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WRITINGS OF 5AM HOUSTON, 1860
443
together in the campaign in North Mexico at the beginning of the Mexican War. At the close of that War, Kinney returned to Corpus Christi, and there engaged in trade with various partners. He and his associates owned many ships that traded with the countries bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, and they owned a fleet of prairie schooners that carried freight from Corpus Christi to the interior of Texas. All this time Kinney continued to take a great interest in politics, and served in the Senate for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th legislatures of the State of Texas. He bought and sold land, and induced many homeseekers to the Corpus Christi country, for the purpose of promoting his own in- terests by selling them land and cattle at a high profit. In 1852, he organ- ized and conducted the Corpus Christi Fair, using his own money and credit in the hope of inducing thousands of settlers to come to that region. He spent money as if it were as plentiful as the sands on the Gulf shore; he suffered many losses, but they never seemed to worry or discourage him, for before he had finished exploiting one project, he had already begun another. Close investigation shows that Kinney was never greatly successful in mak- ing money, and that actually little of the funds that went through his hands actually belonged to him; but he was able to command almost unlimited funds advanced by speculators in New York and other points of the North, men who were eager to invest in Texas lands, and "to get in on the ground floor of Texas prosperty." In 1850 Kinney married Mrs. Mary B. Herbert, a widow with several children. Mrs. Herbert was the daughter of Judge James Webb. The TE:r:as State Gazette, August 10, 1850, in giving an account of this wedding, states that it occurred on the day before the issue of the paper; but the Matagorda Tribiine, August 16, 1850, states that the wedding took place on June 13, 1850. The marriage was not a happy one. The newspapers of the time assign various reasons; at any rate, there was a separation, and Mrs. Kinney took her children and made her home in Galveston. In 1854 Kinney left Texas on a filibustering expedition to establish a colony- "a new Government"-in Nicaragua. Kinney's Central American scheme was fantastic. Financed by New York speculators, he contracted for 30,000,000 acres of land in the Mos- quito Territory, for which he was to pay $500,000. He dreamed of setting up a new empire-establishing a new kind of government-and as a step to this end he offered himself as a candidate for the governorship of the town of Greytown. But he was defeated. In fact, all his Central Ameri- can plans came to naught; his strongest financial supporter died; others deserted his project; even his men whom he had carried to Nicaragua left him to join William Walker. Broken in fortune, and for once, thoroughly discouraged, he returned to Texas. There, his former glory stood him in good stead, and he managed to be elected to the Eighth Texas Legislature. But he was not in sym- pathy with the secession movement that had swept Texas like a storm; anyway he had been out of the state politics too long to be able to swing himself into any position of authority, so he resigned his seat in l\Iarch, 1861. Fulmore, The History and Geography of Texas as Told in County Names, p. 81, says that he went to Matamoros and became involved in difficulties between the "Rohos and the Crinolinos," and was killed there
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