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| "Eagle Pass, Mexican Section, 1939" (Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration) |
The Norwegian bark, Arendal, a
three-masted 19th-century ship, sailed from Bordeaux to New Orleans
in the winter of 1850. Upon arrival in the polyglot city, the captain immediately
placed a newspaper notice stating he would not be responsible for debt that the
crew might incur.
It was January 21 when two French passengers, Adolphe Duclos and his sister Josephine, descended into the muddy streets. They drew no attention, but the Arendal’s cargo created a stir. Hundreds of bottles, casks, crates, baskets, and pipes of claret, kirsch, Saint-Julien, Saint-Emilion, Haut Sauterne, absinthe, Belle Creole champagne, Pauillac, La Rochelle brandy, and Mont Ferrand “ordinary red wine” did not sit for long on the docks.
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| Port of New Orleans ~1850 (German print) |
Overnight, the spirits and wines became available for sale in local shops. Not to mention olive oil, macaroni, vinegar, mustard, sardines, dried fruits, truffles, and other treasures from across the sea.
Josephine went off to find a room in a boarding house. She couldn’t wait to unpack her trunk stuffed with corsets and crinolines. Soon, she would marry and have a family.
Twenty-five year old Adolphe planned to become a merchant on the Texas-Mexico border. He spoke French and English fluently; possibly Spanish. In New Orleans, he met with cotton brokers, for the city handled more cotton than any port in the U.S. and cotton would be the centerpiece of his business.
Then he was on his way to Eagle Pass, Texas,
a windswept border town named for Mexican eagles (technically falcons called crested
caracaras) that swooped through the cottonwoods and willows along the Rio
Grande and its tributaries.
To get there, Adolphe traveled by boat along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, stopping in Galveston and Corpus Christi before debarking on a strategic barrier island, the port Brazos Santiago. Here, at the mouth of the Rio Grande, sandbars had recently been made navigable with flat-hulled steamboats.
Pushing northwest toward Eagle Pass, Adolphe might have canoed upriver, but it is likely that he went overland. The shallowness of the Rio Grande made it largely impassable by boat.
Adolphe was about to join a community that numbered close to 400. Its population had doubled two years earlier when the U.S. Army built nearby Fort Duncan, its stated purpose to fend off attacks by the Lipan Apache Tribe. The soldiers wielded frontier justice over runaway slaves, bandits, immigrants, smugglers, and anyone else who got in their way. The controversial Texas Rangers were welcome there, too.
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| "View of Fort Duncan, near Eagle Pass" (1852). Engraving commissioned by US Secretary of the Interior, 1857. (University of Texas at Austin) |
Within this zone of "Anglo" safety, Duclos set up shop and built his fortune over time. He purchased Arkansas- and Texas-grown cotton in San Antonio and brought it to Eagle Pass in convoys of mule-drawn wagons that stretched for miles. Eventually he acquired a cotton press, which enabled him to compress the cotton into standardized bales. Each bale weighed as much as 500 lbs. but transporting them—as opposed to loose ginned cotton—was far more efficient.
Next the cotton crossed the river to Piedras Negras, the Mexican sister town of Eagle Pass, before heading to Laredo and southeast to Matamoros, a boomtown on the Rio Grande.
While the route crosses flat, lowlands terrain, the wagons loaded with cotton and the muleteers who drove them were easy targets for thieves. Moving any kind of goods around Texas posed big risks.
During these long years of border wars, American entrepreneurs and Mexican government officials brutalized and exploited Mexican laborers. Violent retaliation ensued.
***
A long way from France, Duclos called himself
“Adolfo” and it stuck. His certificate of naturalization bears that name.
In 1872 he traveled to Washington, D.C. to testify before the U.S.-Mexican Claims Commission about a raid on Piedras Negras that occurred years earlier, in October 1855, when he was a fledgling entrepreneur in Eagle Pass.
This commission was created to adjudicate fast-multiplying claims of damage by Mexico against U.S. property owners and vice versa. In the case of Pedro Tauns vs. The United States, 190 Mexicans had asked for reparations following a brutal assault on Piedras Negras led by a Texas Ranger, James Callahan.
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| Unattributed, Facebook |
They argued that Callahan’s band of Rangers and vigilantes had the full support of the U.S. Army out of Fort Duncan. The U.S. insisted that Callahan’s destruction of Piedras Negras was part of a counterattack on Lipan Apaches and thus justifiable.
Adolfo Duclos was asked to estimate the
monetary value of possessions that had been destroyed during the raid. “I knew
the village of Piedras Negras, and was well acquainted with the condition and
circumstances of all of its inhabitants at the time of the raid of filibusters,”
he began.
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| Texas Rangers, 1868: James Thomas Bird (left) and John J. Haynes (right). (Source: True West Magazine) |
The people were “the poorest class of Mexicans, living in huts built of pickets stuck into the ground, with grass roofs, and without windows or floors,” Duclos continued. These jacales, he guessed, had little value—$50 each, perhaps.
Twenty of Duclos’ Texas compatriots joined him in testifying that the victims of Callahan’s raid had filed fraudulent claims for farm animals, jewelry, libraries, clothing, homes, and more. The witnesses based their testimony on personal acquaintance with the petitioners.
In April 1872, the U.S. agreed to compensate 150 claimants: the Mexican government would distribute $50,000 among them. By that time, Duclos had left Eagle Pass in the dust.
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| “A Mexico Jacal,” On a Mexican Mustang Through Texas, from the Gulf to the Rio Grande (1883) |
To be continued.
