Episode 383 - The Texas Revolution: Part 1

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Hello and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.

I'm Joe, and with me is Tom and Nate.

And together we chair the Buckies Revolutionary Committee of Killeen, Texas.

It's been hard going in these early days of our glorious People's Revolution.

We've had to break up fights between frontiersmen, gunfights between American volunteers, and mediate a six-hour-long meeting between several parties of settlers over the proper place to park their slaves.

Our shelves have been picked clean, our bathrooms destroyed by dysentery, and now we all have mumps.

We're truly in God's country.

Fellas, how are you doing?

I'm very excited to spend the next couple of episodes learning about guys who spent the majority of their lives shitting sideways.

There's a lot of disease in the next four episodes.

I'll tell you right now, this is part one of four on our series of the Texas Revolution.

My yee-haws are primed.

My cousins are married, and my rights are slowly being whittled away.

I'm ready to say fuck y'all.

I'm ready to say fuck all y'all because y'all singular in this case.

I'm ready to make that clear.

I'm ready to hear stories about whatever the psychedelic traditions of the indigenous residents of Texas before colonization were because I won't think that Texas tea and that purple drink are just eternal.

They always existed there.

Got spinners on my wagon and I'm exactly chopped and screwed fiddle.

Exactly.

The wagon, that's why, because wagon wheels were wood back in those days.

So when you worked wood wheels, you know, it was a real thing and it just stayed on a tradition in Texas.

I like the idea of

the only music.

Whenever we talk about military bands on the Texan side of things, it's only dudes blowing on jugs and fiddle music.

And or the band, the band from Trick Daddy's Shut Up, where he says, We're going to let the band deal with this one.

And then you just, yeah, I'm just saying.

The end of the day, if you were on a wagon coming to Texas and you were drinking from a canteen in the early 19th century, you were gripping and sipping because you had to hold on to the wagon and you had to grip that canteen and you had to sip.

So, you know what?

Texas is always just going to be Texas.

Now, we have an interesting layout here because obviously, Nate and I are both American.

We've heard things about the Texas Revolution growing up in school or some other supplementary thing.

But Tom, you've probably never heard fuck all about any of this.

I have no idea at all.

The only thing I know is that more than likely Hank Hill's dad, Cotton Hill, has some problematic opinions about the Texas Revolution.

Unfortunately, I would say most people

who looked back on it as this glorious thing, there's two options here.

They don't know.

the truth of it because Texas doesn't teach that.

Like I lived in Texas for about a decade.

I didn't go to Texas schools, but like, I knew a lot of Texans.

They don't really teach the true roots of the revolution in Texan schools.

They frame it very similar to how like the American Revolution is framed in American schools.

Like, no, it's about our rights.

Oh, and then you squint to like, what rights exactly?

Look for the small text.

Yeah.

Or they are purposefully doing so.

You'll often hear a Texans say, like, Texas is the only state that's still allowed to become its own country.

Yeah.

That is not true.

Texas, it's like, yeah, your rights to either do slavery or do like the judge shit from fucking Blood Meridian.

Yeah.

Like,

that is what happens here.

This is a whole country ran by judges.

I mean, that's literally the point of Cormac McCarthy's book.

That's why he wrote it.

Yep.

That's why he fucking wrote it.

I believe Cormac McCarthy's book, Blood Meridian, is post-annexation, but I don't remember.

But it's set in Texas and he's from Texas.

Yeah, 100%.

So this is before, this is proto-judge.

Now, the Republic of Texas, everyone's favorite repository of the world's most annoying football fans, psychotic politics, and of course, the one guy who will never let you forget what state he's from, owing to the fact he probably has the outline of the state tattooed somewhere on their body.

Texas, despite its uncountable flaws, has a unique place in the annals of American history.

An independent body, kind of.

created from a revolution separate from the American Revolution, kind of, but at its core, the Texas Revolution was almost like the American Revolution's strange cousin that would do things to their other cousins that the rest of the family doesn't like to talk about.

Because this is the South.

Made up almost entirely of American slave owners, also known as Anglo-Texans, Texians, or Texans, who illegally immigrated into what would become known as the Mexican Empire for a brief bit there.

and then the Republic.

You cannot attempt to look at the Texas Revolution without also looking at America and one of its greatest historical sins and the part that it played in its eventual temporary creation of the Republic of Texas, which is what we're going to be looking at over the course of the next four weeks.

Oh, everyone likes to imagine they're the judge from Blood Meridian, but in reality, this name isn't escaping me, but they are just the protagonists of Butcher's Crossing.

It's...

No, to pull from other Cormac McCarthy, everybody thinks that they're the judge from Blood Meridian, but actually they're just the baby getting roasted on a spit in multiple Cormac McCarthy clothes.

You're just the baby tree from Blood Beridian.

There's a baby tree, and then there's baby roasted on the spit to be eaten in both Outer Dark and The Road.

And I know there's more.

I haven't read every book by him.

It's actually really fucked up that, like, in school, we read The Road for The Leaving Cert.

It was like, fucking kidding me.

Yeah, because it was like, what?

It was comparative English.

So it was like, we read The Road, we watched Children of Men.

And then we, for the play,

read

Brian Friel's translations, which is about like the death of the Irish language because of the land ordinance surveys of the British Empire in the like late 19th century, early 20th century.

Irish school sounds way more metal than ours.

Oh my God.

I mean, here's what I would say.

The Road is the only book that has ever actually scared me in my adult life.

I couldn't put it down.

I was in Fayetteville, North Carolina when I read it.

I read it in one go.

And then thankfully it was air conditioning season.

I I made sure all my windows and doors were locked.

And I was like, damn, I should own a gun.

Like, that book scared the fuck out of me.

That is an incredible book.

I have a funny version of The Road story as well.

Our show's a wonderful producer, Ani, saw me reading Blood Meridian and

asked if there's anything else by Cormork McCarthy that she should read.

And the only other book that I owned by him was The Road.

I was like, Yeah, you should read The Road.

And she was so bad at me afterwards.

She did like the book, but she's like, I didn't warn her about anything that was inside of it.

There are three really, really good post-apocalyptic books that I can describe in terms, and they have different approaches.

But The Road is one, Station Eleven is another, and The Parable of the Sower is another.

All three of these have something in them that's terrifying, but The Road is like,

as I've used this metaphor before, The Road is just like drinking the concentrated Coca-Cola syrup they put in the drink fountain machine of like...

terror and horror and just like stress because it's like what would you do in the apocalypse you'd be standing guard over your child trying to keep warm constantly because everyone would be trying to kill and eat you.

And thinking about saving ammunition in case you have to kill both your child and then yourself.

Yep.

Yeah.

To prevent them being field-dressed and boiled and eaten.

Which happens.

And well, not to the characters, but.

But the history of the Texas Revolution really began with Mexican Texas, then part of the larger Spanish Empire.

We talked about this before on our episode of the Battle of Medina.

So I really don't want to go over it again.

I will, but not as much at length.

Consider that a supplement to this episode.

Honestly, this is a missing branding of like, instead of calling themselves like Texicans, they should have called it like Mexis.

Mexis.

Mexis sounds a lot like Hexus, the villain from the 90s, like pro-environmentalism animated movie Fern Gully.

Oh fuck, you're right.

What is Texas after all of that a strange goop of oil climbing through the trees?

Yeah, that got locked away in a fucked up tree for like a thousand years.

Mother spilk.

But to make a very long story short, Spain was doing a very, very bad job running its Mexican holdings, which by extension also meant Texas.

So bad to the point there are multiple governments all trying to administer the land, Mexican uprisings, Spanish uprisings, Tejano uprisings, and American freebooters all either fighting one another, fighting the state, and sometimes uniting together for brief amounts of time to fight someone.

But most of these struggles collapse hilariously.

Again, go listen to our episode called called The Battle of Medina.

Another key part was the American interest in Texas.

As a whole, the U.S.

government at the time insisted that it was supposed to be included in the Louisiana Purchase.

Obviously, Spain disagreed.

America eventually backed off those claims, at least officially, but a certain brand of Americans never did.

Hence all the freebooters, who were kind of indirectly, but also sometimes directly supported by the United States government.

Then following the Mexican victory in the War of Independence in 1820s, Mexico broke free from Spain, and with it, so did Texas.

Texas, as we all know, is a massive piece of territory, but in 1821, it was barely populated at all.

