Lone Star Nation Read Free

hands of someone who knew what he was doing. Observation and brief experiment convinced Austin that he could triple the mines’ output.
    Returning to Ste. Genevieve, Austin presented a plan to Valle whereby Spain would grant Austin land and mineral rights in exchange for his commitment to develop the mines and furnish Spain with the lead shot and sheets its army and navy required. With Spain enmeshed in the wars of the French Revolution, Austin guessed that this strategic angle would appeal to Valle. It did—almost as much as Austin’s offer to cut Valle in as a partner. Valle endorsed Austin’s plan and sent it south to his superiors in New Spain.
    Austin returned to Virginia to await the verdict of the Spanish government. Six months later it arrived. Austin was awarded less land than he had asked for—one league instead of sixteen—but, given that he had requested far more land than he needed, he was happy to accept Spain’s terms.

    In the summer of 1798 Moses Austin led his family and followers out of Virginia and into the mountains of Tennessee. The family consisted of Maria, five-year-old Stephen, three-year-old Emily, and Austin’s sister and her husband and two sons; the followers were some thirty free workers and slaves from Austinville. They went to establish a mining operation at Mine à Breton, but also a colony, since nothing in the way of a settled community existed there. Moses Austin would be employer, political leader, and patriarch.
    The journey lasted three harrowing months. Austin’s sister died of disease, as did one of her sons. The other son drowned in the Ohio. All the travelers were gravely weakened by the bad food, bad weather, and bad luck of the trip; when the party landed on the western, Spanish bank of the Mississippi, several could hardly walk.
    Spanish officials were scarce in Upper Louisiana, and Austin, after renouncing his American allegiance and declaring himself a subject of the Spanish crown, was essentially free to govern his colony as he chose. This brought him no more than the usual conflicts with family and his own workers, but the handful of seasonal French miners who had previously worked the Mine à Breton objected. They hadn’t entirely accepted the notion of Spanish rule, and now to find themselves confronted by this American—whatever nationality he currently claimed—sat even less well.
    More troublesome than the Frenchmen were the local Indians, who hadn’t accepted
any
of the whites. The Osages and their neighbors didn’t entirely resist the white presence, for they valued the trade goods the whites provided: the knives, cooking pots, firearms, beads, and other items that made aboriginal life easier or more pleasant. But where the French and Spanish had come primarily to trade, these Americans were coming to settle. The effect on the neighborhood could only be disruptive.
    The Osages attacked in 1799, then again the next year, and the year after that. The most serious assault occurred in May 1802. Stephen Austin was eight years old at the time, and the experience stuck in his memory. “In 1802,” he wrote later, “the village of Mine à Breton was attacked by a large party of Indians, their chief object being to plunder my father’s house and store, and to kill the Americans, or Bostonians, as they called them.” Stephen Austin continued: “He had, however, taken the precaution to provide himself, in addition to other arms, with a three-pounder [a cannon that fired three-pound balls], and being fully prepared for a defense, the Indians failed in their efforts and were driven back.”
    Against the Indians and the French, Moses had his hands full defending his colony. Yet he had never expected the frontier to be for the faint-hearted, and he proceeded to develop the lead mine according to his initial blueprint. He poured all of his own money into the works and borrowed many thousands of