The Cradle of Texas: La Salle's Legacy and Influence in Texas' History
byRobin Montgomery, PhD
La Salle’s Legacy
The legacy of René Robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle is of phenomenal proportions.
It shaped the foreign policies of multiple nations spanning nearly 200 years. These policies, whether
of France, Spain, Mexico, the First and Second Republics of Texas, the State of Texas or the United States, developed the story of Texas along a path blazed by La Salle. We will look at each of these stories in turn, against the theme of the Cradle of Texas.
La Salle, Progenitor of Louisiana
In 1682, traveling from the Illinois Country, La Salle led an expedition to the mouth of the Mississippi River. This was the first land expedition to discover the broader dimensions of the river, although a Spanish Naval
Expedition under Alonso Alvarez de Pineda had discovered and named it the Rio del EspÍritu Santo in 1519.
Putting Spain and the rest of the world on notice, La Salle staked a claim for France of all the lands drained by the mighty river. Then, for his sovereign, Louis XIV and his wife Anne, he named that vast area Louisiana.
Rise of the Original Texas
Returning to France, La Salle gathered an expedition then set out to revisit the Mississippi. Missing his mark, on 20 February, 1685 he landed instead far to the west at Matagorda Bay. Not only did he miscalculate his destination, but various mishaps resulted in only one of his four ships remaining until the final landing. That one, the Belle,
soon was wrecked, leaving the remainder of his expedition stranded. Hence off Garcitas Creek, which flows into Lavaca Bay, La Salle established a base of operations which he christened Fort Saint Louis.
Great was the alarm of the Spanish, from their headquarters in Mexico City, on learning of this French incursion into territory which they claimed as part of New Spain (now called Mexico). La Salle’s mishap alerted Spain to the
importance of the area above the Rio Grande, which river marked the northern limit of their official presence at that time. While the Spanish searched for him by land and sea, La Salle led several expeditions inland. Most importantly for this study, the first was westward to the Rio Grande.1 Then he traveled eastward nearly to his
goal of the Mississippi. On a final expedition on 19 March, 1687, near present Navasota, a quarrel among his followers resulted in the death of the great explorer.2
But La Salle’s death was just the beginning of the far-reaching repercussions of his expedition. On finding the remains of Fort St. Louis in 1689, Frenchmen from La Salle’s last expedition brought to the Spanish a chieftain from the Hasinai branch of the Caddo Nation. It was this chieftain who invited them to establish a mission in his land. This the Spanish did. In 1690, the expedition of Alonso de Leon and Father Damien Massinet established beyond the present city of Crocket the Mission San Francisco de las Tejas. Here the Indians referred to the Spanish as Tayshas, which means in Spanish, Tejas. The English translation is Texas. Directly related to La Salle’s last expedition, the Spanish established what came to be the Spanish Province of Tejas and, along the way, blazed the La Bahia Trail. Thus inaugurated was the Cradle of Texas.3
Rise of the First Republic of Texas, the Green Flag Republic
In the 1720s, the first capital of the Province of Texas was established at Los Adaes in the western portion of present
Louisiana.4 In 1762, France ceded Louisiana to Spain, thus reducing Spanish fears of French encroachment on their territory. Consequently, in 1773, the capital of Texas was moved west to San Antonio, a city founded in 1718. Here a hardy and independent breed of Spanish, forged on the frontier, emerged. These were the Tejanos.5
Meanwhile, the United States was also harvesting a generation of hardy souls, searching for adventure and a cause. They found a cause when France, upon once more becoming the proprietors of Louisiana in 1800, three years later sold the vast region to the United States. Here we return to the La Salle factor.
La Salle, it will be recalled, explored to the Rio Grande, thus establishing the French claim to that extent. It was for this reason that upon orchestrating the Louisiana Purchase from the emperor, Napoleon I of France, US
President Thomas Jefferson considered that river as the boundary with Spanish Texas. However, given the diplomatic stalemate, it was decided to finesse the issue of the border in order to consummate the agreement.6
But the issue would not go away, leaving it up to military officials on the scene in 1806 to fashion a neutral ground,
far from the Rio Grande, between the Sabine River and the Arroyo Hondo, the latter stream near the Red River. While cooperation extended to joint US-Spanish patrols on occasion extricating undesirable elements from the zone, by 1812 cooperation had broken down, thus resuscitating the LaSalle-based Rio Grande argument.
