Texans and War by Mendoza Alexander;Grear Charles David;

Author:Mendoza, Alexander;Grear, Charles David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART II

Wars in Texas History

Chronological Conflicts

7

Between Imperial Warfare

Crossing of the Smuggling Frontier and Transatlantic Commerce on the Louisiana-Texas Borderlands, 1754–1785

Francis X. Galán

IN THE FALL of 1762, French officials at Natchitoches learned that a German deserter named Christophe Haische sold stolen goods to soldiers at the nearby Spanish fort of Los Adaes. Haische bartered twenty-five pounds of gunpowder and thirty-four pounds of ammunition with Antonio Gil Ybarbo in exchange for fifteen cowhides as well as three hundred flints for three piasters (French currency).1 With formal conclusion of the Seven Years’/French and Indian War (1754–63) only a stroke of the pen away from eliminating French sovereignty in North America, the region between Texas and Louisiana increasingly attracted the movement of peoples and goods from completely opposite directions and cultures. English traders soon appeared along the upper gulf coast of Texas, while Comanches began their own expansion eastward following their victory over the Spanish at San Sabá. The Mexican silver trade that Spain denied its European and indigenous rivals unintentionally placed the British and Comanches on a collision course in Texas, but for the American Revolution. What these emerging powerful nations least expected was strong local resistance from Spanish, French, and Caddo regional elites, who jockeyed for control of smuggling routes through the Louisiana-Texas borderlands as transatlantic commerce clashed against mercantilism.

Apparently, Haische followed in the footsteps of others seeking similar opportunities in the borderlands. In 1757, as the French and their Algonquian allies held off the British in the Ohio Valley, an English deserter named Chomure made his own residence in Natchitoches and engaged in smuggling with Los Adaes through the assistance of African slaves. Under interrogation, a slave named Etienne, who belonged to Cesar De Blanc, commandant of the Natchitoches post, divulged to French officials that a female slave named Marion, owned by the commandant’s wife, had sent stolen goods from another slaveholder to Los Adaes in exchange for silver pesos. Among the contraband items were cloth, a bottle of “wild cherry,” and a box of undisclosed contents. But unable to obtain the silver, Marion deposited the items with Chomure, who paid her with a horse “until the arrival of the Spanish army.”2 These seemingly isolated instances of desertion at the Louisiana-Texas border were byproducts of warfare and contraband trade on a wider scale in North America.

The Louisiana-Texas borderlands remains in the shadows of the US-Mexican border, yet the origins of the latter began with the Franco-Spanish rivalry of the late seventeenth century following French claims to the vast wilderness west of the Mississippi River to the Rio Grande. In response, Spain dotted the Texas landscape with forts to prevent foreign encroachment upon its silver mines in Mexico as well as with missions to convert indios bábaros into Christians as justification for expansion. Los Adaes, established in 1721 with the expedition of the Marqués de Aguayo, stood for half a century at la frontera (“the border”) of Texas and Louisiana, approximately fifteen miles west of present Natchitoches in northwestern Louisiana. The terminus of the Camino Real that stretched from Mexico City, Los Adaes was designated the capital of Texas.

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