confronting the leaders of Reunion was that, far from being self-supporting, the community was living off its capital. By August, a substantial herd had been established — eighty beef cattle, thirty milk cows, twenty pigs — and it was possible for the community to set up its own butcher shop at a time when the village of Dallas had none. The colonists could also boast that they had placed four hundred acres of land under cultivation and had established an elaborate irrigation system including three hundred meters of zinc pipe. But the system was worthless when springs were running dry, and the colonists had no more to show for all their efforts than a little grain and a few plates of radishes. They still had to buy almost all their food except meat in Dallas. And even though they now had a sawmill, lumber and other supplies had to be purchased at Dallas or else carted in at great expense from Houston.36 In time, Considerant believed, the capital investments already made would bear fruit, and the value of the land would increase dramatically once Dallas was linked by rail to the rest of the country. For the immediate future, though, Reunion would continue to absorb vast amounts of capital unless he acted decisively. But Considerant was unable to act. Instead, he fell silent and in effect retreated to his hammock. For six months after his arrival at Reunion he did not send a single letter to the directors in Paris, allowing Cantagrel and Savardan to handle all communications. Later he wrote that the only acceptable course of action would have been to send back to Europe nine-tenths of the colonists and simply write off the losses of the first year. However, this could only have been done if he had been confident of his ability to carry on. He possessed no such confidence.37 Finally Considerant adopted a compromise solution. In his capacity as executive agent of the European-American Colonization Society in Texas — and without consulting the directors in Paris — he devised a plan that would limit the support given to Reunion. Creating an autonomous Society of the Proprietors of Reunion, he ceded to it “the domain of Reunion,” consisting now of 12,286 acres of land. The Colonization Society, which had originally organized the venture, then bought four hundred shares in the Proprietors’ Society for $30,000. At the same time, it was decided that colonists would receive a daily wage ranging from $1.00 to $1.65 depending on the kind of work they did. But they were only to receive one-third of this wage in tokens good for making purchases at Reunion’s store. The rest would be withheld by the Proprietors’ Society and converted into shares to be credited to the account of each worker.38

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The Proprietors’ Society was formally constituted on August 7, 1855 with Cantagrel as director and an administration handpicked by Considerant. At that time, there were 128 colonists at Reunion, but only 95 of them joined the new association. The other 33 chose not to accept Considerant’s terms. A dozen of them bought land and set about creating a new settlement to the west of Dallas on the road to Fort Worth. Some of these defectors were quick to let the Paris directors know what they thought about the “unbelievable ineptitude” of Considerant’s leadership. As for Considerant himself, he had now become sick and embittered by the whole experience, aware of his responsibilities but at the same time unable either to write the directors in Paris or to deal with the colonists whom he had brought to Texas.39 Considerant’s rapid disenchantment with the whole venture, his exhaustion, and his inability to exercise real leadership are evident in many of the descriptions of life at Reunion during the first year. But the most vivid picture is that of his enemy, Dr. Savardan, whose Naufrage au Texas portrays him lying in his hammock all day, smoking his pipe, and sighing. In other accounts Considerant appears in a better light. Still, he had clearly lost control of the situation and had fallen into a state of mental and moral collapse. He said as much himself in the extraordinary apology he wrote two years later under the title Du Texas. There he described himself as a passive spectator and Reunion as a sort of monster that had come into being despite his efforts.40 In October 1855, Considerant abruptly left Reunion to go to Austin — ostensibly to seek the support of members of the Texas State Legislature. But equally important motives, no doubt, were the desire to get away from Reunion and to investigate other possibilities for settlement under conditions more to his liking. And in fact, with the help of a state legislator named Supervielle he did locate some very attractive land that might be bought for a reasonable price along the Sabinal River in the hill country west of San Antonio in what was then called Uvalde Canyon.41 Considerant was back at Reunion by mid-March 1856. Not long after his return, rumors began to spread among the colonists that he was making plans to dissolve the Proprietors’ Society and to sell off its land in small parcels. These rumors were not very wide of the mark. His main concern now was indeed to relieve the Colonization Society of the burden of maintaining the community at Reunion. Once this goal had been achieved, he believed, the resources of the parent society could be used to promote an effort of colonization elsewhere, presumably in Uvalde Canyon. This time there would be no question of throwing all the resources of the Colonization Society into a premature attempt to create a Fourierist association. Instead, by purchasing all of Uvalde Canyon, the

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Colonization Society could open up a vast area to different types of settlement. Thus in the spring of 1856 Considerant was still hoping to realize his original vision: the creation of a testing ground for different types of radical social experimentation.42 A first step in this direction was taken on May 7, when, on Considerant’s initiative and against the strong objections of Dr. Savardan, the administration of the Proprietors’ Society voted to allow shareholders to exchange their shares for land. This opened the way for the establishment of privately owned farms within the community, and it marked the abandonment of the attempt to create anything like a Fourierist association at Reunion. Naturally, Dr. Savardan opposed the move. For him Considerant was a “dictator” who was willing to destroy an authentic experiment in Fourierist association simply to engage in land speculation.43 Although Considerant had given up on Reunion by spring of 1856, the community’s material situation was in some ways more promising than in the previous fall. The winter had been bitterly cold, and a good deal of time had been spent insulating the bunkhouses and dormitories hastily constructed the previous summer. But new buildings had been built—a smokehouse and a bakery and new workshops and storage buildings— and a general store had been established; the herd of cattle had been enlarged, and by the end of March, the plowing and planting were well underway. Hunting parties brought in wild game that, with the addition of a few winter vegetables, made savory hot soups that colonists remembered long afterward. As the days grew longer and warmer, visiting resumed and the morale of the colony improved. But then in early May 1856, disaster struck. A bitter north wind brought a severe frost that ruined the growing crops and gardens. It was so cold that—in May!— the Trinity River froze over. The plowing and planting had to be done all over again. But little of what was planted in May survived the sun, drought, and grasshoppers of another hot summer.44 To complicate the situation still further, six new groups of colonists arrived during the first six months of 1856, bringing the total population at Reunion to almost three hundred. Most of these new arrivals were specialized workers who came with approval of the directors in Paris. But others came on their own, bringing children and elderly relatives. A few of these were refugees from Icarian schisms. But even the invited specialized workers sometimes turned out to be worthless. The gardener Guillier, for example, who had run a nursery in Algeria, announced that he had not come to Reunion to work but to direct the work of others. He wound up spending most of his eight months in the community playing the accordion.45 Considerant himself obviously bore a large share of the blame for these

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unwanted arrivals. His failure to give clear instructions to the directors in Paris during the first six months had placed them in an impossible position. By April 1856, he finally understood that something had to be done to stop the flow of immigrants. He sent an agent back to France to explain to the directors that no new immigrants could be accepted. On the way, the agent met several parties of would-be colonists, the first in the middle of the prairie between Dallas and Houston. They had come much too far to turn back.46 What these new colonists found on their arrival at Reunion must have made many of them wish that they had turned back. They had been warned about the material hardships awaiting them. But what they could not have been prepared for was the total lack of direction at Reunion and the general atmosphere of acrimony and discouragement. The restaurant and store were still relatively well run, but among the work groups, discipline had collapsed. Woodcutters and artisans now spent their days fishing and hunting for their dinner; groups of workers quarreled interminably over the use of a team of horses; and tools, sacks, and saddles lay abandoned in the fields. The whole community was divided into factions whose members spent more time trading insults and accusations than working at their assigned tasks. Considerant and Dr. Savardan had become bitter enemies. Cantagrel was accused of mismanaging funds. Many of the original members of the community were complaining openly about Considerant’s lack of leadership. And Amédée Simonin, the accountant whose diary is a major source for this period, had become convinced that Considerant was no longer in possession of his faculties.47 On April 7, 1856, a banquet was held to celebrate Fourier’s birthday. Speeches and toasts were given, and Considerant regained some of his old eloquence in appealing to the colonists to lay aside their differences. He also took personal responsibility for most of the mistakes that had been made. At the end of his talk, many colonists cheered. Others were silent. Simonin noted afterward that Considerant himself did not seem to believe his own hopeful words. No wonder then that he “could no longer electrify” a crowd that just a year earlier had “considered him a demi-god.”48 The real problem was that Considerant was no longer capable of making a decision. His thoughts were muddled. He now spent much of his time writing long and impractical “position papers” on the problems confronting the community— only to disavow them in the face of objections. He and Cantagrel began to argue over the possible dissolution of the Proprietors’ Society and the privatization of its land and resources. But when Cantagrel talked of resigning, Considerant’s response was to threaten suicide.49 By the end of April, Considerant had lost the confidence of almost everyone. Now a number of the colonists began to leave. A few who

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could afford it returned to France, and others moved into Dallas to seek work. Simonin the accountant resigned in early June; Cantagrel kept talking of returning to France, and Considerant of leaving for west Texas. In July, matters finally came to a head. Cantagrel resigned as director on July 6. The next day Considerant took over negotiations with the unhappy colonists and reached an agreement that gave them half of the wages previously withheld. This agreement was to be signed on the morning of July 8, 1856. But that morning Considerant was nowhere to be found. His wife remained at Reunion. But he was gone, unable to tolerate the situation any longer (Figure 15.5).50 One of the ironies of the story of Reunion is that only after Considerant’s departure did a bill to incorporate the Colonization Society finally pass both houses of the Texas State Legislature. It was signed into law by Governor Pease on September 1, 1856. This outcome, after a debate that included fierce attacks on the “French colony of communists,” gave little cause for celebration to those who remained at Reunion. For the main concern of most of them by the summer of 1856 was to find a way of getting out of Reunion with at least something to show for their time and ef15.5

Victor Considerant’s house near the Mission la Concepción just outside San An-

tonio. This is where the Considerants settled after the failure of Reunion. They remained here throughout most of the 1860s. This drawing by James Wells Champney originally appeared in Scribner’s Magazine in the early 1870s and was later published in Edward S. King, The Great South (Hartford, Conn., 1875), 156.

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fort. Some did manage to leave, and these were, as Simonin put it, “the best.” For the others, it was another long, hot summer, a summer marked by the complete collapse of morale and work discipline, by the wasteful and irresponsible use of the community’s resources, and by an atmosphere of constant bickering and recrimination. For their part, the directors in Paris had come to share Simonin’s view that, given two more years of collective life, the colonists at Reunion might well run through all the resources of the Colonization Society.51 To put an end to this situation and to liquidate the Proprietors’ Society, the directors in Paris decided to send one of their number to Texas. This was Allyre Bureau. When Bureau arrived at Reunion in January 1857, he found a situation so bad that he fell sick in attempting to deal with it. Full of anger at Considerant, at the directors, and at each other, many of the remaining colonists demanded the immediate payment in cash of all the money withheld from their wages. Bureau wanted to give them something, but he reminded them that during the preceding year and a half they had been housed and fed, however inadequately, at the expense of the Colonization Society.52 Finally, on January 26, 1857, a sleepless and exhausted Bureau held a general meeting of the whole community to discuss the question of the withheld money. This meeting quickly turned into a shouting match. Bureau was physically threatened, and, according to Savardan, he was so intimidated by the colonists that he fled without explaining his plans. Two days later, Bureau, who was by this time prostrate with exhaustion, announced by poster the dissolution of the Proprietors’ Society with limited compensation for its members.53 Since Allyre Bureau was no longer in any condition to manage the affairs of Reunion, and since Considerant refused to have anything to do with the colony, someone else had to be called in to oversee its dissolution. This task fell on the Belgian Vincent Cousin, who arrived on February 15 to replace Bureau as the director of Reunion. Throughout the spring and summer of 1857, Cousin devoted himself to selling off the tools, livestock, and land of Reunion to former colonists and, in a few cases, to American farmers and settlers. At the same time, he drew up grandiose plans for a new city of Reunion, to consist of privately owned building and garden lots, which he hoped to sell to settlers. Cousin actually managed to sell thirteen of these lots in 1857. But the new city never materialized. By 1860, about half the original colonists had made their way back to Europe, and the other half had established themselves in the area around Dallas. Allyre Bureau returned to Reunion in January 1858 to build a house for his family and to resume the direction of what had now become no more than a collection of isolated, privately owned dwellings

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and a general store. But Bureau’s return to Reunion was short-lived, for he died of yellow fever in October 1859. In the end, just one of the original colonists, François Santerre, established his family permanently on the site of the original colony.54 With the dissolution of Reunion, the shareholders of the grandly named European-American Colonization Society in Texas were left with land — some 10,000 acres of unoccupied land in the vicinity of Dallas and another 50,000 acres of virtually unoccupied land that Considerant had purchased west of San Antonio near what is now Utopia, Texas. For fifteen years they kept hoping that the growth of the population of Texas and the spread of railroad lines would raise the value of the land enough to compensate for the big losses suffered at Reunion between 1855 and 1857. This never happened. Instead, the dislocations produced by the Civil War led to the collapse of the economy, a decline in land values, and a delay in the coming of the railroad. Finally, in 1875, the Colonization Society was itself dissolved and its holdings put up for sale. The greater part of its land was purchased by François Cantagrel for a sum that made it possible to pay off shareholders at the rate of 12 percent on their original investments.55 Today almost nothing is left of Reunion. There is a plaque on Hampton Road in west Dallas, and one can find the graves of a few of the original colonists in the small French cemetery on Fish Trap Road. But the chalky bluffs on which the community of Reunion rose have been dug out by a cement plant, and in place of Julie Considerant’s outdoor salon and the garden with its sanded pathways and its irrigation trenches and its “300 meters of zinc piping” stand the shopping malls and housing projects and used car lots of West Dallas. Three miles away, on the other side of the Trinity River, rises the modern city of Dallas, a city built by oil money and by forms of entrepreneurial capitalism that the founders of Reunion could not dream of. Dominating the skyline of modern Dallas is a fifty-story observation tower that bears the name of Reunion. But it’s doubtful that many residents of modern-day Dallas could explain the origin of the name. There is one respect, however, in which the attempt to build utopia in the promised land of Texas did bear fruit. It brought to the area around Dallas many francophone Europeans —French, Belgians, Swiss—who stayed on after the breakup of Reunion. In fact, more than half the colonists settled in Texas permanently, and about forty families moved into the small community of Dallas. Most were well educated, broadminded, and hardworking, and (as James Pratt has shown) many of them were to play an important role in the early history of the city.56 Benjamin Long was to become the mayor of Dallas after the Civil War; the botanist

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Julien Reverchon introduced new methods of grafting and breeding and scientific farming in the Dallas area; François Santerre and others enriched the libraries of Dallas with their personal book collections. John Louckx and Jean Loupot were responsible for some of the earliest building projects in Dallas, and others set up the city’s first brickworks, first lime kilns, first tailor shop, first tannery, and first brewery. In these ways the seeds planted by the Fourierists in the “immaculate soil of Texas” bore fruit— even if it was not quite what Considerant and his colleagues had in mind. It is not hard to explain the failures of both the Icarians and the Fourierists in Texas. Neither Cabet nor Considerant really knew what he was doing. Cabet was taken in by the Peters Land Company and sent his followers off on a fool’s errand with totally inadequate directions. When things went wrong, he blamed Gouhenant and “the Jesuits.” Considerant authorized the purchase of land that turned out to be unsuitable for farming and then had to face an exceptionally hot and dry summer. Unable to cope with dissension or to exercise leadership or even to stay in touch with the directors in Paris, Considerant finally just ran away. Both Considerant and Cabet were guilty of false advertising. Both chose, or in Considerant’s case acquiesced in the selection of, colonists who lacked the agricultural skills needed in Texas, and both failed to halt emigration when it was evident that conditions in Texas were not right. But inept and irresponsible leadership was not the only problem. How, one wonders, could Cabet’s Texas Icarie or Considerant’s Reunion ever have succeeded, given the limitations and the inaccessibility of the sites chosen and the enormous gap between the expectations and aptitudes of the would-be colonists? But the question of why the two communities failed might not be the right one to ask. More interesting, perhaps, is the question of the place of Reunion and Icarie within the broader history of secular experiments in communal living in nineteenth-century America. Viewed in this light, Cabet’s Texas Icarie can be seen as the first in a series of efforts to give substance to the utopian vision elaborated in his Voyage en Icarie. The later efforts — at Nauvoo, Illinois, and (after Cabet’s death) at Corning, Iowa, and Cheltenham, Missouri— were to prove longerlived and vastly more successful. In fact, the Nauvoo community was, according to Robert Sutton, “the closest the Icarians would ever come to creating the ideal society Cabet portrayed in his book.” Cabet was present at Nauvoo, as he had not been in Texas. Significantly, though, what eventually drove apart the community at Nauvoo was the tension between the official ideology of equality and fraternity on the one hand and Cabet’s authoritarian style of leadership on the other. Finally, in October 1856, Cabet was expelled from Nauvoo by his own followers. He was sixty-eight years old, and within two weeks he was dead of a heart attack.

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What is most striking in the accounts of both the Texas Icarie and Nauvoo is the religious devotion Cabet inspired among his followers, including those who eventually turned against him. Cabet was not initially regarded — and did not regard himself— as a messiah or a prophet. But after the publication of Le Vrai Christianisme he came increasingly to be seen — and to see himself— in these terms; and the Icarian movement came to look more like a religious sect. From 1846 on, Cabet was repeatedly described by his disciples in Biblical terms as the “New Moses,” the “dear and worthy apostle of Christ,” the “faithful imitator of Christ,” and even the “new Messiah.” His persecution was compared to that of Jesus Christ, and the Icarians referred to themselves alternately as “New Hebrews” who would “conquer the Promised Land” and as disciples of “the living martyr of our epoch.” When Cabet arrived at New Orleans in January 1849, the Icarian Pierre Bourg described him as “our venerable Messiah” whose appearance brought “tears of joy” from most of his disciples but also “a few Judas kisses” from those who were about to turn against him.57 One occasionally finds religious language in the writings of the Fourierists. Considerant refers fairly often to the “Promised Land of Texas.” But Considerant never received, or asked for, the religious veneration that was given to Cabet, and the Fourierist movement in general did not inspire the kind of religious commitment or faith that was such a conspicuous feature of Icarianism between 1846 and 1856. One reason for this was a fundamental ambiguity in the attitude of the Fourierists toward the community they were trying to create. In the thinking of the Fourierists, the community of Reunion was both a communitarian social experiment and a profit-seeking land development scheme. On the one hand, Reunion was the most ambitious of all the attempts made by the followers of Charles Fourier to give at least a measure of reality to his vision of a new and harmonious social order based on cooperation rather than competition. On the other hand, Reunion was also a capitalistic business venture. What Considerant actually proposed in Au Texas was the creation of “colonization agency” to be run as a joint-stock company. By investing in Texas real estate —buying land, improving it, and selling it to groups of prospective settlers — Considerant hoped to create a “champ d’asile” open to social experimentation of many different kinds. But the role that he assigned to the colonization agency was in fact not very different from that played by land development companies organized by capitalist entrepreneurs. The tension between these two visions — Considerant’s and that of the Fourierist rank-and-file—is one aspect that made Reunion distinctive. It also finally proved to be destructive.58 As we have seen, the Colonization Society actually created in Texas came to play a much larger role than

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Considerant originally intended. In the end, it was the rank-and-file who had their way and who transformed the Texas colonization project into just the sort of premature attempt to “realize” Fourier’s ideas that Considerant had warned against. In retrospect, it is evident that he would have done better to stick to his original plan to hire an advance guard of American laborers to initiate the process of resettlement. But this no longer seemed possible once the readers of Au Texas had overwhelmingly indicated their own desire for an immediate experiment in association. The problem was that Considerant had become the prisoner of his own eloquence. He had so compellingly described the opportunities awaiting settlers in Texas that his readers simply did not hear his warnings and his qualifications. And he himself forgot or ignored them as he prepared to leave Europe in January 1855 to “plant liberty, science, and love” in “the immaculate soil” of Texas. Notes 1. Etienne Cabet, Réalisation de la communauté d’Icarie (Paris, 1847–1848), 412; Jules Prudhommeaux, Icarie et son fondateur Etienne Cabet (Paris: Cornély, 1907), 218; Robert P. Sutton, Les Icariens. The Utopian Dream in Europe and America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 50; Fernand Rude, ed., Voyage en Icarie. Deux ouvriers viennois aux États-Unis en 1855 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952), 24. The social contract referred to by Cabet was his own, not Rousseau’s. My thanks to Carl Guarneri for his guidance in the study of American communitarianism and to Richard Bienvenu for giving this essay a thoughtful reading. 2. The question of the appeal of Voyage en Icarie and the response of Cabet’s followers to his utopian vision is treated with subtlety and imagination by Jacques Rancière in the long chapter on the Icarians in La Nuit des prolétaires, trans. John Drury under the title The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 356–426. The best single work on Cabet is Christopher H. Johnson, Utopian Communism in France: Cabet and Other Icarians, 1839–1851 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974). Johnson focuses on the political movement created by Cabet in France during the 1840s. For the history of the American Icarian communities inspired by Cabet’s ideas see Prudhommeaux, Icarie, and Sutton, Les Icariens. 3. Sutton, Les Icariens, 41– 42. 4. Cabet, Réalisation, 34– 46 and 400 –401; Prudhommeaux, Icarie, 205–207 and 225–228. On the links between Owen and Peters see Sutton, Les Icariens, 45–46. On the Peters Land Company see Seymour V. Connor, “The Peters Colony in North Texas, 1841–1854” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1959). 5. Etienne Cabet, Réalisation de la communauté d’Icarie (Paris: Bureau de Populaire, 1847); Sutton, Les Icariens, 46–47; Prudhommeaux, Icarie, 225–227. 6. Prudhommeaux, Icarie, 219.

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7. On Cabet in 1848 see Johnson, Utopian Communism, 260 –287, and Pierre Angrand, Etienne Cabet et la République de 1848 (Paris, 1948). 8. Prudhommeaux, Icarie, 223–224; Sutton, Les Icariens, 57–58. 9. Letter to Cabet signed by twenty-seven members of the first Advance Guard, May 13, 1848, and Gouhenant to Cabet, May 20, 1848, both cited in Prudhommeaux, Icarie, 230–231 n. 10. Letter cited in Prudhommeaux, Icarie, 231 n. 11. Sutton, Les Icariens, 58; Prudhommeaux, Icarie, 229–230. Prudhommeaux says “seven” died of “a kind of malaria.” 12. Prudhommeaux, Icarie, 230–234; Sutton, Les Icariens, 58–59. 13. Prudhommeaux, Icarie, 235, 238–240, 243; Sutton, Les Icariens, 59. 14. Prudhommeaux, Icarie, 238, gives a full list of Icarian departures for Texas. The total number of emigrants in 1848 was 495. 15. Prudhommeaux, Icarie, 240–242; Sutton, Les Icariens, 61. 16. Gouhenant was a longstanding admirer of Cabet and had been a defendant in a widely publicized trial of Cabet’s followers in Toulouse in 1843. Victor Considerant wrote down Gouhenant’s story in a six-page article possibly destined for, but not published in, the second edition of Au Texas. See Archives Nationales 10as 28 (9). Considerant’s encounter with Gouhenant is also described in Considerant to Parisian Fourierists, June 14, 1853, carton 8, 1:1 (Archives Victor Considerant, École Normale Supérieure). 17. On Victor Considerant see Jonathan Beecher, Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). A substantial part of this work (pp. 295–388) is devoted to Considerant’s Texas years. On Considerant in Texas see also Russell M. Jones, “Victor Considerant’s American Experience (1852–1869),” French-American Review 1 (1976–1977): 65– 94 and 124–150, and Rondel Van Davidson, Did We Think Victory Great? The Life and Ideas of Victor Considerant (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988), 238–285. On the history of Fourierism in America see Carl Guarneri’s magisterial The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 18. Considerant to Allyre Bureau, December 22, 1852, and Considerant to Parisian Fourierists, May 27, 1853, carton 8, 2:1 (École Normale Supérieure). 19. Victor Considerant, Au Texas, 2d ed. (Brussels: Société de Colonisation, 1855; reprint: Philadelphia, 1975), 57, 68. 20. For a fuller account of the response to Au Texas see Beecher, Victor Considerant, 317–318. 21. Considerant, Au Texas, 87–91, 101, 111–118. 22. Ibid., 93, 105, 117–118. 23. Ibid., 117, 118, 129, 184; Victor Considerant, Du Texas. Premier rapport à mes amis (Paris: Librairie Societaire, 1857), 7; Auguste Savardan, Un Naufrage au Texas (Paris: Garnier, 1858), 22–23. 24. Considerant, Au Texas, 324.

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25. Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 331; Considerant, Du Texas, 5– 6. 26. Texas State Gazette, February 17, 1855, quoted in William J. and Margaret F. Hammond, La Réunion: A French Settlement in Texas (Dallas: Royal Publishing Co., 1958), 68. 27. Auguste Savardan later contended (Naufrage, 31) that Cantagrel was hurried into the choice of a site for the colony by Considerant and his agent, Edmund Roger. Savardan neglected to point out another, more compelling reason for making a rapid choice: his own group of forty-three colonists had sailed from Le Havre on February 28, 1855, without waiting to learn that a site had in fact been selected. 28. Bulletin de la Société de Colonisation Européo-Américaine au Texas (hereafter cited as Bulletin) 2 (May 2, 1855): 2–3; 3 (June 13, 1855): 1–2; 4 (August 6, 1855): 1–6; George H. Santerre, White Cliffs of Dallas: The Story of La Réunion, the Old French Colony (Dallas: Book Craft, 1955), 47–51. James Pratt is preparing a major study of Reunion that will shed much light on all aspects of the community’s history. A recent sampling of ongoing work on Reunion is Michel Cordillot, ed., “Autour de la colonie de Réunion, Texas,” a special issue of Cahiers Charles Fourier 4 (1993) with articles by Carl Guarneri, James Pratt, Jonathan Beecher, Bruno Verlet, and Michel Cordillot. A solid study of the reasons for the failure of Reunion is Rondel Van Davidson, “Victor Considerant and the Failure of La Réunion,” Southwest Historical Quarterly 76, no. 3 (January 1973): 277–296. Still worth consulting are two older books on Reunion: Hammond and Hammond, La Réunion, and Santerre, White Cliffs of Dallas. Both books are based on original research, and the Hammonds are good on the attitude of the Texas press, but each work contains significant errors and should be used with caution. 29. Bulletin 2 (May 2, 1855): 1–3; Jones, “Considerant’s American Experience,” 125. 30. Savardan, Naufrage, 140; Bulletin 4 (August 6, 1855): 2, 5–6. 31. Jean Louckx, letter, June 24, 1855, in Bulletin 5 (October 8, 1855): 7; Savardan, Naufrage, 57; Kalikst Wolski, “New Light on La Reunion from the pages of Do Ameryce I w Ameryce,” in Arizona and the West 6, no. 2 (summer 1964): 143–144. 32. Wolski, “New Light,” 142, 145–147; Vincent Cousin to Parisian directors, July 2, 1855, Bourson-Demeur papers, fond 251, opis 1 (Russian State Archives of Social-Political History, Moscow); Bulletin 5 (October 8, 1855): 7– 8. 33. Vrydagh, letter, in Bulletin 5 (October 8, 1855): 7. 34. Wolski, “New Light,” 150 –151. 35. Savardan, Naufrage, 83–85; Wolski, “New Light,” 149–150. 36. Bulletin 6 (December 18, 1855): 5– 8. 37. Considerant, Du Texas, 12. 38. Bulletin 5 (October 8, 1855): 1– 6. 39. Naufrage, 110; Bulletin 5 (October 8, 1855): 1–2, 5. 40. Savardan, Naufrage, 120–121; Considerant, Du Texas, 13. 41. On Considerant’s land purchases in Uvalde Canyon (near the modern towns of Utopia and Vanderpool) and his attempt to get support for a communal experiment there see Beecher, Victor Considerant, 346–363.

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42. Considerant to Parisian directors, November 28, 1855, extracts in Bulletin 12 (November 14, 1856): 40; Considerant to Julie Considerant, March 6, 1856, and October 1, 1856, 10AS 28 (9) (Archives Nationales); Amédée Simonin, “Journal,” April 3 and 15, 1856, Simonin Papers, Mss. 18,160 (Library of Congress); Savardan, Naufrage, 173–176. 43. Savardan, Naufrage, 177; Bulletin, 10 (August 8, 1856): 21–22. 44. Bulletin 7 (February 29, 1856): 6–7; 8 (May 3, 1856): 1; 9 (June 17, 1856): 18; Marie Moret, ed., Documents pour une biographie complète de Jean-Baptiste-André Godin, (Guise [Aisne]: Familistère, 1902–1906), 1:580 –582; Savardan, Naufrage, 178–179; Santerre, White Cliffs, 62–63. 45. Moret, Documents, 1:576 –579; Savardan, Naufrage, 172–173, 247–248; Wolski, “New Light,” 147–148. 46. Simonin, “Journal,” April 24, 1856; Savardan, Naufrage, 165–166. 47. Simonin, “Journal,” April 16, 19, 21, and 27, 1856; François Cantagrel to Emile Bourdon, March 6, 1856, an 10as 37 (2). 48. Simonin, “Journal,” April 7, 1856; Savardan, Naufrage, 175. 49. Simonin, “Journal,” April 6, 15, and 16 and May 1, 1856. 50. Savardan, Naufrage, 182–185; Gabrielle Rey, Le Fouriériste Allyre Bureau (1810 – 1859) (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de l’Université de Marseille-Aix-enProvence, 1962), 470 –471. 51. Hammond and Hammond, La Réunion, 80–84; Simonin, “Journal,” April 22 and 27, 1856; Ferdinand Guillon to Simonin, Simonin Papers, Mss, 18,160 (Library of Congress). 52. Moret, Documents, 1:605; Bulletin 11 (September 13, 1856): 29–30; Rey, Allyre Bureau, 472–473. The whole story of Bureau’s intervention at Reunion is fully and carefully told in Rey, Allyre Bureau, 470 –488. 53. Savardan, Naufrage, 204–206; Rey, Allyre Bureau, 483; Bulletin 14 (May 5, 1857): 54. 54. Savardan, Naufrage, 235; Bulletin 18 (June 16, 1858): 86; Rey, Allyre Bureau, 503– 528; Bruno Verlet, “François Santerre et les siens. Une famille fouriériste au Texas,” Cahiers Charles Fourier 2 (1991): 57–68. 55. Bulletin 32–39 (1868–1875), passim. 56. James Pratt, “Our European Heritage. The Diverse Contributions of La Réunion,” Legacies. A History Journal for Dallas and North Central Texas 1, no. 2 (fall 1989): 14–17. 57. Johnson, Utopian Communism, 254–255; journal of Pierre Bourg cited in Prudhommeaux, Icarie, 240. In a long and fascinating chapter (Utopian Communism, 206–259), Johnson argues that Cabet “allowed himself to be swept away by the tide” of religious sectarianism when he found himself unable to reconcile his own longstanding pacifism with his discovery that class conflict was at the heart of the social disorders of July Monarchy France. 58. For further reflections on the significance of this tension see Jones, “Considerant’s American Experience,” 144–145 and Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 332.