It was within this volatile political atmosphere that a priest in Mexico, Miguel Hidalgo, on 16 September, 1810 garnered a rag tag army, sparking the eleven year struggle to win Mexican independence from Spain. Before his betrayal and execution, Hidalgo commissioned Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara a Lt. Colonel and sent him to the US seeking support. There adventurers were in abundance ready to claim the mandate forged by La Salle. Therefore, with an army of restless United States citizens, Indians and Tejanos, Gutiérrez conquered San Antonio on
1 April, 1813 to establish the First Republic of Texas. From the start, this Green Flag Republic was plagued with dissension leading to the republic’s demise at the Battle of Medina on 18 August, 1813. Later, in 1821, though, the
eventual liberator of Mexico, Agustin de Iturbide, gave official sanction to Gutiérrez’s efforts in support of Mexican
Independence.7
Rise of the Second Republic of Texas, the Lone Star Republic
Even as an independent Mexico consolidated its power, the issue of its border with Texas waxed volatile. This remained so even though one of the last acts of Spain was to consummate the Adams-Onis Treaty. This marked, in part, the Sabine as the border with the United States, while Spain ceded Florida to the US. Though Spain ratified the treaty in 1821 as a last gasp of its control of Texas, Mexico, Spain’s successor, hesitated until 1831 to follow suit.
Meanwhile, public opinion in the US was not uniformly favorable to surrendering Texas. For instance, the treaty sparked the Dr. James Long Expedition to try, unsuccessfully, to free Texas from Spain. Even after Mexico
began allowing empressarios such as Stephen F. Austin to colonize Texas, just below the surface of US public opinion festered the desire to free Texas. In 1826, the issue caught fire with the rise in Texas of the Fredonian Republic. A disgruntled empressario, Haden Edwards, and his brother, Benjamin, along with a goodly collection of followers, sought to garner an empire stretching from the Sabine to the Rio Grande.
Though the Fredonians quickly failed, the revolt placed the Mexican government on alert. Adding to Mexican insecurities were US newspaper reports that the new president, Andrew Jackson, intended to resurrect the La Salle factor as his rationale to take Texas with the Rio Grande as the southern border. Both the Jackson and John
Quincy Adams administrations did indeed make explicit offers to buy Texas. Adding fuel to the fire along the way was the Mexican ruling of 6 April, 1830 greatly limiting further efforts at emigration from the US.
This was the atmosphere which led in 1836 to the Mexican siege of the Alamo and the following pivotal Battle of San Jacinto which generated an Independent Texas. After that battle, what has been called the “Treaties” of
Velasco, one public, the other private, listed the victor’s terms of surrender. Among those were the demands that Mexican troops retire south of the Rio Grande and that the Rio Grande would be the southern border. At the First Congress of the Republic of Texas, the members also made explicit their insistence on the Rio Grande as the
border.8
The border issue continued to fester, even as Texas accepted the invitation of the United States to become a state in the union. Texas claimed the Rio Grande, while Mexico insisted on the Nueces River to the north. Furthermore, Mexico had never recognized the Texas Republic as an independent nation. Thus did echoes from La Salle yet resound over Texas and Mexico. Soon those echoes would crescendo into the sounds of a major war.
Annexation of Texas and the US-Mexican War
Although President John Tyler orchestrated the annexation of Texas in late 1845 it was President James K. Polk who stroked the fires of war. General Zachary Taylor was his means. Polk sent Taylor with a military force straight to the heart of the wound throbbing in the collective soul of Mexico, the disputed territory between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. There Mexicans fired upon US forces. This President Polk used as his pretext for war.
