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Our Catholic Heritage in Texas
into cloth, as well as the cotton, in sixteen looms, and in one instance they had a regular tailor shop. Spiritually the five missions had baptized five thousand one hundred and fifteen natives. They had given Christian burial to three thousand three hundred and twenty-two, and they had married seven hundred and forty-one couples. There were living in the missions at this time twelve hundred and forty-two Indians, representing twenty-three different nations or tribes: The Xaraname, Payaya, Zana, Lipan, Coco, Top, Karan- kawa, Pajalata, Tacame, Xarame, Sanipao, Pacao, Borrado, Mesquite, Orej6n, Sayopin, Pamaque, Piguique, Parnpopa, Pastia, Canana, Cana, and Aguasalla. Many of these tribes lived over a hundred miles away and had to be brought from their native haunts to the missions and induced to stay there. These figures and facts bear eloquent testimony to the success which attended the labors of the zealous and unassuming friars, who .worked incessantly for the welfare of their beloved but wayward children of the wilds. Presidio San Antonio de Bejar and Villa de San Femando. When the Bishop of Guadalajara visited Texas at the close of 1759 he was greatly disappointed with the conditions he found prevalent throughout the entire province. He was particularly impressed with the inadequacy of its defence and the wretched conditions of the civil settlements. In a letter to the viceroy he declares that there were, in fact, no presidios in Texas properly speaking, and that the few settlements were truly diminutive and totally defenseless. "There is not even a poor bulwark or breastwork," he exclaims, "behind which to entrench a cannon. The four or six swivel guns of the Presidio of San Antonio de Bejar arc lying on the ground without a carriage." The Villa de San Fernando was not much better. The whole settlement consisted of about sixty families, so poverty-stricken and wretched that they subsisted only by the grace of God. In the opinion of the bishop two hundred Indians armed with guns could put the entire settlement to flight. Such conditions could not be allowed to continue, the good bishop remonstrated, because the site of this struggling settlement was the most important in the entire province and the best suited for the development of a large town. The most urgent need, it seemed to him, was to build a respectable fort that could furnish the settlers the security and safety required for the development of a prosperous community. The garrison of five men, all that were left in the presidio after the assignment of
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