16

IS THERE FRENCH ARCHITECTURE IN TEXAS? R I C H A R D C L E A RY

The building most famously identified with the French in Texas is the French Legation, the oldest surviving building in Austin (Figure 8.3). Commissioned by Alphonse Dubois de Saligny, the French diplomatic envoy to the Republic of Texas, and completed in 1841, the house added a note of grace to the recently founded city, which offered few architectural comforts. Father Jean Marie Odin and the land empresario Henri Castro capitalized on its “almost regal magnificence” (as described by Anson Jones in 1841), the “Parisian and beautiful” furniture, and the skills of its French cook to wine and dine Texas politicians in their respective campaigns on behalf of the Catholic Church and colonization.1 Dubois de Saligny took pains to import French cuisine and furnishings to Texas. He apparently entrusted the design of his house to local builders who worked to a higher standard than seen elsewhere in Austin, though they remained within the conventions of contemporary practice. The arrangement of rooms on each side of a central passageway is a sophisticated version of the familiar dogtrot plan. The thoughtfully detailed colonnaded porch, the French doors, and the dormer windows recall houses in more prosperous regions of east Texas and Louisiana and would not have been out of place in New Orleans, the nearest center of high culture and a city Dubois de Saligny knew well. One might argue that these refinements lend the house a French accent, but if so, the inflection would be Creole rather than Parisian. The French Legation illustrates the difficulty of interpreting architecture in Texas in terms of national identity. Without a doubt it is an important artifact of early Franco-Texan relations, but its design, apart from some of the furnishings, looks to the metropole indirectly at best. Thus, when we seek meaningful relationships among the terms French, architecture, and Texas, we need to be clear about our objectives. Do we mean 226

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San Antonio, François Guilbeau House, designed by Jules Poinsard, 1847. The

cube-like massing, projecting central pavilion crowned by a pediment, and details such as string courses, quoins, and round-arched French doors, are common features of French neoclassical architecture during the first decades of the nineteenth century. The University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio.

to speak of architecture in Texas commissioned, designed, or built by persons of French descent, or architecture that displays or otherwise embodies characteristics thought of as French? These questions acquire an additional layer of complexity when we consider the definition of the term French. With respect to people, national and cultural identities do not always align. For example, many of the colonists of Henri Castro’s colony in Medina County were citizens of France, but their cultural identity, reinforced by language, was more properly Alsatian, and they shared much in common with fellow colonists from neighboring Rhineland German states and Switzerland. Indeed, some immigrated to Texas out of frustration with efforts by the French national government to control affairs in Alsace. To identify them generically as French means little. Another dimension of this problem may be seen in the case of the architect Paul Cret (1876 –1945), who transformed the campus of the University of Texas at Austin in the 1930s. He received his architectural training in France but practiced in the United States. He

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Castroville, Jacques and Margaritha Monier House, circa 1847. The four-room

plan, stone construction, broad front porch, and double-pitch roof are typical of the houses built in Henri Castro’s colony and illustrate how readily the settlers adopted housing types particular to central Texas. Photograph by Richard Cleary.

became an American citizen at the age of fifty-one but maintained close personal and professional ties to France throughout his life. How and to what degree can we discriminate between the French and American strands of his cultural identity? Such questions become no less complicated when we turn from people to buildings. For the purposes of linguistic shorthand, it’s convenient to label a feature “French” rather than applying a more specific appellation, such as “Burgundian” or “Breton,” but when we do so, we must remember that architecture in France is not homogeneous. Thirteenth-century gothic architecture differs region by region; seventeenth-century classical architecture in Aix-en-Provence is not easily confused with that Paris, and vernacular architecture responds to available materials, particular climatic conditions, and local cultures that in the case of border regions such as Alsace may extend beyond national boundaries. There have been efforts to identify unifying characteristics or underlying principles that might be labeled French, but these have limited application.2 Whether or not an architectural feature was originally inspired within a French con-

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text, its cultural identity is not immutable and may be replaced by another when the feature is transported to a new setting. These nuances of interpretation make the study of architecture and the French in Texas difficult but not impossible, and there are interesting stories to tell. Some, such as the history of the French Legation, are familiar. Others are known only in rough outline. One rich topic for further research is the architecture commissioned and built by members of the French community in San Antonio in the mid–nineteenth century. Figures such as the businessman François Guilbeau, the architect-engineer François Giraud, and the architect-builder Jules Poinsard were responsible for a variety of prominent buildings in the city, but our knowledge of their achievements is incomplete (Figure 16.1).3 In this chapter, we will examine ways of considering the architecture of the French in Texas from three vantage points: settlement during the republic and early statehood, architectural fashions and theoretical principles, and case studies of individuals. American and European immigrants alike in the mid–nineteenth century viewed Texas as a tabula rasa —an open land upon which settlers could inscribe their own stories. Three architecturally noteworthy settlement efforts involving French nationals were Henri Castro’s colony in Medina County, Victor Considerant’s Fourierist colony, Reunion, near Dallas, and the efforts of the Roman Catholic Church to re-establish its presence throughout Texas. Henri Castro founded Castroville in September 1844. The town’s initial houses were roughly built, but over the next decade the settlers realized well-crafted, modest houses, many of which survive today (Figure 16.2). Although the houses vary considerably, certain features are sufficiently common to permit a composite sketch. They typically are masonry structures presenting variations of double pen (two rooms side by side) or double pen and lean-to plans set parallel to the street, gable roofs often double-pitched at the rear to accommodate lean-to extensions, and broad front porches. Given the colony’s isolation at the edge of the frontier and its relatively homogeneous population, which included skilled masons and carpenters, one might expect that these houses would exhibit stylistic or constructional conventions of the builders’ homeland. However, they exemplify regional adaptation more than a little Alsace. Recent studies have identified few points of similarity between traditional planning and construction in Alsace and the houses of Medina County but many among the latter and the contemporary settlements of German-speaking immigrants in New Braunfels and Fredericksburg. Both immigrant groups apparently responded to the region’s unfamiliar climate and particular

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palette of building materials by adopting the forms and techniques employed by the Mexican and Anglo-American populations they encountered as they passed through San Antonio.4 In March 1855, as Castro’s colonists were firmly establishing themselves in the Medina River valley, the vanguard of Victor Considerant’s Société de Colonisation Européan-Américaine au Texas founded Reunion on the West Fork of the Trinity River near the tiny village of Dallas. Their vision of collective living included communal buildings that were to follow design principles articulated in Considerant’s prospectus, Au Texas (1854).5 He wrote: “The buildings will be determined by a spatial unit and an architectural element [his italics] deduced from climate and other local conditions.”6 He explained that by “spatial unit” he meant the standardized dimension of a wood-framed structural bay that would serve as a module for arranging buildings on the site as well as the layout of individual structures. The term “architectural element” refers to a standardized system of construction. Considerant believed that by subordinating the exigencies of the building process to these principles, his colonists would achieve “an ensemble of structures that would be expandable, elastic, varied but homogeneous and symmetrical, and adaptable to all contingencies.”7 With optimism not yet tempered by experience living on the Texas plains, he envisioned an idyllic village of symmetrically grouped wood-framed buildings faced with broad verandas festooned with fragrant plants.8 Considerant identified the writings of the French architect and teacher Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (1760 –1834) as his source for these ideas. Durand was one of the most important and widely read theorists of the nineteenth century and taught the architecture course at the École Polytechnique in Paris, Considerant’s alma mater. He advocated an approach to design based on systematized procedures of composition and construction that could be imagined without explicit reference to style.9 His emphasis on economy and utility and his conviction that both are achieved best by regular, symmetrical, simple forms accorded well with Considerant’s Fourierist beliefs. In addition to citing Durand, Considerant mentioned the Crystal Palace built in 1851 in London as an example of how the concept of the architectural element could be applied on a grand scale. This building, which housed the first world’s fair, was the talk of Europe on account of its vast dimensions and remarkable construction of prefabricated cast iron and glass components. As with so many other good intentions for Reunion, Considerant’s architectural plans were thwarted by the unending misfortunes that befell the colonists, and the buildings that they managed to achieve were too few in number and roughly built.10 Ironically, during the first month of

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settlement, the community included among its members the most learned architect in Texas, the prominent French architect and architectural journalist Cesar Daly (1811–1894), who reportedly spent most of his brief stay in bed.11 Father Jean-Marie Odin, from 1840 until his appointment as Bishop of New Orleans in 1862, directed the reestablishment of the Catholic Church in Texas. His administration oversaw the building or reconstruction of more than forty-five churches or chapels, five convents, two large schools in Galveston and San Antonio, and many parish schools.12 The architectural quality of these buildings was uneven, but Odin understood the didactic role architecture could play in the Church’s mission. In a letter written in 1852 soliciting funds from the Société de la Propagation de la Foi in Lyon, he described the newly erected cathedral in Galveston: This church, placed in the principal city of Texas and a unique monument in a land barely emerged from the state of savagery, is a great object of curiosity for all inhabitants. The throngs of travelers constantly moving from place to place all want to visit it. We carefully profit from this circumstance to give them a proper idea of our beliefs . . . The construction of this church was very expensive, but the real good it has accomplished is ample compensation for the financial sacrifices.13 Odin’s institutional vision for the Church in Texas was formed by and consistent with the ideals the French missionary movement promoted by the Société de la Propagation de la Foi and French-based religious orders such as the Vincentians (Odin’s own order), the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and the Ursuline sisters. Given this context, it is reasonable to ask if the architecture achieved during his tenure also looked to France. Saint Mary’s Cathedral in Galveston (Figure 16.3) and the Church of the Immaculate Conception (now cathedral) in Brownsville are among the most ambitious monuments proclaiming the reestablishment of the Roman Catholic Church in Texas. The design of Saint Mary’s (designed and built 1847–1848) is attributed to Theodore E. Giraud and that of the Church of the Immaculate Conception (designed and built 1856–1859) to Pierre Yves Keralum.14 Giraud was the younger brother of the betterknown François Giraud (1818–1877), who made his reputation as an architect and engineer in San Antonio.15 Born in Charleston of French parents, the brothers received their professional training in France and returned to the United States to practice. Around the time of the commission for Saint Mary’s, Theodore also was designing Catholic churches in New Orleans.16 Father Yves Keralum (1817–1872), a native of France, reportedly was trained in cabinetmaking and architecture before entering

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the priesthood as a member of the Oblates.17 He came to Texas in 1852, the year of his ordination. Unfortunately, little is known about where these men studied architecture, and this question is all the more tantalizing in light of the Gothic Revival style of the Galveston and Brownsville churches. The Gothic Revival was new to Texas in the 1850s.18 Elsewhere in the United States, its use for church architecture was most prominently associated with the Episcopalian Church, and the primary formal sources for Gothic Revival design were English. The Galveston and Brownsville churches, however, appear to have a different pedigree. The interior elevation and ornamentation of the sanctuary of Saint Mary’s suggests that Giraud drew on thirteenth-century French Gothic architecture of the Ile-deFrance. Sources for the Church of the Immaculate Conception are much more difficult to discern, but the late architectural historian Willard Robinson has drawn attention to the French character of the pier buttresses on the façade and the filigrees of brickwork along the parapets.19

16.3

St. Mary’s Cathedral in Galveston circa 1860. Design (1847–1848) attributed to

Théodore Giraud. Bishop Odin and Giraud envisioned this Gothic Revival church as a beacon of Catholicism that would attract the faithful and the curious. Photographer unknown. Galveston House Diocese Archives Collection, Catholic Archives of Texas.

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Austin, Walter Bremond House, first phase 1860s or 1870s, builder unknown;

second phase designed by George Fiegel, 1887. The expansion of 1887 transformed the modest one-story structure into a fashionable exemplar of the Second Empire style, then popular throughout the United States. Photograph by Richard Cleary.

Indeed, Keralum’s handling of these features recalls an important example of the early Gothic Revival in France, the church of Saint-Nicolas (designed and built 1843–1869). Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus designed this church in Nantes, the principal city of Brittany, his native province. Might he have seen this building under construction before coming to Texas? The history of the Gothic Revival in France has received far less scholarly attention than its counterpart in the United Kingdom, but recent studies have shown that in the 1840s the style was embraced by Frenchspeaking clergy seeking to revitalize the Roman Catholic Church in France and, as missionaries, throughout the world.20 Odin, the Girauds, Keralum, and other French priests who came to Texas in the 1840s and 1850s may well have seen Gothic Revival architecture through this perspective, which complemented but was independent of the Anglo-American Gothic Revival. Their buildings may be some of the purest expressions of an ideologically French architecture produced in Texas. The Walter Bremond House (Figure 16.4) in downtown Austin has

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been cited by some of the pioneering histories of architecture in Texas as an example of French architecture on the basis of its mansard roof, dormer windows, second-floor gallery, tall proportions, and placement close to the street line.21 While these features may be found in certain French buildings, their appearance here is several times removed from France. The house was built in the 1860s or 1870s as a one-story structure.22 In 1887, Eugene Bremond commissioned builder George Fiegel to add the second story with its mansard roof. This expansion came on the heels of the spectacular house Bremond’s brother, John, and Fiegel had built next door. Both houses are examples of the Second Empire Style (sometimes called the Mansard Style after its signature features, the mansard roof and dormer windows with decorative frames), which swept the United States during the 1870s and 1880s. Inspired by residential and secular public buildings designed during the Second Empire (1852–1870), the style was introduced to the United States in the 1850s by architects who had worked in France and through illustrations published in books and magazines. It became popular on a wave of American fascination with French high culture but rapidly took on a life of its own that did not necessarily require ongoing contact with French sources. Personal taste more than codified rules governed its use, and architects and builders freely applied its features alongside details selected from other styles. In this light, the two Bremond houses are best interpreted as expressions of an Americanized Second Empire Style and of its regional expression in New Orleans, where the artistry of the elaborate wrought-ironwork displayed on their porches was highly developed. The popularity of the Second Empire Style began to wane in the eastern United States even as it was being introduced in the West. A more enduring French contribution to architecture was the pedagogy of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which from the early nineteenth century to the outbreak of World War ii was the premier school of high-style architecture in the European sphere of influence. The pedagogy instilled a particular approach to analyzing design problems and generating solutions governed by principles of formal order including hierarchy, symmetry, regularity, and harmony achieved by consonant proportions. These principles were founded on classical design theory but were understood to be independent of style. In the United States, the Beaux-Arts system provided the model for formal architectural education from shortly after the founding of the first permanent university degree program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1865 through the 1940s. Since Beaux-Arts principles were held to be universal rather than personal, an important element of the ed-

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ucational process was the testing of new work against standards. In France, the application of this doctrine was facilitated by the centralized and hierarchical system of state-supported schools of art and architecture. In the United States, similar ends were promoted by private groups, such as the Society of Beaux Arts Architects formed in 1893 and the Beaux Arts Institute of Design founded in 1916, which ensured an ongoing dialogue with the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The basics of the system are easily learned, but mastery of its subtleties requires sustained study. Consequently, American schools recruited faculty who had studied at the École. The greatest cachet came from hiring a Frenchman, but Americans trained in Paris also were valued highly. Architectural education in Texas followed the patterns established in the East. Between 1910 and 1912, formalized architecture programs were instituted at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, and Rice University. All employed Beaux-Arts pedagogy, and at least one, the University of Texas at Austin, regularly submitted student work for evaluation by the Beaux Arts Institute of Design. None initially hired a French alumnus of the École, but all employed Americans trained in the system. Texas A&M, for example, hired Sampson James Fountain, who had graduated from the Beaux-Arts architecture program at the University of Illinois and had traveled to Paris for additional study, and the University of Texas at Austin filled its entire staff with MIT graduates. Beaux-Arts instruction had its own specialized vocabulary, and generations of young Texas architects, like their counterparts throughout the country, flavored their discussions in the design studios with terms such as poché, analytiques, esquisses, projets rendus, parti, and charette, some of which remain in use today by students unaware of their origins.23 Paul Cret was the most distinguished French architect to have worked in Texas in the twentieth century, and John and Dominique de Menil were the most influential French patrons of architecture. They lived in the United States and maintained close ties to France throughout their lives, but their respective contributions to architecture in Texas speaks less of either country than of international themes. Cret was a native of Lyon who studied architecture at the local École des Beaux-Arts and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.24 In 1903, at the age of twenty-seven, he accepted a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania and moved to Philadelphia, which became his home. He was an influential teacher (among his students was the great American architect Louis Kahn, designer of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth) and a successful practitioner specializing in public architecture. Three of his most significant buildings are the Indianapolis Public Library (1919 – 1927), the Detroit Institute of Arts (1920 –1926), and the Folger Shake-

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speare Library (1930 –1937) in Washington, D.C. He also designed World War i memorials in France and Belgium. Cret was appointed consulting architect for the master plan and buildings of the University of Texas at Austin in March 1930.25 The details of how he came to the attention of the Board of Regents and university officials are not clear. He had some experience with campus planning but was not regarded as a specialist; however, he had a reputation for highquality design and of working well with clients. He retained his position with the university until his death in 1945 and was respected for his broad learning, tact, and ability to get things done.26 Cret’s professional formation and the cultural environment in which he practiced endorsed classicism as the architectural language most appropriate for the expression of civic ideals. He accepted this position and viewed classicism as a living language capable of simultaneously maintaining continuity with the past and identification with the present. For him, classical architecture and modern architecture were not opposing terms. Architects could realize the modern through classical design by developing a thoughtful and particular response to the specific circumstances of a commission (site and use, for example). In addition to designing the master plan, Cret was responsible for defining the architectural character of twenty-one buildings on the University of Texas campus (color illustration 10). Their design and construction were realized through a collaborative process involving university building committees and architects in Austin, Dallas, and Houston. Cret took as a point of departure the Spanish-Mediterranean imagery of red tile roofs and broad eaves previously established on campus but developed each building in accordance with its purpose. For example, the Home Economics Building (now Mary E. Gearing Hall) has a more intimate and sheltering character than the bold monumentality of the campus’s landmark building, the library (Main Building). Cret’s buildings clearly reflect his profound knowledge of Beaux-Arts compositional principles but resist stylistic labels beyond “classical.” Some aspects of Cret’s work in Texas, such as the stark massing and restrained ornamentation of the Texas Museum (1935–1937), executed by Houston architect John Staub, merit comparison with contemporary French buildings, such as the Palais de Chaillot (1935–1937) in Paris, designed by Jacques Carlu, Louis-Hippolyte Boileau, and Léon Azéma, but rather than invoking a distinctly French style, they address concerns shared by an international cohort of fellow travelers. This group includes designers such as the American Bertram Goodhue, the Englishman Edwin Lutyens, and the Italian Mario Piacentini.

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Unlike Cret, the artistic vision of John (1904–1973) and Dominique (1908–1997) de Menil was unabashedly modern.27 The de Menils arrived in Houston in 1942 and defined their position among the city’s cultural elite as patrons of modern art. They evangelized modern architecture through a series of commissions beginning with the design of their own house by Philip Johnson in 1950 and including the Menil Collection building designed by Renzo Piano and completed in 1987. The architecture and architects they promoted transcend national boundaries, but at least one dimension of Dominique de Menil’s approach to art and architecture was informed by a French source. This was her belief in the spiritual power of art. She wrote, “Art is what lifts us above daily life. It makes us more open, more human, more refined, and even more intelligent,” and “Through art, God constantly clears a path to our hearts.”28 These convictions are consonant with the ideals of Father Marie-Alain Couturier (1897–1954), a Dominican priest who was close to both de Menils in the 1940s and 1950s. Couturier was a leader of a movement in postwar France that sought to invigorate liturgical art through modern art and design. He was a presence behind some of the great monuments of art and architecture produced at mid-century, including the Chapel of the Rosary (completed 1951) in Vence, designed by Henri Matisse, and the church of Notre-Dame-en-Haut (1950 –1955) in Ronchamp, designed by Le Corbusier. The Rothko Chapel (1971, designed by Barnstone and Aubry), and the Byzantine Fresco Museum (1997, François de Menil), built by the de Menils in Houston, are similarly intimate settings for personal introspection but do not otherwise lead one to identify them as French. The architectural patronage of the de Menils, like the architecture designed by Paul Cret, the religious buildings commissioned by Bishop Odin, and the houses built by the Alsatian settlers in Henri Castro’s colony, was shaped by a complex array of cultural forces of which French heritage was one component. With rare exceptions, it is difficult to identify buildings in Texas that unambiguously can be labeled French, but, as we have seen, French people and French culture have played notable roles in the state’s architectural history. Notes 1. For a concise history of the house see Kenneth Hafertepe, A History of the French Legation in Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1989). Dubois de Saligny sold the property to Odin in December 1840 but oversaw construction of the house. Its role as the French Legation effectively ended in 1842, when the capital was relocated to Houston. Odin sold the house to Moseley Baker in 1847. Jones described the house in a letter to his wife dated November 10, 1841. See Hafertepe, 22–23.

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2. For a recent example using approaches to masonry construction as a key to identity see Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, L’Architecture à la française (Paris: Picard, 1982). 3. Maria Pfeiffer is pursuing these figures. See her study of the Ursuline Academy in San Antonio, School by the River (San Antonio: Maverick Publishing, 2001). 4. See John Rutherford Bryant Jr., “The European-Texan Buildings: Indigenous Building Traditions among the Nineteenth Century European Immigrants to Central Texas” (master’s thesis, University of Texas at Arlington, 1987), and Mercedes Martinez Guerric, “Castroville Folk Houses: A Comparative Study between South Texas Regional Architecture and Its Alsatian Counterpart” (master’s thesis, University of Texas at San Antonio, 1999). 5. Victor Considerant, Au Texas (Paris: La Librairie Phalanstérienne, 1854). 6. Ibid., 133. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 136. 9. For a concise treatment of Durand’s theory, see Antoine Picon’s introduction to JeanNicolas-Louis Durand, Précis of the Lectures on Architecture (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2000), 1–68. Considerant studied at the École Polytechnique from 1826 to 1828; Durand retired in 1833. Considerant drew broadly from Durand’s Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’École Polytechnique, 2 vols. (Paris: Durand, 1802– 1805). 10. Auguste Savardan provides a caustic and unforgiving description of the buildings at Reunion in Un naufrage au Texas (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1858), 139–154. 11. Daly, an architect and the founder and editor of La Revue générale de l’architecture et des travaux publics, was a Fourierist and close friend of Considerant. He accompanied Considerant to La Reunion but stayed only a few weeks. See Richard Becherer, Science Plus Sentiment: César Daly’s Formula for Modern Architecture (Ann Arbor: umi Research Press, 1984), 9–10. For Daly’s relationship to Considerant see Jonathan Beecher, Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 84, 330, 332, 340 –341, 435. 12. As recounted by Odin in a letter to the Société de la Propagation de la Foi, Lyon, March 1, 1860 (Catholic Archives of Texas, Austin), photostat. 13. Ibid., March 28, 1853. 14. Willard B. Robinson, Reflections of Faith: Houses of Worship in the Lone Star State (Waco: Baylor University Press, 1994), 56, attributes Saint Mary’s to Giraud. 15. Theodore Giraud’s career has received little scholarly attention. See Ellen Beasley and Stephen Fox, Galveston Architecture Guidebook (Houston: Rice University Press and Galveston Historical Foundation, 1996), 47–48. See also John W. Clark Jr., “Giraud, François P.,” in The New Handbook of Texas, ed. Ron C. Tyler (Austin: Texas State Historical Association), 3:174. 16. Among these was Saint Theresa of Avila (1848–1849). 17. For Keralum see Eugene George, “Pierre Yves Keralum, O.M.I.: Architect for God on the Texas Border,” Journal of Texas Catholic History and Culture 6 (1995): 35–46.

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18. Robinson, Reflections, 48–64. 19. Ibid., 56. 20. Jean-Michel Leniaud, “Variations françaises sur le néo-gothique,” and Luc Vints, “Les Missions Catholiques et le néo-gothique dans l’architecture missionnaire,” in Gothic Revival: Religion, Architecture, and Style in Western Europe 1815–1914, ed. Jan De Maeyer and Luc Verpoest (Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 2000): 49–58, 125–132. 21. Drury Blakeley Alexander, Texas Homes of the Nineteenth Century (Austin: University of Texas Press and Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, 1966), cat. no. 157, p. 257; Institute of Texan Cultures, The French Texans (San Antonio: University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures, 1973), 24; Dorothy Steinbomer Kendall, “French Architecture in Texas,” in Texas Historical Preservation Manual (Austin: Texas Society of Architects, 1977), unpaginated. 22. Lisa Germany, “Bremond Block,” Historic Walking Tours (City of Austin, 1994), 13. 23. Poché refers to the thick wall masses typical of masonry construction; analytiques are studies of historic buildings composed to simultaneously present overall form and key details; esquisses are sketch solutions to a design problem; projets rendus are projects rendered in ink and wash; the parti is a drawing of the fundamental scheme from which a project will be developed; and charette refers to a design exercise undertaken with great intensity over a relatively short period of time. 24. See Elizabeth Grossman, The Civic Architecture of Paul Cret (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 25. See Carol McMichael, Paul Cret at Texas: Architectural Drawing and the Image of the University in the 1930s (Austin: Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas at Austin, 1983). 26. The broad scope of Cret’s interests is indicated by the range of titles in his professional library, acquired by the University of Texas at Austin in 2000. 27. See Frank D. Welch, Philip Johnson and Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 39–53, 57–68. 28. Quoted in Calvin Tomkins, “The Benefactor,” New Yorker 74, no. 17 (June 8, 1998): 56.

17

THE ENDURING LEGACY OF THE FRENCH IN TEXAS E DUCATION ANN MARIE CALDWELL

When the dust settled after the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, a new nation emerged with abundant plans for founding an educational system to serve its citizens, though it was destitute of the resources to bring those plans to fruition. Although the new Constitution of the Republic of Texas made some provisions for a general system of education, the struggling new republic was penniless. Public education fared no better after Texas became part of the United States in 1845. The Common School Law of 1854 established the first public school system in Texas, but it did not result in the establishment of a statewide system of public education. In fact, in 1870, U.S. Commissioner of Education John Eaton Jr. stated that Texas was “the darkest field, educationally, in the United States.”1 It was not until 1884 that the school laws were rewritten to provide for a statewide system of free public education.2 From 1836 until 1884, education in Texas was largely a system of private, mostly religious schools, with some state support going to “free schools” for the education of orphans and children of parents unable to pay tuition.3 It was during that time that French missionaries established in Texas a series of private and parochial schools that were, in many instances, the only source of learning for children of settlers. The work of the Ursulines, Marianists, Basilians, Oblates, Sisters of Charity, Sisters of Divine Providence, and Brothers and Sisters of Holy Cross can be seen today in the enduring legacy of the grade schools, high schools, and universities that they founded.4 Jean-Claude Odin, the first bishop of Texas, wanted to establish schools to foster the Catholic faith in his newly created diocese. He invited the Ursuline nuns of New Orleans, an order of French sisters who had gone to Louisiana from Rouen in 1827, to come to Texas to establish a school for girls in Galveston. Seven Ursulines arrived in Galveston in 1847 and 240

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opened in a private house the first school for girls in Texas. The following year, the sisters endured a severe drought and an epidemic of yellow fever that caused hundreds of people to flee to the country. But the number of sisters and pupils grew.5 In 1851, a group of Ursuline nuns led by Sister Marie Trouard journeyed from Galveston to San Antonio, where they opened the city’s first school for girls in a house built by a Frenchman on the banks of the San Antonio River.6 The school was a success for its method of instruction and its teaching of etiquette. In 1868 and 1874, the sisters also opened schools in Laredo and Dallas (Figure 17.1). In his search for teaching orders of men and women who would labor as missionaries in Texas, Bishop Odin journeyed to France in 1851 on a trip that was to be fruitful for the educational future of Texans.7 Odin went to Bordeaux, where he made a plea before the superior general of the Society of Mary, Father George Caillet, to send teachers to Texas. Caillet listened but could not help the bishop of Texas. Odin then presented his request before the Council of the Society, which finally agreed to send three men to Texas and a fourth from the society’s school in Dayton, Ohio.8 On his way to Rome, Odin visited in Lyons the convent of the cloistered Sisters of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament. Mother Angélique, superior of the Fourvière monastery, listened to Odin’s plea for nuns but, like Father Caillet, could not grant his request. She asked him to take a petition to the pope regarding indulgences attached to the Basilica of Our Lady of Fourvière. After talking to Pope Pius ix about the needs of his Texas diocese, Bishop Odin presented him with Mother Angélique’s petition. The pope considered the request and said to Bishop Odin, “Tell the Superior at Lyons that I will readily bestow on her chapel the indulgence of the Basilica of Our Lady of Fourvière if she will give you nuns for Texas.”9 Mother Angélique saw in the pope’s words the will of God, and she agreed to send four sisters to Texas. On March 23, 1852, the Belle Assise set sail from Le Havre, France. On board were two brothers and a seminarian of the Society of Mary, who were to open a school for boys in San Antonio; three sisters and a lay member of the Sisters of Incarnate Word and the Blessed Sacrament, who were to open a school for girls in Brownsville; four Ursuline nuns and one candidate, for their schools in Galveston and San Antonio; six priests and a brother of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who were to open a seminary and school for boys in Galveston and Saint Joseph’s School in Brownsville; and eighteen seminarians, who were to continue their studies for the priesthood under the Vincentian Fathers at Saint Mary’s of the Barrens, Missouri. Three Marianist brothers, Jean-Baptiste Laignoux, Nicolas Koenig, and

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A group of pupils and their teacher at the Ursuline Academy in Dallas, Texas,

1874–1876. Photographer unknown. Catholic Archives of Texas, Religious Congregations Collection.

