Early Settlement of Texas

The Spanish began widespread exploring and colonizing areas of North America in the sixteenth century (Cabeza de Vaca 55-108). The area known today as Texas eventually became a part of New Spain. Eventually, the intermingling of the Spanish and the Native Peoples of what is today Mexico and Texas produced the ethnic people known today as Mexicans (or in Texas as Mexican Americans most often). In the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, however, those people of this ethnicity were known most generally as Teja�os (Tijerina 10-13).

Spain eventually ceded a part of the territory of New Spain to France, and shortly after that transaction, France sold its claim in the center of North America to the United States. That transaction, the Louisiana Purchase, created a great deal of confusion among Americans, many of who assumed that Texas was a part of the deal. Beginning soon after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Anglo-Americans began moving into the Texas territory of New Spain [an area of east and south Texas stretching westward as far as San Antonio and as far south as the Rio Grande River, as well as Mexico] as a part of the so-called "Filibuster" movement, contending that the Louisiana Purchase gave Americans the right to take Texas as their own. While the governors of New Spain prevented these Anglo-Americans from settling in Texas, they also faced internal opposition from the Teja�os already settled in the area. The Teja�os formed the First Republ

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can settlement in Texas to Moses Austin just two years after the James Long incursion. Moses Austin was a promoter with a wide variety of interests; however, he died before he could act on the charter granted by the government of New Spain. Thus, his son, Stephen Austin, established the first American settlement under Spanish charter in Texas in 1821. Many stipulations were attached to Austin's charter, and many of these stipulations were often difficult for Americans to accept. Therefore, Austin required some assurance that colonists accepted into the new community would attempt to honor the stipulations included in the charter. Stephen Austin bore no false illusions about the character of many American desiring to be colonists in Texas. He chose his colonists carefully because he said, "among ignorant � Americans, independence means resistance and obstinacy, right or wrong. This is particularly true with frontiersmen" (Austin, 1822 89). Among other requirements, the colonists were required to be or to become practicing Roman Catholics, to live in a law abiding, orderly manner, and to respect the rights and property of persons already living in Texas. Austin, as charter holder, was required to bring a minimum of 200 Am

Category: History - E