A Time to Stand Read Free

payment of $30—padded perhaps to $200 by the time Mexican bureaucracy had taken its bite. In return, the colonists had only to take the Mexican oath of allegiance and promise to be at least nominal Catholics. The whole program was put in the hands of contractors, called empresarios, who received huge grants of land in return for establishing colonies and bringing in settlers.
    Led by Stephen F. Austin, a tactful administrative genius who had received his grant even before the general law, the empresarios went to work. Newspaper notices appeared,describing the wonderful sites available. McKean’s bookstore in New Orleans blossomed with maps, showing the best routes. Guidebooks sang of the future: “No sturdy forest here for months defies the axe, but smiling prairies invite the plough. Here no humble prices reduce the stimulus to labor, but the reward of industry is so ample as to furnish the greatest incentive.”
    Dolphin Floyd, Dr. Pollard, all the others quickly succumbed. The “Texas fever,” as it was called, swept New Orleans and spread across the South. In Tennessee, a 26-year-old blacksmith named Almeron Dickinson told his bride to start packing. In Kentucky, Green B. Jameson, a lawyer with a mechanical bent, gathered his things too. Throughout the Mississippi Valley men scrawled “G. T. T.” (Gone To Texas) on their cabin doors and headed for the border.
    Soon the whole country knew. On a remote Missouri farm, Andrew Kent explained it all to his wife Elizabeth and began laying plans. Hiram Williamson, a footloose Philadelphia bachelor, decided there was room for him too. In Athens, Georgia, a wild 18-year-old named William Malone went on a drinking spree … couldn’t face his martinet father … set off the following day. In Illinois, young Jonathan Lindley also got ready to go. His father had heard that the Mexican government gave families an extra 160 acres for every child—and the Lindleys had eleven.
    Land was the magnet, but most of these people weren’t just speculators hoping to turn a quick profit. Lewis Duel was a Manhattan plasterer … Marcus Sewell an English shoemaker … William Jackson a landlocked sailor.
    They were, in fact, all types. Henry Warnell was as raucous a character as roamed the frontier. A freckled, redheaded little jockey, he drank hard, talked fast, and chewed mountainous wads of tobacco. Sometime in the early ’30’s he turned up in Arkansas … married (or didn’t marry) agirl in Sevier County … found himself a father … decided it was time to move on to Texas.
    Micajah Autry was the opposite. An adoring husband, he wrote poetry, sketched pictures and played the violin beautifully. But somehow he could never make any money. Born well-to-do in North Carolina, he tried his hand at “literary pursuits,” teaching and the law. In 1831 he brought his family and slaves to Jackson, Tennessee, where he practiced a little, then opened a store. Of course it failed. Deciding Texas might be the answer, he headed west once more, planning to send for his family later. He was one of the last to come, but a letter to his wife Martha conveyed a thought that might well have been written by any of them: “I am determined to provide for you a home or perish.”
    One and all, they poured across the Sabine River and into the promised land. Some with great fanfare—like Sam Houston, the brilliant ex-governor of Tennessee. Houston had resigned in disgrace after mysteriously parting from his bride … brooded for a while among the Cherokee Indians … finally decided that Texas held the key “to grace his name for after ages to admire.” But most came unnoticed, quietly putting up with immense hardships for this great new chance. It was August, 1830 when Jacob Darst piled his wife and two children on an oxcart and creaked away from his Missouri farm. Crawling over the faintest trails, lurching along dry stream bottoms, they took nearly six grinding, painful months to reach the Texas