The majority were groups of Native Americans, of numbers we're not entirely sure of for obvious reasons, but it was tens of thousands, probably.

Now, they were considered as much of a problem to the new Mexican government as they would have been to any given American state.

The new Mexican first empire, for a brief little spell there and then republic, treated Native Americans within Mexican territory virtually the same way as Americans did.

Settlers at this point in history in Texas were mostly Mexican and also previous Spaniards as well, because the Spanish government and the new Mexican government tried desperately to encourage Mexicans and Spaniards to settle Texas.

Some of them had.

They and their descendants would eventually be collectively known as Tejanos, which is what I'm going to be calling them for the rest of this.

It just means people born and raised in Texas.

It literally just means Texan in Spanish.

Yeah.

But specifically not Anglo-Texan, because they call themselves Texan and sometimes Texians.

Texans, yeah, right.

And for the purpose of this, I'm calling them Texans.

Okay.

So Tejanos are Hispanic descendants born and raised in Texas.

Texans, Anglo-Texans, mostly from the United States.

I was going to say, like, I, you know, obviously Texas is like such a huge state and I have been to very few parts of the U.S., but I really, the way I figured out how big Texas is years ago was I was reading a really good book about ZZ Top, the only good thing to ever come out of Texas.

And like Billy Gibbons talking about, yeah, like the early years of my career was just.

playing in Texas.

Yeah.

And it's like, you could make a career never leaving the state of like just going from like place to place to place and not playing the same place for like six months to a year it's true um for the period that i lived in texas i was introduced to the wonderful genre of outlaw country

um which is the only genre of country i like but there's outlaw country singers who are effectively celebrities in texas and maybe only people in oklahoma have ever heard of them because like tahano music when you think about selena how much of yeah exactly and because it's its own ecosystem and of course nowadays the population of the state is fucking massive so it can support that kind of and 90 of them are all stand-up comedians only in austin

but how in the fuck are you gonna say that the zc top are the only good thing to come out of texas when literally all of like ugk bun b pimp c yeah true actually sorry tall wall all houston rap nah man that's okay dall nothing ever good came out of dallas i'll say that one with my chest but come on this is another argument for the buckies revolutionary council of colleen yeah however these settlement encouragement ideas for both the Spaniards and then the Mexicans never really worked out.

This is despite the fact they gave them massive swaths of land if you said you wanted to settle there, completely tax-free, to include like money to build a house and a plantation there, stuff like that.

They really did try to encourage people to move to Texas, but it didn't take for one simple reason.

Texas was a hard fucking place to scratch out an existence that even with all all the government assistance, most people did not see this worth the effort.

And by the time the Spanish Empire exited Mexico, only about 3,500 people settled the whole of Texas.

Now, that number does not count the native population, but like settlement-wise, less than a stadium's worth of people.

Yeah.

We have been to concerts with more people in the audience.

Well, I would point this out too, that it's not the same period, but it's a similar vibe.

Actually, to some extent, it's close, which is another place that people are like, wow, big needs colonists, needs European colonists, is Australia.

And similarly, if you actually read historical documents about what it was like to be a pioneer settler in Australia,

convict transported labor, it's horrible.

It fucking sucks.

No one would have gone there if they weren't forced to, you know, by the fucking, by the English.

And so similarly with this, it's like, it's genuinely, it's like, yeah, it's just a really, it's a beautiful landscape.

It is a hard fucking life out there.

And this is pre-everything.

You know what I mean?

But I mean, like, that's like really in line with just in general, the entire American Southwest, like at this time.

It was a brutal life.

Oh, my God.

Like, it's obviously romanticized in the modern American mind, but like Frontier Life was fucking horrible.

That's why all these people that do take part in Frontier Life, do take part in the Texas Revolution, or all pretty much the personification of vile frontiersmen because they're the only people that survive out there.

Yeah.

I lived in New Mexico for three years as a kid, and like it's a harsh environment now.

And I can only imagine what it would have been like back then.

Yeah.

And the fact that, like, you know, it was there's the disease, the isolation, the extremes of the temperature, the wet, you know, the climate, pests, disease.

You are encroaching on a place that already has a population who do not want you there and will kill you if they can.

Yeah.

And they often did.

And they often did, yeah.

Yeah.

It's, I'll stop interrupting, but you want to read something.

There's a book by Willa Cather called Death Comes for the Archbishop, which is basically about like pioneer culture in New Mexico around this time.

And you're like, ah, the environment will kill you.

And if anyone offers you shelter in their friendly little hut, they're a serial killer with thousands of bodies in their yard.

So like, yeah, that's all you need to know.

And the vast majority of this population was focused around two places, San Antonio de Bear, which I'm just going to call San Antonio from now on, and La Bahia, pretty much the only two settlements.

Spain decided to try another tactic at one point.

Knowing there are a lot of Americans who wanted Texan land, they reached out to an American man named Moses Austin.

That is not who Austin is named for, in case you're wondering.

It is his descendant, but we'll get to there.

Now, Austin made a fortune in the lead industry before eventually going flat broke and was forced to go on the run to escape debtors.

During that time, he relocated to Spanish-held Upper Louisiana and, with the permission of the Spanish crown, began to buy a fuckload of slaves, bring in Americans, start up a mining operation that was very profitable until, of course, that territory suddenly became America.

And then he had to run again, lest he'd be caught up to by all the other dudes he owed money to.

He ended up in Spanish, Texas, and then San Antonio.

Austin was a guy with all he was one of those dudes that always had a hustle up their sleeve, right?

He pitched an idea to the Spanish government, pay me money, and I'll find Americans willing to settle here.

We'll all become Catholic, we'll swear an oath to the king of Spain, and we'll learn Spanish.

We'll just become Spaniards.

Spain, despite being very desperate, thought this was kind of nuts, but not so insane.

They wouldn't give it a chance.

So they limited the amount of immigrants that he could bring to 300 families.

No limit on the size of families, mind you, and agreed to give them 20,000 acres of land because it's Texas and there's a lot of land to go around.

Suddenly a family has 20 to 30 uncles each.

It's all about the unks.

It all comes down to the onks.

Austin found willing settlers surprisingly fast, but he did it the most American way possible.

This is not going to be some kind of manifest destiny frontier situation like we saw in the American West or would see in the American West in the future.

Rather, Austin hired the settlers as contracted employees to what amounted to be a company town that he would run as dictator.

He also insisted that everyone bring as many guns and slaves as they could in order to make the settlement go as smoothly as possible.

At the time, Spain, perfectly fine with slavery.

Mexico wouldn't be.

quite so fine with it in the future, but for now, Spain's like, yeah, totally fine.

Bring as many slaves as you can pack on your wagons.

Sorry, senor.

It's totally okay to own slaves, but you cannot dance after 9 p.m.

or marry your cousin.

It's not okay.

But before the plan could be carried out, Austin dropped dead and left the entire project to his son, Stephen Austin.

Oh, I thought his son was going to be called Austin Backshots.

Austin Austin.

I love the idea that there's just, yeah, that there's already a culture of just all

naming your kids after Texan things before Texas even exists.

It's just like people just show up and they just like the spirit of, of, I don't know, fucking, you know, the kind of guy that Hank Hill is based on, except gross and mean and not redeeming in any way.

It's like that spirit has always existed in Texas.

And if you go there, you got possessed by it and you just decide to start calling your kid Reagan.

You don't know why.

This is my daughter, Reagan, my son, Houston, and my dog, Stephanie.

Like, I'm thinking about like the type of people

who

would have, I suppose, like, eeked out some sort of life in Texas at the time.

And the only...

They're rough dudes.

But see, the only thing that I can kind of compare them to is what we talked about in the first Boer War series of like those type of insane people who's like, yes, the wilderness is the only thing I can live in because the world is changing at a pace that I just can't deal with.

I must go and like fight with God and nature to survive.

I will say there's a lot of connective tissue between the first Anglo-Texans and the Boers.

They have a lot in fucking common.

Okay.

Austin took the mantle of the new settlement boss and led his several hundred Americans towards San Antonio.

But when they're about halfway there, Mexico became independent.

Therefore, so did Texas, and their deal with the Spanish crown was now moot.

This is where Austin meets a man named Jose Antonio Navarro, a self-educated lawyer from a former Spanish noble family.

Self-educated lawyer.