Xavier Mauclerc, the seminarian, journeyed toward New Orleans, while Brother André Edel, who was to be the superior of the group, was traveling south from Ohio to meet them. To his credit, Edel had been a professed member of the Society of Mary for twenty-five years and knew how to speak English. But it also happened that this professor of botany, agriculture, and horticulture had, at the moment, no students to teach.10 Edel met the Belle Assise in New Orleans, and the four brothers journeyed by boat on to Galveston. After a month of preparation, Brothers Edel, Koenig, and Laignoux went to San Antonio, leaving Mauclerc in Galveston. With the help of Father Claude Dubuis, pastor of San Fernando church, plans were made for a school for boys. In August 1852, classes got underway in an old shop on the southwest corner of Military Plaza. The school opened with twelve students but grew to thirty by the end of the month and one hundred by midterm. Brother Laignoux taught the Mexican students since he was conversant in Spanish; Brother Koenig taught the lower classes since his command of English was not good; and a layman, Timothy O’Neill, was hired to teach the older students. The brothers wasted no time in constructing a permanent building. Bishop Odin began raising funds, while Edel and benefactors John Twohig

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and François Guilbeau selected a site on the east bank of the San Antonio River for Saint Mary’s College, which opened its doors in March 1853 (Figure 17.2). When Timothy O’Neill died, Brother Edel took over the upper-division classes. Obviously, not all teachers were talented, and a near-mutiny of some students was averted when Father Dubuis announced that a professor from Austin was going to take Edel’s place. The brothers later hired a Mr. Doyle to teach the higher grades.11 Mauclerc was not happy in the classroom, either, and he refused to do his share of academic work. He felt that by virtue of his ordination to the priesthood, he was above academic duty, despite the fact that equality among brothers was one of the main tenets of the Society of Mary. Mauclerc left to take up residence with Father Dubuis and later went to Dayton. The loss of a teacher was grave, and Edel wrote a series of impassioned pleas to the superior general in France to send both working and teaching brothers, warning that recruits had to be willing to sacrifice: All subjects sent to Texas must be satisfied with corn-bread three times a day, very rarely baker’s bread; content to eat meat half fried;

17.2

A view of St. Mary’s College in San Antonio during the 1880s. François Giraud

was the architect of the school. Grandjean Collection, s-214, Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library.

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to drink black coffee, and instead of wine, river water; in one word, to be in need of many things that are in abundance in France.”12 Edel ended another desperate plea by saying, “The need is so great; the children are so ignorant, come!”13 Help did finally arrive. On Christmas Eve 1854, Marianist Brothers Charles Francis and Eligius Beyrer arrived in San Antonio from France. Brother Charles was to be the leader that the struggling community needed. From the beginning, Edel, by nature a meek and timid man, relied upon the talents of this young brother from Nancy. When Brothers Koenig and Laignoux were transferred to Dayton in 1858, Brother Nicholas took over classes for the Mexican students. When enrollment had gone beyond two hundred, Father Leo Meyer, the American superior, reluctantly sent a teaching brother, Paul Kraus, from Dayton to San Antonio, thus bringing the number of brothers to seven. The years before the Civil War were years of expansion. Probably due to his agricultural background, Brother Edel wanted to secure land for a working farm so that the brothers could produce food for the school, and in 1854, he purchased Mission Concepción and its lands from Bishop Odin. The brothers took possession of the farm by the end of February 1855 and began working the land.14 In 1859, Father Meyer decided to close the school in San Antonio. Bishop Odin offered to transfer the property title to the school to the Society of Mary and to give the brothers the entire property of the Mission Concepción. The conditions of the gift were that the Brothers of Mary remain forever in the city of San Antonio and that a school occupy the premises. This agreement remained in force until 1911, when the Society of Mary received an unencumbered title to the property. During the Civil War years, the school maintained its enrollment, but the Marianists were cut off from both France and Dayton, and no new brothers were forthcoming. They relied upon lay teachers, one being the French painter Théodore Gentilz. After the war, Brother Edel made a journey to Dayton, where he met his new provincial, Father Reinbolt, and then on to France, where he pleaded for new personnel and for his own removal as superior of the small community. He was turned down on both counts. Again the specter of closing the school was raised, and Father Reinbolt journeyed to San Antonio in February 1866. It was during that visit that he began to take a paternal interest in the San Antonio venture. He made some positive changes in discipline and organization and appointed Brother Charles Francis as the school’s director. Reinbolt transferred Brother Edel to Mission Concepción to oversee the farm. There the tired brother was finally

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able to devote himself to the labor he loved. He remained at the farm for the next four years, until he went to Dayton, where he died in 1891. The San Antonio City Council did not open its first public school before 1868. By then, under Brother Charles Francis’ leadership, Saint Mary’s (along with the Ursuline Academy) had become a leading school in the city. In 1892, the Society of Mary purchased a large tract of land from the West End Development Company for the nominal purchase price of one dollar on the condition that a college building be started within a year. Saint Louis College opened its doors in 1894 and conferred its first bachelor degrees in 1904. In 1926, the college became Saint Mary’s University. The Marianists also established San Fernando Cathedral School for the instruction of Mexican boys, parish schools in San Antonio and Victoria, and Central Catholic High School in San Antonio. The fate of Mother St. Clare and Sisters St. Ange, St. Ephrem, and St. Dominic of the Sisters of Incarnate Word and the Blessed Sacrament was similar to that of the four Marianist brothers. After arriving in New Orleans in 1852, they went to Galveston to study English and Spanish, and two young novices joined them. In February 1853, the six sisters set out for Brownsville in the company of four Oblate priests and brothers. There the sisters rented a house and on May 7, 1853, opened their school. On March 25, 1854, the sisters laid the cornerstone for a new convent and school, unaware that they would soon be caught up in the political and natural disasters that were to engulf that region. First, a yellow fever epidemic struck Brownsville, and the new school closed. Between 1855 and 1857, three sisters died, and their Superior Father Verdet was killed in a shipwreck, but new recruits came from France and Ireland, bringing the little community to sixteen. In 1858, yellow fever struck eleven sisters; two of them died, and the school closed. The following year, Juan Cortina raided the city, and the sisters were entirely dependent upon the citizenry to get food into their besieged convent. During the Civil War, the sisters housed the officers’ wives, and when the victorious army of the North arrived, it set a ransom on Brownsville but pardoned its inhabitants in recognition for the good deeds of the Incarnate Word monastery.15 A year later, on October 7, 1867, a hurricane hit Brownsville. The sisters and children huddled together in prayer before the tabernacle for two and a half hours. The buildings around them were leveled, but none of the sisters or their students was injured. The hurricane destroyed the new school and convent. They were rebuilt, and the sisters later opened Nazareth Academy in Victoria and parish schools in Corpus Christi. In 1957, the Sisters of the Incarnate Word and the Blessed Sacrament opened

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Mary Immaculate Teacher Training Institute in Corpus Christi, but it closed after ten years. In 1866, Claude Marie Dubuis, second bishop of Galveston, returned to France to secure a noncloistered order of religious women to establish and staff parish schools, especially among enclaves of German speakers. He also wished to enlist sisters for hospital work, and to recruit priests and seminarians for ministering among Polish and German immigrants. At the time, three-quarters of the priests serving Texas were Frenchspeaking, and the rest spoke English or Spanish. Dubuis went to Lorraine, to the convent of the Sisters of Divine Providence at Saint Jean-de-Bassel in Moselle, and brought two missionary sisters with him to Texas, Sister St. André Feltin and Sister Marie-Alphonse Boegler, who had volunteered.16 The Europa left Le Havre on September 29, 1866, with forty-five priests, seminarians, and sisters, of whom twenty-five were bound for the Diocese of Texas. Among these were four Ursuline nuns, three sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, and two sisters of Divine Providence. A year later, six new recruits of Incarnate Word left Le Havre and reached Galveston, via New Orleans, on December 2, 1867. The sisters were Louise Chollet, or Sister Marie-Madeleine, and Sisters Mary Martha, Mary Raphael, Ann Mary of Jesus, Mary Agnes, and Mary of the Incarnation. The following winter, a third group of sisters arrived in Galveston from the novitiate in Lyons, Sisters St. Pierre, Paul, André, John, and Francis. Bishop Dubuis sent Sister Marie-Madeleine, Mother St. Pierre or St. Pierrette (Jeanne Pierrette Cinquin), and Sister Mary Agnes to San Antonio in 1869. At age twenty-three, Sister Marie-Madeleine was chosen to be the superior. She had only worked for one year in the hospital at Galveston and at the time could not read or write. In spite of her youth and inexperience, however, she was able to start the infirmary that was to become Santa Rosa Hospital. In 1874, the sisters opened Saint Joseph’s Orphanage on a piece of land situated on the outskirts of San Antonio. To raise the needed funds, Sister Mary of Jesus (Agathe Noiry or Noiret) proposed that Mother St. Pierre buy her a team of horses and allow her to go begging for alms and donations. The reverend mother hesitated, but necessity forced her to acquiesce. The adventure of “the Heroine of the Prairies,” as Sister Mary of Jesus came to be known, lasted nine years. Dressed in a soldier’s overcoat that reached to her knees, a pair of heavy boots, and a large straw hat and armed with pistols, the lone nun ventured out into a wilderness that few others dared to enter. After the sisters had opened a school for the orphans, Bishop Anthony Pellicer, the first bishop of the newly created Diocese of San Antonio, re-

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quested that the sisters accept children of the parish in their classes. Since vocations were scarce in Texas and because teachers were needed, Mother St. Pierre went to Europe and returned with 10 recruits in 1878, and with 19 in 1881. By 1891, the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word had grown from 3 to 197 sisters in Texas, and the ministry included ten hospitals, eighteen schools, and two orphanages. In 1893, the sisters opened their first high school, Incarnate Word High School. Five years later, they purchased 283 acres of land from Colonel Brackenridge that became the site of a new motherhouse, a new high school, and eventually Incarnate Word College in San Antonio. By 1918, the congregation was so large that it was divided into four provinces with 678 sisters operating forty-five schools, seven hospitals, and four orphanages in Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Mexico. 17 In 1969, ciw, as the congregation came to be known, operated fifty-two primary and secondary schools in Texas. Clearly, the three sisters who left France for Galveston, Texas, in 1866 and the other three sisters who left Galveston for San Antonio in 1869 made an important contribution to education and health care in Texas. During her tenure from 1867 to 1886, Sister St. André (Figure 17.3), mother superior of the Sisters of Divine Providence, opened twenty-five

17.3

Louise (Mother St. André)

Feltin, founder of the Sisters of Divine Providence in Texas. Joseph Strebler, Alsaciens au Texas (Strasbourg, 1975). Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.

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schools in Texas and increased the congregation in Texas from 2 members to 108. In 1866, after spending a month at the Ursuline Convent in Galveston, Mother St. André, Sister St. Marie-Alphonse (now known as Sister St. Claude), and a new novice from Texas, Sister St. Joseph, set out for Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception Parish in Austin, where Mother St. André’s brother Nicolas Feltin was the pastor. Their stay in Austin was short-lived, and in 1868, Bishop Dubuis transferred Mother St. André and Sister Agnes Wolfe, a novice from Austin, to Castroville to minister to Alsatians and German-speakers living there. On September 8, Mother St. André and Bishop Dubuis signed a contract giving the sisters land for a convent and charge of parish schools in Castroville, D’Hanis, Fredericksburg, New Braunfels, Martines, Panna-Maria, Frelsburg, and Bernard. A religious of exceptional faith, Mother St. André is described as of woman of strong physique and willpower. Although she had taught for thirteen years in French schools, she did not teach in Texas, preferring instead to occupy herself with the formation of the new sisters who entered her order. In doing so she imparted to them the French manner and methods of teaching. In 1876, after the Texas school law was rewritten and the community education system was established, German and Czech communities began to hire the Sisters of Divine Providence to teach in their community schools. Religious orders continued to teach in Texas public schools until the communities became more diverse and newcomers objected to the sisters wearing their habits in the classroom. To escape German Protestant control after annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, sisters of Saint Jean-de-Bassel became more willing to go to Texas. In 1878, 1880, 1882, and 1883, Mother St. André made four trips to France, bringing with her a total of ninety-seven sisters, novices, and candidates from Alsace, Germany, Poland, and Ireland. These teachers were all well trained in European methods of pedagogy, and they spoke French, German, or Alsatian, sometimes all three, and the Irish sisters knew English. Together they developed a curriculum for their diverse student body. But in 1883, Bishop Jean-Claude Neraz decided to separate the Texas province from the Lorraine motherhouse without Mother St. André’s knowledge or approval. And in 1886, a group of priests petitioned the bishop for the removal of Mother St. André as the provincial superior. Although she was able to defend herself against charges of scandal-mongering, Neraz acquiesced to the priests’ demands and insisted upon her removal. After the sisters of Castroville voted to retain Mother St. André, she herself asked the sisters to elect Sister Florence, who was at that time on a recruiting mission to France. When Sister Florence arrived in San Antonio, she was greeted with the news that she was the new mother su-

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perior, and Mother St. André was sent to a school in Galveston. Twice, Mother St. André made unauthorized trips to Anaheim, California, where she hoped to establish a house to minister to the Anaheim Germanspeaking community. As punishment for her disobedience, Bishop Neraz removed her from the congregation, and she went to live in Castroville with her alcoholic brother Louis Feltin and his wife and seven children. When her sister-in-law died, Mother St. André went with the seven children to California, where she opened a little grocery store. Ten years later, after the oldest girl became a schoolteacher and Bishop Neraz died, Mother St. André returned to the motherhouse, where she died in 1905. The new Superior Mother Florence worked closely with Bishop Neraz in furthering the teaching endeavors of the Sisters of Divine Province. She continued to open schools, a total of forty-seven in the space of seventeen years.18 In 1894, the motherhouse was moved to San Antonio, to the sixteen acres touching on Lake Elmendorf that had been given to the congregation by Mayor Henry Elmendorf with the stipulation that a school would be built on the land. The Academy of Our Lady of the Lake opened on September 1, 1896, and was chartered to grant advanced degrees in 1911. By the summer of 1912 there were 403 members of the congregation who taught in sixty schools in Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, and Oklahoma.19 Seven years later, Our Lady of the Lake was certified by the state of Texas, and in 1935, graduate classes in education were added to the curriculum. In 1946, Our Lady of the Lake University was chartered. Thus, from the small beginning of two sisters from a convent in Lorraine, there evolved a system of schools across Texas, culminating in a university. The Brothers and Sisters of Holy Cross had established Notre Dame University and Saint Mary’s College in Indiana before they came to Texas. In 1869, Bishop Dubuis, on board a ship bound for Rome, chanced to meet Father Sorin, superior general of the Congregation of Holy Cross in America. Sorin learned that Mrs. Mary Doyle of Austin was willing to donate a large part of her estate to a religious order that would establish a school on the property. In 1872, he traveled to Austin with Dubuis and, in addition to accepting Mrs. Doyle’s offer, purchased the 120 acres of adjacent property of Colonel W. Robards.20 In 1874, French Brothers John of the Cross (Guillaume Demers) and Maximus (Petit) took up residence on the Doyle property, where they began a farm. A novitiate of sorts was established on the premises, and in 1876, Saint Edward’s College, a boarding and day school for boys, opened its doors (Figure 17.4). Growth was slow until an energetic young priest, Father Peter Hurth, was transferred to Saint Edward’s. The school was chartered as a college by the state in 1885, and within four years enrollment climbed to 235. In 1925, Saint Edward’s was chartered as Saint Ed-

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ward’s University, with the right to confer graduate degrees. The school barely survived during World War ii, but in 1946, the Holy Cross Brothers took over its administration, and the university started to prosper. The brothers also established Holy Cross High School in San Antonio in 1957 and Notre Dame High School in Wichita Falls, in 1964. Another chance encounter, this time between Sister Mary Euphrosine and Bishop Dubuis on his return voyage from Rome, led to the establishment of the Holy Cross Sisters in Texas. Upon her arrival in New York, Sister Mary Euphrosine did not return to Indiana but instead went to Corpus Christi, where she established a small convent and school. She was joined by Catherine Dunne, the first Texan to become a sister of Holy Cross. In April 1871, after an urgent plea from Bishop Dubuis, the two sisters moved their community to Nacogdoches, where they opened a school in an old, abandoned building. Three years later, the community moved to Clarksville, where it remained until 1879.21 Sister Josephine (Renée Potard) remained at Nacogdoches University for more than twenty years. In Austin in 1874, the Holy Cross Sisters took over the administration of Saint Mary’s parish school, formerly in the hands of the Sisters of Di17.4

An 1880s view of St. Edward’s College, founded in 1876 as St. Edward’s Academy

for boys by the Rev. Edward Sorin of the Holy Cross Fathers and Brothers. The photograph is attributed to the Rev. Francis Bouchu. Gentilz-Frétellière Family Papers, 60/2/1, Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library.

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vine Providence. There, despite the absence of fine furnishings and equipment, Saint Mary’s Academy flourished. There were eighty-five pupils in 1875, including a daughter of ex-governor Lubbock.22 The sisters bought Mirabeau Lamar’s former house and built a new Academy in 1882. In June 1908, Saint Mary’s Academy became the first Catholic school in Texas to be affiliated with the University of Texas. The sisters also opened Sacred Heart Academy in Marshall, where they had to endure an outbreak of bigotry, and they opened mission schools in the Austin area. A decline in vocations both in the United States and in Europe began in the 1950s, and many schools founded by the French missionaries have either closed or are now staffed partially or completely by lay teachers. However, the legacy of these dedicated men and women continues to endure in the universities they founded. The Oblate School of Theology, established in San Antonio by the Missionary Oblates of Mary in 1903, is a major seminary in southwest Texas. Our Lady of the Lake University, the University of the Incarnate Word, Saint Mary’s University, and Saint Edward’s University remain thriving institutions of higher education. Our Lady of Victory College, founded in 1910 by the Sisters of Saint Mary of Namur, a French-speaking Belgian order, became part of the University of Dallas. The University of Saint Thomas, founded by the French Order of Basilian Fathers in 1946, continues to serve the Houston area. Another enduring legacy of these French sisters, brothers, and priests is the teaching of the French language, which has remained a popular foreign language in high schools and universities in Texas, despite the fact that there is no large French-speaking community in Texas. In schools established by the French religious orders, French was taught as part of the curriculum. The Ursuline nuns were particularly noteworthy for their foreign language methodology because they not only taught grammar but also required the students to converse in the foreign language.23 French was fashionable and associated with class and distinction. Stephen Austin had wanted to create an Institute of Modern Languages at San Felipe, where Spanish, English, and French would be taught.24 In 1842 at the University of San Augustine, a private school, “French was advertised as the medium of conversation.”25 Nineteenth-century private schools offered French along with calisthenics, piano, drawing, and needlework, and French courses were more expensive than basic ones. Levizac’s Grammar and Anthony Bolmar’s Collection of Colloquial Phrases and his edited Adventures of Telemach or Perrin’s Fables were popular textbooks until the twentieth century. But state officials found French instruction useless and pretentious; they preferred the pragmatic and productive sciences taught at the Agricultural and Mechanical Col-

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lege. “The brilliant language of French,” as Senator Pfeuffer said in 1885, was for urbane scholars and polite ladies.26 In public secondary education, after the 1875 opening of Brenham High School, modern language instruction, if any, was usually given in the language of the predominant linguistic group of the communities served by the high school. And it is likely that some classes were taught in Alsatian in Castroville at that time. Houston Public High School was established in 1878 and began to offer French and German four years later. The University of Texas opened in 1881 with nine academic departments, the last one being “Modern Languages: French, Spanish, German,” headed by Henri Tallichet, born in Lyon and educated in Switzerland in Teutonic and Romanic languages. With the opening of the university, the teaching of foreign languages in secondary schools increased. At that time the curriculum in secondary schools across the state was loosely organized, and uniform standards were nonexistent. To better prepare students for university-level study, the University of Texas began the practice of affiliating itself with high schools that would serve as its “feeder schools.”27 After 1902, French, German, and Spanish, along with Latin and Greek, were recognized as subjects that candidates for admission should study. But German and Spanish, not French, were the languages of preference, due to the predominance of Spanish- and Germanspeaking communities in Texas. In 1916, an official report stated that among a limited number of schools surveyed, German was taught in 109 schools, Spanish in 17, and French in 7. But the two world wars certainly boosted American interest in French.28 French classes increased in number and quality. Three pedagogical revolutions engineered by the teaching profession were introduced during the twentieth century: phonetics and the direct method (teaching in the target language) after World War i; the language lab and its four skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing) during the 1960s and 1970s; and more recently, computer-aided instruction. In 1999, 16 universities, 40 community colleges, and more than 650 junior high and high schools offered French courses in Texas.29 And teachers continue to come to Texas from France to staff universities’ French departments and the three French-accredited lycées of Houston, Dallas, and lately Austin. The French brothers and sisters who built schools and taught in Texas during the nineteenth century were not the only educators of the time: they also founded a tradition of refined teaching and French instruction that continues as part of their enduring legacy to Texas.

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Notes 1. Frederick Eby, “The First Century of Public Education in Texas,” in Centennial Handbook, Texas Public Schools, 1854–1954, (Austin: Texas Education Agency, 1954), 148–150. 2. Frederick Eby, The Development of Education in Texas (New York: Macmillan Company, 1925), 195. 3. Eby, Development, 110–147. 4. For a general history of French teaching orders in Texas see Carlos E. Castañeda, Our Catholic Heritage in Texas: The Church in Texas Since Independence, 1836–1950, vol. 7 (Austin: Von bœckmann-Jones, 1936; reprint, New York: Arno, 1957), 58. 5. Castañeda, Catholic Heritage, 285–287. 6. Sister M. A. Ursulina, The Ursulines in San Antonio, unpublished transcript (Catholic Archives of Texas, Austin); Bernard Doyon, The Cavalry of Christ on the Rio Grande, 1849–1883 (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1956), 35. 7. Sister Mary Helena Finck, The Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word of San Antonio, Texas: A Brief Account of Its Origin and Its Work (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1925), 22–24. 8. Joseph William Schmitz, The Society of Mary in Texas (San Antonio: Naylor Company, 1951), 24–26. 9. Sister Mary Patricia Gunning, To Texas with Love: A History of the Sisters of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament (Austin: Best Printing Company, 1971), 63–65. 10. Schmitz, Society of Mary, 27–30. 11. Sister Mary Generosa Callahan, The History of the Sisters of Divine Providence, San Antonio, Texas (Milwaukee: Catholic Life Publications, 1955), 47–48. 12. Schmitz, Society of Mary, 37. 13. Ibid., 39. 14. Ibid., 44–45. 15. Gunning, To Texas, 85–86. 16. Callahan, History, 34–35. 17. Sister Margaret Patrice, Promises to Keep: A History of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, vol. 2 (San Antonio, Texas), 22–26. 18. Callahan, History, 165. 19. Ibid., 226. 20. Brother Kilian Beirne, From Sea to Shining Sea, (Valatie, N.Y.: Holy Cross Press, 1966). 21. Castañeda, Catholic Heritage, 321–323. 22. Sister Edward Marie Cahill, The Sisters of the Holy Cross in Texas, unpublished transcript (San Antonio: Incarnate Word College, 1941).

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23. Castañeda, Catholic Heritage, 291–292. 24. Mattie A. Hatcher, “Plan of Stephen F. Austin for an Institute of Modern Language at San Felipe de Austin,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 7 (January 1909): 231–239. 25. Eby, “First Century,” 96. 26. Harry Benedict, A Source Book Relating to the History of the University of Texas, University of Texas Bulletin 1757 (October 10, 1917): 318–321. 27. Eby, Development, 250–251. 28. W. F. Doughty and Rebecca Switzer, Texas High Schools: Modern Languages, State of Texas Department of Education Bulletin 82 (August 1, 1918): 15–16. 29. Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS) Data 98–99, online at http://www.tea.state.tx.us/peims/ (Austin: Texas Education Agency).

18

FRENCH TRAVELERS IN TEXAS Identity, Myth, and Meaning from Joutel to Butor

ALEXANDRA K. WETTLAUFER

The history of French travelers in Texas is closely tied to the trajectory of France’s relations with Texas in its many incarnations. From an uncharted “new world” to a Spanish territory, an independent republic and finally one of the United States, Texas has resonated in the French imagination as an exoticized land of possibility and challenge. I will trace French travelers’ shifting missions and impressions in their journeys through Texas from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. Though by no means exhaustive, these texts illustrate the shifting dynamic between France and Texas while at the same time revealing the intricate politics of national identity. France’s first foray into Texas dates back to La Salle’s ill-fated expedition of 1685, as France, England, Spain, Portugal, and Holland vied for the rich resources of the Americas. La Salle set out to found a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi in order to assure the French a position in the Gulf of Mexico and landed at Matagorda Bay. La Salle’s lieutenant, Henri Joutel, wrote a firsthand account of the colony that provided a detailed depiction of life in the western wilderness, including constructing their fort from pieces of the shipwrecked boat, hunting for wild turkey, and building a bison-hide canoe. While Joutel’s narrative glosses over (or obfuscates) many of La Salle’s personal and strategic errors, in his approach to the land and its peoples he adopts a neutral tone that highlights the “documentary” nature of his narrative while asserting intellectual and physical mastery over the foreign land and its occupants. To this end, Joutel casts an empiricist’s gaze upon the Texas landscape fully in keeping with the philosophical paradigms of his day. Relying on fact and observation, he catalogues the flora and fauna of the area surrounding the fort and relates the topography of the journey with mathematical precision. He describes the Indians he encounters with a studied 255

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detachment, transforming them into objects of ethnographic inquiry. Joutel reports: The Indians are all nude except for the women who cover their nudity . . . I also noticed that these Indians had some earthenware pottery in which they cook their meat and roots; they also have some small baskets made of reeds or rushes. I have said that I did not notice any religion among them; however they sometimes indicated to us that there was something great above, pointing to the sky.1 Joutel focuses on the Native Americans’ difference from the European norm— their nudity, primitive implements, and lack of Christianity— to locate their otherness, without ever attributing to them a culture or consciousness worthy of study. Far from unique, Joutel’s approach reflects the pervasive ideology of the European explorers in the Americas. In The Conquest of America, Tzvetan Todorov identifies two responses in the European’s encounter with the Native American: Either he conceives the Indians (though without using these words) as human beings altogether, having the same rights as himself . . . Or else he starts from the difference, but the latter is immediately translated into terms of superiority and inferiority (in his case, obviously, it is the Indians who are inferior). What is denied is the existence of a human substance truly Other, something capable of being not merely an imperfect state of oneself.2 Todorov adds, “Columbus had discovered America, but not the Americans,” an observation that holds true for the French travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well (Todorov, 49). Thus, Joutel’s journal emblematizes the European conquest narrative that approached the Americas as lands to be dominated for the benefit of the invading nation. Indeed, the very concept of the New World is predicated on a denial of its existence prior to European discovery. Although it had been a terra incognita to early European explorers, the Americas were familiar territory to its indigenous peoples, whose “primitiveness” was predicated in terms of its difference from European “culture.” As Robert Young notes, “Culture is always a dialectical process, inscribing and expelling its own alterity,”3 and travel writing is frequently informed by this defining dialectic of self and other. From the earliest accounts of encounters with Native Americans to the modern evocations of les cowboys and Dallas beauty queens, Texans have served as the “Other” for the French traveler, allowing for a definition of the French self through the negative mirror of the American alterity (Figure 18.1). In the writings of the eighteenth-century travelers, the Other is the

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257

If imaginary representations of les cows-boys have been the norm in France, es-

pecially in popular fiction, some scholars were able to portray them more accurately. The great geographer Elisée Reclus included this illustration in his Nouvelle géographie universelle: la terre et les hommes (Paris, 1876–1894).

Native American Indian, and several popular narratives provided the French reading public with images of “primitive” life on the Texas plains. Simars de Bellisle’s archetypal “survival tale” recounts his adventures as an officer for the French West Indies Company abandoned as a castaway near Galveston from 1719 to 1721. In this story, as full of action, emotion, and local color as Joutel’s was straightforward and subdued, the author describes his first encounter with the Indians. He sees them coming down the bay in their pirogues to gather eggs birds have laid in the sand. Weak with hunger, he approaches the Indian he hopes will rescue him: “I wanted to embrace him. But this man recoiled, like a person who had never seen a white person. I thought at that time he was going to kill me.”4 Instead, they tear off his clothes and leave him naked but feed him fish and eggs. Once he is revived by the meal, he reflects, “I became conscious of my nudity; I covered myself with my hands and asked one of these Savages to give me one of my shirts. They began to laugh and to mock me, without doing what I asked” (6:335). Bellisle’s nudity underlines his physical and psychological vulnerability at the hands of “savages” who neither understand his language nor his customs.

