August 2017

As San Antonio prepares to celebrate the Tricentennial of its founding in 1718, let us consider the significance of East Texas to the Alamo City’s critical first 100 years without which there would be no party. Border security trumped the environment when the Spanish first settled in East Texas to check the French threat from Louisiana even though Franciscans and enterprising Spaniards in northern New Spain commented upon the fertility of the upper San Antonio and Guadalupe rivers as ideal settings for missions and towns.  Certainly, East Texas had multiple sources of water for settlement with its many rivers and abundant rainfall. However, the fear that France might capture the silver trade in New Spain following La Salle’s provocative but disastrous sojourn off the Texas coast in the late 1600s meant that a frontera or border had to be created against French Louisiana. This defensive measure meant San Antonio’s founding by 1718 had everything to do with finding a “halfway station” between East Texas and the Rio Grande where the Spanish established San Juan Bautista presidio and mission around 1700, near present-day Eagle Pass, and became what Robert Weddle described as the “gateway to Spanish Texas” from the south. Los Adaes, originally founded as a mission at the end of the Camino Real in present northwestern Louisiana, near Natchitoches and the lower Red River, ironically became the gateway from the east. Meanwhile, Apaches and Comanches increasingly arrived to Spanish Texas from the north in fierce competition over the bison range along a corridor of the Southern Plains that became another dangerous boundary for settlement in San Antonio. The histories of Los Adaes and San Antonio intertwined in so many ways during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries so both are addressed here briefly.

Perhaps the greatest indirect contribution to San Antonio from its beginning was the development of commerce, worship, and kinship between the Spanish in East Texas and the French in Louisiana. Overshadowed in the vast historical literature of the Spanish missions is the fact that Father Antonio Margil, who ventured to East Texas all the way from Panama, celebrated mass and consecrated bread for the residents at French Natchitoches in 1717, just one year before San Antonio was founded.

The histories of Los Adaes and San Antonio, however, are much more intertwined at the local level among the people themselves in religious, military, and social aspects of daily life beyond distant imperial politics, warfare, and borders. The Adaeseños (soldier-settlers from Los Adaes), the majority of whom were native from Coahuila, Mexico, and the Bexareños shared spaces in the three principal institutions that constituted San Antonio’s core identity with the missions, presidio, and town. For example, on March 2, 1728, at Mission San Antonio de Valero, Father Benito Sanchez said the last rites for the burial of Felipe Espinoza, a soldier from Los Adaes. Later that same month, Father Sanchez also gave last rites to Juan José Perez, the fourteen-day-old legitimate son of Cayetano Perez and Feliciana Guerra, both Spanish from Presidio Los Adaes, not long after the priest baptized their baby and described as “Spanish” in this entry.  On the same day as Juan’s baptism, Father Sanchez baptized Gregorio Melchor Vasquez, legitimate son of Cristobal Vasquez, also a soldier from Los Adaes, and Ana Guerra.  On July 6, 1728, also at Mission San Antonio de Valero, Father Salvador Amaya baptized Juana Antonia Ybarbo, legitimate “Spanish” daughter Mateo Ybarbo, a soldier from Los Adaes, and Juana Luzgardea Hernandez, Spanish.  Apparently, soldiers Cayetano Perez, Cristobal Vasquez, and Mateo Ybarbo were among the troops who arrived in East Texas with their spouses under, or shortly after, the Marqués de Aguayo expedition that established Presidio Los Adaes in 1721 and designated the capital of Spanish Texas in 1729. They became part of the 100 Spanish troops assigned to the new presidio where a third of the soldiers brought wives and children with them to the Texas-Louisiana frontier. Soldiers from Los Adaes found themselves called into duty many times over the following years at San Antonio where Apache raids began as early as 1720 shortly after its establishment as a presidio and mission. 

Adaeseños appeared in San Antonio alongside many different independent Indian bands, most collectively known as Coahuiltecans, who lived off the waters of the San Antonio River for centuries and also shared in the joys and sorrows of baptisms and burials. The church records for Mission San Antonio de Valero reveal indigenous peoples such as the Siaguan, Muruame, Pataguo, Payugan, Pomalla, Xarame, and other groups generally called Coahuiltecans, many adopted by their godparents who were soldiers from the presidio at San Antonio. Apache children could also be found in the records among the Adaeseños, Bexareños (soldier-settlers from San Antonio), and Coahuiltecans, mostly taken captives in war, baptized, and raised as servants in Spanish households or as adoptive children. For example, in early September 1726, at Mission San Antonio de Valero, Father Miguel Paredes baptized Rosa Jimenez, “an Apache child of gentile parents” with her godparents listed as Antonio Ximenes, alias the “Veteran,” and his wife, Maria Longoria, both Spanish. Two days later, Father Paredes also baptized Micaela Flores, also an Apache child of gentile parents, whose godparents were Jose Antonio Flores, a “single” soldier from the presidio at San Antonio and Clara Longoria, wife of Pedro Flores, all Spaniards.  What most folks do not know are such ties that bound Adaeseños to Mission San Antonio de Valero along with Bexareños, Coahuiltecans, and Southern Plains Indians.        

