Lone Star Nation by H.W. Brands Read Free Book Online Page B

turned to fighting the rebels. Santa Anna was undeniably brave; wounded in action against the Indians, he further distinguished himself for valor and vigor against the rebels in the battle of the Medina. Arredondo decorated the young man and marked him as one after his own heart.
    Yet Santa Anna’s ambition, besides spurring him to feats of arms, manifested itself in a compulsion to gamble. In time all of Mexico—including Texas—would be his casino; for now the gaming table was his venue, and his downfall. When he couldn’t pay a gambling debt, he forged the signature of Arredondo to access army funds. The fraud came to light and Santa Anna was bankrupted and publicly humiliated.
    The setback was temporary. Displaying the resilience that was the crucial complement to his ambition, Santa Anna redoubled his devotion to the royalist cause. He helped suppress a rebel invasion of Mexico launched by Francisco Mina from Galveston, on the Texas coast—which disposed him, beyond his experience at the Medina, to think of Texas as a breeding ground for brigands and pirates. (In fact the pirate brothers Jean and Pierre Laffite, operating out of Galveston, did abet and equip the Mina expedition and generally had a hand in most of the attacks against Texas during this period.) Santa Anna’s actions were noted by the viceroy of New Spain, who tendered the thanks of the Spanish crown.
    Returning to Veracruz province, Santa Anna directed the relocation of refugees from the revolutionary fighting there. The work went well, and he was happy to report the settlement of hundreds of displaced families. “All this is due to my activity, zeal, and hard work,” he said, displaying another trait—patriotic egotism—that would characterize his whole career. “I did not spare myself work, fatigue, or danger, however great, provided only that I could be useful to my country.”

C h a p t e r   3
    The People of the Horse
    D uring the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while the Spanish were approaching Texas from the south and the Americans and French from the east, another people, more formidable than either the Europeans or the Americans, entered Texas from the north. The Comanches were a young tribe, an offshoot of the Shoshones of the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. Why the tribes separated is shrouded in myth. By one Comanche tradition a group of hunters quarreled over the carcass of a bear they had killed; unable to reconcile, the group divided, with each side taking its dependents: the Shoshones to the north, the Comanches to the west and south. Another version, handed down orally to the twentieth century, explained the split differently:
    Two bands were living together in a large camp. One band was on the east side; the other was on the west. Each had its own chief. Every night the young boys were out playing games—racing, and so forth. They were having a kicking game; they kicked each other. One boy kicked another over the stomach so hard that he died from it. That boy who was killed was from the West camp. He was the son of a chief.
    The father of the dead boy demanded vengeance, and both sides girded for battle. At the last moment, though, one of the tribe’s old men talked the tempers down, and the western chief was persuaded to accept horses and other gifts in mitigation of his son’s death. But he couldn’t continue to live beside the easterners.
    The chief had his announcer tell the people it was time to move camp. “We have had bad luck here. There has been hard feeling.” While they were still there, smallpox broke out. Then they broke up. One group went north; those are the Shoshones. The other group went west.
    Whatever the occasion of the parting, the cause was deeper, as the mention of smallpox and bad luck at the end of this story suggests. In the late seventeenth century the effects of European settlement farther east were