And what a war that of 1846-48 was! The US gained all or part of the states of New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming while making the annexation of Texas complete. And finally, the La Salle factor bore further fruit for the United States as Mexico at last succumbed to the Rio Grande as the border with Texas.9
La Salle, the Confederacy and Cinco de Mayo
Not only did the La Salle factor play into the foreign policies of numerous political entities over the one hundred and sixty six years from 1682-1848. Echoes from the La Salle effect also set the stage for an annual and major holiday, growing in popularity. Celebrating the togetherness generated through a marriage of French Revolutionary Tradition with that of Mexico is this holiday, known as Cinco de Mayo.
The initial setting for this cultural convergence was Puebla, Mexico, on 5 May, 1862. On that day, French
troops of Napoleon III of France met those of Mexico’s Texas-born General, Ignacio Zaragosa. Though outnumbered immensely, Zaragosa prevailed. And great was the fallout worldwide. This was the first loss for the mighty French Army in nearly fifty years. Though France eventually reached its goal of occupying Mexico City, results of the victory were transient, for the Battle of Puebla on Cinco de Mayo had diminished France’s ability to support the Confederacy. This bought time for Abraham Lincoln to conclude the Civil War and muster troops to monitor the Mexican border. Thus did the Battle of Puebla end for Napoleon III his dream of resurrecting the vision of his uncle, Napoleon I. That vision had entailed French dominance in the areas which La Salle had
claimed for France so long ago.10
But Cinco de Mayo has come to transcend these points of conflict. Instead, it blends the vision of freedom inspired by the Battle of Puebla and the French, American and Texas Revolutions into a beckon of light celebrating cultural
togetherness.
What mighty events were set in motion, for Texas and the world, when a valiant explorer lost his way, to end his life’s journey near Navasota. La Salle’s death fostered a proverbial cradle nurturing a road to freedom.
Endnotes:
1 See map, page 113 in William C. Foster, (ed.), Johanna S. Warren, (trans.), The La Salle Expedition to Texas: The Journal of Henri Joutel 1684-1687(Austin: Texas State Historical Association,1998)--Whether La Salle, himself, reached the Rio Grande is unclear to some, but it is agreed that at least “La Salle’s soldiers” did so.(see pp37-38)
2 Herbert Bolton, “The Location of LaSalle’s Colony on the Gulf of Mexico,” pp171-189 in The Southwestern
Historical Quarterly,27(Jan., 1924), no.3.(W. C. Foster, op.cit.,concurs,33-34)
http://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101086/m1/177/med_res/
viewed 1/18/12
For a summary of the contrary positions, see Robin Montgomery, March to Destiny: Cultural Legacy of Stephen F. Austin’s Original Colony(Navasota: ROC Press, 2010), 56-62
3 An intriguing discussion of this sequence of events is in Hodding Carter, Doomed Road of Empire: The
Spanish Trail of Conquest(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 45-47.
4 A scintillating read of this era is Robert Carlton Clark, “Louis Juchereau de Saint-Denis and the Re-Establishment of the Texas Missions,”pp2-26 in The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, 6(July 1902), no.1.—The author was the first to note that the expedition “determined the ownership of Texas”, shaping the course of North American history.
5 For perspective on the rise of the Tejanos, see “Tejano Roots,1700-1848”, chapter four of Robin Montgomery, March to Destiny.
6 The classic essay on the politics of the border issues inherent in Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase is Isaac Joslin Cox, “The Louisiana-Texas Frontier, II”, pp 1-42 in The Southwestern Historical Quarterly,17(July 1913), no.1
7For the cultural context surrounding the First Republic, see Robin Montgomery, Celebrating Togetherness:
Anglos, Mexicans and the 1stRepublic of Texas, 1813 (Richards, TX: Texas Center for Regional Studies, 2011)
8 See, for instance, Jesύs F. de la Teja, “Texas in the Age of Mexican Independence,” Handbook of
Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/uptsd), accessed 1/19/12 published by
Texas State Historical Society.
9 For a succinct, yet instructive, treatment of the US-Mexican War, see Richard Griswold del Castillo, “Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo”, on the PBS website.http://www.pbs.org/kera/usmexicanwar/war/wars_end_guadalupe.html
accessed 1/17/12
10 See Ignacio Gonzalez, “The Significance of Cinco de Mayo.” www.Aztec.net
http://www.mexica.net/literat/cinco.php accessed 1/18/12
La Salle’s Legacy
The legacy of René Robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle is of phenomenal proportions.