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In an important reversal of power structures, Bellisle becomes the Indians’ slave and experiences firsthand the peripatetic life of the Attakapans of southeastern Texas. He spends the summer with them “going from place to place looking for food, because they had neither huts nor cultivated lands to live from.” Their “frightening howls” terrify the prisoner until he realizes that “they howl indifferently, for good and for bad” and that it is, in fact, another variation on a language that he eventually learns. The Frenchman fetches wood and water for his masters, carries their supplies for them and is beaten if he disobeys. The complex text humanizes the Attakapans by giving a vivid sense of their lives and rituals. Yet at the same time they are kept at a distance through their violence to the white man, which serves as an unrecognized mirror for the European violation of slaves and Native Americans throughout the century to follow. The image of their inhumanity served “to encode and legitimate the aspirations of economic expansion and empire,”5 by turning the North American Other into a threatening enemy who would dominate the French if the French did not dominate him. Yet Bellisle’s tale of his captivity includes the complementary image of the “bons sauvages” in the Hasinais, who are friends of the French and help to orchestrate his rescue. Prefiguring Chateaubriand’s Atala, Bellisle is cared for by a beautiful “Sauvagesse” named Angélique. A counterpoint to his hostile captors, Angélique displays the “civilized” emotions of pity and compassion, while being able to express herself in a European language: “She told me in Spanish that she was upset to see me in such a sad state” (6:344). Angélique presents a more acceptable vision of relations between Europeans and Americans to the eighteenth-century reader; female, subservient, and yielding, “she had me served with the best of everything she had, and she had as much affection for me as if I were her child.”6 Ultimately, Angélique gives Bellisle two horses and has her children escort him to the French post at Natchitoches. The contrast between “good” and “bad” Indians, between the powerful masculine dominators and the docile, feminine facilitators, maps the dueling European visions of primitive peoples, who were sanctioned only in their capacity to further the ends of expansionist enterprise. Another eighteenth-century traveler, Pierre de Pagès, gives a first-person account of his voyage across “Texas” as part of his journey around the world. Pagès approaches Texas in 1767 as an independent traveler, and his narration, published in 1782, reflects an Enlightenment sensibility. America is seen as a wilderness that retains an innocence shared by its peoples, and he celebrates the “voluptuousness I had never before experienced and that I felt at the sight of the simple and primeval Nature, as much in relation to the earth as to the inhabitants.”7

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This idealized vision of America reflects the contemporary vogue for rusticity formulated in response to European “high” culture in the âge des lumières. Yet Pagès also emphasizes the difficulty of the journey. As he spends the night with “un bon Sauvage baptisé,” he admits “for the first time in my life I vividly felt the harshness of real need” (Pagès, 51–52), for despite his offers of linen and silver, there is no corn to be had for a meal. As he travels south through Texas, Pagès recounts how he survives the hardships of this “savage land,” eating dried meat, sleeping on bear skins, getting lost and barely escaping death at the hands of a violent tribe. But the most interesting aspects of his tale are the portraits he paints of the inhabitants of Texas, including the Mexicans and Spanish who had become an increasingly visible presence in the Native American territory. The tensions between these groups, and Pagès’ interpretation of their differences from each other and from himself, reveal the negotiations for personal and national identity that underlie this voyage autour du monde. Texas and its Others are neither fixed nor absolute, but in ever-changing relation to the French travelers’ ideologies and agendas. With the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, France had ceded to Spain all of its holdings west of the Mississippi, and Pagès’ narration reveals an ongoing hostility toward the Spanish. Thus, in Pagès’ observations, the Native Americans are portrayed as “passionate,” “generous,” and “excitable” and always in a better light than the Mexicans, “ces Espagnols demi-sauvages” who are “lazy,” “dishonest,” and “thieving” (Pagès, 53–54). In keeping with Rousseau’s formulation of the “noble savage,” Pagès praises the Tejas Indians, insisting, “I must admit that I have never seen anything more noble and more virile than these people” (Pagès, 70). Yet exposure to the Spanish had corrupted the Native Texans by introducing them to ideas such as luxury and consumption that were at odds with the state of nature in which they had lived for millennia. Thus, alongside Rousseau’s philosophical underpinnings, we find political commentary in Pagès’ narrative, as the “noble American savages” serve as a pointed foil to France’s longtime enemy. The traveler explains approvingly that les sauvages “live in rebellion against the Spanish, who have forced them to retreat to the North, in a conduct quite opposite to that of the French, which is filled with gentleness and discretion” (Pagès, 74). When the Native Americans attack the Mexicans, Pagès has his European readers rooting for the “Savages,” aligning the French with the Indians against the Spanish, an alliance that would continue in the nineteenth century. His words of praise for the indigenous peoples of Texas and his celebration of the superiority of a more primitive nature simultaneously encode a critique of the Spanish. Discussing Creoles, Native Americans, and people of mixed race, Pagès observes:

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Between the Savage, the Indian, the Creole and the Spanish, this last was the least sociable. I have never experienced any great injustice on the part of the Savages or the semi-savage Indians; among the tribes, I preferred the dwelling of an Indian to that of a Spaniard: this was in keeping with the plan I had made for myself and with the fascination I had to thoroughly examine the customs of the simple Peoples I found along my route. (91–92) Pagès’ narrative thus offers a firsthand account of life for a French traveler in Texas in 1767, evoking the landscape, customs, and peoples he encounters on the Old San Antonio Road. While promulgating the popular idea of the noble savage and primal nature as found in this New World, Pagès text functions as a dialogue both with his national identity and with that of the Spanish and Mexican colonials. In evaluating the peoples he meets along the way, Pagès applies the values embraced in his own culture, and they are praised to the extent they meet the criteria of French Enlightenment ideals, which in turn dialectically reinforce French

18.2 Alfred Ménard painted this oil portrait of his friend Théodore Pavie during the 1830s. The Chasle-Pavie Collection. Photography by Betje Black Klier.

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identity. The Native Americans are affirmed in their existence as not Spanish and in their resistance to the enemies of the French. In this way, Pagès further reflects on his own culture and nation, rather than truly “seeing” the peoples before him. Texas continued to play a large role in the French collective imagination in the postrevolutionary period, and conversely, France played a role in supporting the new republic. The explorers of the eighteenth century gave way to intellectuals and capitalists in the nineteenth century who were eager to colonize the Americas in their own fashion. These two branches of travel narrative produced a new set of myths of the West for European consumption. The writers of “intellectual conquest narrative” set out “to conquer the world intellectually through writing about the lands and peoples they observed and imposing their visions on the minds of their readers.”8 Perhaps the most eloquent of these intellectual travelers to write about Texas was Théodore Pavie, a young Romantic who visited Texas and Louisiana in 1830 and published his Souvenirs atlantiques

18.3

Pavie sketched several views of Louisiana and Texas, including this view of a

lake. “Texas is a whole other country!” he exclaimed after crossing the Sabine River. The Chasle-Pavie Collection. Photograph by Betje Black Klier.

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in 1832 (Figure 18.2). With sketch pad and journal in hand, Pavie documented his journey through the Sabine borderlands with a poetic vision that mixes immediate experience with a romanticizing sensibility. Pavie’s Texas is produced through that most romantic of filters — the memory— on a cold winter’s day in Paris. The author recalls “the banks of that poetic river yet untouched by the paddle of any steamer” (in Klier, 194) and closing his eyes conjures up the magnolias, deer, pines, and prairies in an exotic echo of Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey. Pavie’s premise as a travel writer is clear: this virgin wilderness can be experienced through the reader’s imagination, and his words will produce a reality that allows the armchair traveler intellectual mastery of lands he or she may never actually visit. Moreover, Souvenirs atlantiques captures the rich mixture of cultures in the Texas-Louisiana borderlands for the French audience, emphasizing the alterity of these multiple Others in relation to the European “norm.” As he travels from Louisiana to Texas, Pavie provides lively portraits of American planters and slave owners, free people of color, outlaws and brigands, Spaniards, Mexicans, and Indians, all of whom contribute to the exotic landscape of the West. As he crosses the Sabine River, Pavie exclaims, “Texas is a whole other country!” (in Klier, xviii), and his adventures in the military village of Nacogdoches illustrate this vividly (Figure 18.3). With an eye to visual detail and dramatic contrast, Pavie transcends the conventions of local color with a series of episodes that juxtapose the clashing cultures of the borderlands in illuminating ways. The military traditions of the new Republic of Mexico and the ancient Cherokee nation collide in a scene that highlights the beautiful and alien nature of each. Pavie sets the décor at the garrison in Nacogdoches by painting for his readers the rustic huts and “handsome horsemen, each leaning on a large, curved sword, wearing a belt of buffalo hide, spurs with a layer of silver on a red background, pants open to the calf and decorated with a piece of well-tanned leather, tastefully stitched” (in Klier, 200). As the anthem of the new republic was played, the infantrymen remove their hats, and “a religious silence reigned among the assembly” until it was suddenly pierced by the screams of Cherokee warriors thundering into camp on horseback. The Indians “proudly carried the remains of some Comanches killed in the latest encounter. There was a cougar skin full of poisoned arrows, lances with stone tips, clubs and one carbine with its stock trimmed with the neck skin of a horse with its mane still attached. But their most beautiful trophy, the one they displayed like a banner, was the silky, well-braided scalps of enemies fallen in combat” (in Klier, 201). The French traveler allows the images to speak for themselves, while the contrast between the Mexican-Texan army and the Cherokees creates a

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tension that emblematizes the hybrid nature of this frontier while privileging neither. The following scene, of a horse race, pits the Mexicans against the Americans in yet another demonstration of competing cultures on the Western frontier. Pavie had observed upon entering Texas that “England, imitated by all Americans, was giving way to Spain, in the form of the Republic of Mexico” (in Klier, 198). This popular vision of New World cultures as secondary simulacre of European originals served not only to render the foreign “accessible” to the European imagination but also to assure the primacy of the Old World as superior base of reference for all Others. The proto-rodeo takes place deep in the forest before an audience that includes all the denizens of the borderlands: Spanish, Mexicans, Anglo-Americans, Indians, and French. Again, using visual markers to set up the dialectic, Pavie allows his reader to synthesize the cultural battle that is enacted on horseback between an “English thoroughbred ridden by a lithe, alert American done up like a jockey with top boots and spurs” and a Spanish corporal “six feet tall and almost naked” riding a Mexican horse “vigorous like all indomitable steeds that Texas nurtures.” As the crowd screams, the antagonists leap onto their horses and fly through the arena: At first the English horse took the advantage, but the Mexican steed whistled by in front of us like an arrow, leaving the other far behind and carrying the winner into the forest, his long legs responding to its furious movements with so much grace that general applause arose. On seeing the noble steed’s white tale disappear under the branches of the forest, the children jumped for joy, crying: “el blanco caballo!” (In Klier, 202) The native steed and the Spanish rider who adopts an indigenous style dominate the elegant Anglophile, and this triumph implies a swift movement toward the future, leaving the uncomfortably transplanted culture of Europe in the dust. Pavie further emphasizes the symbolic nature of this horse race with the image of the joyous children who applaud the white horse’s victory, figuring forth the future of Texas. In a final passage in Pavie’s Texas narrative, he engages in conversation with a young Cherokee, asking him about “the wandering life of his tribe, their beliefs, and even the topography of the region.” In a preliminary alienation, they address each other in English, a foreign language for both, and the Cherokee indicates that the questions make him think about “all these things that he had never before considered seriously” (in Klier, 203). The interrogating gaze of the European Other upon his way of life engen-

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ders a sort of defamiliarization for the American native, and Pavie turns the table for his readers to illustrate that what is foreign to them is so natural as to be invisible to his interlocutor. The Indian describes “the happiness of this primitive life, which he would not have left for anything in the world”; nonetheless, the author invites him to France. Again, reversing the perspective, Pavie turns the Indian’s gaze to France, and, echoing the Eurocentric vision with a Texocentrism that is at once comic and pointed, his Cherokee friend inquires, “Does one find deer and bison and bears in France? Does one find huts on the banks of the streams and trees to chop down to make you warm?” (in Klier, 203). While the questions may be rhetorical, they also serve the function of giving the Native American a subject position from which to look at France as Other and — importantly—undesirable, undermining the very assumptions of superiority at the heart of the discourse of colonialism. Finally, moving to the racism that had long marked European and Anglo-American attitudes toward Native Americans, the Cherokee rejects Pavie’s offer with a direct accusation. The Indian intones, “The Chief of the Osages did what you are proposing to me. We never saw him again—you killed him. No, I will never go!” Then turning the tables for a final time, he asks Pavie, “And you? What are you doing here?” (in Klier, 203). Marking the traveler as the outsider, out of place in a land “that belongs to the savage,” the Cherokee closes the conversation in a way that gives him the final word. Pavie endows the sauvage with power and selfdetermination in a way that departs from Bellisle’s threatening slave masters or Pagès’ generalized noble savages. Allowing the French reader to see the world from the viewpoint of a Native American who looks upon Europe with a critical eye, Pavie expands the discourse of self and other while still maintaining the illusion of mastery and understanding of this foreign subject and his world. A second and more prevalent nineteenth-century discourse of travel was produced by what Mary Louise Pratt has dubbed the “capitalist vanguard,” who replaced the eighteenth-century rhetoric of discovery with a “goal oriented rhetoric of conquest and achievement.”9 Pratt explains, “The vanguard’s task is to reinvent America as backward and neglected, to encode its non-capitalist landscapes and societies as manifestly in need of the rationalized exploitation the Europeans bring” (Pratt, 152). For the French, nineteenth-century Texas represented a land of opportunity, and their capitalist vanguard initially took the form of colonial settlers seeking prosperity and political freedom in a new world. In 1818, following Napoleon’s exile, the first and most famous group of French colonists — 149 Bonapartist refugees—established the colony of Champ d’Asile on the Trinity River. Although Champ d’Asile lasted barely six months, its

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legacy was lengthy, generating a vast romantic mythology. Most of the tales written about Champ d’Asile are fictitious accounts, but they nonetheless bear some attention as “travel narratives” of a sort, for they participated in the production of images of life in Texas as seen through the filter of French consciousness. The earliest of these, L’Héroïne du Texas; ou Voyage de Madame *** aux États-Unis et au Mexique appeared in 1819, immediately following the colony’s demise, and takes the form of a “true account.” The author recounts the exile of the soldier Edmond and his beautiful and virtuous wife, Ernestine, who leave France for America following the fall of Napoleon. The utopian narrative stresses the democratic ideals of the émigrés who espouse the values of “justice, friendship and disinterestedness,” while at the same time embracing a capitalist ideal that equates prosperity with emotional fulfillment. The narrator explains, “In working to make the colony prosper, we would assure the general happiness.”10 For the French, the Americas were associated with the possibility of democracy and equality, a land where anyone could be become rich and powerful regardless of birth. The success of the American Revolution led colonists to turn to the west time and again in the nineteenth century as they set out to establish idealist communities and achieve power, profit, and prestige that were not available in Europe. Yet these colonial enterprises were couched for the reading public in terms of the mission civilisatrice, bringing culture to a benighted wilderness ripe for its positive influence. In a typical formulation, Ernestine muses, “I think that the foundation of our colony will mark an epoch in history; it will flourish, I hope, and our names will be associated with the glory of being benefactors of humanity” (L’Héroïne du Texas, 90). L’Héroïne du Texas is one of the very few nineteenth-century travel narratives to give voice to a female traveler in the Americas, for few women were allowed to make the journey. The end of the tale, however, makes her symbolic role clear, for once the colonists flee Champ d’Asile for Galveston, they face a tempest that destroys the island, and Ernestine demonstrates her strength and courage when she saves others from certain death. Although her valiant efforts endanger her own life, she revives once she reaches the French outpost of New Orleans, where she reunites with her family. In this sense, the noble and idealistic heroine of this account of Champ d’Asile stands as an allegory for the colonialist myth of La France itself, bringing enlightenment and “life” to the empty lands of the uncivilized world. The interest in Texas invoked by travelers dating back to La Salle helped to elicit France’s support of Texas independence in the 1830s. In 1838, Louis Philippe aided the Texas cause by blockading the Mexican customs houses in Veracruz. Under the pretext of accumulated French

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claims against Mexico, he was able to divert the Mexican fleet from attacks on Texas and deprive them of import duties, an important source of revenue. In late 1838, French Admiral Baudin bombarded the fort of San Juan de Ulua and invaded Veracruz. Baudin was received as a hero in Galveston, and his report on the republic played a large part in France’s decision to recognize the Republic of Texas. M. E. Maissin’s addendum to Baudin’s account of L’expédition française au Mexique provides a glimpse at the emerging republic. By 1836, according to Maissin, the population of Texas was nearing 100,000; as Native Americans were pushed farther to the edges of the territory, AngloSaxon settlers, along with their language and customs, began to dominate. Thus, for mid-century French travelers, the indigenous Texan was the white settler, the source of a whole new set of myths. The primitive ideal of the noble savage is replaced in Maissin’s discourse by the ideal of

18.4

This drawing illustrates Léon Blouët’s story about a frightened traveler who had

to share a bed with a gun-toting Texas marshal. The roommate turned out to be quite a nice fellow, though, as he gave the supposedly broke traveler $100. Max O’Rell (pseudonym of Léon-Paul Blouët), A Frenchman in America. Recollections of Men and Things, illustrations by E. W. Kemble (New York, 1891). Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

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the Anglo-Saxon pioneer spirit that shares the fantasy of a happier way of life: “The simplicity of their customs, the morality that one discovers there so easily, the welcoming hospitality that Texans offer you”11 led many to want to start life anew there. This âge d’or du Texas, however, was threatened by the corrupt civilization pressing from the north. Maissin styles the citizens of the United States as the new cultural enemies, while Texans once again symbolize the antithesis of civilization and its discontents. He maintains, “The Texan, like the American of the United States, has judgment, energy, industry and perseverance. May he avoid the intolerable pride that gives the inhabitants of the Union such a high and ridiculous idea of their superiority! And may he also avoid the bad faith in commercial relations that discredits the United States and threatens to become proverbial!” (Maissin, 570). Maissin’s praise for the Texans is another way of criticizing their northern neighbors. Yet for nineteenth-century travelers looking to Texas as a remedy to the ills of their own culture, the fledgling republic held the hope of a fresh start and a return to the peace of an imaginary past. The early–twentieth-century French traveler in Texas was almost always passing through; experiencing Texas through a train window, these tourists engaged alternately in myth-making and myth-breaking, while consistently commenting on the politics of race. Popular stereotypes of lawlessness, lynching, cowboys, and big hats appear throughout these narratives that engage more with the “idea” of Texas than with any experiential reality. Léon Paul Blouët’s comic chapter in A Frenchman in America, “Why I Won’t Go to Texas,” foregrounds these myths of the frontier as he declares: “I won’t go to Texas. I should strongly object to being shot anywhere, but especially in Texas, where the event would attract so little public attention.”12 Blouët goes on to recount a story told by a friend who visited Texas and was forced to share a room in an inn for several days with a “frontier man” who slept with his revolvers under his pillow. Clearly poking fun at French provincialism and prejudice, Blouët explains that the terrified traveler told his roommate each night that the money he was expecting still had not arrived, only to have the generous Texan leave him a check for $100. Importantly, the author does not even have to visit Texas to include it in his travel narrative, and Blouët pointedly illustrates the power of myth as a substitute reality for the European traveler and his readers (Figure 18.4). In 1901, Georges Aubert searches fruitlessly for the mythic West, disappearing rapidly in the face of modernity. Traversing the state on a twoday trip, Aubert expects to see herds of buffalo chased by cowboys the minute he crosses the Texas border, but he complains, “Farewell, once again, my illusions! Once in a while one sees a vulgar nag or an emaciated, melancholy cow grazing on some yellowish grass. The great herds

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have been scattered; they are far away, chased further and further by the railroads.”13 Industrialism and capitalism have transformed Texas into a modern state that the traveler finds less palatable than the primitive model. The rugged frontier has been tamed, and the open range has been replaced by orderly cotton fields that provide the wealth of the region. As Texas moved into the twentieth century as an economic power, many travelers waxed nostalgic for the less threatening image of a backward culture promulgated by the capitalist vanguard. But for Aubert, as for many travelers, the question of race and segregation haunts even the most fleeting visit to Texas. The absence of wild herds and the presence of black laborers toiling in the fields collectively symbolize for Aubert the corruption of Western freedom and democracy. He comments, “The Negroes begin to appear and I notice the railroad cars that are reserved for them. The complete division between the white and black races begins to manifest itself in every manner” (Aubert, 75). Still reeling from the Dreyfus Affair, France’s own confrontation with national prejudice, writers at the turn of the century reveal an acute consciousness of problems of race relations and national identity while systematically condemning the slavery and its aftermath in the American South. By contrast, A. Maufroid’s 1907 journal of his travels reflects the complexities of race, ethnicity, and hybridity in Texas. As he boards the train in New Orleans, he observes the black porter “take his place humbly in the compartment reserved for ‘colored patrons’” and sees Chinese laborers working on the railroad tracks.14 Upon reaching San Antonio he is struck by the architecture, which reflects the mixture of cultures and styles that combined to build this state: “Many of the houses are decorated with balustrades and sculptures that give me a bit of the illusion of walking down the streets of Malaga or Granada . . . Here is the station hotel, brand new, sparkling white, which resembles a German citadel with its towers and battlements. In the middle of town is City Hall, whose high tower topped by a sort of tiara makes one think of a Romanesque church related to Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre” (Maufroid, 91). Perhaps more ready to like Texans than some of his fellow travelers, Maufroid has a different vision of race relations. Although he regrets the segregated railway cars, in Texas he notes “with pleasure that the white clients often sit without repugnance in the compartment for Negroes, next to the people of color; something that would seem monstrous in Louisiana.” In San Antonio, Spanish is seen and heard everywhere, pesos are available at all the banks, and “one feels that the Mexican border is close” (Maufroid, 92). One is reminded of France’s own shared border with Spain, the tensions between the two nations, and the resistance of the French to any sort of cultural or linguistic border crossings. Once

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again, Texas serves as a foil for France, but here its openness to difference and its ability to incorporate multiple ethnicities into a single group identity provides a gentle critique of France’s own less open racism. Cyril Chessux’s Pulsations Américaines (1946) participates in modern myth-making with a focus on Texans themselves. Racing across the country, “foot solidly planted on the accelerator,” Chessux’s narrative continues the fantasy of the freedom of the West with its wide open spaces, but here the cowboy and his horse are replaced by a convertible on the endless American highway. Chessux is struck by the appearance of those he meets, observing that “the inhabitants of Texas are famous for their sparkling teeth and their Herculean size.”15 The French traveler visits the newest attraction in Houston—a restaurant “where the driver does not need to get out of his car; he turns off the ignition in the middle of a fan of automobiles spread out around the establishment and his arrival is immediately registered by a look-out man at the top of a tower who informs the personnel” (Chessux, 179). This image of a drive-in restaurant, with a Foucauldian panopticon in the center looking not to punish but to serve, epitomizes the French vision of Texas car culture and the society of fast food and convenience. Finally, to complement the image of the tall and handsome Texas male is the stereotype of the beautiful Texas woman, at once sexually provocative and dressed in a slightly ridiculous fashion. Chessux describes the carhops as the drive-in’s biggest attraction, for “All of them, without exception, are ravishing. They are capped with a high grenadier’s hat, and wear a little satin blouse with gold epaulettes and short shorts, in fact such short shorts that the restaurateur had to open his establishment outside the city limits so as not to break the municipal laws” (Chessux, 179). Simone de Beauvoir’s L’Amérique au jour le jour (1948) presents both Texas myths and realities in her own hybrid of the existentialist experience of the Wild West. Entering a lunchroom, the mother of modern feminism sees “nothing but men, cowboys with tanned faces hidden beneath large white hats . . . they are all young, male and handsome like Tom Mix.”16 Yet de Beauvoir moves beyond stereotype into a social consciousness that transcends earlier travelers’ condemnation of race relations in Texas. At the bus station she remarks the separate bathrooms and waiting areas for blacks and whites and experiences a collective shame. She confesses, “It is the first time that we have seen with our own eyes this segregation we have heard so much about; and we were warned in vain: something descends upon our shoulders that will not leave us as long as we are in the South; it is our own skin that has become heavy and suffocating and whose color burns us” (Beauvoir, 179). Rather than accusing Americans for the outrage of segregation, de Beauvoir sees this violation

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of fellow humans in terms of a guilt shared by all those in a position of power over the oppressed. Walking through San Antonio she visits the black section of town, which she describes in moving terms. Yet poverty and suffering are not limited to blacks, and de Beauvoir documents the misery in which poor blacks and whites live throughout the South. “Nowhere in Europe do agricultural workers constitute such a large and impoverished population: one could only find something resembling it in their colonies; here the colony is in the interior of United States itself, which does not make the situation more revolting but makes it more striking, more paradoxical and adds to the complexity” (Beauvoir, 218). Indeed, what marks de Beauvoir’s travel narrative is her ability to map the complexity of Texas, and without condoning the social problems facing the South at mid-century, to present them in an empathetic way. Perhaps more than any other French traveler in Texas, Simone de Beauvoir views the state through a philosophical filter that bridges the culture gap with an existential bond of shared consciousness. Avant-garde author Michel Butor used the technique of literary montage to create a portrait of America in his experimental work Mobile.17 Juxtaposing fragments of Franklin’s writings and Jefferson’s speeches with popular song lyrics, advertisements, impressions, and poetry, Butor highlights the multiplicity of America while at the same time encoding a critique of racism. Using the complex, almost Joycean structure of a journey across the continent in which each section represents a single state and an hour of time, Butor maps the myths and competing discourses of the United States. In jazz-like riffs, Mobile’s Texas includes a lengthy meditation on the exploitation of the Navajos juxtaposed with fragments of ads for Sears and Roebuck, Elvis Presley songs, images of Juarez, “whites only” signs, Pepsi Cola, and cigarettes. Color is the leitmotif that unites the shards of visual and verbal fragments, and the segment devoted to a white girl in her car serves to underscore the theme of clashing race and color in the rest of the section. Following a poetic interlude devoted to the flames of refineries and the sound of the wind in the oil derricks, Butor writes: “An orange Buick driven by a young white girl who is very brown in a plum yellow dress with strawberry dots and a hat with lemoncolored flowers, runs into an old indigo one stopped by the side of the road, whose radio is blaring ‘Texas, our Texas,’ ‘we must be lost’” (Butor, 289). By creating a travel narrative without an identified traveler, Butor pushes the genre to its ultimate extreme, presenting pieces of experience that must be synthesized in the mind of the reader to come to a vision of the American states. The meaning of Butor’s text can only be achieved dialectically from the clash between fragments as well as from the points of intersection and divergence with the myriad images of Texas, its land, its

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people, and its myths generated by four centuries of French travelers in Texas. Finally, perhaps the most famous French traveler in Texas is Laurent de Brunhoff’s Babar. In Babar Comes to America,18 the king of the elephants visits a car factory in Detroit, rides a San Francisco cable car, and drives the Los Angeles freeways in a large, red convertible. In this children’s story, popular on both sides of the Atlantic, America is reduced to a set of iconic images that embody the diverse regions of the country. Babar’s visit to Texas, encapsulated in a single illustration and a few sentences of text, touches on nearly all of the myths of the Lone Star State. Babar goes shopping in Dallas (consumerism), wears a large hat (cowboys), and visits a cattle ranch, where he is told, “I’m going to show you the finest bull in the world . . . If I scratch his back, he shakes his head like a big dog” (boasting and tall tales). The accompanying image accords the elephant (in American leisurewear) more dignity and intelligence than the Texan, who looks both simple and eager, while the large herd and expansive ranch make reference to the enduring association of Texas with everything large. Babar, then, the stately image of France’s success in civilizing barbarous Africa into a suit-wearing, French-speaking behemoth, becomes the bemused representative of his adopted land in 1960s America. Although he expresses his pleasure in coming to “the country of Washington, of Mark Twain, of Danny Kaye,” it is “with a strong French accent,” and he experiences the speed, size, modernity, and noise of the western nation with as much discomfort as fascination. His tour of the capital is “very tiring”; he suffers from the pollution and noise in New York. A drugstore lunch emblematizing American excess gives him a stomachache, while a ride in a forty-story elevator gives him an earache. He declares the Grand Canyon “a bit too big” and finds himself marooned in the Arizona desert without gas. At once a playful introduction to America for French children and an affirmation of the essential differences between the two nations, Babar Comes to America asserts the superiority of French culture by virtue of those differences, which are consistently seen through a negative, if comic, filter. Once the land of primitive culture read against France’s advanced civilization, America is now in the inverse position of superiority: bigger, richer, stronger, and more progressive. Yet if the tables have turned within the national hierarchies, de Brunhoff, via Babar, reverses the values so that size, power, wealth, and progress are signs of inferiority, marked by excess and lack of control. Babar’s America is too big, too loud, too busy, too rich, while France—smaller, less productive, less wealthy, less modern—retains the upper position in the cultural hierarchy by virtue of the manipulated mirror of American barbarism. The ultimate stranger in a strange land, Babar, like his many French predeces-

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sors from Joutel and Pagès to Pavie and Butor, participates in the dialectic definition of France’s national identity through its points of intersection and divergence with the American Other. Notes 1. Henri Joutel, The La Salle Expedition to Texas. The Journal of Henri Joutel, 1684– 1687, ed. William C. Foster, trans. Johanna Warren (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1998), 173. 2. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 42–43. 3. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 30. 4. “Simars de Bellisle échoue dans une Baye à l’ouest du Mississippe,” in Découvertes et établissements des Français dans l’ouest et dans le sud de l’Amérique septentrionale, 1614–1754, ed. Pierre Margry (Paris: D. Jouaust, 1879 –1888), 6:334. All translations from the French are my own unless otherwise indicated. 5. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 5. 6. Despite her kindness and her assistance in his escape, Angélique also beat Bellisle. 7. Pierre de Pagès, Voyages autour du monde et vers les deux pôles par terre et par mer, pendant les années 1767, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74 et 76 (Paris: Moutard, 1782), 67. 8. Betje Klier, Pavie in the Borderlands (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 110. All quotations from Pavie’s Souvenirs atlantiques are taken from Klier’s translations. 9. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 148. 10. G —n F — n, L’Héroïne du Texas; ou Voyage de Madame *** aux États-Unis et au Mexique (Paris: Plancher, 1819), 88. 11. M. E. Maissin, ed., San Juan de Uluá ou Relation de l’expédition française au Mexique (Paris: Gide, 1839), 572. 12. Léon Paul Blouët, A Frenchman in America: Recollections of Men and Things (New York: Cassell, 1891), 275. 13. Georges Aubert, Les Nouvelles Amériques: Notes sociales et économiques (Paris: Flammarion, 1901), 74–75. 14. A. Maufroid, Du Méxique au Canada (Paris: Theuveny, 1907), 86–87. In the original French, Maufroid used “colored patrons” in English to emphasize his point. 15. Cyril Chessux, Pulsations Américaines (Paris: La Hune, 1946), 179. 16. Simone de Beauvoir, L’Amérique au jour le jour (Paris: Morihien, 1948), 207. 17. Michel Butor, Mobile, Etude pour une représentation des États-Unis (Paris: Gallimard, 1962). 18. Laurent de Brunhoff, Babar Comes to America, trans. M. Jean Craig (New York: Random House, 1965).