That is a career path that does not exist anymore.

Technically, it does in California, where you could like study for the bar.

Okay.

Like it is a weird apprenticeship that only rich people like Kim Kardashian can do.

Okay.

And not pass the bar, of course.

I love the idea that you just go into a court and you just start winging it and freestyling.

And some people are like, damn, he's got that fire.

He's got that dog in him.

He's good.

And also, how are they going to prove you wrong if you just rock up like, I'm a lawyer?

You can look him up on the internet.

Like, no, he's wearing a tie.

He's probably a lawyer.

Now, my word to the jury, have you not considered my client is based and cool and is not guilty at all?

Have I introduced you to a thing called settler colonialism?

Have you considered that the guilty party is gay?

Navarro quickly acted as a go-between for the settlers and the new Mexican government.

The Mexican government really didn't want to honor the deal made with the Spanish and instead wanted, you know, an actual functional immigration system to...

be put in place rather than like a buy-in system like the world's first golden visa however navarro and austin eventually went to mexico city to plead their case which amounted to look nobody else wants to live there why not let us and for the mexican government there's a lot more at play here they saw three major threats to their new borders and most importantly to the context of our series texas the first was the native population who obviously did not give a shit who said was in charge they wanted to run their own lives and communities because that's their fucking right.

They don't belong to Mexico.

They don't belong to the United States.

They don't belong to Texas.

They want to belong to their own communities like they always have.

Now, this is obviously a problem for the Mexican government because they were completely broke.

They could not fund any kind of military operation to suppress the natives.

So Austin, ever the huckster just like his dad, sold the Mexican government the idea is like, look, you give us the tracts of land, we'll bring our own guns and we'll handle that problem for you.

The second was Mexico's economy was awful post-independence and it would take a very long time to recover.

The Mexican government figured, hey, if we plant a bunch of Americans on the American border, they'll facilitate trade with the United States, which will in turn help us out.

The third threat was America.

It was not that long ago, prior to Mexican independence, that the United States officially claimed Texas.

And only a short time after that did they renounce those claims again, only officially.

Most people in Washington and the American media were talking about how Texas was rightfully the United States property.

But Texas thought, well, they won't invade us if we put something of a meat buffer of Americans between us and them.

We're kind of good at being that, aren't we?

It's just sort of like, it's like it comes second nature to us.

I want to be a buffer zone so bad.

Please.

They make jokes about the meat wave, but what if you're the breaker for the meat wave?

You are the meat breaker.

You are like a breakwater.

Like, yeah, exactly.

They build a seawall out of meat to stop the tide.

And it's like, yeah, take that metaphor as far as it'll go.

There's lots of Americans and most of them are flying with getting killed.

That's why we are the way we are.

Please, daddy, stack up my meat wall.

Yeah, once again, as a point I have made before, is Americans are so comfortable with the concept of jihad, but not the name.

So, before long, these first American settlers made their home around the Colorado and Brazos rivers.

But there was no shortage of Americans willing to take the leap, pack their shit, and move to Texas at the drop of a hat.

I assume a very large cowboy hat.

America was reeling at a time from something called the 1819 panic.

It was America's first real financial meltdown.

It was caused mostly by a larger global impact from the Napoleonic Wars.

The panic impacted everyone, but it impacted the cotton industry in the South especially badly, meaning the vast majority of people lining up to cross the border and become Texans were southern plantation owners.

Ah.

In Texas, they saw cheap land, virtually free land as far as the eye could see, a government scheme that required them to pay absolutely zero taxes for a couple of years and a way out from like their crippling bank debt and would not follow them to Texas.

It was a sweet deal and it was too good to turn down.

I do declare it is so beautiful to get away from the heat and the humidity and the bailiffs of New Orleans.

Yeah, they did the same thing every 18-year-old enlistee in the military does and accidentally built their entire existence around a pile of like Camaros with 20% interest.

And instead of being from Texas like that guy is out, they fled to Texas.

More and more settlement licenses were given to Austin, who in turn sold them to prospective settlers who were given huge quantities of land, but specifically in places where the Mexican government thought they would be most at threat from the native population.

They're like, oh, there's a huge population of Cherokee there.

Let's put Steve and the Georgians right next to them.

They'll handle each other.

Like, what is the kind of like average size of like land holdings that like people are being given?

Thousands of acres.

Fuck.

Yeah.

It's a lot of land.

It's a lot of land to surveil.

What would happen was the government wanted to do it like community at a time.

Okay.

So like a group of plantation owners, mostly from the south, would get together and buy a license.

That license would be tens of thousands of acres to move in and start a whole community.

Okay.

And then they would then part it out to the different plantation owners because Mexican's idea was, oh, we just drop a town right next to where the Cherokees are living and then drop a town here and then drop a town there,

and then they would just be on their own, sink or swim.

Most of the settlements were wild successes, and by that I mean violent as fuck.

Though through this early process, all settlers were required by law to learn Spanish, become Mexican citizens, and convert to Catholicism.

And in the first couple waves of settlers, they did do this.

However, the Mexican government was not looking to just give away all of the land in Texas to white dudes from Alabama.

While they were allowing a few hundred in in at a time, they were also trying to pass more laws to encourage people from the rest of Mexico to take the same land deal, but with a few more benefits on top.

But again, they didn't fucking want to.

It was a hard deal to take.

And most importantly, remember the kind of people that are moving from the United States.

Plantation owners who own slaves.

They have money.

It's easy for them to move in and kind of pop up a community.

without killing themselves to do it.

That's not to say it wasn't wildly difficult, but they had the means.

Your average Mexican citizen did not have those same means, no matter how many benefits the governments offered them.

So American land speculators began bribing Mexican nationals to take the government deal and then in turn give them the land grants.

Ah.

And this still wasn't enough because of course the Mexican government picked up on this.

Like, wow, we're selling a lot of land and then there's still no Mexicans there.

Weird how that's happening.

Just a white guy standing in front of you and you're looking at the clipboard and he's like, so it says your name is Jose Hernandez.

Dode estad la plantación.

Oh, yes.

See, sir, it's like in Glorious Bazers when uh speak the third best Spanish.

Yeah, oh, is it Brad P has to lie?

He can speak German, he speaks

Italian, Italian,

bonjorno, bonjorno, yeah, it's bad.

So, again, the Mexican government tries to limit this, meaning Americans are hitting more red tape.

And rather than waiting or continuing to bribe people, waves of American settlers simply move in without permission.

Instead of really trying to stop this, because the Mexican government really lacked the physical ability to do so, the government just let Austin govern these people as a government within a government.

He was quite literally allowed to be a dictator, absolute authority on all colonial matters, just shy of capital punishment.

He was allowed to pass his own laws, and they were expected to follow those completely independent of the Mexican Constitution or judiciary.

And he tried to run these colonies in a very Puritan manner.

Like he passed laws on drinking, no swearing, no gambling.

And he wildly underestimated the kind of people who wanted to move to the Texan frontier because they ignored this shit immediately.

Yeah.

Mexico left him in complete control of a settler militia to fight the local native people as well.

And this militia was called the Ranger Company.

That might sound familiar because this is considered the precursor to the Texas Rangers, who was ran like a literal death squad, just like the Texas Rangers were.

They effectively became the main genocidal engine for Mexican settler colonialism within Texas through these early years.

Within a year, American settlers in Texas outnumbered the original Tejano population, like by like two to one.

And remember how I said the vast majority of settlers were from the South?

Well, not only did they bring cotton plantations and slaves to Texas, but but they brought their already existing racial prejudices and ideas of racial hierarchy which didn't really exist in the spanish empire in that capacity obviously the spaniards had slaves and they saw anyone outside of that as generally fine

like they didn't really see the difference between like tejanos and mexicans or spaniards and because they were generally the same people according to spain the americans did not see things that way one of the key parts of the settlement agreements was that the mexican government required any new settlers to respect the lands and titles that already existed from Tejanos, from Mexicans, from Spaniards that were given either during the Spanish Empire, assuming that person supported the Mexican War of Independence, and then the Mexican Republic and or Empire.

So in 1825, the leader of one colony near Naga Doches, a guy named Hayden Edwards, decided to just ignore that and decree that any Tejanos living in this area need to vacate their land and make room for new American settlers.

