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of Alonso de León. A frontiersman by birth and training, famed for a score of daring exploits as a border fighter, Alonso de León was well fitted for the task to which the needs of the time summoned him. Under orders from Mexico, in 1686, León set off from Monterey on the first of his expeditions in search of La Salle's colony, following the south bank of Río Grande to the Gulf of Mexico. Next year he reconnoitered the north bank. But not till his third expedition did he come in direct touch with the French peril. He was now governor of Coahuila, at Monclova. This time he encountered a tribe of Indians north of the Río Grande who were being ruled with all a chief's pomp by a Frenchman called by the Spaniards Jarri. It appears that Jarri was not one of La Salle's settlers, but an independent adventurer who had wandered thus early into southwestern Texas from the Illinois country or from Canada. He was promptly stripped of his feathers, of course, and sent to Mexico to be questioned by the Viceroy.

The officials were now thoroughly frightened. A new expedition was immediately sent out under León, who took with him Father Damián Massanet, a Franciscan friar, the Frenchman Jarri, one hundred soldiers, and seven hundred mules and

horses. León could at least promise the Indians a show of Spanish pomp and power. In March, 1689, León crossed the Río Grande and, bearing eastward, crossed the Nueces, Frío, San Antonio, and Guadalupe rivers. Late in April he came upon the site of La Salle's settlement. There stood five huts about a small wooden fort built of ship planking, with the date "1684" carved over the door. The ground was scattered with weapons, casks, broken furniture, and corpses. Among some Indians a few leagues away León found two of the colonists, one of whom had had a hand in La Salle's murder. He learned also that Tonty had erected a fort on a river inland, the Arkansas, or perhaps the Illinois. On the Colorado River León and Massanet had a conference with the chief of the Nabedache tribe, who had come from the Neches River to meet them. The chief promised to welcome missionaries at his village.

León returned to make a report in which piety and business sense are eloquently combined. "Certainly it is a pity," he admonished, “that people so rational, who plant crops and know that there is a God, should have no one to teach them the Gospel, especially when the province of Texas is so large and fertile and has so fine a climate."

A large and fertile country already menaced by the French did indeed call for missions. León was dispatched a fifth time with one hundred and ten soldiers to escort Massanet and his chosen helpers to the Nabedache towns of the Asinai (Texas) Indians, near the Neches River in eastern Texas. On the way they paused long enough for Father Massanet to set fire to La Salle's fort. As the Spaniards were approaching their objective from the Southwest, Tonty on a second journey to seek La Salle in Illinois he had heard sinister reports through the Indians reached the Red River and sent an Indian courier to the Nabedache chief to request permission to make a settlement in his town. On being told of León's proximity Tonty retreated. The fleur-de-lis receded before the banner of Castile. The Spanish flag was raised at the Nabedache village in May, 1690, before the eyes of the wondering natives, formal possession was taken and the mission of San Francisco was founded. The expedition now turned homeward, leaving three Franciscan friars and three soldiers to hold Spain's first outpost in Texas.

Another expedition, after Alonso de León's death in 1691, set out from Monclova under Domingo Terán, a former governor of Sinaloa and

Sonora, accompanied by Massanet to found more missions, on the Red River as well as the Neches. Terán returned without having accomplished anything, largely because of violent quarrels with Massanet, who opposed the planting of presidios beside the missions. Massanet remained with two friars and nine soldiers - the peppery padre protesting against the presence even of the nine. He soon learned that soldiers were sometimes needed. The Indians, roused by their leaders, turned against the missionaries and ordered them to depart. There was no force to resist the command. On October 25, 1693, Massanet applied the torch to the first Spanish mission in Texas, even as he had earlier fired La Salle's French fort, and fled. Four soldiers deserted to the Indians. One of them, José Urrutia, after leading a career as a great Indian chief, returned to civilization, and became commander at San Antonio, where his descendants still live and are prominent. The other five, with the three friars, after three months of weary and hungry marching, during forty days of which they were lost, at last entered Coahuila.

For the time being Texas was now abandoned by both contestants. But the French traders were only looking for a better opportunity and a more

advantageous spot to continue the conflict, which, on their side, was directed against England as well as Spain. They had learned that English fur traders from South Carolina had already penetrated to the Creeks and to other tribes east of the Mississippi and they feared that England would seize the mouth of the river. The Spaniards also were disturbed by the English. They had been driven, in 1686, out of Port Royal and northern Georgia. Now they were alarmed by English fur-trading expeditions into Alabama and by the discovery that the Indians of Mobile Bay had moved north to trade with the English of Carolina. Thus, while France prepared to carry out La Salle's plan to colonize the Gulf coast, Spain with jealous eye watched the movements of both England and France. It was a three-cornered struggle.

In 1697 the King of France, Louis XIV, commissioned Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, fighting trader, hero of the fur raids on Hudson Bay, and the most dashing military figure in New France, to found, on the Mexican Gulf, a colony to be named Louisiana. To forestall the French an expedition was immediately dispatched from Vera Cruz to Pensacola Bay, where in November, 1698, the post of San Carlos was erected and garrisoned. The

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