19 “GRAND

TEXAS”

The Cajun Migration to Texas CARL A. BRASSEAUX

The often acrimonious cultural and economic rivalry between Cajuns and Anglo-Texans in the Gulf Coast oil patch has obscured the longstanding economic and cultural ties that have intimately bound their respective homelands since the colonial era. Present southeastern Texas was a focal point of French smuggling in the eighteenth century, and, following his relocation to Galveston Island in 1815, Jean Laffite marketed much of his ill-gotten booty in rural French Louisiana (now known as Acadiana). In the early nineteenth century, Texas cattle drives once crossed Cajun settlements in the southwestern Louisiana prairies en route to shipping points along Bayous Teche and Courtableau. In the 1880s, the Southern Pacific Railroad followed these cattle trails and provided the principal communication and transportation links between New Orleans and Houston. In the twentieth century, the petroleum industry thoroughly integrated the regions economically, for most of the major companies operating along the Gulf Coast maintained district offices in Houston and regional offices in Lafayette. It is thus hardly surprising that throughout the twentieth century, the principal pattern of out-migration among Cajuns seeking economic opportunity was westward, into this convergence zone. Large numbers of Cajuns now reside in Austin, Houston, and Dallas, but these communities are dwarfed by the expatriate community in the heavily industrial Beaumont–Port Arthur–Orange area of southeastern Texas known as the Golden Triangle and facetiously called “Cajun Lapland” by one scholar because “that’s where Louisiana laps over into Texas.” For two centuries, southeastern Texas has been the economic and cultural crossroads of Acadiana, the Spanish Southwest, and, more recently, Anglo America. As early as the 1740s and 1750s, French traders from Louisiana were smuggling manufactured goods to the area’s indigenous 273

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Karankawa and Attakapas tribes. When New Spain established the Orcoquisac post near present-day Liberty, Texas, to secure the area, the traders merely entered into business arrangements with local Spanish officials and went about their illicit enterprises.1 The extent of these contacts is perhaps illustrated best by a 1770 inventory of the vast Dauterive vacherie between present-day St. Martinville and Lafayette, Louisiana, that listed approximately six thousand Mexican longhorns. The Acadian/Cajun link with southeastern Texas was first forged in 1770, when a group of refugees trekked through the area en route to Louisiana. Originally exiled to Maryland from Nova Scotia, these Acadians pooled their meager resources and in 1769 chartered a derelict schooner for transportation to Louisiana. The ship’s officers and pilot were incompetent, and after numerous shipboard adventures that included a mutiny, the Acadian migrants put ashore at Matagorda Bay, where Spanish authorities summarily arrested them as suspected smugglers. After several months of detention and forced labor at Presidio de La Bahía (present-day Goliad), the ill-starred refugees secured their release through an appeal to the viceroy of New Spain. Authorized to travel overland to Louisiana, the Acadians followed the region’s primitive trails to Natchitoches, stopping briefly at Orcoquisac, where thirteen-year-old Nanette LeJeune remained for unexplained reasons.2 Although her fate is presently unknown, LeJeune’s presence in southeastern Texas appears to have exerted a powerful influence upon her family, who ultimately made their way from Natchitoches to the westernmost fringes of the Opelousas District, the Louisiana settlement closest to Orcoquisac. Although the documentary record does not indicate whether LeJeune’s kinsmen were subsequently able to reestablish communications with her, south Louisiana officials complained in the early 1770s that Acadians living in the Opelousas and Attakapas districts were engaged in smuggling with southeastern Texas Indian tribes.3 This smuggling ring appears to have been short-lived, for the Louisiana government took strenuous steps to confiscate Texas contraband, and there are no extant reports of additional communications between southwestern Louisiana’s Acadian settlements and the present Golden Triangle area until the 1840s.4 In 1842, Joseph Hébert, a twenty-four-year-old native of Lafayette Parish, Louisiana, migrated to the large geographic area then encompassed by Jefferson County, Texas, evidently in search of grazing lands, which were increasingly scarce in his native region. Except for a visit to St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, to marry Melina Andrus, Hébert remained in Texas and established one of the most successful ranching operations in the present Beaumont area. Hébert’s deepening ties to his adopted state

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275

were clearly evident in 1861, when he raised a company for service in the Confederate army. He later assumed the rank of captain in a militia company assigned to Houston for much of the Civil War.5 Following Hébert’s untimely death in February 1865, his eight surviving children continued his ranching operations. His sons eventually diversified the family’s business interests by engaging in real estate speculation. Meanwhile, his four daughters married Acadians from the ranching areas of the southwestern Louisiana prairies, thereby helping to establish a small Acadian colony along the Neches River.6 According to local lore, these transplanted Cajuns subsequently organized periodic cattle drives into Louisiana from their Golden Triangle ranches. Like the Hébert clan, the Chiasson family migrated to Jefferson County sometime before 1853, when an itinerant Catholic priest visited the Beaumont area.7 As with the Hébert family, the Chiassons rapidly rose to prominence, and one member of the group held a judgeship by the end of the nineteenth century.8 The Chiasson and Broussard families formed the vanguard of a significant migration that has persisted to the present. Demographic historian Terry G. Jordan reports that 600 Cajuns, whom he euphemistically identifies as “Franco-Louisianians,” resided between present-day Baytown and Orange by 1850.9 The size of the influx appears to have increased temporarily in the wake of the massive 1859 vigilante movement in southwestern Louisiana before dwindling to a trickle during the Civil War (1861–1865) and Reconstruction (1865–1877).10 By 1887, however, approximately 2,300 Francophone Louisianians, the overwhelming majority of whom were transplanted Cajuns, resided in southeastern Texas.11 Some of the nineteenth-century migrants were criminals who hoped that crossing the state boundary would put them beyond the reach of Louisiana lawmen;12 a few were tuberculosis patients seeking to improve their declining health, but most were ambitious young adults seeking a better life. Some acquired farm and grazing lands that were only half as expensive as their counterparts in the more densely populated southwestern Louisiana prairies.13 Other migrants found employment in the towns lining the Southern Pacific Railroad line between the Sabine River and Houston.14 The railroad provided not only the principal conduit for immigration but also inadvertently promoted immigration through its local employment and advancement policies. The railroad employed surprisingly large numbers of Cajuns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and promotions for Cajun railroad employees usually entailed transfer from southwestern Louisiana communities to the Southern Pacific Railroad’s district office in Houston.15 Most Louisiana immigrants of Acadian ancestry, however, crossed the

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Sabine at the dawn of the twentieth century, following the discovery of oil at Spindletop, near Beaumont, on January 10, 1901.16 The oil discovery precipitated an unprecedented local economic boom, as oil companies established refineries and, later, shipyards. The jobs that these construction projects generated provided a godsend to downtrodden Cajuns. Because of extensive devastation wrought by the Union invasions of south-central Louisiana during the Civil War, the region’s economy virtually collapsed in the early postbellum period, and perhaps half the area’s freeholders were reduced to tenantry. In the relatively well-paying jobs available in southeastern Texas as a result of local petroleum industry’s phenomenal growth, Louisiana tenant farmers and sharecroppers found the first chance in more than a generation to improve their economic standing significantly. It is thus hardly surprising that large numbers of Cajun tenants and sharecroppers rushed to capitalize upon this rare opportunity. Although the size of the early–twentieth-century influx has never been documented, a cursory examination of the documentary record clearly indicates that several thousand Cajuns crossed the Sabine during the first fifteen years of the twentieth century. Within a year of the Spindletop oil discovery, the population of the then-sleepy farming and ranching community of Beaumont quadrupled in size, largely as a result of Cajun immigration. Cajun immigration was even heavier in the communities closer to the Louisiana-Texas state line. For example, Orange, which became a shipbuilding center during World War i, grew from a village of 765 in 1900 to a city of 46,140 in 1940. In 1902, following the establishment of the first Texas Oil Corporation refinery and a company town near Orange, Texas, Cajuns so completely dominated the facility’s work force and housing units that the community became popularly known as Petite Abbeville, drawing its name from the seat of justice in Louisiana’s overwhelmingly Cajun Vermilion Parish.17 The population of Port Neches, located near the refinery’s western boundary, was also dominated by Cajuns. Oral tradition in the Cajun communities of the Golden Triangle maintains that initial twentieth-century immigrants were joined by some Cajun small farmers who had lost everything through boll weevil infestation of their crops. All of the Cajun migrants eagerly anticipated the higher wages and steady employment promised by the infant industries fed by the Texas oil boom. They were not disappointed, and most of the Louisianians stayed. According to one local historian, more than 90 percent of the Cajun immigrants remained west of the Sabine.18 The Cajun influx appears to have continued unabated until a destructive 1915 hurricane, a massive category 4 storm, ravaged the upper Texas coastline, killing 275 people and inflicting major damage on the region’s business and industrial complexes. But rebuilding from the natural disas-

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ter precipitated a second twentieth-century boom, and the new construction jobs lured another group of Cajuns to southeastern Texas. This phase of the migration appears to have touched virtually every area of the Cajun prairies. The Cajun migration drastically altered the Golden Triangle’s sociocultural landscape, as the following quotation from a 1935 U.S. Works Progress Administration (wpa) city guide indicates: Old names, many of them French, are on storefronts and street markers. Some of the names are of descendants of Acadians who came to Beaumont in early years. [They] brought drip coffee and bisque, as well as many Gallic words and customs, to the Neches settlements. Beaumont today has a decided taste for crab gumbo and bouillabaisse.19 The Cajun migration had an equally notable cultural impact east of the Sabine, and by the late 1930s, sorrowful departures for Grand Texas became a central theme of Cajun music. The tu m’as quitté pour t’en aller au Grand Texas motif is seen most clearly in the “Austin Special,” “Grand Texas,” and “Port Arthur Blues” songs composed and performed by the era’s most popular Cajun musician, Harry Choates, a transplanted native of Acadia Parish who worked in the oil fields and shipyards of southeastern Texas.20 The local building boom begun with the reconstruction of southeastern Texas’s shattered infrastructure in 1915 persisted for approximately five years as the nation expanded its shipbuilding and refinery complexes during World War i. The rapid expansion of the Golden Triangle’s heavy industries ended about 1921, and the Cajun immigration that it sustained abruptly declined to a trickle. Meanwhile, though, the rural poor continued migrating to Texas in search of at least subsistence conditions. According to cultural geographers Dean Louder and Michael LeBlanc, those Cajuns who departed Louisiana during the agricultural depression of the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s were the “most marginal of the marginals . . . the people who had less than the [Louisiana] prairie people, who had nothing.”21 The interrupted migration resumed on a large scale with the beginning of World War ii and the consequent increase in the Golden Triangle area’s industrial output. The industrial sector’s heightened demand for ablebodied workers coincided with the onset of wartime manpower shortages, and Louisiana Cajuns rushed to fill the vacuum. Most of the new jobs were generated by the region’s petrochemical and refining industries, the Goodyear company’s new rubber manufacturing plant in the Golden Triangle, and the increased shipping activity following Port Arthur’s designation as a merchant marine home port.

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Many Cajun immigrants during the wartime influx appear to have been middle-aged men who returned to their home parishes after 1945. They were replaced, however, in the early postwar period by farm laborers and sharecroppers who were displaced in Louisiana by agricultural mechanization. The postwar migration of Cajun laborers was short-lived, for the rapid development of the Louisiana petroleum economy, particularly the offshore oil exploration industry, provided local employment opportunities that rivaled or exceeded those afforded by the heavy industries in the Golden Triangle. As the influx of uneducated Cajuns subsided, an impending migration of Cajun college graduates was gaining momentum. Upon the conclusion of World War ii, large numbers of returning Cajun servicemen—like their counterparts throughout the nation — took advantage of the educational opportunities afforded by the GI Bill. During the immediate postwar years, the student body of Southwestern Louisiana Institute (presently the University of Louisiana at Lafayette), the institution of higher learning traditionally boasting the nation’s largest Cajun student body, quadrupled in size, and the school enjoyed steady growth throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Although the Louisiana oil industry enjoyed phenomenal growth throughout this period, Cajun university graduates encountered increasing difficulty in finding acceptable employment. These difficulties stemmed in part from the fact that the oil industry’s workforce was dominated by blue-collar employees and in part from the major oil companies’ reluctance to hire and promote Cajun administrators. Despite their limited professional opportunities, many Cajun college graduates succumbed to intense family pressure to accept positions for which they were overqualified just to remain in south Louisiana. With the virtual collapse of the global petroleum economy in December 1985, however, these familial restraints, which had been eroding for two decades, were no longer viable. According to the 1990 census, 105,982 Cajuns resided in the Lone Star State.22 This number is probably deceptively small, for, like their cousins in Louisiana, many Cajuns, still carrying negative self-images after decades of cultural denigration in their native state, undoubtedly identified themselves as French-Canadian or simply French in the 1990 Census questionnaire. The actual size of Texas’ Cajun community is thus probably closer to a 1980 estimate by Canadian ethnographers of 375,000.23 Texas’ Cajun population, once highly concentrated in the Golden Triangle area, is now widely dispersed. Cajuns migrated to numerous Texas cities (Table 19.1), among which Houston, Dallas, and Austin claimed large shares. It is thus hardly surprising that the University of Louisiana’s two largest out-of-state alumni chapters are located in Houston and Dal-

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TA B L E 19 . 1

The Ten Largest Urban Cajun Communities in Texas, 1990 CITY

NUMBER

Houston

10,184

16

Port Arthur

4,624

7

Beaumont

3,950

6

Groves

3,481

6

Nederland

2,493

4

Austin

2,040

3

Dallas

2,027

3

Port Neches

1,937

3

Pasadena

1,711

3

1,550

2

San Antonio

% OF ALL URBAN CAJUNS

Source: 1990 Census

las, and Austin ranks among the top ten.24 The Cajun migration did not abate in the 1990s, and it is noteworthy that Louisiana sustained a net loss of population during the decade. The participants in this movement were overwhelmingly white-collar employees. Educators and engineers are perhaps the most noteworthy defectors in the recent migration. These Cajun engineers, who constitute a large proportion of the engineering staffs of such Texas high-tech firms as Nortel (formerly Northern Telecomm), eds, and Motorola, played an important role in the Lone Star State’s drive to become a leader in the emerging Information Age economy. The late–twentieth-century exodus of Louisiana Cajuns stands in stark contrast to the earlier migrations to the Golden Triangle area. As during the eighteenth-century Acadian migration to Louisiana, familial networks played a crucial role in shaping the course of the early–twentiethcentury Cajun influx. The Golden Triangle’s initial Cajun immigrants were usually young men who, after finding gainful employment, sent for their families to join them. Numerous collateral relatives often joined migrating Cajun families. Established families not only provided stability for the transplanted community, but they also provided a support network for friends and relatives who followed in their wake. In addition, these

280

19.1 & 2

BRASSEAUX

Music and food are important cultural markers for the Cajun community in

east Texas. These photographs were taken at the 1974 Great Port Arthur Crawfish Festival. The University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio.

networks provided the main mechanism for sustained contact between the mother and daughter communities throughout the modern Cajun diaspora. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of these familial networks, for the sustained contacts they engendered encouraged cultural integrity and continued ethnic identity among Golden Triangle Cajuns. An analysis of Cajun surnames in the early city and telephone directories for

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281

the principal Golden Triangle communities suggests that most of the early–twentieth-century immigrants were drawn from Evangeline, St. Landry, Lafayette, Acadia, and Vermilion Parishes. Between 1910 and 1935, the social columns in the newspapers of the Pelican State’s eastern prairie region document thousands of rail expeditions by both Louisiana and Texas Cajuns to visit relatives residing across the state line.25 These familial ties were strengthened during the 1927 flood, when approximately 100,000 persons — primarily Cajuns—were displaced by rising floodwaters along the eastern rim of the Atchafalaya Basin. The American Red Cross hastily organized camps for the refugees, but the magnitude of the disaster quickly overwhelmed the Red Cross’s badly overtaxed resources. The Red Cross consequently dispatched large numbers of Cajun flood victims to the Golden Triangle, where they were expected to obtain assistance from friends and relatives for the duration of the emergency.26 Meanwhile, Cajun cowboys from the Golden Triangle organized a relief expedition to assist Louisianians in rescuing livestock from the floodwaters.27 The response of the Golden Triangle’s Cajun community to the 1927 crisis reveals the persistence of strong community bonds. These bonds were reinforced in Texas by the general disdain with which they were regarded by their Anglo neighbors and plant supervisors. Such attitudes, particularly in the workplace, and the continuing integrity of the Cajuns’ identity played pivotal roles in the Golden Triangle’s industrial development. According to Louder and LeBlanc, “The first [Texas] plant to be unionized was in Port Neches, and Cajuns, recognizing a class interest, played no small role in the formation of the unions. They, along with fellow workers, negotiated work contracts with American management and the multinational corporations.”28 Transplanted Cajuns and their numerous Texas-born progeny, however, were themselves transformed as they helped to mold their adopted homeland. Orange’s Cajuns, like those in nearby Port Arthur and Beaumont, were generally illiterate and thus were initially forced into bluecollar positions in the oilfields, the refineries, and the shipyards. As with their cousins in southern Louisiana, these laborers learned the value of formal education from their work experiences. Second-generation Cajuns in the Golden Triangle thus consistently finished high school, while their children (third-generation Texas Cajuns) generally attended college. In the post–World War ii era, workers watched their college-educated children take their places in the front offices of the refineries and shipyards where they themselves had toiled for decades with only limited advancement. Other college graduates have formed their own businesses and, in 1986, seventy-nine Beaumont businesses were owned by Cajuns.

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The Texas and Louisiana Cajun communities also experienced parallel development in the area of cultural evolution. As in southern Louisiana, compulsory English education took its toll upon Cajun culture, which went into a long period of decline until the 1970s. Indeed, as early as the 1920s, Cajun parents in the Golden Triangle area actively encouraged their children to master the English language.29 Also contributing to the gradual erosion of Cajun culture were the dwindling contacts between the transplanted and parent communities over the course of the twentieth century. Following the deaths of the first-generation migrants, second-generation Texas Cajuns sharply curtailed visits with their Louisiana relatives. Today, third- and fourth-generation Cajun residents of the Golden Triangle region generally feel little or no affinity whatsoever for their now largely forgotten Louisiana homeland and kin. This is not to say that all Cajuns who currently reside in the Golden Triangle have turned their backs on their heritage. Largely through the efforts of second-generation Cajuns, particularly those of the Beaumont area who in 1980 organized the cultural association Les Acadiens du Texas, the Cajun community of the Golden Triangle area has experienced a cultural revival reminiscent of that in Acadiana. This cultural revival, which began approximately a quarter-century ago, was due in part to the revival of the parent culture in southern Louisiana, but also to the efforts of such Texas organizations as the Knights of Columbus, the Cajuns of Tomorrow, the Golden Triangle Cajun Association, and the Présence Francophone Amérique.30 Local Cajun dance halls remain well attended, and in mid-2001, Cajun French Music Association chapters existed in Houston, San Antonio, and the Golden Triangle (Nederland). In the late 1980s, six radio stations broadcast French-Cajun music, and one of these boasted — apparently without fear of contradiction—that it played more Cajun music per day than any station in French Louisiana. The Golden Triangle area also now points proudly to its several fine Cajun restaurants, which are focal points of a regional effort to attract tourists and thus diversify the region’s oil-based economy. Food and music are increasingly important cultural markers for the Golden Triangle community (Figures 19.1 and 19.2), and their importance undoubtedly will be magnified as the community’s young, Anglophone elite promotes cultural preservation through tourism. The group’s traditional minority status and the social isolation it entailed, the linguistic differences between Cajuns and their neighbors, the class consciousness born of the community’s early blue-collar background, and a grassroots backlash against the eventual threat of assimilation contributed toward maintaining group boundaries and sustaining a group identity. Yet, crosscultural borrowing was inevitable, and the Cajun culture of the Golden

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TA B L E 19 . 2

Urban Cajun Francophones in the Golden Triangle CITY

NUMBER

Port Arthur

2,288

Beaumont

2,138

Groves

637

Orange

577

Port Neches

511

Nederland

508

Vidor

84

Note: The numbers above indicate the number of individuals who spoke French at home. Source: 1990 Census

TA B L E 19 . 3

A Demographic Profile of the Urban Cajun Population in the Principal Golden Triangle Communities CITY

NUMBER OF CAJUNS

% O F T H E TOTA L U R B A N P O P U L AT I O N

Groves

3,481

21.08

Nederland

2,493

15.40

Port Neches

1,937

14.93

Vidor

1,164

10.65

Port Arthur

4,624

7.87

Orange

1,481

7.66

Beaumont

3,950

3.46

Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Census Bureau

Triangle area is, perhaps to a greater extent than its Louisiana counterpart, a synthetic product, the result of far greater demographic mixing between Acadian and non-Acadian groups. The prospects for ethnic survival are nevertheless far brighter in the Golden Triangle than among the other Texas Cajun communities. The

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1990 Census reveals a remarkable number of Francophones within the Golden Triangle’s Cajun community (Table 19.2), and although most of these French speakers are more than forty years of age, the Cajun community retains a demographic critical mass—particularly within the rural areas—that may prove sufficient to sustain it over the coming decades (Table 19.3). The predominantly urban late–twentieth-century immigrants, however, constitute less than 1 percent of the population in the major Texas metropolitan centers and consistently less than 2 percent of their smaller host communities (Table 19.4). It seems certain that, despite the efforts of such grassroots cultural organizations as the cia (Cajuns in Austin) that provide essential social networking among the Louisiana expatriates, the communities will lose their identities over the course of a generation. The Cajun influx, nevertheless, continues unabated as Louisiana’s stagnant job market, shrinking tax base, and declining public services afford young Cajuns little incentive to resist the Lone Star economy’s siren song.

TA B L E 19 . 4

A Demographic Profile of Cajun Communities in Major Texas Metropolitan Areas CITY

NUMBER OF CAJUNS

% O F T H E TOTA L U R B A N P O P U L AT I O N

Houston

10,184

0.62

Austin

2,040

0.44

Dallas

2,027

0.20

Pasadena

1,711

1.43

San Antonio

1,550

0.17

Fort Worth

1,114

0.25

Corpus Christi

790

0.31

Arlington

764

0.29

Irving

692

0.45

Garland

671

0.37

El Paso

325

0.06

Abilene

316

0.30

Source: 1990 Census

285

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Notes 1. Carl A. Brasseaux and Richard E. Chandler, “The Britain Incident, 1769–1770: Anglo-Hispanic Tensions in the Western Gulf,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 87, no. 4 (1984): 357–370; Mathé Allain and Vincent Cassidy, “Trader among the Attakapas,” Attakapas Gazette 3 (1968): 32–38; Herbert Eugene Bolton, Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century: Studies in Spanish Colonial History and Administration (1915; reprint in cooperation with the Texas State Historical Association, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970); Laura L. Porteus, “Index to the Spanish Judicial Records of Louisiana,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 8 (1925): 528–529. 2. Lawrence Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 1765–1794 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949), 2: 141–142. 3. Carl A. Brasseaux, The Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana, 1765–1803 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 185–186. 4. Terry G. Jordan, “A Century and a Half of Ethnic Change in Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 89, no. 4 (April 1986): 405. Jordan, citing dubious sources, maintains that James Taylor White, the famed pioneer east Texas cattleman, was a LeBlanc who had anglicized his name. Other sources indicate that White was an Anglo born in Louisiana of parents who migrated from South Carolina. 5. “Acadian Pioneers of Texas,” Acadian Genealogy Exchange 17 (1988): 3–4; “Indian Wars and Pioneers of Texas,” Acadian Genealogy Exchange 21 (1992): 109. 6. “Acadian Pioneers,” 3. 7. The family’s surname is sometimes rendered Chaisson. 8. “Indian Wars,” 109; “Acadian Pioneers,” 3; P. F. Parisot, The Reminiscences of a Texas Missionary (San Antonio, Johnson Brothers Printing, 1899), 7. The patriarch of the Chiasson clan, Joseph Chiasson dit Joannes, reportedly left his native St. Landry Parish for Texas at the age of 115. “After several years,” he subsequently returned to St. Landry Parish, where he died at the age of 130. Franklin, La., Planters’ Banner, January 26, 1870. 9. Jordan, “A Century and a Half,” 387, 418, 578. 10. Ibid., 396, 418. 11. Ibid. 12. See also Jules Guidry’s’ letter to C. C. Cain in the Opelousas Courier, September 1, 1877. 13. Dean R. Louder and Michael LeBlanc, “The Cajuns of East Texas,” in French America: Mobility, Identity, and Minority Experience across the Continent, ed. Dean R. Louder and Eric Waddell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 310. 14. Rayne Signal, August 14, 1886; February 26, 1887; Weekly Thibodaux Sentinel, April 2, 1887; January 31, 1891; February 21, 1891; Crowley Signal, February 21, 1891; March 14, 1891; New Iberia Enterprise, July 10, 1897. 15. Lafayette Daily Advertiser, October 14, 1918.

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16. On the origins of the Texas oil industry see Diana Davis Olien and Roger M. Olien, Oil in Texas: The Gusher Age, 1895–1945 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). 17. Louder and LeBlanc, “Cajuns of East Texas,” 310. 18. Telephone interview with Clyde Vincent, Beaumont, August 1, 1987. 19. Beaumont: A Guide to the City and Its Environs (Houston: Anson-Jones Press, 1935), 15. 20. Barry Jean Ancelet, Cajun Music: Its Origins and Development (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1989), 29. 21. Louder and LeBlanc, “Cajuns of East Texas,” 311. 22. U.S. Department of Commerce, 1990 Census of Population: Social and Economic Characteristics. United States (Washington, D.C., 1993), Table 142, p. 171. This figure includes individuals who claimed to be of French-Canadian ancestry. With the exception of Canadian-born Nortel employees in the Richardson area, most of these people appear to be transplanted Louisiana Acadians, for there is a remarkably high correlation between the residential locations of both groups. (As in Louisiana, individuals ashamed of their Cajun ancestry appear to have selected more “benign” ethnic identification categories.) 23. Jordan, “Ethnic Change,” 418. 24. Telephone interview with Dan Hare of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette alumni office, May 29, 2001. 25. See, for example, Lafayette Daily Advertiser, September 19, 1918, and April 8, 1922; Abbeville Meridional, May 27 and July 29, 1922; Abbeville Progress, January 7, June 10, July 8, and July 22, 1922; Crowley Signal, July 16 and December 10, 1921; Ville Platte Weekly Gazette, November 19, 1921, and March 11 and July 1, 1922. 26. Glenn R. Conrad and Carl A. Brasseaux, eds., Crevasse! The 1927 Flood in Acadiana (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1994), 41–46. 27. Ibid., 44–45. 28. Louder and LeBlanc, “Cajuns of East Texas,” 311. 29. News release regarding Hugh L. Nini, 1996, in the author’s archives. 30. Louder and LeBlanc, “Cajuns of East Texas,” 314–315.

20

RAOUL JOSSET AND THE

1936 TEXAS CENTENNIAL FRANÇOIS LAGARDE

Raoul Jean Josset was born in 1899 in Fours (Nièvre) and not in Tours, as usually stated (Figure 20.1). He attended the École des Beaux Arts in Paris and fought at Verdun during World War i. In 1918, he became an interpreter for the U.S. armed forces stationed in France and then returned to the Beaux Arts. He had a studio at the La Ruche studio in Paris, drew cartoons for magazines, and wrote art reviews for the journals La Peinture and Le Verbe. He worked with Antoine Bourdelle and exhibited at the Salons des Artistes. Winner of the Prix de Rome in 1923, Josset created fifteen war memorials and some large sculptures for Catholic churches during that period. Along with nine other Frenchmen, two Swedes, and two Italians, Josset was recruited in France by the Chicago-based Northwestern Terra Cotta Company and immigrated to the United States in 1927. In Chicago, Josset taught at the Art Institute and met the architect Donald Nelson, who would later take him to Dallas for the 1936 Texas Centennial. He created art deco bas-reliefs for the 1933–1934 Century of Progress Exposition and for the United States Government building in Chicago. In Vincennes, Indiana, Josset sculpted a pair of Indians, forty-foot-high bas-reliefs, on two bridge pylons. Josset became a U.S. citizen in 1934 and returned to France only once before his death in Dallas in 1957. He taught at the Chicago Art Institute and at Cooper Union, New York. He was married and divorced three times, and his third wife, a native of Romania, became insane. Most of Josset’s art was initiated by government commission, and his allegorical sculptures and decorative work are meant to convey feelings of pride and grandeur. For the 1936 Texas Centennial he sculpted monumental statues and bas-reliefs. With his friend and fellow sculptor José Martin he created the Spirit of the Centennial, a twenty-foot-high female 287

288

LAGARDE

figure standing between the prongs of a cactus tree for the Hall of Administration at Fair Park, Dallas, which today houses the Women’s Museum (color illustration 13). “Gorgeous” Georgia Carroll, a popular actress and singer, modeled for the naked woman who rises and smiles under a portico, brightly illuminated at night, in front of a reflecting pool.1 The 1936 Centennial’s message was meant to inspire pride in Americans as the Great Depression wore on. Josset also created allegories of France, the United States, and Mexico, each twenty feet high in concrete. Hieratic and almost nationalistic, these young and powerful goddesses express majesty and generosity. France has a fleur-de-lis on her chest and grapes in her left hand (Figure 20.2). Also for the centennial, Josset sculpted the Mackenzie Trail monument in Plainview, the memorial to the Mier Expedition in La Grange, the memorial to Amon B. King’s men in Refugio, the George C. Childress

20.1

Looking somewhat impatient, Raoul Josset poses next to a bust he sculpted in

Dallas circa 1950. Photographer unknown. Alexander Architectural Archives, the University of Texas at Austin.