The Mexican government pointed out that, hey, you can't do that, to which Edwards and a portion of his colonists reacted in a very normal, well-thought-out way by suddenly declaring the colony a free and independent state called the Republic of Fredonia.

It's like a kind of name that you expect some like libertarian micro-state to have in the modern days.

Like, no, we're Fredonia.

Or some like really, really low-rent sci-fi author.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hey, I'm sitting right here.

I would say a third option is like city and like founded in Illinois in 1805 that really thought it was going to be the capital.

And it just winds up being just like two parked cars and a shipping container and a lot of heroin.

I mean, that's also most of the places we're going to talk about here in modern day Texas.

But they're weirder.

They're weirder in ways that without riffing too hard and derailing, I'm just saying Texas weird, especially Texas Panhandle weird.

Oh, it's a different brand of weird.

Whoa.

Edwards' militia arrested a couple of Mexican civil servants and the local Cherokee people agreed to recognize the state if Edwards agreed to leave them alone and run themselves.

So they met with Edwards and the chief that made the deal quickly like changed their mind upon meeting him.

Like, this guy's a real fucking asshole.

So he goes back to his tribe and his tribe on the flip-flopping of this deal, getting them involved in quite possibly being more suppressed by the Mexican government and or the settlers.

Then murder their chief for getting them involved.

So, yeah, they policed themselves quite effectively.

Austin was so mad at Edwards that he deployed his militia to work side by side with the Mexican army to march in and end the whole thing.

Fredonia fell without a shot being fired, and Edwards fled back across the board to the United States.

This could have been a story about a single prick getting all uppity and getting kicked down, which is pretty much what it was.

After all, Austin, despite his many flaws, was true to his word.

He helped the Mexicans stop this idiotic rebellion.

And this wasn't even the first time that Austin and his settler militia mustered forces to defend Mexico.

In 1829, the Spanish attempted to re-invade and reconquer Mexico.

They failed, but Austin's militiamen were fighting side by side with the Mexicans against the Spaniards.

At this point, Austin was a true believer in his deal with the government.

There's no doubt that even as a settler colonial slave-oving dickhead, he was actually a man of his word at this point.

However, to the Mexican government, it was only further proof that the settlers could not be trusted.

They believed that Edwards was an agent of the United States, another another freebooter sent in to start shit and steal from Mexico.

And to be fair, like I said, the U.S.

government and multiple presidents, congresspeople, you name it, had reached out to Mexico to offer to buy Texas from them in cash like it was a used car.

Not to mention, it was very popular belief within the United States at the time, publicly, through the media, through the government statements, you name it.

that Texas was rightfully American.

So it really does make sense as to why the early Mexican government would think that Edwards was something of a proto-CIA agent sent in to start shit up.

So in response, the Mexican government ordered an expedition to go around to all the colonies and just kind of check out what's going on there for the first time.

Like, let's see what these fucking white people are up to.

They hadn't done this yet.

Hey, whiteys, y'all chill?

Like, y'all cool?

You're supposed to speak Spanish, right?

And then you just get greeted by a wave of the most horrific slurs ever seen in Texas up until that point.

Hey, hola, brother.

Como estás.

Yeah.

Uh-oh, that's where it is.

Igue.

All I can think of is fucking

El Mariachi.

It's fucking goddamn.

Texas has its positives, but yeah, this part of Texas culture is just like.

Yeah.

I lived in Texas for a long time, and I'm not going to say I hated it.

Like, I, of course, this is a long time ago.

Texas is very different now, at least from my understanding.

I had a positive experience living in Texas.

Question for the table.

Is Texan chili the one with the beans or without the beans?

Without.

No, it has beans.

It has beans or is it?

I thought Texas chili was always the one that was meat only because beans is normal basically everywhere else.

You can get me if I'm wrong, then I'll be wrong for the permanent record.

But I always thought Texas chili didn't have beans.

All right.

I stand corrected.

Texas chili traditions dictate no beans or tomatoes.

So

it's very similar to pozzoli.

It's amazing stuff.

I won't derail it.

It's good to put on top of a hot dog, but that's the Detroiter in me coming out.

Well, I mean, I'm a fucking, come on, man.

I saw all sorts of mishmash shit for me.

I love throwing making chili and putting it on rice, which some places in the southwest do that.

Other places are like, that's like, I don't know, that's like putting ketchup on a fucking ice cream sundae.

Like, you know,

so.

Well, if they're not putting it on rice,

what do they eat it with?

Just the chili.

Do you eat the chili like a stew?

Sometimes you have bread, cornbread,

tortillas, dried, like tortilla.

Because like tortilla chips, I mean, it really kind of comes just with like dried tortilla crackers shit, but you know, there's all sorts of bread-adjacent stuff in that food that you can use to do it.

It's good.

I like food in Texas is slapping

Texan barbecues.

Mexican food is soft.

Yeah, exactly.

And Tex-Mex, when it's done by Tex-Mex, people can be fucking amazing.

It's good.

Yeah.

I mean, we have argued about this on the show for years, but Nick and I and some other co-hosts of mine have argued that Mexican food in Texas is better than in California.

Okay.

And that was something that I think was the closest Nick ever came to actually throwing down with me about.

I mean, it's obviously like

you can get some Taco Bell adjacent shit, but like you can get really good stuff.

But also like, I don't know, man.

Same thing with Arizona.

Like, I love Sonoran food.

And like, Arizona is basically next to Sonora.

So like you get a lot of it there.

You know, you get a lot of from Mexico, especially like Serenia food.

Like you get a lot of stuff from Baja California.

I don't know.

It's great.

It's great everywhere.

It's different everywhere.

You gotta actually, but you gotta go to the place where it basically looks like somebody fucking cut a hole in a school and they're selling tacos out of it.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

I used to buy empanadas and breakfast tacos from someone's balcony.

I

told me about this the other day, and it was the best I've ever had.

I invite all of our fans from the southwestern states to just argue amongst themselves in the comments.

I'm going to leave you with one thing really quickly, and then I'm going to start coughing and be quiet because I'm sick.

One time when I first got back from Honduras, I lived there for six months.

I was deployed there.

I learned Spanish, and I learned it pretty well because fucking, I already speak French.

And there were some Puerto Rican ladies at Fort Richardson, Alaska, in like one of the post buildings, and they had like a little coffee shop kiosk and they sold empanadas.

And I asked them, I, you know, I said to them, obviously in English, in uniform, looking like me, red hair, pale as fuck, El Blanqui Tito.

And I was like, could I get my, I know the guys in my office have never had empanadas before.

A lot of them haven't.

Could I get like, I don't know, like 20 of them?

And she's like, yeah, because normally they tell them like one or two to ten.

I was like, if that's cool, like, I don't want to take all your stuff.

And they're like, no, it's fine.

And then the girl told us to the other one at the spin.

She's like, just give them the, give them the really small ones.

Like, that'll be fine.

And then I was like, I basically said in Spanish, like, it's not a problem either way.

I don't mind paying more.

And she looked at me just dead, which is like, que ver cuenza, like, what shame

i was like i said to her spanner like don't worry no one would ever assume i speak spanish

unless you lived in argentina or something or quite frankly in central america there's white as fuck people you meet them there you know most of them are mennonites but it exists previous to this the mexican government had passed what could be considered slavery reform rather than abolishing it outright love reforms love a reform of all the institutions that don't need reform

Unless you consider abolishment a kind of reform.

It allowed slaves to be in the colonies, but it ordered to be shifted away from American chattel slavery.

By that, I mean slaves could only be on a contractual basis for six months at a time.

And by the end of it, they had to be released rather than a lifetime of bondage and then that status being passed down to their children, like the American model.

No slaves could be bought or sold within Mexico.

And while children could be slaves, they fell under the same rule of six months only or to their 14th birthday.

Colonies swore up and down that they were following this law, but when that expedition went to check on colonies, they discovered not a single fucking one of them were following that.

They just had tons of slaves.

The settlers had imported American chattel slavery and simply lied about it.

Furthermore, the expedition found that nobody was speaking Spanish, none of them were Catholic, and only a small fraction of the settlers were even there legally at all.

So by 1829, Mexico abolished slavery, which panicked Austin.

He was worried that once word got out, the columnists would revolt.

So Austin went to the government of the Texas territory and pleaded his case that slavery was the only thing keeping the Texan economy going.

And I should point out here, he was not wrong.

