Robert A. Calvert - The History of Texas

The Spaniards also pushed to settle the country along the Rio Grande. Don José de Escandón took charge of this expedition, and by the early 1750s he had colonized the south bank of the river and also planted the seeds of modern‐day Laredo, Texas. The lands of the lower Rio Grande Valley proved conducive to farming and ranching, and the region up to the Nueces River became pastureland for feral cattle and horses. The settling of this territory on both sides of the Rio Grande proved to be one of Spain’s most successful ventures in the Far North.

Church efforts to win converts also begot expansion, although attempts to broaden the mission system proved disappointing. In 1746, the Church established a mission (and the viceroy authorized the construction of a presidio in 1747) on the San Gabriel River (near present‐day Rockdale, Texas) to assist the Tonkawas, who were then being victimized by the Apaches and Comanches, and it added two more missions in the vicinity in 1749. But the Crown never fully attended to these assignments. Demoralization among the presidial soldiers and even the missionaries set in, and the Indians became dissatisfied due to what they felt was a lack of proper attention. The project on the San Gabriel thus died in 1755.

An attempt to convert the dreaded Apaches also failed. Since the establishment of the San Antonio complex, these Indians had made periodic attacks on the settlements there, but by the 1740s their own hostilities with the Comanches had made the Apaches receptive to an alliance with the Spaniards. In turn, attacks by the Comanches and their allies upon Spanish settlements prompted the Spanish to make appeals to the Apaches for mutual defense plans. Given this opportunity to Christianize the Apaches, the Spaniards in 1757 established a mission and fort along the San Sabá River (near modern‐day Menard, Texas); prospects of finding silver deposits also encouraged the enterprise. It did not last long. In March of 1758, a broad group of tribes allied against the Apaches (led by the Comanches) attacked the new mission and destroyed it completely. In addition, the Apaches showed indifference to the Spaniards’ proselytizing overtures. Following a series of futile attempts to carry out imperial and missionary objectives there, the viceroy abandoned the San Sabá enterprise in 1769.

What Spain sought by its efforts at settlement and missionization in Texas was the annexation of its far northern territory into the national core. Incorporation would involve transplanting the attributes of Spanish civilization to the frontier and ensuring the defense of the region from foreign threats by linking it to social and political systems in the interior of New Spain. Ideally, such a move would establish ties to the center of Spain’s New World empire, which would be maintained through the presidio, the mission, the rancho, and the villa, institutions that had been successful in the process of incorporating former frontier regions throughout New Spain. But, as in all such efforts, settling the periphery of the empire entailed dealing with the indigenous peoples, who by their numbers, military prowess, and economic and political support systems controlled all of Texas except for the San Antonio to La Bahía wedge.

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