Raoul Josset and the Texas Centennial

20.2

289

Raoul Josset and José Martin created allegorical sculptures of France, the United

States, and Mexico for the 1936 Texas Centennial. This statue represents France, as signified by the fleur-de-lis and the grapes. Photographer unknown. Alexander Architectural Archives, the University of Texas at Austin.

monument in Washington-on-the-Brazos, Texas, and the impressive monument to Cavelier de La Salle in Lavaca (Figure 20.3). He designed bronze reliefs of Stephen Austin and Green DeWitt and bas-reliefs of James Fannin and Davy Crockett. He remained in Texas after the centennial, except for a stay in New York during World War ii. In Dallas, his studio became “a center of gaiety, intellectuality, art, and love,” said José Martin, who wrote a moving memoir about his friend.2 In 1948, Josset sculpted a seventy-five-foot-long

290

20.3

LAGARDE

The 22-foot-high monument to Cavelier de La Salle, shortly after it was erected

in 1936 on Indianola Beach near Port Lavaca. The statue, made of pink granite, was designed by Raoul Josset and sculpted by Ugo Lavaggi. Photographer unknown. Alexander Architectural Archives, the University of Texas at Austin.

bas-relief for the Grand Lodge Masonic Temple in Waco that was designed by his friend Donald Nelson. It depicts in a pseudo-antic or art deco style the construction of the temple of Solomon. In addition to Texas public heroes whose virtues and deaths are memorable, Josset’s sculptures always represent the human body: a poilu of the Great War, a discus thrower, a hunting Indian on his horse, a dancing girl à la Maillol, a hockey player, a flamboyant La Fayette, a nurse and child for Children’s Hospital in Dallas, Saint Francis freeing the dove of

Raoul Josset and the Texas Centennial

291

peace, a Romanesque virgin and child, Sam Houston in his Free Mason attire, and an angel with a sword and geometric wings. On his bas-reliefs and plaques, allegorical, stylized, and muscular heroes break their chains and brandish large swords. La Salle holds his two hands on a huge sword planted in front of him and looks like a medieval chevalier, fierce and lionesque. The Amon B. King’s Men statue in Refugio represents a kneeling soldier, naked and holding a broken sword behind his shoulder, while his other hand rests on the palm of peace. Josset liked “le vin, les femmes, et la pierre” (wine, women, and stone), said Martin. He was a talented and forceful sculptor, bringing to life stone images of heroic strength and wounds. While working on the Waco bas-relief, he taught French in a high school at night. He survived the Battle of Verdun, two world wars, and the Depression and went on to sculpt grand images, yet Josset died a poor and sick man. “He never became ‘Americanized,’ but always stayed the typical Frenchman, intellectual and dialectic, lover of history, poetry, with a little touch of pedantry,” confides Martin. Josset was encouraged to go to America by his mother. In Le Havre, she gave him a letter to be opened at high sea which read: “Go my child! Argonaut full of beautiful dreams! Go and search for the lode of gold which has attracted men for so long.”3 Martin believed that in spite of his momentary success, Josset was unhappy in America. “If Raoul had stayed in France, he would be by now one of the ‘pontifs’ [pundits] of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, decorated with the Légion d’honneur.” Verlaine was his favorite poet. José Martin was born in Arbois (Jura) and immigrated to the United States with Josset in 1927. In addition to the work he did with his friend, Martin sculpted the State Fair of Texas statue for the 1936 Centennial in Fair Park. A third French sculptor associated with the Texas Centennial is Pierre Van Parys Bourdelle, son of sculptor Emile Bourdelle. Born in Paris in 1903, he fought in World War i (like Josset) and became deaf. A former student of Rodin, he immigrated to New York in 1929, worked in Chicago for the Century of Progress Exposition, and went to Texas to work on murals and bas-reliefs for the Fair Park’s buildings (color illustration 14). He invented a technique of mixing sculpture and fresco that he called cameo. Bourdelle produced large-scale paintings and murals for the rail and shipping industries, as exemplified by his decorative works on the California Zephyr and on the SS America. A friend of Josset and Martin, Bourdelle died in 1966.4

292

LAGARDE

Notes 1. Carol Morris Little, A Comprehensive Guide to Outdoor Sculpture in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 153. 2. Raoul Josset Papers, manuscript material and photographs, box 1, jos 1–14 (Alexander Architectural Archive, Architecture Library, University of Texas at Austin). 3. Ibid. 4. See Dorothy Grafly, “Pierre Bourdelle, Sculptor, Painter, Creative Artist,” American Artist 16, no. 5 (May 1952): 42–46, 54–57.

21

GLOBAL CULTURE French Economic Presence in Texas, Summer 2001

FRANÇOIS LAGARDE

For the past half-century, emigration of French capital to Texas has continued to increase, with 50,000 people working for French subsidiaries in Texas in the year 2001. By comparison, about one-fifth that number of “French-born” lived in the state.1 A handful of emigrants settling in nineteenth-century Texas had a small economic impact and a very minor cultural one. But today, when French-headquartered Valeo, Alcatel, or Vivendi decide to invest, divest, or restructure in North America, their decisions are felt worldwide, including in a large number of offices, plants, markets, and homes across Texas. The history of French enterprise in the United States is almost a century old. Péchiney began construction on an aluminum smelter in North Carolina in 1913, but World War i prevented completion of the project. French companies began to move to North America as technological advantages appeared to guarantee lower production costs and a share of the U.S. market. Péchiney invented an energy-saving aluminum manufacturing process, Michelin the radial tire. In 2001, French smart card technology, high-tech eyewear, and pharmaceutical discoveries continued to bring French companies to the United States. The French also have come in search of raw materials. Cogema mined uranium in Texas in the 1980s, and TotalFinaElf continues to search for oil and gas along the Gulf Coast. These companies have come for markets, synergy, and value, pushed by competition, growth imperatives, and sometimes hubris. Many of the endeavors follow a pattern: They begin with exporting their products, then launch a joint venture with a U.S. company to manufacture locally and avoid trade barriers, and finally buy a U.S. company or merge with one. French multinationals have carved out a small but increasing share of the market in almost all sectors of the economy. 293

294

LAGARDE

Not all French companies, however, are successful. La Salle and his companions never found the Spanish gold mines, and on April 16, 1947, the French-owned and crewed SS Grandcamp exploded in Texas City’s harbor, a disaster that ravaged the city and killed 576 people. The ship was loading ammonium fertilizer made from recycled explosives when a fire triggered the blast. At the time, no one knew how to handle the chemical. “Litigation over the Texas City disaster was finally settled in 1962, when the United States Supreme Court refused to review an appeals court ruling that the Republic of France, owner of the Grandcamp, could not be held liable for any claims resulting from the explosion.”2 During the 1990s, a French-Canadian tgv, or high-speed rail, was slated to be built in Texas, but the project fell through because of financial difficulties and opposition from the airlines and because passenger trains are not a strong feature in Texan culture. Multinationalization of French companies took off after World War ii, and the volume of French investments in the United States and Texas has exploded since the 1970s. In 1975, 350 French firms had subsidiaries in the United States, 80 percent of which were less than fifteen years old.3 In 1998, according to the Census Bureau, 14,129 businesses were acquired or established in the United States by “ultimate beneficial owners” whose native country was France. In 1992, French investment expenditures in the United States were less than $500 million but reached $24.5 billion in 1999.4 French direct investment in Texas tripled in a decade, from $2.8 billion in 1987 to $8.3 billion in 1998. Affiliates and subsidiaries of French companies employed 12,300 people in Texas in 1987 and 48,200 people in 1998.5 In 2001, France was the fifth largest foreign investor in Texas, after the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and Japan. Estimates released at the French in Texas symposium in Austin in 2000 stated that “about 140 subsidiaries of French companies [are] operating in the state of Texas.”6 French businesses in Texas are not culturally French but are Frenchowned. Although not necessarily French-managed, most are financially and hierarchically attached to a parent company based or headquartered in France. A Texas-based catering company owned by a French immigrant selling French wines and French pâtés prepared by French cooks at a Bastille Day event is not legally a French company but a U.S. company. However, a Texas-born-and-bred plant that becomes a subsidiary of a French multinational after a merger and manufactures an American product with but a handful of cadres who are French is classified under France. In 2001, La Madeleine, the restaurant chain started in Dallas in 1983 by a French entrepreneur as “an authentic French bakery,” was registered in the United States. The company was owned by two French ven-

Global Culture

295

ture capital firms and two American investment firms but could be counted as French only if the two French owners held a majority of shares. In the context of international business and globalization, “French” refers to historical and geographical origins or to ownership and location of company headquarters. A Texas subsidiary of a French multinational is more French by contract and nationality than by identity. In addition, no official list of French companies in Texas exists, since “the State of Texas does not require foreign companies to report their Texas business activities differently than domestic firms.”7 Therefore, we sketch with caution a summer 2001 portrait of the companies and subsidiaries established in Texas for which France was the “country” of their “ultimate beneficial owner(s),” as stated in administrative documents. To complicate the matter, the French economic scene in Texas is constantly evolving and will have changed by the time this information is published. Some companies will have disappeared, others will have changed their names and possibly their nationality, and new ones will have emerged. French oil and gas industry companies have been in Texas since 1925, beginning with Schlumberger, whose original French nationality has been replaced by its inter-, intra-, and multi-nationality. Registered in Curaçao, Dutch West Indies, headquartered in The Hague, in New York, and — for its resource management services division — in Paris, Schlumberger is said to be 60 percent owned by American capital. Its origin is certainly 21.1

Schlumberger’s engineer Gilbert Descharte, left, prospecting with his assistants

in Randando, Texas, in 1926. Photograph by Gilbert Deschartre. Archives of Schlumberger Ltd.

296

21.2

LAGARDE

Gilbert Deschartre leans over a potentiometer in Seguin, Texas, in 1926. Photo-

graph by Gilbert Deschartre. Archives of Schlumberger Ltd.

French, tracing its history back to Souabia and Alsace, and a number of the firm’s employees working in Texas are French, including some coopérants militaires. In the 1920s, a method invented in France for oil exploration brought the brothers Conrad and Marcel Schlumberger, founders of the Société de Prospection Eléctrique, to Texas and California (Figure 21.1 and 21.2).8 In 1934, they founded Schlumberger Well Surveying Corporation in Houston. In 1946, North American Wireline Operations, also in Houston, was established by Marcel’s son. After the war, Jean de Menil came to Houston with his wife, Dominique Schlumberger. Menil, who renamed himself John and made English and the dollar Schlumberger’s official language and currency, also moved Schlumberger Limited headquarters to Houston. The couple patronized the arts extensively, as evidenced by the Menil museum and the Rothko chapel. The company diversified and expanded greatly, then moved to New York. In 1987, it opened its Austin Research Center and related facilities in Sugarland. Schlumberger’s business is no longer concerned only with oil exploration and meters. In 2001, it manufactured smart cards, competing on

Global Culture

297

the U.S. market with two other French companies, Gemplus and Oberthur. Since the smart card is a French invention (licensed by Roland Moreno), one could say that, from electrical drilling to smart card technology, Schlumberger continues to bring French innovations to the United States via Texas. Schlumberger owned GeoQuest in Houston and incubated Metadot, a start-up Internet company in Austin headed by a French engineer and specializing in managed portals and web applications. But multinational Schlumberger is not really a French company anymore. It hires highly rated French engineers, but only 10 to 15 percent of its total workforce is French. There are more Asians than French in the company, but this does not make Schlumberger an Asian company, either. TotalFinaElf is a French company headquartered in France that in March 2001 operated 235 wells in Texas and the Gulf of Mexico. After a merger between TotalFina and Elf Aquitaine in 2000, it became the fourth largest oil company in the world. In addition to oil and gasoline, it manufactures all types of petrochemical products used in plastics, paints, resins, diapers, carpets, shampoos, and lipsticks. In 1988, Total tripled its size when it acquired the Houston-based csx Oil and Gas Corporation. Fina has merged with petroleum companies for the past four decades, owning a refinery in Port Arthur, one in Big Springs (sold to an Israeli company in 2000), chemical plants in Bayport and La Porte, pipeline systems, storage terminals, and tank cars, as well as oil and gas reserves in West Texas and the Rio Grande Valley. Elf Aquitaine acquired Texas Gulf in the late 1980s. Atofina, a subsidiary of TotalFinaElf, has a joint venture with a Japanese firm in an acrylic plant in Pasadena (American Acryl) and another joint venture with German basf in an immense plant in Port Arthur. Atofina sold its 2,800 Fina gas stations but still owned chemical plants in Mont Belvieu, Crosby, La Porte, and Bayport. In 2000, Gaz de France owned a third of the Houston-based Sofregas, a company with expertise in underground gas storage in salt caverns. Tractebel Power became a large French subsidiary of Suez-Lyonnaise des Eaux in 1999. It produces electricity and steam and built a plant near Bridgeport and one near Ennis for the Dallas–Fort Worth area. In the oil and gas exploration industry, Houston-based Coflexip Stena Offshore markets underwater pipes and remote-operated vehicles. Compagnie Générale de Géophysique, also in Houston, is the parent company of Flagship GeoSciences and of Sercel, headquartered in Nantes, which manufactures seismic data acquisition equipment. Geoservices specializes in mud logging and oil exploration and has been in Texas since 1975. Bouygues Offshore undertakes deepwater exploration and has a joint venture with Doris Engineering. Forasol had a subsidiary in Texas, Foratex, marketing oil field

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supplies, but it went to Wall Street in search of capitalization and was bought by Pride, thus losing its French nationality. Technip, owned in part by French oil and gas companies, builds petrochemical facilities, including the American Acryl plant in Bayport and the Amoco plant in Chocolate Bayou. Framatome’s Texas subsidiary, Packinox, has an office in Houston “because it is one of the global decision-making centers in oil and gas,” the website states. T-Surf specializes in earth modeling technology and commercializes software developed by geophysicists and computer scientists from the École Nationale Supérieure de Géologie of Nancy, France. T-Surf is financed by an international consortium but remains very French, based in Lorraine. In comparison, larger companies, through recapitalization and internationalization, tended to become Anglo-Saxon in the last years of the twentieth century. Coflexip, Geophysique, and Schlumberger have become Wall Street companies. In the petrochemical industry, Houston-based Acreon Catalysts began in 1993 as a joint venture of Procatalyse (a joint subsidiary of RhônePoulenc and isis, itself a subsidiary of the Institut Francais du Petrole) and United States Engelhard Corporation. Acreon was French by one parent but was acquired by Procatalyse and renamed Procatalyse North America. Eurecat, also a subsidiary of isis and the Dutch-based Akzo Chemicals, offers off-site catalyst treatment services and operates a plant in Pasadena. In 1999, snpe, a French state-owned chemical company based in Paris and Toulouse, opened a phosgenation plant at La Porte in cooperation with Dow Chemical. In the aerospace industry, Weber Aircrafts, a subsidiary of Francebased Zodiac, operates a plant in Gainesville, manufacturing airplane cabin equipment. Thalès, formerly Thomson-csf, a world leader in defense electronics, military communications, and guided missiles, is the parent company of stmicrolectronics, which has a plant in Carrollton. Thalès is also the parent company of sagem, in turn the parent company of sfim, which has a plant in Grand Prairie. Thalès has several joint ventures in the United States, in particular with Raytheon. Thomson-csf Semiconductors Specifiques (Grenoble) has a long-term partnership with Motorola Semiconductor in Austin. In 1992, Thomson attempted to acquire ltv, a missile manufacturer in Dallas, but the U.S. Congress and President George Bush opposed the purchase. Nationality remains an important issue within the defense industry; being “French” matters more for missiles than consumer goods. In 1993, Thomson acquired Hughes Rediffusion Simulation of Arlington, which became Thomson Training and Simulation. Since then, Thomson has bought and sold a number of companies in Texas, most often in the electronics industry. In 2001, Thalès bought a global positioning systems company, Naviga-

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tion Solutions llc in Plano. In San Antonio, it owns Sextant Avionique, which acquired the Mil-Com Electronics Corporation, and was renamed Sextant Electronics. Thalès owned Crouzet Automatismes before it became a subsidiary of Schneider in 2000. Crouzet has a plant in Carrollton manufacturing components for the aviation industry. snecma, still French state-owned in the summer of 2001, manufactures jet engines and has equity in cfm International, a joint venture with General Electric, producing aircraft engines. snecma became the parent company of Turbomeca and Microturbo after acquiring Labinal in 2000. Turbomeca Engine Corporation assembles and repairs helicopter engines in Grand Prairie. In 1980, it had 14 employees and in 2000, 160. Its new lab is directly connected to Turbomeca operations in France so engineers in Toulouse can monitor tests in real time. Microturbo, also in Grand Prairie, sells engines to the U.S. military for target drones and cruise missiles. cfan, created in 1991 as a joint venture between ge Aircraft Engines and snecma, manufactures fan blades and has acquired ctec in San Marcos. In 2000, American Eurocopter, born in 1992 from a merger between Aerospatiale-Matra and Daimler Chrysler Aerospace of Germany, became a full subsidiary of the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company headquartered jointly in Paris and Munich with French, German, and Spanish entities. Eurocopter itself consists of its parent company, Eurocopter, and a German subsidiary, Eurocopter Deutschland. “This ultimate configuration has enabled the group to have unified command structures, while at the same time respecting the national identities of the partner nations,” proclaims the Eurocopter website. In the United States, Eurocopter markets French-made Dauphin and Panther helicopters to federal agencies and private companies. Meanwhile, French astronauts who work with nasa in Houston and fly U.S. spaceships over France in less than two minutes are called European rather than French in Agence Spatiale Européenne’s reports.9 In the construction sector, Ciments Lafarge in 1956 started Lafarge Cement of North America, which became Canada Cement Lafarge (ccl). ccl entered the United States with Citadel Cement, a joint venture with Lone Star Cement of Texas. In 1982, it acquired Dallas-based General Portland, the third largest United States cement producer. In 1990, it purchased a limestone quarry in New Braunfels, adjacent to its Balcones cement plant. Lafarge owns Redland Stone Products, the leading producer of aggregates and asphaltic concrete in Texas. In 2000, Lafarge’s ceo was a Frenchman, born in Lyon, who graduated from the École Polytechnique and from the University of Texas at Austin. In the manufacturing sector, Air Liquide is the world’s largest pro-

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ducer of industrial gases, with installations throughout Texas. In 1986, it acquired Lincoln Big Three Industries, headquartered in Houston. It also has acquired Action Welding Supply, the Odessa and Lubbock facilities of the boc Group, and Lincoln Welding Supply, all in Texas. The Air Liquide Electronics division is based in Richardson and Air Liquide Healthcare America in Houston. The company has plants in Longview, Freeport, Orange, Corpus Christi, Ingleside, Beaumont, and Port Neches, in addition to numerous on-site operations, the largest one with Texas Instruments. Air Liquide realizes 25 percent of its turnover in the United States, where it employs 5,000 people. Entrelec, based in Lyon and Irving, sold electrical housing devices but was bought in June 2001 by abb, a Swiss-Swedish multinational, losing its French-in-Texas identity. Schneider Electric has several subsidiaries in Texas, including Crouzet and Square d, acquired in 1991, thus making Schneider the world’s largest manufacturer of electrical supply equipment. Schneider is in a joint venture with Toshiba in Houston. Rexel, a distributor of electrical equipment and a subsidiary of Pinault-PrintempsRedoute, acquired Dallas-based Maverick in 1999. Houston-based bci Bernard Controls is a direct subsidiary of L. Bernard, a world manufacturer of electric actuators. Vallourec, specializing in seamless tubes, has a Houston-based joint venture with smi Oil Field Services of Sumitomo of Japan, and another one, v&m Tubes, with Mannesmann of Germany. Trouvay & Cauvin, a manufacturer of plumbing equipment, has operations in Houston, where its French subsidiary Rivard created Rivard Corp USA in 1999. Legrand manufactures electrical components and owns several plants in the United States, including one in San Antonio, where it moved in 1988 after purchasing Power Controls. Groupe Francois-Charles Oberthur, a worldwide provider of high-security printing, from lottery tickets to passports and stamps, operates a plant in San Antonio employing 400 people. When the “Texan company” lost a bid for a contract with the state of Texas in 1999, a San Antonio senator sponsored a bill, which passed, allowing state agencies to take into consideration the economic impact (on local hiring and tax revenues) when weighing companies’ bid for state work. Oberthur also manufactures smart cards in its California plant, and its ceo declares: “A chip card migration will happen in the United States between 2000 and 2003.”10 The French Ancenis-based Manitou, which manufactures forklifts and telehandlers, acquired k-d Manufacturing Company in Waco in 1985, renaming it kd-Manitou. Saint-Gobain employs around 24,000 people and operates more than 120 plants throughout North America. Saint-Gobain owns Norton Chemical Process in Bryan, Certain Tweed Ventilation in Dallas, which manu-

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factures fans and turbines, ProCut Products in Dallas, which manufactures abrasives, Vetrotrex America in Wichita Falls, a roofing plant in Ennis, a pipe plant in Waco, and a beer-bottling plant in Waxahachie. In 2000, Saint Gobain acquired Holz Precision, a semiconductor components company with a plant in Austin. In Corpus Christi, De Dietrich is a full subsidiary of De Dietrich & Cie., which is based in Niederbronn-les-Bains. The parent company has a long French history dating back to 1684, but is it still French? In July 2000, a takeover bid for all De Dietrich shares was initiated by the Société Industrielle du Hanau (sih), a subsidiary of abn Amro Capital France, itself a subsidiary of abn Amro Holding, a Dutch bank. abn-Amro obtained control of 95 percent of De Dietrich’s capital and 92 percent of the voting rights. De Detriech therefore became the France-based parent company of Netherlands-owned, Texas-based De Dietrich in Corpus Christi. Carbone Lorraine manufactures industrial components for the automotive industry and owns Fermag in Laredo, which owns Uremag, a manufacturing plant in Nuevo Laredo employing 5 French managers and approximately 700 workers. Valeo bought a Fort Worth operation from Volkswagen in 1990 to open Valeo Climate Control but then moved to Toluca, Mexico, where its major customers, Chrysler and Volkswagen, already had plants. About 200 workers lost their jobs in the transfer. But in 2000, Valeo Electronics moved its corporate operations to offices near Fort Worth’s Alliance Airport and opened its first U.S. “greenfield” facility there. Sofanou Technology, a subsidiary of France-based hbs Technologie, owns a plant in El Paso that manufactures components for the automotive industry. Plastic Omnium bought egc Corp, a Houston-based processor of plastic components with plants in Houston and Shepherd. For a decade, American National Can, with a plant in Longview, has been a subsidiary of Péchiney. After the acquisition, the French ceo declared: “Yes, we’re a French company, but we’re going to manage it the American way.”11 Rhône-Poulenc was renamed Aventis after its 1999 merger with Hoechst. Aventis is no longer a French or a German company, but “an internationally active group of companies with many of its roots in Germany and France and its headquarters in the European city of Strasbourg.”12 Finance, personnel, and communications are centralized in Strasbourg, but offshoot companies are legally and operationally independent. Rhône-Poulenc acquired many North American companies including Union Carbide and Roer. Since 1994, Rhône-Poulenc has had a strategic alliance with Introgen Therapeutics of Austin to develop and commercialize gene therapy products for cancer. Through its subsidiary Gencell, it has been involved in medical research at the M. D. Anderson

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Cancer Center in Houston. It has also funded biogenetic research on cotton and corn in Texas. In 2000, Rhodia became independent from RhônePoulenc after the Aventis merger and acquired a waste treatment business in Dallas, Heat Energy Advances Technology, which became a joint venture parented by Suez-Lyonnaise des Eaux. In 2001, Suez, which owns Tractebel, acquired Ondeo Nalco, a large water treatment company with an operating site in Odessa. Suez owns Cordier Estates, a vineyard started in the late 1980s by Domaine Cordier of Bordeaux on land owned by the University of Texas. Cordier imports wine from France in bulk and bottles it at the Ste. Genevieve winery in Fort Stockton. Danone Group is the parent company of Dannon Company, which produces yogurt in two plants, one in Ohio and the other in Fort Worth. Danone also owns water springs in the United States, after buying Aquapenn and McKesson Waters Products, with activities concentrated in California and Texas. Vivendi Universal owned numerous companies including Canal Plus, Havas, Seagram, Universal Music, and MP3. It merged with United States Filter Corp (then owned in part by the Bass family of Texas), which brought in Tote Systems, a pharmaceutical industry based in Burleson. Vivendi owns Utility Supply Group in Waco and all Culligan distributors in Texas. It also owns Texas Spring Water and Crystal Clear Water of Forth Worth after buying their parent company, Sierra Spring. Vivendi has acquired Waste Management of Houston and Onyx Environmental Services subsidiaries in Texas, including a plant in Port Arthur that generates heat from waste. It also owns Curriculum Advantage, a company that produces and markets scholastic software including a program to prepare students for high school proficiency exams such as the Exit Level Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. After acquiring its former owner, Houghton Mifflin, Vivendi now owns Curious George, the monkey invented by a German couple living in Montmartre at the beginning of World War ii. Vivendi also owns movies like The Mummy Returns and The Fast and the Furious. In the telecommunications industry, Alcatel has grown from a French state-owned telephone company into a worldwide Internet multinational, competing with U.S. giants such as Motorola and Lucent, which it almost bought in 2001. Alactel USA moved its headquarters from Richardson to Plano in 1979. In the 1980s, Alcatel flooded the U.S. market with small, cheap data terminals made in France, boosted by the Post Office minitel program and an agreement with Communications Corporation of America of Dallas. In the 1990s, English became Alcatel’s official language, and the company has acquired a number of North American businesses, such as Xylan, Genesys, Newbridge Networks (Canada), and Texas-based dsc.

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In 2000, it sold its plant in Longview and, when the market fell, sold its Richardson plant, cutting 600 jobs in the Dallas area. Qualiflow, a fiberoptic manufacturer from Montpellier, migrated to Texas in Alcatel’s tow. Dallas-based Intecom is a telephone and telecom company that belongs to Wang, Matra, Lagardère and was part of eads, the parent company of Eurocopter and Arianespace. France Telecom is the parent company of telecommunications provider Global One and Globcast, which transmits The Money Game talk show. In 1998, Paris-based Publicis was doing 40 percent of its turnover in the United States and had acquired the EvansGroup in Dallas. lvhm (Louis Vuitton Hennessy Moët) acquired Donna Karan and dfs, a distribution company located in world airports, and there has been talk of opening a Bliss spa in Dallas. ppr (Pinault-Printemps-Redoute) acquired Cable & Connector Warehouse in Dallas with assets in Austin and Irving. Sanofi-Syntelabo, owned in part by TotalFinaElf, has a regional sales office in Addison and agreements with Pharmacia and Bristol-Myers Squibb to distribute Ambien, Avapro, and Plavix, all medications in which French Sanofi has a large stake. Sodhexo acquired Wood Dining Services and Gardner Merchant Food Services, creating the world’s largest management company providing food service, housekeeping, and maintenance to the health care, education, and detention industries of Texas. In the pet health sector, Virbac merged with Agri-Nutrition Group and operates a plant in Fort Worth. Auchan, after opening a “hyperstore” in west Houston in 1988, opened a second one in Houston’s East End in 2000. Accor, based in Dallas, owns Motel 6 (850 hotels in 1999), Red Roof Inns (350 hotels in 1999), and the Houston and Dallas Sofitels. L’Oreal has a joint venture with Nestlé, Galderma Laboratories with offices in Fort Worth and a plant in San Antonio. Cap Geminy is in Dallas, Pernod Ricard left Fort Worth after selling off Ramsey/sias, and Air France is in Houston. Prestigious French companies like Cartier, Chanel, Lenôtre, and Hermès have stores in Texas. Major French banks are found in Texas—bnp-Paribas, Crédit Agricole, Crédit Lyonnais, Natexis, bfce—as well as insurance and investment firms like Scor Reinsurance and Axa, which bought Equitable Life Insurance. This list became history even as it was written, but it remains obvious that in 2001, the French economic presence in Texas was extensive. It should be noted also that these companies account for only direct French investment. The indirect French economic presence, through exports, travel, exchanges, and e-trade, is even larger.13 This French “invisible hand” is not well known. There have been a few problems, and antiglobalization critics condemn the environmental violations that Air Liquide, Elf Atochem, and Eurecat admit to. Euro-

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copter defrauded the U.S. government in a sale with Israel. RhônePoulenc engineered Starlink, a genetically modified corn for animals that was used in the preparation of tacos sold in stores.14 For these accidents, the companies paid dearly, but Dallas and Houston are not Third World countries where globalization can bring havoc. Valeo cut 200 jobs in Dallas to go to Mexico on the pre-nafta highway, but ten years later there were 50,000 Texas jobs linked to Texas-based French companies, more than six times the number of people Dubois de Saligny had promised to bring in 1841 for his Franco-Texian company. TotalFinaElf and Sothexo are among the largest non-U.S. employers in the United States. So there was also much applause for French economic successes in Texas. The act of La Salle claiming Louisiana for his God and King had changed significantly to French ceos claiming subsidiaries in Texas. By 2001, French multinationals had held onto their growing economic claims for more than a half-century. Were France-headquartered businesses in Texas culturally French in 2001? Some French managers and engineers transferred to Texas facilities (Alcatel had a popular European program called go usa), and this small, often temporary human migration brought a modicum of Frenchness to Houston and Dallas, where there are French restaurants, salons de coiffure, bakeries, chorales, art troupes, translators, antique dealers, Alliances Françaises, Accueils, lycées, and popular Bastille days. But there is more Frenchness within “expatriates” than in the fab where they work. Franco-Texan companies are globalized and are culturally local, Texan, American, or borderland. Thalès’ director of personnel encourages his Francophone employees to use the French tu form with each other, which is actually a way to anglicize the French language. He explains, “Thomson csf used to be a tricolor defense company made up of French engineers. Today, it’s an electronics company which goes beyond defense, doing business in many countries, and half of whose workforce speaks a foreign language.”15 This can be said of many French multinationals in Texas. French ownership and headquarters do not grant French cultural identity. The first cart that Maxime Guillot built in Dallas in the 1850s was very French —it was a replica —while the latest high-tech lab that Alcatel acquired in the United States is not. Texas-made facilities and products are not French, but the company’s parent and owners are. In Texas in summer 2001, the French had a hand in manufacturing and distributing telecommunication services, purified water, performance eyewear, house fans, car bumpers, underwater tubing, space exploration equipment, hotel rooms, beer bottles, disposable diapers, yogurt, wine, pet health care products, lottery tickets, smart cards, medicines, transgenic cotton, Curious George, scholastic testing, and Hollywood movies,