The Texan territorial government and the Mexican government had allowed the economy to be completely slavery driven and reaped massive benefits from it for years at this point.

The governor agreed and turned to explain to the Mexican president, Anastasio Bustamante, who you might remember from our Pastry War episode, that, like, hey, you gotta give us something.

If you take away slaves, we're fucked.

So, Bustamante backpedaled, banning slavery in Mexico, everywhere other than Texas, who would get a one-year reprieve to give them a chance to figure out something else to recoup their losses and whatever.

You can almost certainly guess where this is going.

Not well.

I mean, slavers are famous for, when given a timeline to come up with a new economic model, they are famous for just abandoning slavery, right?

Not simply coming up with a new way to do slavery, like buying spice or like fake weed at the gas station.

They, oh no, they banned the last chemical compound.

This is a new one.

It's perfectly legal.

That's effectively what the slavers in Texas did.

They dialed the evil up to 11.

They forced their slaves to sign a lifelong contract of indentured servitude, and indentured servitude was technically legal in Mexico.

The contracts include a fake astronomical amount of debt the slaves owed to their slave master and listed daily wages so small it would never be able to be mathematically paid back over the course of the entire lifetime.

There's also a clause that the debt was inherited, meaning chattel slavery through indentured servitude.

Yep.

Also, your child, when put in chains upon birth because you can't pay back your debt, cannot begin accruing money towards the debt until they're 18.

That way, when Mexican inspectors came around to see if settlers are following the rules, they'd be like, no, sir, that's not my slave.

He's legally an employee.

Let me show you my books.

Yeah.

Just like nowadays, like, no, I don't need, I don't need to give them benefits.

That person's not an employee.

They're an independent contractor.

This system, while unspeakably evil, was a boon to the settlers and the territorial government, who could point to the settlements as the main economic drivers for the entire territory, which were now also following the law.

But this only pissed off Bustamante further.

He saw immediately what they were doing because, like, indentured servitude for life in Mexico was not a thing.

Yeah.

But it was not technically illegal.

It was solidly in the gray.

Yeah, so they consulted like, you know, a self-taught Texan lawyer.

The most evil man to ever walk the earth.

I'm just your simple Texan slavery attorney.

Oh, God, the self-taught Texan slavery attorney is just like such a deeply evil concept.

It's like, well, we can't own them, but we can own their debt,

which we have also invented.

That guy today just works for something called like the Freedom Research Institute.

Yeah.

Or McKinsey.

Yeah.

And it's like, oh, how can we leverage like, oh, God, it's Texan McKinsey.

It's Texan Pete Budigej.

Yeah.

But it's like, I, because growing up in Ireland, Ireland doesn't have like a credit score system.

It's one of the like handful of countries that doesn't.

And it's like when I moved to the UK and had to contend with, oh, I suddenly have a credit score that I have to maintain, but also build.

Maintain through constant, unrelenting debt.

Yeah.

And it's like, you know, in Ireland, you don't, most people don't have credit cards.

Like, it's just like, you just pay with what you have.

And like, if you have to get a mortgage, you have to like have the sufficient money and sufficient money coming in to like pay the deposit, but also make the payments.

But it's like beating in the UK and like seeing how much debt people go into is insane.

Like the amount of people who like just buy anything on Clarina, and it's like

that is something that's so strange, even as an American, that's weird to me that like everything in the UK is debt-based.

We're like, obviously, the U.S., we have mortgages, car payments, student loans, like everybody is entrapped by these things, but like you're not like financing like a roasted chicken.

Like I have a big holiday plan for next year and it's going to be my first time ever in Asia.

But I was having a conversation with someone and it was like talking about like, oh, you know, I'm putting money away, you know, each month so I could like, you know, have it all paid for when I go and have cash to spend and everything.

And he was just like, why don't you just pay for it on your credit card?

And I was like, One, I don't own a credit card.

And two, are you fucking insane?

I've never owned a credit card.

And it's like, when I was young, I remember I started my first bank account when I was 17 because I had to enlist in the army.

Um, and they wanted to give me a credit and a debit card.

Yep.

And that was like the one thing my mom told me because we grew up very, very poor.

And she grew up like bouncing from one credit card to another to try to make so we could survive.

And she's like, never own a credit card.

And I still, I'm 37.

And I, I mean, yeah, I also don't live in the United States anymore.

And it's not so much of a thing here either, but I've never owned one.

Small victories.

I find it like absolutely baffling.

Like him just saying, is like, oh, why don't you just pay for it on credit card?

And it's like someone flipped a switch in my mind.

I realized, like, oh, all the people that like I know that are like going on holidays or like doing XYZ, it's like they're paying for it all on credit and accruing massive amounts of debt and just making the monthly minimum payments.

I'm like, which will never pay them off by design.

I would just prefer not to do that stuff and not be in debt.

Yep.

Yep.

The evil Texan slavery attorney is like, what if the whole country was ran by Klarna?

What if we turn the entire state into Klarna and we also use the people as currency?

Yeah, pretty much.

So Boostamonte gets pissed.

He comes up with new ways to try to discourage settlement to Texas and to effectively hurt their financial base, which is admittedly kind of like shooting yourself in the foot to spite your other foot.

when he could have just used the Mexican government to get rid of this.

But also, it's assuming as well, like the people who are like settling there, like you said before, they had money, but also were like taking on debt to like set up these.

So

it's just a circle of people owing money.

The people at the very bottom are people who are essentially slaves who own, who owe money to the plantation owners, who then owe money to whoever set up the community, who then owes money to whoever gave them the money to move there.

And all of them are running from debts in the southern United States.

Yeah.

So Bustamante slashes all the benefits that were given to the original settlers.

Like you have to pay taxes now.

You don't get cheap land anymore, trying to slow down immigration.

So the Americans now stopped trying to apply for land licenses.

They just poured over the border illegally, bringing their not-slave slaves.

Americans pouring into Mexico illegally?

Yeah, that is the basis of the Texan Revolution.

You laugh, but that's also a thing that's happening now where people are getting told to go back to America because they're like, damn, Mexico rules and it's cheaper in America and healthcare is affordable.

The Mexicans are like, you don't have legal status here.

Bye.

My personal favorite is like Vietnam War veterans going to Vietnam to live off of their pension.

But when Booz de Monte put tariffs in place between specifically Texas and the United States, he just created a whole network of smuggling.

By the 1830s, tens of thousands of Americans had illegally immigrated into Texas.

And even their slaves that they brought with them outnumbered the original Tejano population in the state.

This massive population of settlers treated the Tejano population like they were outsiders and second-class citizens, despite the fact that they were the actual citizens in the situation.

They ignored the Mexican government officials who tried to tell them what to do, seeing them as not racially being allowed to be their superior.

And this is something that Mexican civil servants constantly complained about.

was like, these people will never see us as their superiors, regardless of our position.

Like, Like, they're all insanely racist.

Like, the letters going from the Mexican government to the territory of Texas government are hilarious.

They're like so confused about what these people believe in.

They're all like uncouth frontiersmen.

They're like, they're saying that I'm subordinate.

Like, this guy hasn't bathed in months.

Once again, what does this remind us of?

Yeah, it's just the boer shit all over again.

Yeah.

It's yee-haw boer shit instead of silent Protestant contemplation boers.

Yeah, and then eventually we would come to have to suffer through the Texan boar, aka Elon Musk.

Yeah, that's why he moved to Texas.

You're basically just saying is that at a certain point, white settler colonialists, if your ass gets unwashed enough, you become a boar.

Yeah.

Like boar is kind of like, it's like a superlative state of being nasty.

Well, if you're, you also have to learn Dutch.

That's

you're not really doing yourself a lot of favors with countering my argument that it's a superlative state of being nasty when when you talk about having a lot of nasty stuff.

This is the paradox of the ass carapace is that, like, you develop a fine enough crust that's thick enough, it's protective from, you know, outside assault, but it unfortunately seeps into your psyche as well and makes you spiritually bore.

I think the difference between the two ass carapaces, right, is like the Boer Askerapis is made out of Boer Vurst.

It's made out of like Bill Tong.

Like Bill Tong, whereas the Texan Ask carapace is like mesquite barbecue and shit.

It's made out of chili with no beans in it.

Yeah, exactly.

You have to get a good look at the as carapace to be able to tell what kind of settler they are.

You don't want that much fiber because if you do have fiber,

you might literally burst your ass carapus from the inside.

