I I ' I • I
Our Catholic Heritage in T e:zas
garrisons be refilled with men recruited in the province, Governor Martinez, fully aware of how depleted the population was, informed Colonel Perez, of San Antonio, that not a single man could be spared for military service. Until new settlers came, he answered Arredondo, the man power of Texas was indispensable for tilli~g the soil and caring for the scattered herds in order to prevent the people of the province from starving. 10 Clearly the solution to the man power question was immigration. On this, the Governor, the Commandant General and the Viceroy agreed perfectly. But the source of immigrants acceptable to the Spanish Crown remained the insoluble problem. Slowly but surely, forces were at work destined to open the floodgates to the wave of immigrants already clamoring for entrance. Unusirahle settlers. Fatio, the Spanish consul at New Orleans, warned Governor Martinez in July of 1817 that he had learned on good authority that more than two thousand . settlers from Kentucky and Tennessee were planning to establish themselves in Texas without as much as "with your leave." They had, through an agent in Natchi- toches, secured a promise of cooperation from the Indians.n Such independence of action and such disregard for the laws of Spain served but to confirm the opinion of Spanish officials that the Americans were not only undesirable as settlers but also constituted a serious menace to Spanish dominion in Texas. Just as.a vacuum is contrary to nature, so also the absence of occupants of the vast, fertile lands of Texas, except for roaming Indians and countless herds of buffalo, was contrary to the nature of the land-hungry pioneers of the West. The ever-increasing stream of immigrants who had laboriously climbed the Appalachians before 1763 had begun to pour across the western slopes shortly after the American Revolution. By 1810, more than a million pioneers had spread out beyond the mountains as far west as the Mississippi. Ten years later, the number had doubled, and had begun to filter beyond the Mississippi as far as the Sabine and Red rivers. The signing of the Florida Treaty in February, 1819, by which all claims to Texas as a part of Louisiana had been renounced, augmented the urge. The loud protest against the sacrifice of what the Westerner had come to consider his inalienable right has been noted. It was at 10 Martinez to the Viceroy, March 31, 181 7; Martinez to Perez, July 5, r 8 r 7;
Arredondo to the Governor, August 20, 1817, Bexar Arcl,ives. 11 Fatio to the Governor of Texas, July 12, 1817, Bexar Archives.
Powered by FlippingBook