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as well as gas that remained two to three times cheaper than in France. In the same manner as other products and services, fast Internet digital service lines (dsl) in America, provided by Alcatel, was becoming a way of life, like air-conditioning and apple pie. French companies may have imported a little French flavor to a few places across a state bigger than France, but their hand in the business end of American culture has been much more significant. French capital, technology, and management continue to play an important role in shaping the American way of life. A good example of the impact that a French-based company can have on American culture can be found in Essilor. Essilor International is a French multinational company headquartered in Charenton-le-Pont, near Paris. Essilor of America, its U.S. subsidiary, is based in Dallas. The company manufactures and sells corrective lenses in Texas and throughout the world. From small nineteenth-century villages of Meuse and Jura to the high-tech labs of America, Essilor has evolved much as a person or a family would. The company was created when two French competitors, Essel and Silor, merged in 1972. Essel was an old enterprise whose lineage originated with the Association Fraternelle des Ouvriers Lunetiers, or Société des Lunetiers, a cooperative founded in Paris in 1849, at the time when the French Fourierists came to Reunion near Dallas. Soon the société built factories in eastern France, opened a shop in London, and sent traveling salesmen throughout Europe and South America. Over the next century, Essel developed numerous eyeglass and optical technologies. With the 1970s launch of Varilux, which replaced bifocal lenses, Essel became a worldwide success. The parent organization of Silor was Les Frères Lissac, a contemporary enterprise dating from 1938, when the first modern eyewear store was opened in Paris. In 1954, Lissac opened La Lunette de Paris on New York’s Fifth Avenue. The merger between Essel and Silor made Essilor the third largest optical group in the world. It continued to invent new products and grew quickly, acquiring companies in France and Europe. As many French companies were doing, Essilor began to export its products to North America. In 1971, it launched a joint venture with Milton Roy in Florida, then became sole owner. Around this time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration decreed that lenses for children had to be resistant to a steel ball impact; mineral or glass lenses of the time were not. So Essilor, expert in plastic lenses, came to America to produce glasses that came to be in great demand. During the 1990s, Essilor bought a succession of U.S. optical laboratories where eyeglasses are manufactured and prescriptions filled. It acquired Gentex (a leader in polycarbonate lenses), Southern Optical, Duf-

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21.3

Essilor of America moved its headquarters to Dallas in

1997. Archives of Essilor International.

fens Optical, and Omega Opco, whose largest laboratory was in Dallas, where Essilor America moved its headquarters in 1997 (Figure 21.3). For lenses that darken according to light, Essilor initiated a joint venture with ppg, inventor of the cr39 resin that Lissac engineers used to create the Orma plastic lens. In 2000, the company had fifteen fully consolidated subsidiaries in the United States. In 2001, it launched VisonWeb, an Austin-based professional Internet platform, in a venture with Johnson & Johnson and Allergan. It is also working with MicroOptical Corporation on miniature display systems attached to eyeglasses. Essilor of America, comprised of all these American plants, is not so much a French company any more but rather a United States-based, French-owned, and French–headquartered international company. The tree that started to grow in France a century and a half ago is still rooted in France, but its branches have grown all across Texas and into the world as well. Essilor has subsidiaries in thirty-nine countries and employs 22,000 people of more than one hundred nationalities. The constant graft-

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ing and cross-pollination that globalization nurtures has brought Essilor a new multinational identity. “For the first time, English has surpassed French as the most widely spoken language in the Group, and today, the workforce distribution is 22 percent in French companies, 17 percent in Europe, 40 percent in North America, and 21 percent in the rest of the world,” stated a company report in 2000. Yet the company’s nationality remains French, as do most of its directors. Essilor is making technological advances and creating value in Texas. It generates half of its total turnover in North America. It markets hightech optical products that bring better vision to half of all corrective lens users in the United States. These lenses originate from French inventions, and it was Frenchmen René Grandperret, Bernard Mignen, and Jean Boudet who led the research on plastic lenses and Bernard Maitenaz who invented Varilux. Varilux became popular in the United States only after some marketing, as there was a traditional attachment to bifocals and a cultural attitude toward presbyopia or antireflective coatings that had to be changed for French lenses to be sold in the United States. But this French company did change some American cultural habits, in a progressive way. This is only one example of a French multinational playing a discreet but important cultural role in another country. Half the people wearing glasses in Texas use Essilor lenses, most likely unknowingly, but certainly for their benefit. Today, the manufacture and distribution of goods and services that have national origins effectively shape local and global culture and ways of life. Notes 1. Foreign-born, as opposed to native-, or U.S.-born, are terms used by the U.S. Census Bureau. 2. “Texas City Disaster,” in The New Handbook of Texas, ed. Ron C. Tyler (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1996), 6:302. 3. See Julien Savary, Les Multinationales françaises (Paris: puf, 1981). 4. Foreign Direct Investment in the United States (U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2000). 5. Texas Economic Development (Austin: Texas Department of Economic Development, 1999). 6. Pierre Lepetit with Ludovic Francesconi, “The French Economic Representation in Texas” (www.consulfrance-houston.org.trait/discours). The Consulat Général de France, Houston, gave a higher figure (249), based on a different definition of “subsidiary” (www.consulatfrancehouston.org/texas). Variations in figures are explained by variations in the definition of “subsidiary.”

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7. “Texas Subsidiaries of Companies from France” (Texas Department of Economic Development, Business and Industry Data Center, 2001). 8. See Geoffery Bowker, Science on the Run (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993); Ken Auletta, The Art of Corporate Success: The Story of Schlumberger (New York, Putnam, 1984). 9. See European Space Agency information notes and press releases (www.esa.int/) regarding French astronauts Léopold Eyharts, Jean-Pierre Haigner, and Jean-François Clervoy. 10. Richard Mitchell, “Oberthur Keeps Its Focus on Cards,” in Card Technology (New York: Faulkner and Gray, 1999). 11. Erin Alexander, “Ergas Packages Growth at Amer. Nat’l Can,” Crain’s Chicago Business, December 16, 1991, 18. 12. Aventis website, 2001. 13. For an example in pension funds and international investment see Philippe Manière, Marx à la corbeille (Paris: Stock, 1999), 5–20. 14. In 2001, it was reported that some people complaining about Starlink poisoning had been eating safe tacos only. See New York Times, Friday July 13, 2001. 15. Yves Mamou, “Nouvelle consigne au sein de Thalès: apprendre à se tutoyer,” Le Monde, April 8, 2001.

Epilogue FRANÇOIS LAGARDE

A recent front-page report of the magazine France Amérique about the discovery of La Salle’s cannons and shipwreck was titled “Quand les Français s’installaient au Texas” (When the French were settling down in Texas).1 As now is known, La Salle and his colonists did not exactly settle down, as the perhaps a bit Gallic-proud claim asserted. Nevertheless, the lapsus refers to what French immigrants have accomplished in Texas, where French-born and second-generation French Texans have settled for the past three centuries. In Texas, the French have explored, conquered or attempted to conquer, proselytized, traveled, colonized, invested, worked, “stocked” the land, and settled. Their “Texas history” began during the colonial period, when France, Spain, and colonists from America were competing for territory. From the time of La Salle’s claim of Grande Louisiane in 1682 to the Texas Revolution and annexation, this was a time of colonial conquest for soldiers and colonists. Early explorers and traders such as St. Denis and later his son-in-law de Mézières followed by the Champ d’Asilians, Laffite, and the Associates were conquerors, if only of modest means and of mixed intentions. In different ways and at different times, they fought and traded for control of the land, routes, markets, and, in some cases, for power over the inhabitants. Nineteenth-century Icarians and Fourierists would be conquerors of a spiritual and political sort. Even the Catholic missionaries came to conquer souls, while France was launching her “mission civilisatrice” in Africa and Asia. And, in the following century, multinational Frenchbased enterprises certainly conquered, in a civilized way, new markets and millions of customers. But when Texas finally found its claimers in 1836 and 1845, the history of French people in the state changed. Texas was no longer the focus of international or regional struggles for control: it was a newly more inviting place to be colonized. Immigrants replaced soldiers, explorers, and “first wave” colonists. Texas became a land of economic opportunities—the “great garden of roses” of which Guillaume Apollinaire dreamt humorously, a few years after Spindletop:

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Sur la côte du Texas Entre Mobile et Galveston il y a Un grand jardin tout plein de roses (On the coast of Texas Between Mobile and Galveston there is A great garden full of roses)2 Immigrants no longer had to conquer routes and great expanses of land for God and the king; now they carved out their own spaces and the right to work and settle in a new country. Immigration came to be the principal force shaping the lives of millions who crossed the Atlantic. Immigration defined their personal and shared history, a history of private individuals of similar origins who faced new horizons, a new language, altered identities. André Illiers was a pied noir, that is, a French settler in Algeria, and a poet who died in Texas. At age sixteen, he left Constantine in Algeria with his mother and sisters and lived in Corsica and Germany before immigrating to Texas in 1971, in the footsteps of his American fiancée. Illiers found menial work in Houston but was unhappy with the people there as well as with jobs, housing, and cars. He started to drift away after an automobile accident that left him disfigured. A born actor, Illiers read plays and stories for audiences in public libraries. Schoolchildren, hearing his French accent, thought he had come from neighboring Louisiana. After twenty-two years in Texas, alone and poor, never having returned to his homeland, Illiers began to experience despair and insanity. On August 1, 1993, carried by the wings of fierce winds into the tempestuous waves of Mustang Beach, Illiers was swept away to his death and glory.3 Eight years earlier at Port Lavaca, not far from Raoul Josset’s sculpture of La Salle, “A. I.,” as Illiers signed his poems, had written these verses: Grand’pa s’en va-t-au cimetière La grand’ma est clouée en bière son âme est céleeeeste Y a ceux qui passent et ceux qui restent Les qui remballent, les qu’on enterre en terre étrangèèèère [Gran’pa’s going to the cemetery Gran’ma’s nailed in her coffin her soul is celestiiiial There are those who go on and those who stay Those who pack up and those who are buried in a foreiiiign land]

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A. I. was right, of course. There are those who immigrate, settle, and die in their adopted countries, and there are those who move on to other places. Not every French person who came to Texas immigrated there. Count Dodur de Karoman did not immigrate to Texas. The French dos dur means “hard back” and refers to someone who takes hits without complaint, like a mule. “He had been a soldier in Algiers and was of a very military bearing and handsome, dignified, and claimed to be a very great rider. He would give the Texas boys suggestions which they did not appreciate,” recounted a Mrs. Meveriscks.4 And so the said boys asked Dodur to mount “a Norman horse about four years old, full of life” that promptly unseated him. The Frenchman explained with much dignity that he really didn’t care to ride again. He went from our house to a place near Boerne where a lot of young Englishmen were dipping sheep. He offered some small advice, which they didn’t appreciate, and they suggested that he ride on, or they would catch and dip him—white silk suit and all—in the sheep vat. He evidently felt that he was unappreciated in the country and went back to San Antonio, where he married the daughter of a barkeeper and left for Panama.5 Count Dodur de Karoman cuts an almost mythological figure (Karoman sounds like “one-fourth novel” in French), and, in any case, he moved on and did not settle in Texas. A. I., meanwhile, is the true immigrant, the one who dies in the foreign land. Today, Texas remains a land of immigration for French and Francophone people, although more people migrate to Texas for only the duration of a job or a contract than immigrate permanently. It is almost impossible to know whether there have been more Illiers than Dodurs in Texas history, more immigrants than migrants. It is possible that the number of French migrants will remain superior to the number of immigrants, or longtimers, in Texas’ future. The mighty Atlantic Ocean and two world wars never stopped French immigration to the United States and Texas. As long as the two states, whose flags share the same colors, remain on friendly terms, French immigrants will continue to come to Texas. But today’s cultures are globalized, communication and transportation are easy and fast, binationalism and bicultural or multicultural identities are becoming common, and whites of Western nations migrate more than they immigrate. The trickle of French immigrants that began four centuries ago will continue to flow to the garden full of roses. In 2002, France was the country exhibited in Houston’s annual International Festival. Paul Clémenceau, grandson of Georges “The Tiger”

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Clémenceau, and the astronaut Jean-Loup Chrétien presided over two grand weekends of French culture and economic presence. Three regions particularly were represented: Bretagne, Pays de Loire, and Poitou-Charentes. A cornucopia of circus and theater, galas, exhibits, symposia on high technology and investment, Chanel, Baccarat, and Hermès was offered to Houston and Texas. French singers at the festival — all Francophones who did not always sing in French — included Cheb Mami, Les Tambours de Brazza (The Drums of Brazza, i.e., Brazzaville, Congo), Latcho Drom, Nguyen Le and Lokoal Mendon, a Celtic band of twenty-five members from Bretagne. Twelve thousand Texas teachers were given a two-hundred-page “curriculum” on French affairs in Texas. France advertised the event as “une manifestation à caractère culturel, pédagogique et économique.” Yes, the French were present in Texas. A postcolonial and Francophone republic was lavishly spreading culture, art, and gastronomie upon the city. Distinguished hommes d’affaires met at the FrancoTexan Chamber of Commerce, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie was a hit at the box office, Austin’s Lance Armstrong had won the Tour de France for the third time, and schoolchildren were told about La Salle and his “settlers.” “La colonie,” as the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères still refers to the French of Texas, was alive and doing very well, merci. Notes 1. France Amérique 1486 (June 30 –July 6, 2000), 1. 2. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Annie,” in Alcools (1913; reprint in Poésie, Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 38. Translation by the author. 3. André Illiers, Twa l’âme en l’R (1985), unpublished manuscript. Translation by the author. 4. J. Marvin Hunter, One Hundred Years in Bandera, 1853–1953 (Bandera, Texas: Hunter’s Printing, 1953). 5. Hunter, One Hundred Years, 13.

Selected Bibliography

Listed per topic by year of publication

C AV E L I E R D E L A S A L L E Pierre Margry, ed. Découvertes et établissements des Français dans l’ouest et dans le sud de l’Amérique septentrionale, 1614–1754, vols. 1, 2, 4. (Paris: Jouaust, 1879–1888). Henri Joutel. “Journal historique du dernier voyage.” In Pierre Margry, Découvertes, vol. 3. Translated by Johana S. Warren in William C. Foster, The La Salle Expedition to Texas, The Journal of Henri Joutel, 1684–7. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1998. Francis Parkman. The Discovery of the Great West. 1869. Reprint under the title La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, New York: New American Library, 1963. Isaac J. Cox, ed. The Journeys of René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. 2 vols. New York: Barnum, 1905. Reprint, New York: Allerton, 1922. Marc de Villiers du Terrage. L’Expédition de Cavelier de La Salle dans le Golfe du Mexique (1684–1687). Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1931. Jean Delanglez. The Discovery of the Mississippi. Chicago: Loyola University, 1945. Marcel Giraud. Histoire de la Louisiane francaise. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953. Translated by Joseph C. Lambert under the title History of French Louisiana, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974. Robert S. Weddle. Wilderness Manhunt: The Spanish Search for La Salle. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973. Patricia K. Galloway. La Salle and His Legacy: Frenchmen and Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1982. Peter H. Wood. “La Salle: Discovery of a Lost Explorer,” American Historical Review 82, no. 2 (April 1984): 294–323. Robert S. Weddle, ed. La Salle, the Mississippi, and the Gulf: Three Primary Documents. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987. Robert S. Weddle. The French Thorn: Rival Explorers in the Spanish Sea, 1682–1762. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991. Daniel Spurr. River of Forgotten Days: A Journey down the Mississippi in Search of La Salle. New York: H. Holt & Co., 1998. Curtis Tunnel. “A Cache of Cannons: La Salle’s Colony in Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 102, no. 1 (July 1998): 18–44. Robert S. Weddle. The Wreck of the Belle, The Ruin of La Salle. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001.

313

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L O U I S J U C H E R E A U D E S T. D E N I S Ross Phares. Cavelier in the Wilderness: The Story of the Explorer and Trader Louis Juchereau de Saint Denis. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952. Jack Jackson, Robert Weddle, and Winston DeVille. Mapping Texas and the Gulf Coast: The Contributions of Saint-Denis, Olivan, and Le Maire. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1990. Donald Chipman. Spanish Texas, 1519–1821. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. Patricia Lemée. “Tios and Tantes: Familial and Political Relationships of Natchitoches and the Spanish Colonial Frontier,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 101 (January 1998): 340–358.

AT H A N A S E D E M É Z I È R E S Eugene H. Bolton. Athanase de Mézières and the Louisiana-Texas Frontier, 1768–1780. 2 vols. 1914. Reprint, New York: Kraus Reprint Corp., 1970. Elizabeth A. H. John. Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540–1795. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Donald E. Chipman and Harriett Denise Joseph. Notable Men and Women of Spanish Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999.

BÉNARD DE LA HARPE, DES PRÉS DERBANNE, SIMARS DE BELLISLE Jean-Baptiste Bénard de La Harpe. “Relation du voyage de Bénard de La Harpe.” In Pierre Margry, Découvertes et établissements, vol. 6, 1888, translated by John Cain and Virginia Koenig under the title The Historical Journal of the Establishment of the French in Louisiana, Lafayette: University of Southern Louisiana, 1971. François Buyon Des Prés Derbanne. “Relation par le Sieur Derbanne.” In Pierre Margry, Découvertes et établissements, vol. 6, 1888. François S. de Bellisle. “Relation de ce qui m’est arrivé depuis le quatorze aoust 1719.” In Margry, Découvertes et établissements, vol. 6, 1888, translated by Henry Folmer under the title “De Bellisle on the Texas Coast,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 44, no. 2 (October 1940): 204– 241. Marc de Villiers du Terrage. Un explorateur de la Louisiane: Jean-Baptiste Bénard de La Harpe, 1683–1765. Rennes: Oberthur, 1934. Marc de Villiers du Terrage. Les Indiens du Texas et les éxpéditions françaises de 1720 à 1721 à la baie Saint-Bernard. Paris: Au Siège de la Société des Américanistes de Paris, 1948. Katherine Bridges and Winston De Ville. “Natchitoches and the Trail to the Rio Grande: Two Early Eighteenth Century Accounts by the Sieur Derbanne.” Louisiana History 8, no. 3, (1967): 239–259. Mildred Wedel. “J.-B. Bénard, Sieur de La Harpe: Visitor to the Wichitas in 1719.” Great Plains Journal 10, no. 2 (1971): 37–70. Robert S. Weddle. The French Thorn: Rival Explorers in the Spanish Sea, 1682–1762. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991.

315

Selected Bibliography

P I R AT E S Joseph Ingraham. Laffite, the Pirate of the Gulf. 1836. Reprint, New York: Garrett Press, 1970. Lyle Saxon. Laffite the Pirate. New Orleans: Crager, 1930. James J. Fortier. The Story of Jean and Pierre Laffite, The Pirate-Patriots. New Orleans: Louisiana State Museum, 1938. Harris G. Warren. The Sword Was Their Passport: A History of American Filibustering in the Mexican Revolution. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1943. Stanley C. Arthur. Jean Laffite, Gentleman Rover. New Orleans: Harmanson, 1952. Jane de Grummond. The Baratarians and the Battle of New Orleans. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1961. Charles W. Hayes. Galveston : History of the Island and the City. Austin: Jenkins Garrett Press, 1974. David G. McComb. Galveston: a History. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Robert Vogel. “Jean Laffite, the Baratarians, and the Historical Geography of Piracy in the Gulf of Mexico.” Gulf Coast Historical Review 5, no. 2 (1990): 62–77. Jack C. Ramsay. Jean Laffite, Prince of Pirates. Austin: Eakin Press, 1996. Robert Vogel and Kathleen Taylor. Jean Laffite in American History: A Bibliographic Guide. St. Paul, Minn.: White Pine Press, 1998.

CHAMP D’ASILE Louis Hartmann and J. B. Millard. Le Texas, ou Notice historique sur le Champ-d’Asile. Paris: Beguin, 1819. Translated by Donald Joseph under the title The Story of Champ d’Asile as Told by Two of the Colonists, Dallas: Book Club of Texas, 1937. G—n, F—n. L’heroïne du Texas, ou, Voyage de Madame *** aux États-Unis et au Mexique. Paris: Chez Plancher, 1819. Just Girard. Les Aventures d’un capitaine français, planteur au Texas, ancien réfugié du Champ d’Asile. Tours: Mame, 1862. Maurice Soulié. Autour de l’Aigle enchaîné: le complot du Champ d’Asile. Paris: Marpon, 1929. Marcel Moraud. “Le Champ d’Asile au Texas.” Rice Institute Pamphlet 39, no. 3 (1956): 18–44. René Rémond. Les États-Unis devant l’opinion française, 1815–1852, 2 vols. Paris: Colin, 1962. Kent Gardien. “Take Pity on Our Glory: Men of Champ d’Asile.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 86, no. 3 (1984): 241–268.

DUBOIS DE SALIGNY Mary K. Chase. Négociations de la République du Texas en Europe. Paris: Champion, 1932. Marcel Morand. “Diplomatic Relation of the Republic of Texas.” Rice Institute Pamphlet 43 (1956): 29–54.

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Nancy N. Barker. “The Republic of Texas: A French View,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 71, no. 2 (1967): 181–193. Nancy N. Barker. “Devious Diplomat: Dubois de Saligny and the Republic of Texas.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 72, no. 3 (1969): 324–334. Nancy N. Barker. The French Legation in Texas. Vol. 1, Recognition, Rupture, and Reconciliation. Vol. 2, Mission Miscarried. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1971 and 1973. Nancy N. Barker. “From Texas to Mexico: An Affairist at Work,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 76, no. 1, (1976): 15–37. Kenneth Hafertepe. A History of the French Legation. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1989.

ICARIANS Etienne Cabet. Voyage en Icarie, roman philosophique et social. Paris: Mallet, 1842. Jules Prudhommeaux. Icarie et son fondateur. Paris: E. Cornerly. 1907. Fernand Rude, ed. Voyage en Icarie: Deux ouvriers viennois aux États-Unis en 1855. Paris: p.u.f., 1957. Odie B. Faulk. “The Icarian Colony in Texas, 1848: A Problem in Historiography.” Texana 5 (1967): 132–140. Christopher H. Johnson. Utopian Communism in France: Cabet and the Icarians, 1839–1851. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974. Claude Francis. Partons pour Icarie: Des Français en Utopie, une société idéale aux États-Unis en 1849. Paris: Librairie Perin, 1983. Harry Wade. “Les Communistes in East Texas.” East Texas Historical Journal 24, no. 1 (1986): 15–26. Jacques Ranciere. The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

FOURIERISTS Victor Considerant. Au Texas. Paris: Librairie Phalanstérienne, 1854. Translated by Rondel Davidson under the title Au Texas, with the addition of The West, and European Colonization in Texas, Philadelphia: Porcupine, 1975. Augustin Savardan. Un Naufrage au Texas, Observations et impressions recueillies pendant deux ans et demi au Texas et à travers les États-Unis d’Amérique. Paris: Garnier, 1858. Clarisse Coignet. Victor Considerant: Sa vie, son œuvre. Paris: Alcan, 1895. Maurice Dommanget. Victor Considerant: Sa vie, son œuvre. Paris: Editions Sociales Internationales, 1929. George H. Santerre. White Cliffs of Dallas: The Story of La Reunion. Dallas: Book Craft, 1955. Jonathan Beecher. Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Rondel V. Davidson. Did We Think Victory Great? The Life and Ideas of Victor Considerant. New York: University Press of America, 1988.

317

Selected Bibliography

Carl Guarneri. The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Carl Guarneri. “Réunion, Texas: Post-scriptum ironique au Fouriérisme Américain.” Cahiers Charles Fourier 4 (1993), 13–27. Jonathan Beecher. “Une Utopie manquée au Texas: Victor Considerant et Réunion.” Cahiers Charles Fourier 4 (1993), 40 –79. Jonathan Beecher. Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

CASTROVILLE Henri Castro. Le Texas. Anvers: Bushmann, 1845. Julia Waugh. Castroville and Henry Castro, Empresario. San Antonio: Standard, 1934. Bobby D. Weaver. Castro’s Colony: Empresario Development in Texas, 1842–1865. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985. Cornelia Crook. Henry Castro. San Antonio: St. Mary’s University Press, 1988. Nicole Fouché. Émigration alsacienne aux États-Unis 1815–1870. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1992. Janine Erny. Et parmi les pionniers du Far West il y avait des Alsaciens. Aubenas: Le Verger, 1999.

C AT H O L I C M I S S I O N S Emmanuel Domenech. Le Journal d’un missionnaire au Texas et au Mexique, 1846–1852. Paris: Gaume, 1857. Emmanuel Domenech. Les Secrets de ma valise. Paris: Dentu, 1895. Pierre Parisot. The Reminiscences of a Texas Missionary. San Antonio: Johnson Bros., 1898. Mary Helena Finck. The Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word of San Antonio, Texas. Washington: Catholic University of America, 1925. Mary Fitzmorris. Four Decades of Catholicism in Texas, 1820–1860. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1925. Carlos E. Castañeda. Our Catholic Heritage in Texas. 7 vols. Austin: Von BœckmannJones, 1936–1958. Reprint, New York: Arno, 1976. Ralph F. Bayard. Lone-Star Vanguard: The Catholic Re-Occupation of Texas, 1838–1848. St. Louis, Mo.: Vincentian Press, 1945. Mary X. Holworthy. Father Jaillet: Saddlebag Priest of the Nueces. Corpus Christi: Incarnate Word Academy, 1948. Bernard Doyon. The Cavalry of Christ on the Rio Grande, 1849–1883. Milwaukee: Bruce, 1956. Mary L. Hegarty. Serving with Gladness: The Origin and History of the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, Houston, Texas. Milwaukee: Bruce, 1967. Patrick Foley. “Jean-Marie Odin, C.M., Missionary Bishop Extraordinaire of Texas.” Journal of Texas Catholic History and Culture 1, no. 1 (1990): 42–60 James T. Moore. Through Fire and Flood: The Catholic Church in Frontier Texas, 1836–1900. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1992.

318

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T R AV E L E R S Pierre de Pagès. Voyages autour du monde et vers les deux pôles, 1767–1771. 2 vols. Paris: Moutard, 1782. Translated under the title Travels around the World in the Years 1767–1771, London: Murray, 1792. Maurice Persat. Mémoires du Commandant Persat, 1896 –1844. Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1910. Théodore Pavie. Souvenirs atlantiques: Voyage aux États-Unis et au Canada. Angers: L. Pavie, 1832. Translated by Betje B. Klier, Anne Marsh, Philip Stewart, and Alexandra Wettlaufer under the title Tales of the Sabine Borderlands, Early Louisiana and Texas Fiction, College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999. Eugène Maissin. San Juan de Ulùa, ou relation de l’expédition française au Mexique. Paris: Gide, 1839. Translated by James Sheperd, Pierre de Blanchard, and André Dauzats under the title The French in Mexico and Texas, 1838–1839, Salado, Texas: Anson-Jones Press, 1961. Frédéric Gaillardet. “Lettres sur le Texas.” Journal des Débats, October 1, 4, 8, 10, and 26, 1839. Translated by James D. Shepherd under the title Sketches of Early Texas and Louisiana, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966. Frédéric Leclerc. Le Texas et sa révolution. Paris: Fournier & Cie, 1840. Translated by Jane Shepherd under the title Texas and Its Revolution, Austin: Jones Press, 1950. Jean Houzeau. La Terreur blanche au Texas et mon évasion. Bruxelles: Ve Parent & Fils, 1862. Simone de Beauvoir. L’Amérique au jour le jour. Paris: P. Morihien, 1948. Betje Black Klier. Pavie in the Border Lands. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

ARTS AND SCIENCES Jean-Louis Berlandier. “Voyage au Mexique pendant les années 1826 à 1834.” Manuscript. Library of Congress. Translated by Sheila Ohlendorf, Josette Bigelow, and Mary Standifer under the title Journey to Mexico During the Years 1826 to 1834, 2 vols., Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1980. Samuel W. Geiser. Naturalists of the Frontier. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1937. Theo White. Paul Philippe Cret, Architect and Teacher. Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1973. Dorothy Kendall and Carmen Perry. Gentilz, Artist of the Old Southwest. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974. Carol McMichael Reese. Paul Cret at Texas: Architectural Drawing and the Image of the University in the 1930s. Austin: Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, 1983. Elizabeth G. Grossman. The Civic Architecture of Paul Cret. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Calvin Tomkins. “The Benefactor, Collector Dominique de Menil lived an extraordinary art-centered life.” New Yorker 174, no. 15 (June 8, 1998): 52–76.

319

Selected Bibliography

ENTREPRENEURS Virginia H. Taylor. The Franco-Texan Land Company. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969. Anne Schlumberger. The Schlumberger Adventure. New York: Arco Publishing, 1982. Ken Auletta. The Art of Corporate Success: The Story of Schlumberger. New York: Putnam. 1984. Geoffrey C. Bowker. Science on the Run: Information Management and Industrial Geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920 –1940. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.

MISCELLANEOUS Xavier Blanchard Debray. A Sketch of the History of Debray’s (26th) Regiment of Texas Cavalry. 1884. Reprint, Waco: Waco Village, 1961. Carland Crook. “Benjamin Theron and French Designs in Texas During the Civil War.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 68 no. 4 (1965): 432–454. Noel M. Loomis and Abraham P. Nasatir. Pedro Vial and the Roads to Santa Fe. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967. The French Texans. San Antonio: University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures, 1973. Sarah Morgan. The Saga of Texas Cookery. Austin: Encino Press, 1973. Nina Mjagkij. “Forgotten Women: War Brides of World War i.” Amerikastudien/ American Studies 32, no. 2 (June 1987): 191–197. Pierre Savard. “Du Lac Saint-Jean au Texas: Claudio Jannet à la recherche de l’Amérique Idéale.” Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 77, no. 3 (1990): 3–18. Milo Kearney and Harriett Joseph. “Brownsville’s French and German Communities: A Distant Reflection of Their Interaction in Europe.” Journal of The American Studies Association of Texas 23 (1992): 61–76. David LaVere and Kitia Campbell. “An Expedition to the Kichai: The Journal of François Grappe: September 24, 1783.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 98, no. 1 (1994): 58 –78. Elizabeth A. John. Inside the Comancheria, 1785: the Diary of Pedro Vial and Francisco Xavier Chaves. 1785. Translated by Adan Benavides Jr. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1994. Ron C. Tyler, ed. The New Handbook of Texas. 6 vols. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1996. John Ferling. “Texas City Disaster.” American History 30, no. 6 (July 1996): 60 – 64. François Weil. “French Migration to the Americas in the 19th and 20th Centuries as a Historical Problem.” Studi Emigrazione/Etudes Migrations 33, no. 123 (September 1996): 443–460. Maurice Ezran. Histoire du Texas. Paris and Montréal: L’Harmattan, 1996. Betje B. Klier. “Peste, tempestad, and Patisserie: The Pastry War: France’s Contributions to the Maintenance of Texas’ Independence.” Gulf Coast Historical Review 12, no. 2 (1997): 58 –73. Robert Robertson. “Texas: La Terre Promise.” West Texas Historical Association Yearbook 73 123 (1997): 11–30.

