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Seat of Empire | 160 || Chapter 15 | Fiasco After months of wallowing in a Mexican prison, Hugh McLeod craved something stronger than water to quench his thirst. He stepped off the Rosa Alvina’s gangplank onto a Galveston pier and scanned the waterfront for possibilities. A group of similarly parched Texans, all veterans of the failed Santa Fe Expedition led by McLeod, accompanied the happy man. Following their former commander into the closest bar, the party smiled gratefully as McLeod, on the strength of a doubloon he claimed in his pocket, ordered a round of drinks for his companions. Joyful toasts and satisfied smacks of pleasure embellished the men’s drinking. But suddenly McLeod’s smile gave way to a look of consternation. Nervously and repeatedly sticking his hands into various pockets, he cried, “What have I done with it—with the doubloon!” As the men fidgeted in embarrassing silence, the captain of the ship arrived and, overhearing McLeod’s exclamation, reminded him that he had given the coin to his friend William Cooke before departing Mexico. The generous bartender forgave the debt and bade the celebrants a cheery farewell.1 Walking among the weed-choked streets of his frontier capital, President Mirabeau Lamar envisioned the imperial grandeur that was Austin’s destiny . One day not far in the future the city would welcome endless trains of wagons bearing Mexican goods from Santa Fe. These wagons would rumble through paved streets to a bustling waterfront, where dockhands would transfer the precious cargo to waiting steamships. An easy trip down the Colorado River into the Gulf of Mexico would deliver these goods to Galveston warehouses, which in turn would supply the ever-increasing number of American merchant ships calling at the Texas seaport . The trade would transform an anemic Texas economy into a financial powerhouse and Lamar’s humble village of Austin into the grandest metropolis in the west. Not only that, as Edward Hall wrote to Lamar, “If the Santa Fe Expedition succeeds it will immortalize you.”2 Few Texans doubted this scenario. As the commissioners selecting Waterloo as the seat of government had remarked, “The commissioners Fiasco | 161 | confidently anticipate the time when a great thoroughfare [through Austin ] shall be established from Santa Fe to our Sea ports.” The Austin City Gazette echoed the sentiments of many with its prediction that “the time is not very far distant when the waters of the Colorado will be rendered navigable to this place, above here the rapids will ever present an insurmountable barrier to further progress. Austin, therefore, at some future day is destined to be a place of some importance as being located at the head of navigation.” Early signs encouraged optimism. Shortly after Mirabeau Lamar’s triumphant 1839 entry into Austin, a merchant named Thomas Grayson advertised a claim that appeared to vindicate the town’s Colorado River location: “The subscriber being perfectly convinced of the safe navigation of the Colorado, has now on the river two keelboats, to wit: the David Crockett and Tanterbogus. Mr. Editor—I came up in the last boat, and found no obstacle greater than I found from Richmond to Groce’s, on the Brazos river.”3 And, whereas Grayson’s trip upriver originated at “the head of the raft,” another citizen publicized his intention to bring goods all the way from the coast: NAVIGATION OF THE COLORADO.—A respectable gentleman living in the vicinity of this city, has requested us to state, that if he can get the sum of five thousand dollars subscribed, to warrant him in the expense he may be put to in cleaning out the river, &c., he will agree to navigate the Colorado with a keel boat, from the city to Matagorda.4 Mirabeau Lamar therefore entertained no doubts about a vast trade one day bestowing riches upon his newly created capital. Furthermore, he saw no reason to leave the source of this wealth in the hands of a government still technically at war with his own. Indeed, while speaking against annexation in his inaugural address to Congress in 1838, Lamar laid bare his imperial ambition: “When I view her [Texas’s] vast extent of territory, stretching from the Sabine to the Pacific and away to the South West as far as the obstinacy of the enemy may render it necessary for the sword to make the boundary.” Lamar supporters encouraged the president ’s dream. Former campaign manager William Jefferson Jones urged Lamar to action by pointing out...

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