STAN GINSEL

How Texas Began

 

Many people believe that Texas started with the Battle of the Alamo where a group of American colonists fought to their death to free their colonies from the rule of Mexico. A massacre that led to the subsequent Battle of San Jacinto, where the outnumbered “Texians” defeated a superior Mexican Army in less than twenty minutes and won their independence.

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Although well known these battles mark the final chapter in the story of how America's Texas began, which actually occurred some sixteen years earlier when two men who had not seen each other in over twenty years, recognized one another in a crowded town plaza and struck up a conversation.

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One of these men was Moses Austin, father of Stephen F. Austin, a familiar name associated with the settlement of early Texas. The other was Philip Hendrik Nering Bögel also known as the Baron de Bastrop, a name very few will recognize. But without the ingenious skills of this one man, the Texas we know today probably wouldn’t exist.

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It was an instant in time but a critical moment in Texas history when a chance meeting set into motion the American colonization of the Spanish state known as “Tejas” and helped to shape it into a land for which these colonists where willing to lay down their lives almost two decades later at those epic battles. This is the prequel to the Alamo story. The day America's Texas began.

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