It shaped the foreign policies of multiple nations spanning nearly 200 years. These policies, whether
of France, Spain, Mexico, the First and Second Republics of Texas, the State of Texas or the United States, developed the story of Texas along a path blazed by La Salle. We will look at each of these stories in turn, against the theme of the Cradle of Texas.
La Salle, Progenitor of Louisiana
In 1682, traveling from the Illinois Country, La Salle led an expedition to the mouth of the Mississippi River. This was the first land expedition to discover the broader dimensions of the river, although a Spanish Naval
Expedition under Alonso Alvarez de Pineda had discovered and named it the Rio del EspÍritu Santo in 1519.
Putting Spain and the rest of the world on notice, La Salle staked a claim for France of all the lands drained by the mighty river. Then, for his sovereign, Louis XIV and his wife Anne, he named that vast area Louisiana.
Rise of the Original Texas
Returning to France, La Salle gathered an expedition then set out to revisit the Mississippi. Missing his mark, on 20 February, 1685 he landed instead far to the west at Matagorda Bay. Not only did he miscalculate his destination, but various mishaps resulted in only one of his four ships remaining until the final landing. That one, the Belle,
soon was wrecked, leaving the remainder of his expedition stranded. Hence off Garcitas Creek, which flows into Lavaca Bay, La Salle established a base of operations which he christened Fort Saint Louis.
Great was the alarm of the Spanish, from their headquarters in Mexico City, on learning of this French incursion into territory which they claimed as part of New Spain (now called Mexico). La Salle’s mishap alerted Spain to the
importance of the area above the Rio Grande, which river marked the northern limit of their official presence at that time. While the Spanish searched for him by land and sea, La Salle led several expeditions inland. Most importantly for this study, the first was westward to the Rio Grande.1 Then he traveled eastward nearly to his
goal of the Mississippi. On a final expedition on 19 March, 1687, near present Navasota, a quarrel among his followers resulted in the death of the great explorer.2
But La Salle’s death was just the beginning of the far-reaching repercussions of his expedition. On finding the remains of Fort St. Louis in 1689, Frenchmen from La Salle’s last expedition brought to the Spanish a chieftain from the Hasinai branch of the Caddo Nation. It was this chieftain who invited them to establish a mission in his land. This the Spanish did. In 1690, the expedition of Alonso de Leon and Father Damien Massinet established beyond the present city of Crocket the Mission San Francisco de las Tejas. Here the Indians referred to the Spanish as Tayshas, which means in Spanish, Tejas. The English translation is Texas. Directly related to La Salle’s last expedition, the Spanish established what came to be the Spanish Province of Tejas and, along the way, blazed the La Bahia Trail. Thus inaugurated was the Cradle of Texas.3
Rise of the First Republic of Texas, the Green Flag Republic
In the 1720s, the first capital of the Province of Texas was established at Los Adaes in the western portion of present
Louisiana.4 In 1762, France ceded Louisiana to Spain, thus reducing Spanish fears of French encroachment on their territory. Consequently, in 1773, the capital of Texas was moved west to San Antonio, a city founded in 1718. Here a hardy and independent breed of Spanish, forged on the frontier, emerged. These were the Tejanos.5
Meanwhile, the United States was also harvesting a generation of hardy souls, searching for adventure and a cause. They found a cause when France, upon once more becoming the proprietors of Louisiana in 1800, three years later sold the vast region to the United States. Here we return to the La Salle factor.
La Salle, it will be recalled, explored to the Rio Grande, thus establishing the French claim to that extent. It was for this reason that upon orchestrating the Louisiana Purchase from the emperor, Napoleon I of France, US
President Thomas Jefferson considered that river as the boundary with Spanish Texas. However, given the diplomatic stalemate, it was decided to finesse the issue of the border in order to consummate the agreement.6
But the issue would not go away, leaving it up to military officials on the scene in 1806 to fashion a neutral ground,
far from the Rio Grande, between the Sabine River and the Arroyo Hondo, the latter stream near the Red River. While cooperation extended to joint US-Spanish patrols on occasion extricating undesirable elements from the zone, by 1812 cooperation had broken down, thus resuscitating the LaSalle-based Rio Grande argument.
