A Time to Stand Read Free Page B

now he was said to own a million acres. He had gone to San Antonio in 1828, turnedCatholic, become a Mexican citizen and married the richest girl in town—blond 19-year-old Maria Ursula de Veramendi. He had made still more money, survived countless adventures—like the fabulous Indian fight near the San Saba mine, where he and ten friends fought off 164 Indians for two days.
    A typical performance, for Bowie was the toughest of fighters. But never in a rough-and-tumble way. On the contrary, he was smooth, polished, rarely raised his voice. But this very coolness somehow made him seem, when aroused, all the more lethal.
    Such moments were rare, for Bowie was quite used to getting his way. Once, returning on an exhausted horse from deep inside Mexico, he fell in with Sam Houston. Bowie’s greeting was brief and to the point: “Houston, I want your horse.”
    “You can’t have him. I have only one and I need him.”
    “I’m going to take him,” said Bowie, and left the room for a moment.
    “Do you think it right,” Houston asked a friend, “for me to give up my horse to Bowie?”
    “Perhaps,” answered the friend quietly, “it might be proper under the circumstances.”
    “Damn him, let him take the horse.”
    Yet Houston liked the man. Unlike Austin, who always sniffed at Bowie as an impossible adventurer, Houston saw in him the admirable qualities of a born leader, a good friend.
    And Bowie was all this. Generous, even extravagant, he gave much to his friends and expected much in return. Once in San Antonio Bowie got into a fracas and asked a companion why he didn’t offer better support. “Why, Jim,” the man said, “you were in the wrong.”
    “Don’t you suppose I know that? That’s just why I needed a friend.”
    Underneath this hard, uncompromising approach ran a streak of curious gentleness. To people in distress he wasinstantly helpful. Once he intervened in a marriage ceremony to save a girl from a well-known charlatan. On another occasion he brought order to a rowdy congregation so that a frightened young Bible student might be heard. And in his relations with women he was positively courtly.
    Perhaps it was this gentleness that made his marriage such a success. He was the most devoted of husbands, and Ursula a perfect wife. As the daughter of Vice Governor Juan Martin Veramendi, a proud aristocrat of pure Spanish blood, she might have been impossibly sheltered and aloof. Actually, she was wise, tactful and immensely helpful in Bowie’s myriad business deals. She seemed especially useful in fending off various Mexicans who had given Bowie unsecured funds for investment. She would write him tactfully that “here they have another way of thinking.” But whatever the problem, she would always close her letters: “Receive thou the heart of thy wife.”
    All this ended in 1833. When cholera broke out that summer, Bowie packed Ursula and their two children off to the safer climate of the Veramendi summer home at Monclova. Then he took off himself on a business trip East. He was in Mississippi when he got the shattering news—the cholera had swept Monclova too; Ursula, the children, her father and mother were all dead.
    Bowie couldn’t get over it. For months he grieved in Louisiana, then returned to San Antonio, where he tried to pick up the strings again. More dealing, but his heart was no longer in it. He lived a lonely life in the big empty Veramendi house on Soledad Street, surrounded by odds and ends of the past—Ursula’s black dress, Ursula’s apron. People noticed that he was drinking more than before.
    Bowie’s career was of course anything but typical. Few other Americans, even in San Antonio, mixed as deeply inMexican affairs. Most of the new arrivals took the opposite course—they stayed clear of the Mexicans completely. Instead, they formed new towns of their own, or settled in the American-dominated communities flourishing in eastern Texas. John McGregor, a jaunty Scot devoted