society entailed marriage–could not convince the Caddos of their good intentions, so by 1693 the Spanish had departed East Texas.
The departure proved temporary, for events from within and outwith New Spain forced a return to Caddo land. Father Francisco Hidalgo, who had worked with Massanet among the Tejas, desired to resume the work he had helped begin in East Texas. In addition, the French renewed their activity along the mouth of the Mississippi to thwart English plans to move westward from the Atlantic to the middle of the continent. When the French established themselves at Mobile Bay in 1702, then farther west at Natchitoches, in what is now western Louisiana, it gave the Spaniards cause for alarm.
Although several motives had brought the French to the border of Texas, trade ranked high on the list. This became evident when in 1713, a French Canadian named Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, who had been trading successfully with Indians in Louisiana, appeared in Natchitoches with an array of merchandise and a determination to seek markets among the Spaniards.
Setting out across Texas, St. Denis and a small detachment of French and Hasinais headed for New Spain proper. They arrived at San Juan Bautista on the Rio Grande (some thirty miles downriver from today’s Eagle Pass on the Mexican side) on July 19, 1714, where Captain Diego Ramón quickly arrested them, detaining the encroachers until word arrived from the viceroy early the next year that the Frenchmen should be taken to Mexico City for official interrogation. Once in New Spain’s capital, St. Denis gave a revealing account of his purpose: the French had received a letter from Father Francisco Hidalgo the previous year describing the Tejas and asking if the French would support a mission for the Indians. St. Denis disclosed that the Tejas yearned for a continuation of Christian missionary work, especially that of Father Hidalgo. As for trade, St. Denis declared that he saw no legal bans against commercial intercourse between French and Spanish territorial possessions.
Whatever the pretext, the viceroy saw no real justification for the French intrusion, so he immediately ordered Captain Domingo Ramón (the son of Diego Ramón) to make preparations to convert East Texas into a buffer zone by rebuilding the Spanish missions there. Assigned as second‐in‐command of this expedition was none other than St. Denis, who had adroitly persuaded the Spaniards that he now planned to set up stead on the Texas frontier and assist the Spanish in the work of Christianizing the Tejas. Although room for distrust existed between the Spanish viceroy and the Frenchman, both found mutual benefit in their alliance. The Spaniards hoped to take advantage of St. Denis’s knowledge of the Texas terrain, his command of Indian languages, and his knack for befriending certain Indians nations so as to repair fractured terms with the Caddos and establish a prosperous trade in East Texas. According to some historians, however, St. Denis’s subsequent marriage to Captain Diego Ramón’s step‐granddaughter at San Juan Bautista lay at the heart of his defection from the service of France.
Settlements
Such was the course of events in the early eighteenth century that placed the Spaniards permanently in Texas. In February 1716, Captain Domingo Ramón and St. Denis crossed the Rio Grande headed for East Texas at the head of about seventy‐five people, among them twenty‐six soldiers and several Franciscan priests (including Father Hidalgo). Upon the Europeans’ arrival, the Tejas and other Caddos greeted them warmly, for they regarded St. Denis as their friend, and consequently believed the Spaniards would, as did the French among them, abide by Caddo custom of entering their kinship system by marriage (with Caddo people) and establishing family residence within the village proper. In late June, therefore, the explorers set up base at a site close to the Neches River. They immediately constructed a temporary presidio, then four missions close by it, among them Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Nacogdoches, situated near present‐day Nacogdoches. With the erection of the missions and presidio by the summer of 1716, the Spaniards had succeeded in accomplishing two objectives: revitalizing missionary work among the East Texas Indians, which Father Hidalgo had sought; and laying claim to the region, the objective pursued by the Spanish government in order to ward off French encroachment.
But this was not the end of New Spain’s Texas enterprise, for now New Spain’s central government pushed ahead with plans to solidify the Spanish position on the northern periphery. At the beginning of 1717, Captain Ramón and Fray Antonio Margil de Jesús established two more missions farther east of the original foundations, inching the missionaries closer to the French post of Natchitoches. These settlements struggled. The missionaries and soldiers faced stark conditions, receiving little help from the Crown in the way of supplies, food, clothing, and weapons, and then getting practically no assistance from the Caddos they had been dispatched to convert, for the Spaniards were still not inclined to establish residence among Caddo society as custom mandated. Another expedition, led by Martín de Alarcón, marched from Mexico City toward the Río San Antonio in 1718 to found a military post called San Antonio de Béxar and a mission they named San Antonio de Valero. The new presidio and mission would serve the purpose of Christianizing the Coahuiltecan Indians, who had long eked out a marginal existence in their ancestral territories and were presently under attack by marauding bands of Apaches coming down from the plains. Additionally, the presidio‐mission complex midway between the Rio Grande and the East Texas frontier line would become a supply station. The result was the peopling of what became the original municipality of San Antonio. Around this site, the Spaniards constructed the Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo in 1720 and three others in the 1730s. In 1721, the Spaniards secured control of the Bay of Espíritu Santo (or La Bahía) by building a fort that they hoped would serve as a Gulf Coast deterrent to Frenchmen desiring to initiate sea trade west from Louisiana. They also reasoned that the garrison would temporarily store provisions to be brought into Texas from Vera Cruz by ship. In 1749, however, the Crown moved the presidio and mission (built in 1722) of La Bahía inland toward the San Antonio River at the site of modern‐day Goliad (the site kept the name of La Bahía) as part of a plan to found two civilian communities there. The towns did not thrive, but the presidio‐mission‐settlement complex of La Bahía remained.
Despite the entrenchment, the French chased the Spaniards out of East Texas in 1719, when war broke out in Europe between Spain and France. In a countermove, the Spanish Crown dispatched the governor of the province of Coahuila and Tejas, the Marqués de Aguayo, to regain the lost East Texas lands. The governor discharged his assignment by restoring the old missions among the Tejas and establishing a new presidio in July 1721 named Nuestra Señora del Pilar de los Adaes, just fifteen miles west of Natchitoches, near the present‐day town of Robeline, Louisiana. Los Adaes, as the site came to be known, did well, as its friars, soldiers, and civilian residents of necessity adapted to Caddo patterns of village living and rules of comportment, and in the process became more accepting of the Caddos, upon whom they depended for survival. Returning to San Antonio in early 1722, Governor Aguayo issued directions for finishing the San Antonio de Béxar presidio started in 1718, then headed for La Bahía, where he established a mission to protect and Christianize the Karankawas and other coastal tribes. By the time Aguayo returned to his home in Coahuila in May 1722, he had increased the number of military posts and missions in Texas, repopulated the region with civilians, and established a much stronger Spanish hold on the entire province.
A new reconnoitering expedition in 1728 partly undermined Aguayo’s work when it ascertained that the French were no longer the threat they had been once and concluded that a reduction in the number of Texas presidios, missions, and civilian settlements would make sense financially. But the friars remained committed to working among the Indians; hence some of the missions continued functioning as before. Moreover, the imperial government still desired to reinforce the halfway station at San Antonio. A villa, or civilian settlement, called San Fernando de Béxar, was built there in 1731, when sixteen families (between fifty‐five and fifty‐nine individuals) arrived from the Canary Islands. In that same year, the friars from East Texas relocated to San Antonio. Therefore, before the end of the 1730s, a presidio, a municipality, and five missions constituted the San Antonio (or Béxar) complex. Additionally, small Indian communities sprang up in the vicinity of San Antonio as Indian families gathered there, relying on Béxar for protection and material help.
