To the Vast and Beautiful Land: Anglo Migration into Spanish Louisiana and Texas, 1760s-1820s

by Light Townsend Cummins

Overview

To the Vast and Beautiful Land gathers eleven essays written by Light Townsend Cummins, a foremost authority on Texas and Louisiana during the Spanish colonial era, and traces the arc of the author’s career over a quarter of a century. Each essay includes a new introduction linking the original article to current scholarship and forms the connective tissue for the volume. A new bibliography updates and supplements the sources cited in the essays.

From the “enduring community” of Anglo-American settlers in colonial Natchez to the Gálvez family along the Gulf Coast and their participation in the American Revolution, Cummins shows that mercantile commerce and land acquisition went hand-in-hand as dual motivations for the migration of English-speakers into Louisiana and Texas. Mercantile trade dominated by Anglo-Americans increasingly tied the Mississippi valley and western Gulf Coast to the English-speaking ports of the Atlantic world bridging two centuries, shifting it away from earlier French and Spanish commercial patterns. As a result, Anglo-Americans moved to the region as residents and secured land from Spanish authorities, who often welcomed them with favorable settlement policies. This steady flow of settlement set the stage for families such as the Austins—first Moses and later his son Stephen—to take root and further “Anglocize” a colonial region.

Taken together, To the Vast and Beautiful Land makes a new contribution to the growing literature on the history of the Spanish borderlands in North America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781623497422
Publisher:	Texas A&M University Press
Publication date:	02/19/2019
Series:	Elma Dill Russell Spencer Series in the West and Southwest , #47
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

LIGHT TOWNSEND CUMMINS is professor emeritus of history at Austin College in Sherman, Texas. He is author or editor of a dozen books, including Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas. From 2009 to 2012, he was appointed by the governor to serve as the state historian of Texas.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Chapter 1 An Enduring Community: Anglo-American Settlers at Colonial Natchez and in the Felicianas, 1774-1810 1

Chapter 2 Anglo Merchants and Capital Migration in Spanish Colonial New Orleans, 1763-1803 27

Chapter 3 The Galvez Family and Spanish Participation in the Independence of the United States of America 49

Chapter 4 Oliver Pollock and George Rogers Clark's Service of Supply: A Case Study in Financial Disaster 71

Chapter 5 "Her Weary Pilgrimage": The Remarkable Mississippi River Adventures of Anne McMeans, 1778-1782 85

Chapter 6 Oliver Pollock's Plantations: An Early Anglo Landowner on the Lower Mississippi, 1769-1824 115

Chapter 7 "In Territories So Extensive and Fertile": Spanish-and English-Speaking Peoples in Louisiana before the Purchase 133

Chapter 8 Oliver Pollock and the Creation of an American Identity in Spanish Colonial Louisiana 148

Chapter 9 Spanish Louisiana Land Policy: Antecedent to the Anglo-American Colonization of East Texas, 1769-1821 172

Chapter 10 Church Courts, Marriage Breakdown, and Separation in Spanish Louisiana, West Florida, and Texas, 1763-1836 186

Chapter 11 Across the Sabine: The Stephen F. Austin Family in Spanish and Antebellum Louisiana 206

Bibliographic Essay 227

Index 257