You don't want that.

However, as a result of the Mexican government investigation into the colonies, one thing was recommended in order to control them.

Establish military garrisons near many of the settlements.

to police them.

These garrisons would be a show of force from the government, as well as to collect taxes and customs the settlers are purposely avoiding.

Between 1828 and 1830, several of these garrisons were built around the settlement areas and ports, with the garrison commander of each fort being in charge of law and order in a specific region.

And as you can imagine, the quality of these commanders varied wildly.

Some were completely in with the settlers because the settlers would bribe them.

Others just took part in the illegal smuggling because it was very lucrative.

And then there were others, like Juan Davis Bradbird of Galveston Bay Fort, who was absolutely a notorious hardass.

He was like, no, you will follow the law.

Which is interesting, because as you may have picked up from his surname, Bradburn, he was not a Tejano.

He was not born and raised in Mexico.

He was from the United States.

He had built a massive fortune in the slave trade before joining the expedition that would eventually lead to the Battle of Medina.

He was one of the few that survived.

And despite that, he joined Mexico's War of Independence against Spain, befriended the very brief Mexican Emperor Augustine I,

and was commissioned an officer in the Mexican army.

He was now commanding a Mexican fort against his fellow Americans, but he demanded they follow the law, and he raided multiple colonies and freed slaves by force whenever he found them.

He was what the settlers were supposed to be.

But Bradbird was also hilariously corrupt.

But in ways that would kind of support his mission, he used government resources to build a kiln in his fort to crank out bricks, at which point he would sell them to settlers at a cut rate, but would only sell them to settlers if they built their house near his fort.

That way they'd be easier to control.

And of course, he pocketed all the profits of the brick sales.

Kingshit.

Bradburn also clashed with local government.

The local government in Texas knew where their bank accounts were filled from, and that was from the settling slavers.

They knew that granting illegal land grants and permits to illegal settlers was good for them and good for the economy.

So Bradburn arrested several government workers for breaking the law on these land permits, insisting that his authority as a representative from the Mexican federal government was greater than theirs in the territory of Texas.

However, each time he did that, the federal government would release them.

So it ended up being like this constant tug of war over who was actually in charge.

This continued between the two sides till 1832, when Bradbury received a letter listing 10 settlers living in the town of Anahoc who were openly agitating for Texas to become an independent state.

This is something that Bradburn long suspected that was happening in colonial circles, so he wasn't surprised.

Then a group of his soldiers was accused of assaulting a woman in the same town.

A lot of conflicting stories on this one.

It seems to be something did happen.

And then that story, you know, kind of got the colonial game of telephone.

It got worse with each retelling.

Yeah.

So it turned into another form of tension between the two sides.

When the Texans demanded that the soldiers be turned over to them for justice, Bradburn refused.

Because interestingly enough, as the story goes, in the book, The Texian Iliad, which is quite a good read when it comes specifically to the military history of the revolution and not so much to political aspect of it, according to the book, this assault happened and a Texan watched it happen and didn't intervene.

So they lynched that guy

for not intervening.

And they insisted.

that the soldiers be turned over for the same justice.

So of course, Bradburn refused.

The Texans began forming a militia and openly threatening Bradburn's life.

And remember, they already don't like this guy.

Forming a militia at this point was no longer legal like it once had been.

There was one allowed militia that was under the command of Austin per the Mexican government.

And individual settlements cannot just pop up bands of armed white dudes.

But they did anyway.

So Bradburn sent in a patrol to arrest its leader, Patrick Jack.

And He was arrested, but that only pissed the Texans off more.

They in turn sent their militia to begin taking up positions inside the town of Anahok and demanding the release of Jack.

When Bradburn sent in dragoons to see what was going on, the militiamen captured them because he sent the dragoons in with the explicit word of like, do not kick off anything.

Okay.

So they got surrounded by militiamen.

The dragoons like, well, Captain said not to cave in these dudes' head with my sword, so I guess we're captured.

So, of course, now the militia is like, you give us our guy back, we'll give you back your guy.

Bradbury decided to cut this deal and release his prisoners if they released theirs and the armed men most importantly had to put their fucking guns down and go home everyone seemingly agreed to this however the militia was not united it was a militia after all so when some militiamen left annahawk some stayed bradburn saw this as a violation of their bargain and threatened to open fire on them the militiamen in turn saw that as a violation of their bargain so They both started shooting at each other.

This is a short firefight.

A couple people died on both sides.

But let's put it in that for a second because to better understand what's happening next, you do need to understand what's happening to Mexico at large here.

Right before all this kicked off, Mexico itself erupted into one of many civil wars.

Valentin Gomez Ferraz, a reformer in the Federalist sense of the way, enacted what was known as the Plan of Veracruz in January 1832.

This was a plan for the Federalists' military faction to kind of strong-arm the centralist Bustamante to allow Federalists into cabinet.

However, it spiraled wildly out of control and just turned into an outright war to topple Bustamante altogether.

Several garrisons of the Mexican army declared their allegiance to one side or the other.

And for the sake of our immediate story, Bradburn was a centralist, which makes sense when you see that he was loyal to the former emperor.

So Mexico is once again destabilized.

Its military is being ripped apart by factions.

And now the Texans are starting shit in their settlements.

After this first so-called Battle of Anahoc, the Texans loudly proclaimed themselves to be on the side of the Federalists because in a federal republic, Texas would be allowed to self-rule, hypothetically,

whose military efforts were commanded by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, who obviously become important here in a little while.

But it's important to remember here at the very beginning, They're on the same side, though Santa Ana was the fan of any side that allowed him to come up on top.

This will happen like a dozen times.

Santa Ana is so interesting to me because he was president in a very fluid way so many times that historians cannot agree on how many times Santa Ana was actually president.

Yep.

It's fucking incredible.

I tried to thread the needle on this for the episode about the Pastry War and it was like, it's so unbelievably confusing.

Yeah.

Like sometimes he was president, but we'll get to that as well.

Yeah.

He wanted to be president, but not actually act as president.

He wanted the title, but not to govern.

And this happened a lot.

So an order goes out from the Texans, a call to arms to gather more militiamen, more guns, and the several cannons that the Mexican government had given them to better fight the natives.

Bradburn in turn called for reinforcements from the rest of the centralist faction military.

However, the other centralist military commanders in the region point out to Bradburn, like, look, We have enough fucking problems right now.

We need to stop Texas from blowing up and really getting involved.

And these guys really don't seem political.

They mostly seem to hate you personally.

Yeah.

So resign your command and everybody will calm down just a little bit.

So Bradburn agreed, but the first officer told to replace him just refused to take it.

He's like, I don't want nothing to do with that shit.

The second man, a colonel named Jose de la Pedras, took command and immediately agreed to the deal, released all of his prisoners without charge.

Though he was only in command a few days before his own garrison rose up against him and declared their loyalty to Santa Ana and the Federalist cause.

Meanwhile, the coup eventually worked in Mexico.

An interim president, Gomez Pedraza, was selected to keep the seat warm until elections, which saw Frayeas elected president with Santa Ana as vice president.

Though I should point out here that even though the rebellion to replace Bustamante was over, there were several other rebellions going on throughout Mexico at the time.

Yes.

But in the process of all of that happening, the Mexican army was shattered by several rebellions.

They had withdrawn completely from eastern Texas, leaving the settlers as the only real force in the region.

And for the Texans, this was great.

They saw this as the iron fists of the centralists of Bustamantes type people, leaving them alone.

They've been defeated.

And now this is what Federalist Texas would look like as part of the Republic of Mexico.

They'd be left alone to govern themselves.

They did believe that a Federalist Republic of Mexico under Santa Ana and Ferraris would give them more rights, namely more representation in government, as Texas to be a state.

And the Texans soon held a political convention to outline their real grievances to the new government.

One of the men present was the legendary, my personal favorite, this entire story in the Texan side of things, Sam Houston.

Now, Sam Houston is a guy that had a very strange life before he washed up in Texas.

He was born in Virginia.

He hated work, hated school, and refused to do either one.

He ran away from home as a teenager and was adopted by the local band of Cherokees for several years.

Oh, hell yeah.

He only left his pretty much officially adopted family to fight in the War of 1812.

After that, he re-entered American society.

He apprenticed to be a lawyer and ran unopposed to be a Texas state representative.