It was within this volatile political atmosphere that a priest in Mexico, Miguel Hidalgo, on 16 September, 1810 garnered a rag tag army, sparking the eleven year struggle to win Mexican independence from Spain. Before his betrayal and execution, Hidalgo commissioned Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara a Lt. Colonel and sent him to the US seeking support. There adventurers were in abundance ready to claim the mandate forged by La Salle. Therefore, with an army of restless United States citizens, Indians and Tejanos, Gutiérrez conquered San Antonio on
1 April, 1813 to establish the First Republic of Texas. From the start, this Green Flag Republic was plagued with dissension leading to the republic’s demise at the Battle of Medina on 18 August, 1813. Later, in 1821, though, the
eventual liberator of Mexico, Agustin de Iturbide, gave official sanction to Gutiérrez’s efforts in support of Mexican
Independence.7
Rise of the Second Republic of Texas, the Lone Star Republic
Even as an independent Mexico consolidated its power, the issue of its border with Texas waxed volatile. This remained so even though one of the last acts of Spain was to consummate the Adams-Onis Treaty. This marked, in part, the Sabine as the border with the United States, while Spain ceded Florida to the US. Though Spain ratified the treaty in 1821 as a last gasp of its control of Texas, Mexico, Spain’s successor, hesitated until 1831 to follow suit.
Meanwhile, public opinion in the US was not uniformly favorable to surrendering Texas. For instance, the treaty sparked the Dr. James Long Expedition to try, unsuccessfully, to free Texas from Spain. Even after Mexico
began allowing empressarios such as Stephen F. Austin to colonize Texas, just below the surface of US public opinion festered the desire to free Texas. In 1826, the issue caught fire with the rise in Texas of the Fredonian Republic. A disgruntled empressario, Haden Edwards, and his brother, Benjamin, along with a goodly collection of followers, sought to garner an empire stretching from the Sabine to the Rio Grande.
Though the Fredonians quickly failed, the revolt placed the Mexican government on alert. Adding to Mexican insecurities were US newspaper reports that the new president, Andrew Jackson, intended to resurrect the La Salle factor as his rationale to take Texas with the Rio Grande as the southern border. Both the Jackson and John
Quincy Adams administrations did indeed make explicit offers to buy Texas. Adding fuel to the fire along the way was the Mexican ruling of 6 April, 1830 greatly limiting further efforts at emigration from the US.
This was the atmosphere which led in 1836 to the Mexican siege of the Alamo and the following pivotal Battle of San Jacinto which generated an Independent Texas. After that battle, what has been called the “Treaties” of
Velasco, one public, the other private, listed the victor’s terms of surrender. Among those were the demands that Mexican troops retire south of the Rio Grande and that the Rio Grande would be the southern border. At the First Congress of the Republic of Texas, the members also made explicit their insistence on the Rio Grande as the
border.8
The border issue continued to fester, even as Texas accepted the invitation of the United States to become a state in the union. Texas claimed the Rio Grande, while Mexico insisted on the Nueces River to the north. Furthermore, Mexico had never recognized the Texas Republic as an independent nation. Thus did echoes from La Salle yet resound over Texas and Mexico. Soon those echoes would crescendo into the sounds of a major war.
Annexation of Texas and the US-Mexican War
Although President John Tyler orchestrated the annexation of Texas in late 1845 it was President James K. Polk who stroked the fires of war. General Zachary Taylor was his means. Polk sent Taylor with a military force straight to the heart of the wound throbbing in the collective soul of Mexico, the disputed territory between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. There Mexicans fired upon US forces. This President Polk used as his pretext for war.
