Lone Star Nation by H.W. Brands Page A

First!” But Victoria and the other veterans of the revolution hadn’t survived for years in the mountains without developing a knack for self-preservation, and they maneuvered Santa Anna off to Yucatán.

    Stephen Austin observed the fall of Iturbide with ambivalence. On one hand, he cheered the emergence of a more representative form of government for Mexico. A Mexican by choice, he remained an American by birth, with all the congenital preference for republican government Americans after 1776 exhibited. And he couldn’t help feeling the warm glow from what he called “the spark of liberty” that was struck by Santa Anna at Veracruz and which “soon kindled into a bright flame and spread with astonishing rapidity over the whole Empire.” On the other hand, Austin had invested many months and much effort cultivating Iturbide on behalf of the Texas project—time and effort that now came to naught.
    Wearily Austin resumed his petitioning, this time of the republican successors to Iturbide. Finally, after eleven months in the Mexican capital, he received the requisite seals and signatures, granting authority over colonization on the Brazos River in Texas to “Don Estevan F. Austin.” He left Mexico City, he informed his brother, “with all my business finished to my complete satisfaction.” On the way out he surveyed the political landscape and declared, “The revolution is complete. . . . All is quiet.” Yet he added, significantly, “I will not vouch for its being permanent.”

C h a p t e r   5
    The Three Hundred
    W illiam Dewees found his way to Texas as many others among Austin’s original colonists did: by accident following setback succeeding disappointment. Dewees was not quite twenty-one when the Panic of 1819 swept through Tennessee, propelling him west with hundreds of others from the Cumberland Valley. He boarded a boat that drifted down the Cumberland to the Ohio, the Ohio to the Mississippi, and the Mississippi toward the Gulf. The prospects appeared no better along the great water highway than back home. “On this river there are but few inhabitants,” Dewees wrote. “Most of them were pale-faced, sickly looking people, apparently fishermen and wood-choppers.” Natchez stood out on the river’s left bank, and in the mind of this innocent young man. “I have often heard of dissipation, but I never saw it in its nakedness till I came to this place. It would fill you with perfect horror were I to describe to you the fighting which is carried on between the boatmen and the citizens of ‘Natchez under the hill.’ . . . Here you might see men, women, and children mingling together in every species of vice and dissipation, the very thought of which is enough to sicken the heart.” Below Natchez, Dewees’s boat entered the plantation country of the Mississippi delta. The scenery was “truly delightful,” but all the land was owned by rich white planters and all the work was done by black slaves, leaving little room for the poor white boy who floated past.
    Hearing good things about Arkansas, Dewees ascended the Red River to that territory—only to be disheartened for a different reason. “I saw for the first time a person shaking with the ague [malaria]. I supposed the person to be dying, but was told it was nothing but the ague.” Dewees himself fell ill a short while later, and was incapacitated for six months. After his health improved, he joined a party of buffalo hunters heading northwest toward the Great Plains. On the hunt he narrowly escaped ambush by Osage Indians, hypothermia from the rain and sleet of winter, and accidental violence at the hands of drunken fellow hunters. At the end of the hunting season he was nearly destitute and thoroughly ready for something else.
    When a friend in similar straits suggested, in early 1821, a visit to Texas, Dewees eagerly