I love the idea of you running off and being able to convince the local band of Cherokees to adopt the craziest of crazy white boys.

Like, this is what we lost.

This is what they took from us.

This is what Texas took from us.

Basically, which we took from ourselves, basically, by fucking doing all this shit to horrible shit to Native Americans because they were willing to adopt Crazy White Boy.

Like, yes, you can, we'll, we'll.

Yeah, sure.

Welcome in, buddy.

Welcome in, buddy.

The tents have

walls made of animal hides and cloth, so when you kick and punch them, it doesn't put a hole in them like it was drywall.

His tribal name was Crazy White Boy.

Yeah.

And in 1827, he became governor of Tennessee.

He was an Andrew Jackson-aligned political operative, and he had a bright future in politics.

That was until he shot a guy in a duel, got a divorce, and resigned as governor.

After this, he left from that high position to just go rejoin his Cherokee family, where once there, he acted as effectively an advocate as the white guy in the tribe to go talk to the U.S.

and be like, you need to leave them alone.

He was a strong advocate for Native rights, at least in his period of life.

But when he was accused of like a weird vote buying scheme and official corruption, instead of submitting himself for an official investigation, he simply beat the congressman who accused him with a cane half to death.

Hell yeah, I can get behind this.

Then he packed his shit and moved to Texas in 1832.

Like after all the shit's already blowing up, when Sam Houston shows up, several people have already been shot.

There's multiple civil wars going on.

He's like,

God's country.

How can I make this worse?

Houston and the others penned a Texas state constitution and formally requested the government allow Texas to become a federal state within Mexico and send a delegation to Mexico City to meet with Santa Ana, who had become president in 1833, with Farias now as his vice president this time around.

Though this period of time, Santa Ana's rule is known as the absentee president, because again, he wanted the title of president, but didn't want to govern.

He left everything to his vice president, who was very busy pissing off virtually every conservative in Mexico by taxing the shit out of the Catholic Church.

He attempted to reform them, ban mandatory tithing, ban official religion.

He was kind of doing French Revolution shit, which was very, very unpopular.

The Texan delegation was led by an unelected but undisputed leader in the form of John Austin.

Santa Ana was not exactly the most welcoming man to him and blew Austin off.

So Austin got pissed and penned a letter asking the governor of the Texan territory to simply declare it a state on its own.

Not an independent state, but a federal state, which is not how anything works.

But the letter was intercepted.

Santa Ana saw this quite rightly as treason and had Austin arrested.

In the meantime, the government was wildly unpopular owing to Farias attempting to find any way to generate income.

There were concertive rebellions throughout the country against him, and even though he was technically only vice president, he was blamed for virtually everything.

Following this, a law was passed ordering the arrest of dozens of Mexican politicians, accusing them of being, quote, unpatriotic.

Farias, again, gets all the blame for this, but historians generally agree that it was Santa Ana that ordered this.

Santa Ana would often do that, where he would come up with a really unpopular plan, spitball it to Farius, knowing he would have to be the one that writes it down.

And then when it all blew up at his face, everybody would point at Farius and say that he fucked up.

And Santa Ana's like, well, he shouldn't have done that.

I mean, it's a great plan.

It worked for him.

This caused conservative elements that were not yet in open rebellion against the government to plan to overthrow Farius.

And then Santa Ana joined them.

He was always doing this, to be honest with you.

Yeah, he did this like a dozen times.

This is not even the only time he do this during this series.

So just so you can better chart this in your mind.

Santa Ana was a federalist rebel who helped overthrow the government until conservatives rebelled against him as federalist president, at which point he abandoned the government and joined the conservative rebellion.

The federalists collapsed very quickly.

Santa Ana was a federalist rebel himself and now a conservative rebel, who then, once again, kind of became president of a now centralist government again.

Maybe he just really likes rebellions.

That's where his bag is.

It seems to be the only thing he was truly good at was being part of the rebellion.

He dissolved virtually every department of government and replaced anyone he could with loyalists.

However, for now, the Mexican Constitution would remain in place, at least for a little while, but consider it mortally wounded at this point.

He ordered all militias in Mexico to disband, disarm, and the total expulsion of every illegal settler in Texas.

Santa Ana is just like spiritually bisexual.

What?

It doesn't even make sense.

Play both sides, play all sides, never lose.

Constantly change your mind, be really annoying.

Yeah,

charge his phone, eat hot chip and live.

Yeah, exactly.

If only they had some means of, you know, plugging in speakers and reproducing sound back in those days, you would not give this man the ox chord.

So at this point, I remember he had jailed Austin, who was now out of prison by 1835.

But Santa Ana actually did do a lot of things that Austin and the other Texans asked for.

Now, at this point, Texas is officially known as Cojia Yateas.

So this is now split into three departments, San Antonio, Nagodoches, and Brezos.

All three of these new Texas departments would have more elected representation.

English should be allowed as an official language.

Nobody was forced to be Catholic anymore.

And so Texas isn't technically a unified body state within Mexico, but virtually all of their demands are met, right?

But for many Texans, this is simply too little, too late.

Austin, released from prison, had changed his politics from being a die-hard on Mexico side guy to simply saying there's no way forward other than independence for the Texan people.

And a lot of Texan leaders were now agreeing with him, including ones that had been elevated to legitimate power by Santa Ana's departmental reforms.

But this caused friction in Mexico City as Santa Ana was...

retaining aspects of federalism, namely in the form of Texas.

Conservatives who put him back in power demanded a return to Bustamanteist centralism, which Santa Ana simply shrugged and said, yeah, fine.

He's like, yeah, fuck it.

I'm actually not attached to any of these political ideologies, I promise.

Do I get to be president?

Is there any kind of revolution or rebellion on the horizon that I can be involved in?

You betcha.

So he does this.

This causes a federalist uprising in several parts of Mexico, which Santa Ana and his army brutally crush.

Texas' governor, Augustin Viesca, refused to follow Santa Ana's order to dismiss the state government and instead ordered a meeting of the territory's political leaders in San Antonio.

However, Viesca himself was arrested before he could make it there, and Santa Ana appointed a new governor that nobody recognized.

So we have like a Texas anti-pope situation.

This left Texas itself unsure of what to do next.

Not everyone there wanted to join the growing uprising against Santa Ana.

However, Santa Ana fucked up.

Viesca was not in favor of taking up arms.

For example, prior to his arrest, multiple militias popped up and he told them all, cut that shit out.

Like he was on the side of a peaceful resolution to this and now he was in prison.

But now with Vaesca gone, that left very agitated Texans as the loudest voice in the room.

Whether they had been in favor of or not, they were certainly not in favor of keeping things the way they were.

There's more to this as well.

Every man gathering in San Antonio also knew what had happened in other parts of Mexico who had disobeyed Santa Ana.

For example, in the state of Zacatecas, the Mexican government effectively allowed soldiers to have like a two-day-long purge as a reward for their conduct in the crushing the rebellion.

So like Texans were like, that's going to fucking happen here if we don't fight them.

So that's certainly on their minds when they gather to talk about what to do next.

And two of the men present were Juan Seguin and William Travis.

Seguin was probably the most interesting of all of them.

Unlike almost any other leader in the Texan inner circle, he was Tejano.

He had worked with the Spanish administration.

And Travis was like a lot of other settler leaders, a lawyer from the southern U.S.

who ran away from debts.

Eventually, he's decided to hold a referendum over what exactly what to do.

Return to Mexican federalism, submit to Santa Ana centralism, break away entirely, some secret fourth option.

And this became known as the consultation.

But this is not a general referendum, of course.

There's no popular suffrage in Texas.

It would be voted on by delegates, and they'd have to vote for those delegates first in the various parts of Texas with the consultation scheduled to begin October 15th.

Many people in Texas are worried that Santa Ana would take this as a sign of open rebellion, which is exactly what he did.

And we should pause here and point out that the U.S.

was not being very quiet on this entire situation either.

Both members of the government and the media were openly calling for Texan independence at this point.

They were painting Santa Ana as some kind of tyrant, which admittedly he was.

He was a mass murderer at this point.

And Santa Ana was worried eventually that the U.S.

might militarily get involved and support the Texans, which would then mean Mexico is dragged into open war with the United States, which he knew he was not going to win.

Yeah.

At least for now.

In about 20 years, he would change his mind on that, but we'll get there.

