Clash of Cultures

In 1824 the Mexican Congress joined Texas with the neighboring state of Coahuila to ensure a Spanish speaking majority in Texas, and authorized the region to dispose of its lands to new settlers.  The new state of Coahuila-Texas established the so-called empresario system a year later. An empresario was a person who had been granted the right to settle on land in exchange for recruiting and taking responsibility for new settlers.

Fifteen promotors, Mexican and American, took advantage of its general terms.  In exchange for vast holdings, each pledged to settle 100 or more families within six years.  Each family would receive "one labor" which was 177 acres, of farmland, and "one sitio" for grazing land totally 4500 acres. 

These new American settlers were exempted from taxes, tariffs and conscription.  All settlers were required to be of the Catholic faith, although only a small percentage actually were, but officials looked the other way as long as Protestants did not worship together in public.

The immigration policy was a huge success. In 1827 there were 10,000 US born Texans - three years later there were 2x that many.  Their relations with Mexico were cordial.  Potential troublemakers and Protestant ministers were screened out.  All dealings with the central government went through proper channels which albeit slow and tedious. 

Rival empresarios began to settle of their own land grants, intent on running things their own way.  Squatters who were mostly hunters and farmers, but many were thieves, murderers, and fugitives from the American justice system, began drifting in along the Red River region.  Few had legal claim to the land and were not interested in what the Mexican government said.

Tensions rose quickly.  Some were political, but most were cultural.  Mexicans and Americans never truly understood nor trusted each other.  Newcomers were over-bearing, ill-mannered and if seemed, bent on taking over.  The Americans, at that time in frontier history, believed they were destined by Providence to subdue the western wilderness regardless of who stood in they way...

Next time...The Fredonia Revolt
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Today in Pioneer History: "On August 29, 1876, Charles Franklin Kettering, the American engineer and longtime director of research for General Motors Corp. (GM), is born, in Loudonville, Ohio. Of the 140 patents Kettering obtained over the course of his lifetime, perhaps the most notable was his electric self-starter for the automobile, patented in 1915.