And what a war that of 1846-48 was! The US gained all or part of the states of New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming while making the annexation of Texas complete. And finally, the La Salle factor bore further fruit for the United States as Mexico at last succumbed to the Rio Grande as the border with Texas.9
La Salle, the Confederacy and Cinco de Mayo
Not only did the La Salle factor play into the foreign policies of numerous political entities over the one hundred and sixty six years from 1682-1848. Echoes from the La Salle effect also set the stage for an annual and major holiday, growing in popularity. Celebrating the togetherness generated through a marriage of French Revolutionary Tradition with that of Mexico is this holiday, known as Cinco de Mayo.
The initial setting for this cultural convergence was Puebla, Mexico, on 5 May, 1862. On that day, French
troops of Napoleon III of France met those of Mexico’s Texas-born General, Ignacio Zaragosa. Though outnumbered immensely, Zaragosa prevailed. And great was the fallout worldwide. This was the first loss for the mighty French Army in nearly fifty years. Though France eventually reached its goal of occupying Mexico City, results of the victory were transient, for the Battle of Puebla on Cinco de Mayo had diminished France’s ability to support the Confederacy. This bought time for Abraham Lincoln to conclude the Civil War and muster troops to monitor the Mexican border. Thus did the Battle of Puebla end for Napoleon III his dream of resurrecting the vision of his uncle, Napoleon I. That vision had entailed French dominance in the areas which La Salle had
claimed for France so long ago.10
But Cinco de Mayo has come to transcend these points of conflict. Instead, it blends the vision of freedom inspired by the Battle of Puebla and the French, American and Texas Revolutions into a beckon of light celebrating cultural
togetherness.
What mighty events were set in motion, for Texas and the world, when a valiant explorer lost his way, to end his life’s journey near Navasota. La Salle’s death fostered a proverbial cradle nurturing a road to freedom.
Endnotes:
1 See map, page 113 in William C. Foster, (ed.), Johanna S. Warren, (trans.), The La Salle Expedition to Texas: The Journal of Henri Joutel 1684-1687(Austin: Texas State Historical Association,1998)--Whether La Salle, himself, reached the Rio Grande is unclear to some, but it is agreed that at least “La Salle’s soldiers” did so.(see pp37-38)
2 Herbert Bolton, “The Location of LaSalle’s Colony on the Gulf of Mexico,” pp171-189 in The Southwestern
Historical Quarterly,27(Jan., 1924), no.3.(W. C. Foster, op.cit.,concurs,33-34)
http://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101086/m1/177/med_res/
viewed 1/18/12
For a summary of the contrary positions, see Robin Montgomery, March to Destiny: Cultural Legacy of Stephen F. Austin’s Original Colony(Navasota: ROC Press, 2010), 56-62
3 An intriguing discussion of this sequence of events is in Hodding Carter, Doomed Road of Empire: The
Spanish Trail of Conquest(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 45-47.
4 A scintillating read of this era is Robert Carlton Clark, “Louis Juchereau de Saint-Denis and the Re-Establishment of the Texas Missions,”pp2-26 in The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, 6(July 1902), no.1.—The author was the first to note that the expedition “determined the ownership of Texas”, shaping the course of North American history.
5 For perspective on the rise of the Tejanos, see “Tejano Roots,1700-1848”, chapter four of Robin Montgomery, March to Destiny.
6 The classic essay on the politics of the border issues inherent in Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase is Isaac Joslin Cox, “The Louisiana-Texas Frontier, II”, pp 1-42 in The Southwestern Historical Quarterly,17(July 1913), no.1
7For the cultural context surrounding the First Republic, see Robin Montgomery, Celebrating Togetherness:
Anglos, Mexicans and the 1stRepublic of Texas, 1813 (Richards, TX: Texas Center for Regional Studies, 2011)
8 See, for instance, Jesύs F. de la Teja, “Texas in the Age of Mexican Independence,” Handbook of
Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/uptsd), accessed 1/19/12 published by
Texas State Historical Society.
9 For a succinct, yet instructive, treatment of the US-Mexican War, see Richard Griswold del Castillo, “Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo”, on the PBS website.http://www.pbs.org/kera/usmexicanwar/war/wars_end_guadalupe.html
accessed 1/17/12
10 See Ignacio Gonzalez, “The Significance of Cinco de Mayo.” www.Aztec.net
http://www.mexica.net/literat/cinco.php accessed 1/18/12