So he believed that I need to get in there and end this shit before the U.S.

gets involved.

So he ordered the military commander of San Antonio, Colonel Antonio Ugachea, to disarm the Texans.

And one thing that Ugachea did was order the Texans to hand over their heavy weapons, namely a single cannon in the town of Gonzalez.

The cannon had previously been given to the local militias a few years before to help them defend the town from native raids.

And Ugachea's men walked in the town, demanded the cannon, and then got the shit kicked out of them.

So he ordered 100 dragoons to advance on Gonzalez in September and take that fucking cannon back.

The people in the town mustered a massive defensive force of 18 guys.

Now, these 18 men did do one very smart thing, which is immediately take the ferry that Ugache was going to need to cross into the town and keep it on their side of the river because the Guadalupe River is quite large.

You can't just ford that shit.

Forcing the Mexican forces to be stuck on the other side.

And inside the town, the men weren't like juicing themselves up for a fight.

This is more of a pride thing.

Ugache was there for the cannon, so we'll simply not give it to them.

They disassembled it and buried it.

That is the funniest fucking option they could have taken.

Oh my God.

Then writers from Gonzales went in every direction urging local militias to come out and help them.

Several militias answered the call.

However, one militia accompanied coming from Columbia, Texas, couldn't come to an agreement over who was in command.

and said it would be commanded by committee, with everyone being forced to vote on every decision.

According to the book Texian Iliad, this is mostly the fault of a man named Robert Coleman, who refused to submit his authority to anyone else, demanding the fact that, quote, we are all captains.

So fucking spiritual Boomhauer is what you're.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Spiritual Dale.

This is spiritual Dale.

Definitely not Boomhauer.

I don't believe that any one man should be captain.

Meanwhile, other militias, like they had to elect their leadership, but it was generally agreed upon who would be their leadership anyway.

The Mexicans, who were trying to find another way to get the canon without an open battle, sent a mediator to the town of Gonzalez.

A fellow Texan named best name alert of the entire series right here.

Dr.

Lancelot Smithers.

No,

shut the fuck up.

Fuck.

Yes.

Texan Dr.

Lancelot Smithers.

Smithers met with a Texan man named Captain Matthew Old Paint Caldwell, who promised if he returned the next day with the Mexican commander, they'd hash everything out and settle this like gentleman.

Small problem here, though, this will become a trend throughout the next three episodes, is that just because one militia captain said something I didn't mean the other militia captains were going to listen to him.

Another captain, John Henry Moore, called a council of war to plan an attack on the Mexicans, with Moore writing, quote, it would not do to bear their own expense, to ride the distance they had, to meet the enemy and return home without a fight.

They prepared their weapons, dug up the cannon, put it back together, and began to scrounge up scrap metal to fire out of it because they didn't have any cannonballs.

And on October 1st, the Texans went on the march with 150 men.

On the night of the 2nd, the Texans crossed into the Mexican camp under the cover of darkness, but their stealth attack was ruined by two things.

A barking dog and some guy who saw something in the darkness and took a shot at it.

In the confusion that followed, both sides blindly fired at each other in the dark while hitting nobody.

The only casualty was a Texas militiaman who was thrown from his horse, landed face first, and broke his nose.

So that's how the Texas Revolution begins.

Not with the thundering of a musket volley, but a very scared, confused man breaking his face out of rock.

Oh, fuck!

Ow!

Ow!

They got Dale!

Painting the big number three on the side of my horse.

I remember Dale's face.

Somebody called Boom Hauer.

Both sides took cover as the morning broke, and brought with it a fog that made it so neither side could really see the other.

The commanders tried to figure out what to do next because it's important to point out here that the Mexican captain was not sent there with the idea of like assaulting the town.

Yeah.

Texans began raiding a local watermelon patch for food because they were hungry.

At seeing this, the Mexicans ordered a mounted assault using dragoons armed with sabers and lances.

But the Texans quickly withdrew behind a nearby tree line and opened fire, wounding a Mexican cavalryman and forcing them back.

Then out of nowhere, Dr.

Lancelot Smithers reappears in the middle of everyone screaming at them to stop shooting.

So the Texans arrested him.

They eventually release him to act as another parlay between the two sides.

And the Mexican commander sits down with the Texan commander.

The Mexican commander's orders are very simple.

I'm only here for the cannon.

Give me the cannon.

I'm fucking leaving.

I don't give a shit about your muskets.

The Texans are like, we're not giving you the fucking cannon.

We need this to defend ourselves from natives and also you now.

You shot at us.

And the Mexican commander's like, well, you shot at me first.

And eventually the two sides literally storm away from each other because they're about to come to blows.

But the next morning, the Texan militiamen draw up a banner, hang it above their cannon, which you've certainly seen that says simply, come and take it.

Then they fired the cannon at the Mexicans, spitting nothing but scrap metal and nails.

And this was enough to convince the Mexican captain, I have been outplayed.

They're shooting the cannon at me now.

I gotta go.

My orders were explicitly not to set this shit off.

It is very clearly set off.

I'm going home.

Dale's over there.

He's got a fork in the forehead.

And that is how the Battle of Gonzales ended.

Known in the Texian Iliad as the Lexington of Texas.

The Yeehaw heard around the world.

It was not exactly a massive success or a victory, but it was a victory.

And the come and take it banner lives in infamy.

Yeah.

Many of the Texans there that day had been on the fence about a revolution, but now there was no doubt.

There was no backing down from Santa Anna at this point.

We just fired a bucket load of nails at his homie.

We cannot turn back.

Exactly.

Things might have been able to be brought down to a cooler temperature, but one of us ran after Santa Ana with a sock full of quarters, and now we all have to come together.

God damn it, Tyler.

Get down from that fucking cannon.

For Santa Ana, there was no question that the Texans were now in open revolt.

And soon afterward, the glorious victory of the Battle of Gonzales spread far and wide, both within Texas and the United States.

And soon thousands of volunteers were flooding both within and over the border to offer their services.

The Texas Revolution had officially begun.

And that's where we'll pick up next time.

Yay!

Y'all, all y'all.

All y'all are fucking crazy.

All y'all are off the

I'm going to show up to the next recording dressed like JB Moni.

It's important to point out here that just so you can better envision how these militias look, we'll talk about this a bit more later, but like there's frontiersmen looking the most frontiers like you've ever seen in buckskins and coon hats.

There's dudes in like three-piece suits and top hats like plantation owners.

There's Tahanos dressed exactly like the Mexicans to the point that they have to wear a little armband so people can tell the difference.

It's wild out there, man.

I am so excited for the next three parts.

I'll come for the next one, probably having to go to the doctor and get put on promethazine so I will get to be chopped and screwed.

Nate, sipping on that traditional Texan beverage of lean.

Yeah, I'm going to take promethazine cough syrup, that Swiss soda that's made out of fucking Milkway and a little Ricula throat drop and put it together, shake it up.

Got my purple, actually not purple drink.

I'll be like, brown drink.

Oh,

sip it on that Sasissa sewage.

The Tex-Mex drank where you put the promethazine in and then you just put a scoop of smooth chili over it.

You're hot.

Yeah, man.

That's just called Texan cough syrup.

It's that real Texas tea right there, yeah.

So, boys, we're at the end of the Texas Revolution Part 1.

How do y'all feel?

I'm so excited for the rest.

Yeah, it's a good one.

I had a lot of fun.

I don't think Tom did sitting on the other side of my table watching me giggle as I wrote it.

It was so funny.

Like, I was like working on something and you would just be typing away and then you'd like start giggling and then you'd like start typing again and then stop and start laughing.

And I knew I couldn't tell you because I had to save it.

But that is the Texas Revolution Part 1.

Three more parts to go.

Boys, you host other podcasts.

Plug those other podcasts.

What a hell of a way to dad.

Trash Shucher, Kill James Bond, No Gods, No Mayors.

I am involved with them in some capacity, some way, and they have both free feeds and bonus feeds if you like them.

So check those out, please.

Beneath Skin, show up with the history of everything, told you the history of tattooing.

Books on beneath skin shop.com.

And keep an eye out for November when I have some new stuff coming out as well.

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That's the only way you can rap like UGK is drinking chili mixed with lean.

Yeah.

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Yeah, it's like if you wanted to have purple drink, but it was designed by the guy from Primus.

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And until next time, yeah!