The ties of Adaeseños to Mission San Antonio de Valero included its lands following the pressure of development and the need for secularization to make room for their resettlement after Los Adaes was abandoned in 1773 and the transfer of the provincial capital to San Antonio. Soon after their arrival in San Antonio, Antonio Gil Ybarbo, who was the son of Mateo Ybarbo and born at Los Adaes, successfully petitioned the viceroy to allow him and a majority of Adaeseños to return to East Texas. In 1778, Agustín Rodriguez, leader of the Adaeseños who remained in San Antonio, petitioned for land to allow them to subsist with their families.  By 1793, approximately 40 Adaeseños received lands from the recently secularized Mission San Antonio de Valero. Among them were Francisco Carmona, Domingo Carmona, Manuel Franco, Luis Castro, Luis Ramirez, Miguel Losoya, Manuel Losoya, Cipriano Losoya, Diego Herrera, Lorenzo Ramos, Luis Cruz, and Antonio Chiver, along with other Spanish residents and mission Indians in San Antonio.  Meanwhile, back in East Texas, Antonio Gil Ybarbo eventually founded the present town of Nacogdoches in 1779 at the site of former Mission Nacogdoches and reestablished commercial ties with French traders from Louisiana. 

Adaeseños also celebrated the rite of marriage at the San Antonio Missions and San Fernando church (present Cathedral) before and after removal to San Antonio that brought them into wider social networks like many entered at Natchitoches. In July 1772, Father Pedro Fuentes, the parish priest at San Fernando Church, permitted the marriage between Jose Cristobal de los Santos, age 24, a Spanish native from the Villa of Saltillo, with Maria Mendez, age 25, also from said villa in Saltillo, to take place at Mission Espada. Among the witnesses who gave depositions for this marriage were Juan Feliciano Casanova, a soldier from Los Adaes “now stationed here at the presidio of San Antonio de Béxar,” and stated “he has known Santos well, and knows he has never married.” Casanova added that he also knew Maria Mendez “since he saw her at Mission San Francisco de la Espada” and that she has never married.  In late December 1773, for example, Diego Hirineo Hernandez, age 48, who migrated from the interior of New Spain and became a resident at the presidio and Villa of San Fernando, married Maria Ignacia de Peña, age 45, legitimate daughter of the late Joseph Antonio de Peña, whose name appears on the statement of sums due former troops from the abandoned presidio at Los Adaes. Maria Ignacia was also the widow of Manuel Antonio Losoya, who came from Los Adaes. Father Fuentes, who performed the marriage ceremony, was the uncle of Erasmo Seguín and came into contact with other Adaeseños, as well as many migrants and immigrants, through his many years of service at San Fernando Church. The social circles that Adaeseños mingled and became intimate ran the gamut from San Antonio’s elites who descended from the original Canary Islanders and from other villas in northern New Spain to the mission Indians.  Historian Frank de la Teja, in his 2008 article published in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, titled “Why Urbano and María Trinidad Can’t Get Married: Social Relations in Late Colonial San Antonio,” describes a case of inequality and drama like a modern-day telenovela or Mexican soap opera, which perfectly illustrates the entanglements of Adaeseños in San Antonio and a reminder that racial and class barriers appeared in Spanish society on the remote frontier of New Spain long before the arrival of Stephen F. Austin and African-American slaves.         

The Adaeseños and their descendants in San Antonio and East Texas became caught in the struggle for Mexican independence from Spain in 1810, especially the Battle of the Medina (1813) that established the first short-lived Republic of Texas and the Texas Revolution in the mid-1830s. Gregorio Esparza and Toribio Losoya were some of the Tejano defenders at the Battle of the Alamo (1836) with family roots from Los Adaes whose descendants remain in the environs of the Alamo City today. Adaeseños infused a spirit of accommodation and rebellion from the Texas-Louisiana border at Los Adaes to South Texas. Indeed the spirit of Native Americans and immigrants from many directions provide another reason for celebrating San Antonio’s 300th birthday with its rich, cultural heritage and survival deep in the heart of Texas along the San Antonio River and a more complicated legacy of violent clashes over borders, warfare, and trade too readily overlooked under subsequent flags of the Lone Star State.