Free Lone Star Nation by H.W. Brands Page B

effect was most dramatic in the West, where the entire economy was premised on rising—not falling—prices for land. The panic and its aftermath set an army on the march: an army not of soldiers but of farmers and their dependents, men and women and children akin to those bedraggled pilgrims Moses Austin had seen in 1796 looking for their promised land in Kentucky. The growth in population since then had pushed the promised land farther west, to the American territories of the upper Louisiana Purchase—and, as things developed, to the Spanish territory of Texas.
    While financial developments made emigration to Texas appealing, technological developments made it possible. The greatest inventions of the era were the cotton gin and the steamboat. Eli Whitney’s 1793 invention of a mechanical technique for separating seeds from fibers of the short-staple cotton that flourished on the Gulf Coastal plain opened whole new territories to settlement. Whitney’s gin reduced costs of cotton goods, putting manufactured textiles within the reach, and on the backs, of millions who previously wore homespun. Cotton had been a crop; now it became an industry, and a very profitable one for those who acquired land inexpensively. Within a generation the territories of Alabama and Mississippi filled up with cotton planters and their slaves. Some plantations were large, sophisticated enterprises, with hundreds of slaves toiling under the supervision of hired managers and overseers. Other plantations were mere farms, with the owners toiling beside their slaves. But large or small, the cotton operations required land, and the cheaper the better.
    Robert Fulton’s steamboat was no less decisive for the development of the West. Observers laughed when Fulton guided his belching, banging contraption up the Hudson River in 1807, but as the revolutionary nature of his antigravity device—a boat that could travel
up
stream, under its own power—became apparent, its commercial and hence demographic promise silenced the laughter. Never in American history had the self-sufficient farm been more than a myth; farmers required access to markets. Before Fulton, access had often been slow and subject to the uncertainties of weather and river currents (like those that sank Stephen Austin’s barge). Fulton weakened the tyranny of nature by letting boats climb against the current and keep to more or less regular schedules. The first steamboats were ungainly and subject to spontaneous explosion, but as the technology developed they became (relatively) safe and able to navigate even the most modest watercourses. Every river promised to be a highway, along whose banks farmers could grow crops for sale; every estuary became a potential port of entry, the hub of a thriving community upstream.

    â€œThe land lies on the Colorado and Brazos rivers and includes a situation on the Bay of St. Bernard, suitable for a sea-port, at which place a port of entry is ordered to be established,” Stephen Austin wrote in July 1821, in a public notice regarding the Texas venture. “This concession to my father is granted by Don Joaquin de Arredondo, the governor of the Internal Provinces, and is duly confirmed by the Supreme Council of those Provinces. . . . It contains a permission to settle three hundred families on the lands, to each of whom a tract of land is to be given and to whom most liberal privileges are secured, both in regard to commercial interests and civil rights.”
    Austin’s notice, printed in several western papers, had an immediate effect. “This part of the country is all alive and nothing spoken of but the province of Texas since your publications in the papers have appeared,” Maria Austin wrote from Missouri. “And I have no doubt but one-third of the population of Missouri will move in the course of another year.”
    There was much to do before the settlers arrived—starting with a visit by