Unsettled Land by Sam W. Haynes

Author:Sam W. Haynes [W Haynes, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

THE SO-CALLED CITY OF HOUSTON, THE NEW CAPITAL OF TEXAS, did not exist when William Wharton left on his diplomatic mission to the United States a year earlier. The change of venue was at best a marginal improvement over the miserable accommodations at Washington-on-the-Brazos. Though touted by its enterprising founders as “handsome and beautifully elevated,” where residents could enjoy the “sea breeze in all its freshness,” Houston sat on a flat, treeless prairie about twenty miles west of Galveston Bay. The town was accessible to the Gulf by a stagnant waterway, Buffalo Bayou, which was so narrow in some places that steamboat passengers often needed to get out and remove fallen trees and other detritus blocking the boat’s path. Until recently the town had been little more than a collection of tents, which one visitor likened to a revival campground or a traveling circus. But in the summer of 1837, Houston was a boom town, with two hotels filled to capacity, a few stores, and numerous grog shops. Its unpaved streets, which turned into ankle-deep, muddy bogs when it rained, thronged with immigrants from the United States, speculators and gamblers, volunteers recently discharged from the army, and large numbers of “floaters,” rootless young men with no discernible livelihood in search of opportunities.5

The rise of Houston from the swampy lowlands of the Gulf Coastal plain was emblematic of the explosive growth which the country had experienced during Wharton’s absence. Literally scores of town-building projects appeared along the country’s many waterways, all vying to provide goods and services to the influx of settlers from the United States. Most would remain undeveloped, though the savvy entrepreneur was not always the poorer for it. Little capital was required to have a town site surveyed and platted, and the demand for town lots was so great after independence that land titles often served as the principal medium of exchange.

Speculators invested heavily along the coast, especially in areas they thought would serve as ports of entry. Thomas Jefferson Green and the Wharton brothers bought up land in Velasco, which seemed for a time destined to become the great commercial emporium of the new republic. As president of the Velasco Association, Green spent lavishly to promote the town. He operated a horse track and bought a newly constructed hotel, where he held grand balls during racing season, shipping in food and liquor from New Orleans. By all accounts the galas were a tremendous success, attracting visitors from the plantations along the river and as far away as Houston. The fare failed to meet the exacting tastes of one English traveler, however, who thought the sherry tasted like chili vinegar and bilge water.6

Green’s dream of founding a Gulf Coast metropolis might well have succeeded if not for the sandbar at the mouth of the Brazos, which proved so treacherous that the port was littered with the hulks of vessels that had run aground. Faced with prohibitively high maritime insurance rates, shippers looked for safer ports of call. They found one on Galveston Island, a barren, thirty-mile-long sand bar farther up the coast.

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