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Introduction
- Texas A&M University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
R arely can we follow all the major events of Texas history in the first half of the nineteenth century through the life of one man. Peter Ellis Bean was such a man. His life stretches like a fuse between 1800 and 1847 all the way from Nacogdoches to Mexico City. Once Bean’s fuse was ignited, it set off charges down through the years —explosions involving every major figure in the history of both Texas and Mexico. They are all there, from Philip Nolan to Sam Houston, their powder kegs sitting alongside Bean’s slow-burning fuse and triggered when the time was right. He fought with Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans and conferred with men as diverse as Jean Laffite and José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara. In Mexico Bean was associated with all the heroes of the revolution against Spain, men such as José María Morelos, Guadalupe Victoria, Vicente Guerrero, Nicolás Bravo, Manuel de Mier y Terán, and others. Shortly before the capture and execution of Morelos, Bean conducted Morelos’s young son, Juan N. Almonte, to exile in New Orleans, where Almonte grew to manhood. They all knew Bean and respected the role he played in freeing Mexico from Spanish rule. Likewise in Texas, there was hardly anyone who had not heard of Bean after his return to the Nacogdoches region in 1823. His role in putting down the Fredonian Rebellion in the winter of 1826 –27 was a decisive one. Thereafter Bean managed Indian affairs for Mexico in east Texas until the outbreak of the revolution that took Texas out of the political realm of the Republic of Mexico—a republic that Bean had helped establish. During this decade Bean worked with men like Stephen F. Austin and his fellow empresarios to keep peace with the various Indian tribes in Texas, whether native to the region or those flocking in from the United States. These duties, of course, also brought Bean into contact with all the Mexican officials of the period, ranging from alcaldes, Introduction to political chiefs, to governors, to commandant generals, to the presidents of the nation. At one time or another they either met Bean personally or read his letters reporting the situation in Texas on a wide range of subjects. Bean, with a colonel’s commission in the Mexican army for his past services to the nation, also wanted to be an empresario himself. His aspirations were blasted, however, when it was discovered that Bean had a wife in Texas in addition to one residing in Mexico. That Bean was a bigamist is fairly certain, despite the legal niceties of the question. While in Mexico Bean claimed that he was legitimately married to a woman in Jalapa but admitted that he had a “mistress” back in Nacogdoches. While in Texas he said he was married to the woman he had brought from Tennessee (or at least lived with her and their three children in that status) and the señorita in Jalapa was nothing but a “mistress” whom he occasionally saw while on business trips. It seems likely that both women thought they were Bean’s one and only. This aspect of Bean’s behavior is rather unsavory, to modern noses especially. But even in Bean’s era it was a strike against him, one that doomed his hopes of being a colonizer of the boundary reserve along the Sabine River. Although high-placed friends in the Mexican capital vouched for Bean’s moral character and fitness for the job, it came to naught. Apart from his association with the Nolan Expedition, his activities in defusing the Fredonian Rebellion, and his being a bigamist, Bean is most remembered as an Indian agent among the “savage” and semicivilized tribes of east Texas between 1826 and 1836. That aspect of his long career is our focus here. Because new documents have been brought to bear on this subject, it is hoped that some clarity will emerge on exactly what Bean was doing and why. Was Bean genuinely interested in the welfare of these Indians (the Cherokees especially), or was he only slyly manipulating them on behalf of Mexico’s best interests instead of their own? Because Sam Houston, after his 1833 arrival in Texas, considered himself to be the Cherokees’ main spokesman, his relationship with Bean receives much attention. Were they working together on Indian affairs or at odds with one another? This question has...