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part฀2 :฀Galveston to Port Lavaca T hE DECK of our six-hundred-ton ferry, the Gibb Gilchrist, is packed to the gills with a full load of cars, trucks, and mobile homes as it steams across Galveston Bay. Overhead, hundreds of noisy gulls soar, angle, and dive for the breadcrumbs and other tidbits tossed into the air by passengers. A crowd has gathered on the bow of the big ship to watch the school of dolphins that is swimming in front of us, leading our vessel through the choppy bay waters. To the south, far out in the open waters of the Gulf, a line of oceangoing tankers and barges wait their turn to enter Galveston Bay and the ship channel to houston. Just ahead and to the north the ruins of the SS Selma, an old tanker, protrude from the shallow waters in front of Pelican Island. The massive, four-hundred-foot concrete hull, barnacled and crumbling, suggests an ancient marine archaeological site. Galveston Island comes into view, and the first features I can make out are the tall, dark profiles of three industrial cranes on the waterfront of the Port of Galveston. The three cranes, silhouetted against the afternoon sky, remind me of the observation made almost two centuries ago by the earliest explorers who saw this island. Near the middle of the island, there were— according to all accounts—three trees. Because the island was so utterly flat and otherwise featureless, these three trees stood out like beacons. In fact, no one who saw and wrote about Galveston Island prior to 1850 failed to mention the three trees. In 1836, Colonel W. F. Gray wrote that “there are only three trees on [Galveston Island].” A year later, an anonymous traveler wrote in his journal,“The whole island presents rather a dreary and forbidding aspect, with nothing to relieve the eye or diversify the prospect except three lone trees upon its southeastern side, about midway, and which stand as the only beacon to the mariner along this solitary and monotonous portion of the Gulf of Mexico.” Some observers specifically identify the trees as live oaks. In 1842 William Bollaert added more specific information about the trees.“Leaving the town of Galveston, and along the shore some fifteen miles,” he wrote, “the ‘Three trees’ are arrived at, which forms a good landmark. What is known as the ‘Three trees’ is composed of a clump of some twenty trees, then a small grove, and lastly three trees.” Despite the many accounts of the three trees, it would be an entirely different feature of the island and its adjacent waters that would determine Galveston’s important role in the early history of Texas. This feature was first noted in 1785 by Don José de Evia, the commander of a Spanish surveying expedition, as he sailed south from New Orleans, charged with mapping the coast of present-day Louisiana and Texas. Approaching Galveston Island, Evia observed that the currents of the surrounding bay appeared to make a natural harbor behind the barren island. Perhaps sensing the future importance of the island and its potential harbor, Evia named the island in honor of the viceroy of Mexico, Bernardo de Gálvez. Before European explorers arrived, the island had been a favorite hunting and fishing grounds for the Karankawa Indians, who, according to h. yoakum, in his 1855 History of Texas, had their own name for the island. From the discovery of the island in 1686, by the colony of LaSalle, until 1816, it had remained unsettled. A few roving Carankawees occasionally resorted to the western end of the island for purpose of fishing, but there were no human habitations on it. . . . In the beginning of the year 1816, it was covered with long green grass, on which fed herds of deer. It also abounded in serpents, from which it was called, by the pirates of the gulf, Snake island. By 1816, Louis Aury, the French pirate, had come to Galveston from haiti and established a stronghold of rebels in support of the Mexican revolution against Spain. But Aury’s hold on Galveston was short-lived. When he left the island in 1817 to accompany Gen. Javier Mina of Mexico on an expedition to the Santander river, another outlaw—none other than the infamous Jean Lafitte—set up his own pirating outpost on Galveston Island. Lafitte’s smuggling and pirating operations on Galveston lasted about four years, before he was run off the...

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