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Alwyn Barr. Polignac’s Texas Brigade. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1998. Annick Foucrier. Le Rêve Californien, Migrants français sur la côte Pacifique, XVIIIeXXe siècles. Paris: Belin, 1999. Claude R. Isnard. Sorceress of the Trade Winds. Houston: Emerald Ink Publishing, 2000. Jacqueline Lindenfeld. The French in the United States, An Ethnographic Study. Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey, 2000. Colette Berthès. La Machine à tuer. Paris: Les Arènes, 2000.

Contributors

Wayne M. Ahr is Mollie B. and Richard A. Williford Professor of Geology at Texas A&M University. A descendant of Castroville’s founders, he researches Castroville’s history. Jonathan Beecher is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (University of California Press, 1986) and Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism (University of California Press, 2000). Carl Brasseaux is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Cultural and Eco-Tourism at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is the author of A Comparative View of French Louisiana, 1699 and 1762: the Journals of Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville and Jean-Jacques-Blaise d’Abbadie (Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1979); The Founding of New Acadia: the Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana, 1765–1803 (Louisiana State University Press, 1987); The “Foreign French:” Nineteenth-Century French Immigration into Louisiana (Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1990); Acadian to Cajun: Transformation of a People, 1803–1877 (University Press of Mississippi, 1992); Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country (University Press of Mississippi, 1994). Ann Marie Caldwell is Associate Professor of French and Spanish at Saint Mary’s University in San Antonio. Her most recent publication, “A flac model for Increasing Enrollment in Foreign Languages Classes,” appeared in the May 2001 issue of French Review. Richard Cleary is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Place Royale and Urban Design in the Ancien Régime (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Merchant Prince and Master Builder: Edgar J. Kaufmann and Frank Lloyd Wright (Carnegie Museum of Art and University of Washington Press, 1999). Janine Erny is Associate Professor of Ethnology at the Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, France. She is the author of Et parmi les pionniers du Far West, il y avait des Alsaciens (Le Verger, 1999). Betje Black Klier is a sixth-generation Texan. She is the author of Pavie in the Borderlands (Louisiana State University Press, 2000) and Théodore Pavie: Un Angevin en Louisiane et au Texas en 1830 (Cheminements, 1999) and the editor of Tales of the Sabine Borderlands: Early Louisiana and Texas Fiction (Texas A&M University Press, 1998). She has published numerous articles on French travelers and colonists in Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama. She is currently completing Champ d’Asile: The History, Literature, Art, and Music of the Bonapartist Colony on the Trinity River in 1818. 321

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François Lagarde is Associate Professor of French at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of René Girard ou la Christianisation des Sciences Humaines (New York: Lang, 1995) and La Persuasion et ses effets (Gunter Narr Verlag, 1998), an essay on French classical literature. He is the editor of L’Esprit en France au XVIIe siècle (Gunter Narr Verlag, 1999). Patricia R. Lemée is a Visiting Scholar at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on colonial cultural interactions of the French, the Spanish, and Native Americans along the caminos reales from modern Mexico through Texas to Louisiana. She has published several articles on the subject and currently is preparing a booklength manuscript about Juchereau de St. Denis. R. Dale Olson is the founding president of The Laffite Society and directs the restoration of historic buildings on Galveston Island. He is the author of Sensory Evaluation of Brass Musical Instruments (A. I. Press, Fullerton, California, 2000) and The Day the Music Died, A History of F. E. Olds and Son, Musical Instruments (forthcoming). F. Todd Smith is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Texas. He is the author of The Caddo Indians: Tribes at the Convergence of Empires, 1542–1854 (Texas A&M University Press, 1995) and The Wichita Indians: Traders of Texas and the Southern Plains, 1540 –1845 (Texas A&M University Press, 2000). Martha Utterback is compiling a catalog of the work of Théodore Gentilz and recording the work of other members of his family. She is Assistant Director of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library in San Antonio and serves as curator of the art and photograph collections. As curator of art at the Witte Museum she organized an extensive loan exhibition of early Texas art (see Early Texas Art in the Witte Museum, San Antonio, 1968). She is a graduate of Trinity University. Robert S. Weddle is the author of thirteen books, including The San Saba Mission: Spanish Pivot in Texas (University of Texas Press,1964); San Juan Bautista, Gateway to Spanish Texas (University of Texas Press, 1968); Wilderness Manhunt: the Spanish Search for La Salle (University of Texas Press, 1973); The French Thorn: Rival Explorers in the Spanish Sea, 1682–1762 (Texas A&M University Press, 1991); La Salle, the Mississippi, and the Gulf: Three Primary Documents (Texas A&M University Press, 1987); The Wreck of the Belle, the Ruin of La Salle (Texas A&M University Press, 2001). Alexandra Wettlaufer is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. A specialist in nineteenth-century art and literature, she is the author of Pen vs. Paintbrush: Girodet, Balzac, and the Myth of Pygmalion in Post-Revolutionary France (New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press, 2001).

Acknowledgments

All the participants of the 2001 French in Texas Symposium, the French of Austin who were interviewed in 2000, Robert S. Weddle and the thirteen other authors of this book, and every person who took part in the French in Texas Project since its inception in 1996 need be thanked and praised. Our chaleureux remerciements — our warm thanks and acknowledgments — must be addressed in particular to: Betje Black Klier, Patricia R. Lemée, and Dina Sherzer, Chair of the Department of French and Italian at the University of Texas at Austin, for their invaluable guidance and help; and to Martha Utterback of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, San Antonio; Kinga Perzynska and Susan Eason of the Catholic Archives of Texas, Austin; Don Carleton, Kate Adams, and the librarians of the Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin; Ron Tyler of the Texas State Historical Association; William Bishel and Lynne Chapman of the University of Texas Press; Elisabeth Barret, Alice Hart, Sylvia Grove, Françoise de Backer, Maria Wells, Robert Dawson, Peter Fazziola, Jean-Pierre Montreuil, Nicholas Tallett, and John Terrill, among other members of the Department of French and Italian at the University of Texas at Austin; Stella Behar of the University of Texas-Pan American; Cecile Carter; Monique Christensen; Sharon Fairchield of Texas Christian University; Pamela Ferguson; Karen Gerhardt; Maria Pfeiffer; and Rolande Leguillon of the University of Saint Thomas, Houston; Sylvie Robin-Feuillie of Université Paris X; Judith Woodard of the Huguenot Society of Texas; Alain Bron; Frederick Kluck of the University of Texas at El Paso; Ronald Creagh of the Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier; Patrick Foley of The Catholic Southwest; Jean-Joseph Goux of Rice University, Houston; Alfred Lemmon of the Historic New Orleans Collection; Philippe Seminet of Texas A&M University; and James Pratt and Robert Vogel of the Laffite Society, among other scholars; Laurence and Jérôme Denis, Elisabeth Joffrain of Austin Accueil; Mildred K. Terril, Frédérique Moinard, Michel Dassonville, and Jérôme Potts of the Alliance Française of Austin, and other friends; Mr. and Mrs Hubert Sagnières of Essilor of America; Mr. William Utt of Tractebel Power; Mr. Pierre Lepetit, Houston’s French Consul in 2000; Mrs. Marie-Paule Serre; Dr. Richard Lariviere of the College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas at Austin; and Mr. Camille Grousselas of the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris, our true supporters. Austin, Texas January 31, 2002

323

Index

Acadians, 274 Accor, 303 Acreon Catalysts, 298 Agence Spatiale Européenne, 299 Aguayo, Marqués de San Miguel de: ancestors of, 38–39; campaign against the French by, 39; as governor of the New Philippines, 39; return to Mexico of, 42 Air Liquide, 299–300 Alarcón, Martin de, 28 Alcatel, 302 Allen, John, 210 Allen, Lucy, 74 Alsace, 124–127 Alsatians, 158 American Eurocopter, 299 Anfrecheyne, John, 66–67 Angélique, Mother, 241 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 309–310 Arh family, 138 Armant, Jospeh M., 55 Arnold, Ripley A., 167 Aubert, Georges, 267–268 Auchan, 303 Aury, Louis-Michel: control of the Texas coast by, 62; departure of, 64; as governor of Galveston, 62; and Mina, 63–64; occupation of Galveston Island by, 61 Austin, Stephen, 251 Aventis, 301 Barbier, Gabriel, 7 Barre, Euphémie, Sister St. Ange, 245 Barthélemy, Pierre, 15 Basterrèche, Jean, 113 Baudin, Charles, 108, 110, 266 Baulard, Victor, 121 bci Bernard Controls, 300 Beaujeu, Captain, 14 Beauvoir, Simone de, 269–270

Bellet, Xavier du, 164 Bellisle, François Simars de: landing of, 21; in Louisiana, 30–31; narrative by, 256–258; rescue of, 23; as slave of the Akokisa, 23; voyage with La Harpe of, 28–29 Beluche, Renato, 70 Béranger, Jean, 21: encounters with the Karankawa of, 25; explorations of, 24–26; voyages of, 24, 28–29, 31 Berlandier, Jean-Louis, 169 Bernhardt, Sarah, 104 Bernou, Claude, 4–5, 11, 13 Beyrer, Eligius, 244 Bienville, Jean-Marie Le Moyne de, 23, 41 Blake, Robert Bruce, 100–101 Blanc, Antoine, 142 Blanc, Césaire de, 46, 52 Blanc, Louis Charles de, 46, 52, 56 Blouët, Léon P., 267 Blum, Léon and Sylvain, 167 Bonaparte, Joseph, 85, 86 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 79, 80, 81, 83, 102 Bouet-Laffitte, Paul, 56 Bourdelle, Pierre Van Parys, 291 Bourg, Louis du, 142 Bourg, Pierre, 221 Bourquin, Germaine, 179 Bousquet, Jean-Baptiste, 56 Bouyghes Offshore, 297 Bowie, Jim, 101 Bray, Xavier Blanchard de, xiii, 164 Bremond, Eugene, 234 Bremond, John, 121 Bremond, Paul, 121 Bremond, Walter, 233–234 Brisbane, Albert, 205 Brothers and Sisters of Holy Cross, 249–250 Brulay, George, 165 Brunet, Adèle, 179 Brunhoff, Laurent, 271

324

Index

Bullock, Richard, 113 Burkly, Charles, 210 Burnett, David, 113, 115 Burreau, Allyre, 218, 219 Butor, Michel, 270 –271 Cabello, Domingo, 55, 56, 57 Cabet, Etienne: devotion to, by followers of, 221; and Icarians, 204; popularity of, 200; responsibility of, 220; and Robert Owen, 200; Voyage en Icarie by, 198 Caillet, George, 241 Cajuns: after Spindletop, 276–277; and cattle ranching, 274–275; and education, 281–282; immigration of, 159; and 1927 flood, 281; numbers of, 282–284; and railroad, 275; and World War ii, 278 Campeachy, 64, 70 Candolle, Pyrame de, 169 Cantagrel, François, 208, 210, 216–217 Carbone Lorraine, 301 Casteñada, Juan de, 88 Castro Colonies Heritage Society, 139 Castro, Henri: colonists sent to Texas by, 131–132; as consul of Texas to France, 130; death of, 135; as empresario, 130; as founder of Castroville, 128; and Indians, 134; and Jacques Laffite, 129; origins of, 129; recruiting of immigrants by, 124; as representative of Basterèche and Lassaulx, 118; and Saligny, 130 Castro, Lorenzo, 164 Castroville: architecture of, 227, 229; dialect of, 138; exchanges of, with Alsace, 139; expansion of, 137; founding of, 128; population of, 128, 136, 138; Saint Louis Day at, 138; St. Louis Society of, 135; Saint Nicholas Day at, 138; traditional recipes of, 139 Cavelier, Jean, father, 8 Cavelier, Jean, Abbé: in Canada, 9; conspiracy of, 3, 17; and La Salle, 14; voyage of, 15, 17 cfan, 299 Chabrier, Adrien, 170 Chambodut, Louis, 150 Champ d’Asile: disbanding of the colony of, 88; life at, 87; location of, 79; myth of, 90; population of, 87; and

325

privateers, 72; representations of, 93; travel to, 86 Chaptive, André, 164 Chataignon, Marius, 170 Chatillon, Joseph A. de, 178 Chaumes, Michel de, 121 Chauvaux family, 165 Chazelles, Mathieu, 135 Chessux, Cyril, 269 Chew, Beverly, 63, 64, 72 Chiasson family, 275 Choates, Harry, 277 Chollet, Louise, Sister Marie-Madeleine, 152, 246 Ciments Lafarge, 299 Cinquin, Jeanne P., 246 Claver, Peter (Saint), 151 Clémenceau, Paul, 311 Coflexip Sena Offshore, 297 Compagnie Générale de Colonisation, 119 Compagnie Générale de Géophysique, 297 Considerant, Victor: and Albert Brisbane, 205, 208; in Austin and Uvalde, 214; as author of Au Texas, 206; and Cantagrel, 210, 211, 214; and colonists, 213–214; colonization project of, 207; downfall of, 216; first trip to America of, 205–206; and Fourierism, 205; and Jean N. Durand, 230; and Know-Nothings, 208; political career of, 205; responsibility of, 220 –221; at Reunion, 211–213; and Savardan, 214, 215, 216; second trip to America of, 208 Constant, Benjamin, 84, 90 Consulat de France in Houston, 121 Consuls of France in Texas, 158 Cordier Estates, 302 Cortina, Juan, 245 Courbière, Andrés, 57 Cousin, Vincent, 212, 218 Couturier, Marie-Alain, xiii, 237 Cramayel, Jules de, 116–117, 120 Cret, Paul-Philippe: and Beaux-Arts architecture, 234; design by, of the University of Texas at Austin’s master plan, 236; education and career of, 235–236; immigration of, 227 Crockett, David (Davy), 98–99 Croix, Teodoro de, 52, 54

326

Crouzet Automatismes, 299 Crozat, Antoine, 36 Curious George, 302 Curtis, Sarah, 147 Danone Group, 302 Daughters of Charity of Saint-Vincent de Paul, 153 Decormé, Gérard, 172 De Dietrich & Cie, 301 De Forest, David, 73 Delisle, Guillaume, 42 Demers, Guillaume, 249 Despaliers brothers, 178 Devin, Valentin, 26, 29, 31 D’Hanis, Guillaume, 133 Didelot, John, 178 Domenech, Emmanuel, 135, 146 Donelson, Andrew J., 117 Douleurs, Marie des, 46 Doyle, Mary, 249 Drouet, Sébastien and Adolphe, 121, 168 Dubray family, 172 Dubuis, Claude, 102, 114 Ducos, Armand, 119, 130 Dufal, Pierre, 144 Duhaut, Pierre, 15 Dunne, Catherine, 250 Durand, Jean N., 230 Dyer, Joseph O., 71–72 Eaton, John, Jr., 240 Edel, André, 242–244 Elliot, Charles, 117–118 Engerand, George, 172 Entrelec, 300 Epperson, Jean, 74 Erny, Jeanine, 137, 138 Escudée, Marie-Agnès, 152 Essilor of America, 305–307 Eurecat, 298 European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, 299 Evia, José Antonio de, 61 Farnesé, Charles de, 108 Favard, Pierre, 203 Feltin, Louise, Mother St. André, 247, 249 Feltin, Nicolas, 248 Fiegel, George, 234

THE FRENCH IN TEXAS

Flagship Geosciences, 297 Flood, George, 115 Forasol, 297 Foratex, 297 Forest, Jean-Antoine, 144, 151 “Fort Saint-Louis,” 5, 7 Fouché, Nicole, 135, 136, 158 Foulois, Benjamin, 170 France Telecom, 303 Francis, Charles, 244–245 Francisco el Francés, 178 Franco-Texan Land Company, 164 Franco-Texian Bill, 113, 118 Fremont, John, 164 French: in Austin, 173–175; definition of, ix; in 1870 U.S. Census, 169; in Galveston, 161–162; gender of, 160; in nineteenth century, 164; number of, 157–158, 160; in Texas cities and smsas, 162 Frenchtown, Houston, 170 French traders: with Indians, 47–48, 49; and Louisiana, 273–274; in Natchitoches, 52; with Spaniards, 49, 55 Frenzeny, Paul, 178 Frétellière, Andrée L., 179 Frétellière, Auguste, 131, 161 Frontenac, Comte de, 10, 11 Gaillardet, Frédéric, 110 Gallagher, Nicolas, 152 Gallinée, Abbé, 10 Garneray, Ambrose L., 179 Gaz de France, 297 Gemplus, 297 Gencel, 301 Gentilz, Henriette A., 180, 186 Gentilz, Marie-Louise: and Claude Dubuis, 186; marriage of, 181–182, 186; musical compositions of, 187; watercolors of, 187 Gentilz, Théodore: albums by, 183, 184–185; and Auguste Frétellière, 181; and Castro, 132; education of, 179, 180; and Henri Castro, 181; immigration of, 180–181; marriage of, 181; teachers of, 180; teaching career of, 184 Geoquest, 297 Giraud, François, 229, 231

327

Index

Giraud, Théodore, 231 Gissac, François de, 179 Gonnard, Jean, 146–147 Gouhenant, Adolphe, 167, 202, 204, 205 Graham, George, 73, 88, 89, 92 Grandjean-Develle, Louis D., 178 Grappe, Alexis, 47, 55 Grenêt, Honoré, 102–103 Grenêt, Louis E., 179 Guilbeau, François: in Castroville, 132; and Saint Mary’s College, 243; and Saligny, 120; in San Antonio, 166–167, 229 Guillaume, Mathieu D., 179 Guillier, 215 Guillot, Charles, 118 Guillot, Maxime, 168, 304 Guizot, François, 116, 119, 129 Gutierres, Bernardo, 63 Haas, George Louis, 128 Halff, Mayer, 165 Halff, Salomon, 165 Hamilton, 112 Hartmann, Louis, 93 Hauterive, Renault d’, 41 Hébert, Joseph, 274–275 Henderson, James P., 108, 112 Henri, R. P., 168 Herrera, José Manuel de, 62 Hidalgo, Fray Francisco, 36 Houston, Sam, 86, 99; and Castro, 130; and Cramayel, 116; and Saligny, 116; support of Church Bill by, 113; support of Franco-Texian Bill by, 113 Humbert, Jean-Joseph A., 62, 68–69, 89 Hurth, Peter, 249 Huth, Ferdinand Louis, 131–132 Huth, Ludwig, 131, 133, 136 Iberville, Pierre Le Moyne d’, 36 Icarians: departure of, 198–199; failure of, 203; hardships of, 203–204; legacy of, 220; in Nauvoo, Illinois, 204, 220; in New Orleans, 204; and the 1948 Revolution, 201; travel across Texas by, 202 Illiers, André, 310 Intecom, 303 Introgen Therapeutics of Austin, 301

Jaricot, Pauline, 144 Jassaud, Jean, 130 Jay, Aimé, 167 Jolliet-Marquette expedition, 10 Jones, Anson, 117, 130 Jordan, Terry G., 275 Josset, Raoul, 287–291 Joutel, Henri, 3, 15, 41, 255–256 Kahn, Emanuel M., 167 Kahn, Louis, 235 Karoman, Dodur de, 311 Kennedy, William, 130 Keralum, Pierre Y., 231, 232, 233 Koenig, Nicolas, 241–242, 244 Kraus, Paul, 244 Lacarrière-Latour, Arsène, 86, 90 Lacoste, Jean-Baptiste, 167 Laffite, Jacques, 129, 130 Laffite, Jean: in Campeachy, 64; death of, 74–75; and Graham, 73; Journal of, 65–66; and Lallemand, 89–90; legend of, 65; and “Maison Rouge,” 71; retreat of, 74; and Sandoval, 73; slavetrading by, 86, 273 Laffite, Pierre, 65, 74 Lafitte, Jean. See Laffite, Jean Lafon, Barthelemy, 64, 66, 67–69 La Gaudelle, Gervais de, 21 La Harpe, Jean-Baptiste Bénard de, 21; and Bellisle and Devin, 29; and the Caddoan Indians, 28; commander of Saint Bernard Bay, 28; failure of, 30, 31; and the Karankawa Indians, 29 Laignoux, Jean-Baptiste, 241–242, 244 Lallemand, Charles: and Champ d’Asile, 79; and Laffite, 86; and Napoleon, 82–83; in Texas, 85 Lallemand, Henri D., 82, 83 La Madeleine, 294 Lamar, Mirabeau Buonaparte, 110, 118, 251 La Mathe, Nicolas de, 56 La Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, Antoine de, 36 Larousse, Pierre, 94–95 La Salle, Robert Cavelier de: assassination of, 15; attempts on life of, 12; character of, 4, 10; claim of Louisiana by, 13; and the expedition of

328

1669, 10; failure of, 14; false claim of, 10; family of, 8; at Fort Frontenac, 11; goals of, 5; and the Jesuits, 8; journeys of, 6–7; naming of Baye-Saint-Louis by, 20; at Saint-Sulpice, 9; travel to France of, 11; wreck of the Griffon by, 12, 13; wreck of L’Aimable by, 6; wreck of La Belle by, 6 Lassaulx, Pierre de, 113 Lassus, Jean-Baptiste, 233 Lavalette, Antoine, 83 Lavender, Eugénie, née Aubanel, 178, 192–195 Leclerc, Frédéric, 109 Lefebvre-Desnouëttes, Charles, 82, 85 Léger, Théodore, 168–169 LeJeune, Nanette, 274 Letot, Clément and Sylvain, 165 Levi, Abraham, 167 Levy, George, 165 L’Héroïne du Texas, 265 Lipscomb, Abner, 115 Long, Benjamin, 219 Long, James, 74 Louckx, John, 220 Louis xiv, 4, 11, 98 Louis xviii, 80–81, 82, 83 Louis-Philippe, 107, 125 Loupot, Jean, 220 lvhm, 303 Magruder, John, B., 150 Maissin, Louis, 110, 266 Manitou, 300 Manuci, Dominic, 152 Marchand, Alexis-Armel, 203 Marianist Brothers, 242–245 Martin, José, 291 Martin family, 166 Matel, Jeanne Chézard de, 145 Mauclerc, Xavier, 242–243 Maufroid A., 268 Maximus, Brother (Petit), 249 Mayfield, James: role of during Pig War, 113–116; support of and opposition to the Franco-Texian Bill by, 113 McMullen, John, 132 Méliès, Gaston, 103–104; 172 Ménard, Pierre, 148 Menil, John and Dominique de, 172; 237, 296

THE FRENCH IN TEXAS

Mény, Joseph, 167 Mérou, Henri, 160 Metadot, 297 Meyer, Leo, 244 Mézières, Athanase de: as governor of Natchitoches, 51; as governor of Texas, 55; life of, 47; in San Antonio, 55; travels of, 50; treaties with Indians by, 51–54; trip to Europe of, 52 Michelin, 293 Microturbo, 299 Millard, Jean-Baptiste, 93 Mina, Xavier Francisco, 63 Minet, Jean-Baptiste, 27 Missionaries: charitable work of, 148; congregations of, 144, 240; construction of churches, schools and infirmaries by, 147–148; hardships of, 150; mission of, 147; preparation of, 145 Molé, 108 Montel, Charles de, 128, 132 Moreno, Roland, 297 Morvant, François, 49 Motel 6, 303 Motorola Semiconductor, 298 Nathelin, Marie-Blandine, 152 Neraz, Jean-Claude, 103, 144, 151, 258 Noiret (Noiry), Agathe, 246 Noonan, George H., 128 Nueva Vizcaya, 13, 14 Oberthur, 297, 300 Odin, Jean-Marie: in Castroville, 132–133; and Church Bill, 112–113, 142; conservatism of, 145; construction of Saint Mary’s cathedral by, 231; education of, 142; in Missouri, 142; and Sisters of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament, 241; in Texas, 142–143; and Ursulines, 240–241 Oge, Louis, 167 Olier, Jean-Jacques, 145 O’Neill, Timothy, 242 Onís, Luis de, 68, 85 O’Reilly, Alejandro, 50–51 Orvanne, Alexandre Bourgeois d’, 119, 130 Owen, Robert, 198, 200

329

Index

Packinox, 298 Pagès, Pierre de, 258–261 Parilla, Diego Ortiz, 49–50 Pavie, Théodore, 261–264 Péchiney, 293 Peire, Henry, 62 Pellegrini, Snider de, 118 Pellicer, Anthony, 246 Peñalosa, 13, 14, 20 Pepin, Rosalie, Sister Mary Euphrosine, 250 Peters, William S., 130 Pfanner, Grégoire, 133 Pig War, 113–116 Pillot, Claude, 165 Pillot, Eugène, 121, 165 Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, 300 Pirson, Victor, 130 Plastic Omnium, 301 Pluyette, Eugène, 113 Poinsard, Jules, 229 Pontois, Edouard de, 108 Portier, Michel, 142 Potard, Renée, 250 Pratt, Mary Louise, 264 Procatalyse, 298 Publicis, 303 Qualiflow, 303 Ramón, Domingo, 31 Ravier, Benoîte, Sister St. Dominic, 245 Renaudot, Eusèbe, 13 Republic of Texas, 107–108 Ret, Etienne, 172 Reunion: architecture of, 230; beginnings of, 210; dissolution of the Society of Proprietors of, 218; economic and material hardships of, 213, 215; first colonists of, 211; later colonists of, 215; remains of, 219; second colonists of, 212; Society of Proprietors of, 213–214 Reverchon, Julien, 220 Rhône-Poulenc, 301, 304 Richard, Pierre, 135 Rieux, Louis de, 64 Rigau, Antoine, 72 Rivard Corp USA, 300 Rodríguez, Juan, 37, 39–40, 42

Romagny, Jean-Marie, x, 158 Rose, Louis “Moses,” 98–101 Roussin, Marie-Joseph, 152 Saint-Gobain, 300 Saligny, Alphonse Dubois de: and Abbé Anduze, 110; and Castro, 118; as chargé d’affaires, 112; and Charles Elliot, 117; and the Church Bill, 112; construction of French Legation in Austin by, 226; first mission of, 108, 110; and the Franco-Texian Bill, 113; and James Mayfield, 116; in Paris, 112; and the Pig War 113–116; recall of, 117; retreat to Louisiana of, 116 Sandoval, Don José, 73 Sanofi-Syntelabo, 303 Santerre, François, 219, 220 Satin, Peroline, Sister St. Ephrem, 245 Sauvalle, Paul, 170 Sauvinet, Jean, 62 Savardan, Auguste, 212, 214, 216 Savary, Joseph, 62 Scary, Mathieu, 146 Schlumberger Ltd., 295–296 Schneider Electric, 300 Schreiner, Charles A., 165–166 Sercel, 297 Sextant Electronics, 299 Simonin, Amédée, 216, 217 Sisters of Divine Providence, 137 Sisters of Incarnate Word and the Blessed Sacrament, 241, 245–247 Sisters of Saint Jean-de-Bassel, 248 Sisters of Saint Mary of Namur, 251 Smith, Ashbel: and Anson Jones, 117; and Castro, 130; and d’Orvanne, 119; and Maissin, 110; and Saligny, 116 SNECMA, 299 Société de Colonisation EuropéeAméricaine, 131 Société de la Propagation de la Foi, 142 Sodexho, 303 Sofanou Technology, 301 Solms-Braunfels, Carl, 120, 132 Sorin, Edouard, 249 Soto, Hernando de, 9 Staub, John, 236 St. Denis, Juchereau de: and Aguayo, 40; ancestors of, 36; and Bienville, 36; as

330

commandant in Louisiana, 36; as commandant of Natchitoches, 43; as commandant of Rivière aux Cannes, 41; marriage of, 37; marriages of daughters of, 46–47; travels to Mexico of, 37 St. Denis fils, Louis Juchereau de, 46, 48 St. Denis, Marie Pétronille Juchereau de, 47 St. Edward’s College, 152, 249 Suez, 302 Sully, Charles, 201 Tallichet, Henri, 252 Talon, Jean-Baptiste, 10 Talon family, 5 Tarrillion, Peter, 178 Tavernier, Jules, 178 Technip, 298 Texas City Disaster, 294 Texas Historical Commission, x, 1 Thalès, 298 Thions, Claude, 151 Thompson, Frank, 105 Thomson-CSF, 298 Timon, John, 111, 142 Todorov, Stephan, 256 TotalFinaElf, 293, 297 Tractebel Power, 297 Travis, William B., 99 Treaty of Amity, Navigation, and Commerce, 112

THE FRENCH IN TEXAS

Trouard, Marie, 241 Trouvay & Cauvin, 300 Tschirhart, Annette and Ralph, 138 Tschirhart, Edward, 167 T-surf, 298 Turbomeca, 299 Ursuline Sisters, 241–242 Valentin, Frances, Mother St. Clare, 245 Valeo, 301 Vallourec, 300 Vaudricourt, Augustus G. de, 178 Vial, Pierre, 56 Viller, Jacques, 172 Villiers, Marc de, 14 Virbac, 303 Vivendi Universal, 302 “War brides,” 160, 170 War of the Quadruple Alliance, 21, 23 Weber Aircrafts, 298 Wilson, Sir Robert, 83–84 Wolski, Kalikst, 211 You (Youx), Dominique, 69–70 Young, Robert, 256 Zuber, William, 99, 100