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Show CHAPTER XXVII. TEXAS CONTINUED. ROBERT CAVALIER, Sieur tie la Salle, led the first European im-migrants to Texas, landing near the entrance to Matagorda Bay, on the 18th of February, 1685. William Penn had founded Philadelphia three years before; the French were stretching their settlements from Canada ' down the western rivers, and the Spaniards were advancing slowly northward into New Mexico. A hundred and fifty years before, some survivors of the Pamphilo de Narvaez expedition had traversed Texas as captives among the Indians, but no title to the country could result therefrom. La Salle, as American history calls him, had discovered the mouth of the Mississippi, April 7th, 1682, and soon after took possession of all that region by proclamation and proces verbal, in the name of Louis XIV. He was on his return with four ships to make a settle-ment, when an error in his calculations brought him on the Texan coast. All his people were in ecstasies over the beauty and richness of the country, and a settlement was agreed upon at once. Soon after they moved over on a stream they called Les Vaches, which the Spaniards afterwards translated into La Vaca, both meaning " the cow- s." Hard work and imprudence in such a climate produced sickness ; care-lessness led to murders by the Indians; Beaujeu, commander of the fleet, sailed away with two of the vessels ; one of the other two was soon after wrecked, and the little colony got badly discouraged. By the law of nations this country, thinly occupied by wild Indians, now belonged to France; but in due time Spain took a different view of it, relying on previous Spanish explorations, never proved however, to the satisfaction of diplomats. Near the close of the sixteenth century Philip II., the gloomy tyrant of Spain, issued a royal order forbid-ding all foreigners to enter this territory under penalty of extermina-tion. Thus began a " border question," which, passing down suc-cessively from Spaniard to Mexican, and from French to English and American, lasted two centuries and a half, till settled by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, on the 2d of February, 1848. In this contro- |
